A continent on the level of the Middle ages. Youma, shapeshifting demons, often take the form of a human in a given village and then secretly kill people during the night to eat them. The Claymore are there to stop and kill the Youmas and protect the villages. The Claymores are all women, wearing huge swords, but are a hybrid of Youmas and humans, which gives them strength. One of them is Clare, ranked as the lowest in the team, no. 47, who saves a kid, Raki, from a Youma. Raki thus decides to follow her. A long time ago, as a kid, Clare was herself saved from a Youma by Claymore Teresa. But when Teresa attacked a rapist, she breached the Claymore rule which forbids them from harming humans. Claymore Priscilla was summoned and killed Teresa, but in the process, Priscilla mutated into a semi-Youma, an "Awakened Being". Several Claymores unite to fight against the super-strong Youmas in the North, led by Isley. A mutated Clare fights the mutated Priscilla, but spares her life when Raki appeals to her. Back to normal, Clare flees with Raki from her own Organization.
Even though it was very popular, horror-fantasy anime series "Claymore" is a tiny bit overrated: it starts off well, even mysterious, but with time just sinks into the waters of endless-routine action and battle sequences, which are very monotone after a while. The shapeshifting Youmas, who can take the perfect form of any human in a village, evokes the "chameleon" paranoia from Carpenter's "The Thing" (one memorable sequence has Clare attacking Raki's brother, only for the brother to reveal his true form and transform into a Youma, even adding how "his previous body is crying", as a side effect of still having some traces of affections for Raki; another has a Youma finding a perfect place to hide inside a church: to shapeshift into a corpse of a relic saint), yet it is quickly dropped for the story to focus on the inter-fighting between the Claymores themselves in the second half of the storyline. However, their "civil war" is not particularly satisfying nor as engaging as it was planned. The characters are grey and stiff, and another problems is that Claymores all look similar: all of them are pale, blond women, mostly with short hair, making it difficult to distinguish them all. The finale, where the Claymores are fighting against the "Awakened Beings" in the North, is cozily set in a winter village covered with snow, yet, as said, their battles become tiresome after a while. The series is often very brutal, with several splatter violence moments (in one episode, in a duel, Ophelia even slashes the legs of Clare, yet the latter is able to regenerate them back thanks to her powers; in another episode, a Youma uses its tongue to literally pierce the stomach of a Claymore woman), little of whom have a justification for such an extremist approach, except for to sustain the interest of the viewers, who probably started to realize there is only a limited amount of value to this anime.
Grade:++
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