Trigun is without a doubt one of the best Anime TV series to be releases in America in 2000, and it continues strong into 2001. While episode 14 is nothing more than light hearted fluff, episodes 15 and 16 up then ante, showing us that Trigun, as a series, really is going somewhere.

For those who haven't been following Trigun from the beginning, it is the story of Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon. Vash is a silly looking, silly acting gunman who is credited with the destruction of the city of July 23 years ago. No one knows how, or why Vash destroyed July, but the remarkeable thing is that not a single person died that day at July. Milli and Merryl are "damage control experts" for the Bernadelli insurance society, and their job is to find Vash the Stampede, and then follow him, keeping him from causing more damage that their company would have to pay for.

The first dozen episodes of Trigun we're all very light hearted adventures, pitting Vash against various criminals, and beautiful women, all of which he managed to defeat without killing anyone. However in later episodes things start to get a bit more serious, finally boiling over in episode 13 with Vash's first confrontation with one of the "Gung Ho Guns". While the aforementionned episode 13 is just filler, episodes 14 and 15 continue in the serious tone set in episode 12. This is honestly a breath of fresh air for a series, that as amusing as it is, was starting to feel like it was going no-where.

Animation wise, Trigun has been top notch since the very first episode and continues in this vein with the latest episodes. The animation is very fluid, and rarely suffers from any sort of "lazy animation". Colors are brilliant, a mixture of bright colours and not so bright colors that really makes focussing on the important parts of the image a pleasure. Once again, Madhouse has proven itself to be one of the best animation studios in Japan today.

Interestingly enough, Trigun is one of the few Anime's which, IMHO sounds better in English than in Japanese. The English script, voice acting and directing are absolutely top notch. I really do enjoy the english voices, particularly that of Vash. My only complaint about the English track is that the sound effects and music seem to be slightly muffled, but this only becomes apparent when actually comparing the English track to the Japanese track.

My biggest complaint about this DVD are the DVD features, or lack thereof. No 5.1 soundtrack, not even in English. No extras worth mentionning, sure the textless opening and ending are nice, but couldn't Pioneer have scrapped something together? The menus on the other hand are nicely done, even if the chapter menus are a tiny bit hard to navigate. Other than this, the DVD seemed to be totally defect free, the sound was crisp and the image didn't seem to suffer from any of the shortcomings that the previous Trigun DVDs suffered from, "rainbows" on the screen and such.