Claymore is a highly-regarded classic that follows the journey of four Claymores. The beginning of the story centers on Clare, the lowest ranked of her kind, and through her story we meet many of her comrades. The most important of these is Phantom Miria, who in many ways is the actual heroine of the series, and one of the most compelling female heroes in all of manga and anime.
The art and music direction in Claymore are quite fantastic. The art emulates the manga, favoring gothic tones and a Tim Burton-esque grayness, while the music swings from eerie to sad to heroic. The representation of female soldiers, taking into account the differences in socially conditioned temperament, is responsible and there is a notable absence of the usual fan service that often wrecks the tone in anime.
As for the screenwriting and general narrative, Claymore doesn't really break ground in the particulars of the story. But the relationships between the fighters and the people they care about is handled deftly, and there is an often moving exploration of trauma and coping with loss. The concept of awakened beings - the living expression of human nightmares - gives the series a nefarious, difficult to understand villain that generally produces more mystery the more we find out about them. The interplay between the moving parts of the story - Clare and Raki, the Miria-Clare-Deneve-Helen clique, Miria and the Organization, Clare and Rubul - is something that is reminiscent of TV, rather than animation, such as the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones.
Alas, there is one drawback to this anime. The production company, Madhouse, canceled the series while in production. This left Claymore with a completely nonsensical, makeshift ending. So be warned: season 1 is just maybe one tenth or one twentieth of the way through the story in a manga that finished almost a decade after Claymore was aired in 2007. The ending it's given changes dramatically what happens at the conclusion of events that were not intended to end the story at that juncture.
Nonetheless, Claymore is a wonderful anime, and it is a rare responsible representation of women in action, horror, and fantasy in general. In anime I often have to lower my expectations about the treatment of women, and remember in context that anime is marketed primarily at Japanese males with conditioned expectations about sex appeal in fiction. Claymore is not just one of my favorite series and manga - it's a powerful representation of female heroism that defies convention in its medium and genre.
