Our protagonist is Nadie (pronounced: naw-dee-ay, kids), a super-sexy, gunslingin’ bounty hunter with…naw, I’m kidding. In reality, she’s probably the worst bounty hunter ever. It’s true that she’s great with a revolver, but, as far as this first boxset is concerned, she doesn’t do any actual bounty hunting! In fact, the only bounty that we see her hunt, she becomes best friends with. And that’s in the first episode.

That bounty was Ellis, an incredibly naïve amnesiac WITCH headed South. Where South? I’m not sure even the director knows the answer to that question, and frankly, it doesn’t matter. It’s just an excuse for Nadie and Ellis to go on a slow-paced, episodic adventure until Mashimo gets drunk enough to come up with a real plot.

The most common complaint I’ve seen for El Cazador is what’s outlined above—nothing happens. I’m here to say that those people are fools. These are the same people that watched the same episode of Haruhi eight times in a row. It would be more accurate to say that nothing interesting happens (their words, not mine). At least they wouldn’t be totally wrong. This time.

I’m not going to tell you that El Cazador is an amazing show, because it isn’t. The action is lame—shootouts with no blood? You must be joking. The plot is unnecessarily inscrutable—even by Mashimo standards; and the music is subpar at best. Sorry Yuki Kajiura, but .hack//SIGN this is not. However, there is one thing that El Cazador does very well, and it’s something that so incredibly rare in anime that it makes up for all of its faults—IT’S FREAKIN’ HILARIOUS!

And yes, that is an exact quote.

If you recall in my last article (Comic Party Revolution), I said that anime rarely makes me laugh. While El Cazador isn’t nearly as funny as Rune Soldier’s Louie punching a wild boar in the face or the ultimate moe girl from Welcome to the NHK, it’s definitely a force to be reckoned with. This isn’t the forced slapstick humor that always falls flat in anime. Instead it’s subtle, dry, and sarcastic.

From cross-dressing bounty hunters to the infamous gun grappling hook, this box set had me laughing the entire way though. It also helps that pretty much everything Ellis does and says is utterly brilliant. There are still 13 episodes left, so I can’t say for certain whether El Cazador is a great show as a whole, but if you’re looking for something to laugh to (or at) without having to think to hard you should, at the very least, Netflix the first box of this series.

Overall Grade: B
Review by: John-Paul Natysin
Director: Koichi Mashimo
Animation Production: Bee Train
Distributed by: Funimation