is a Japanese anime television series created and produced by Trigger. The series follows vagrant schoolgirl Ryuko Matoi on her search for her father's killer, which brings her into violent conflict with Satsuki Kiryuin, the iron-willed student council president of Honnouji Academy, and her mother Ragyo Kiryuin's fashion empire. Ryuko, Satsuki, and others obtain martial arts superpowers from their clothes, which appear to have a will of their own.
The series is Trigger's first original anime television project, directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi and written by Kazuki Nakashima, both of whom had previously worked together on Gurren Lagann in 2007 and would go on to work on Promare in 2019. Kill la Kill was broadcast in Japan on MBS' Animeism programming block between October 2013 and March 2014. An original video animation (OVA) was released as a 25th episode in September 2014. A manga adaptation by Ryō Akizuki began serialization in Kadokawa Shoten's Young Ace magazine from October 2013 to March 2015. A video game adaptation, titled Kill la Kill the Game: IF, was released in July 2019, with slight deviations to the main storyline of the anime.
In North America, Aniplex of America licensed the anime for a simulcast with a home video release starting in July 2014. The series premiered in the United States on Adult Swim's Toonami block in February 2015.
Synopsis
Setting
is a fictional high school situated in Tokyo Bay, Japan, on the island of Honnō City. The school is dominated by its fearsome student council led by their president Satsuki Kiryuin. The students wear which give their wearers superhuman abilities because they are constructed with a special material known as . Honnouji Academy and Honnō City feature a stratified class structure, in which higher-ranked students are allowed to obtain more powerful Goku Uniforms. This in turn affects the social status of the student's family.
Plot
Ryuko Matoi, a vagrant transfer student armed with a scissor-shaped longsword that can cut Goku Uniforms, arrives to Honnō City to find the murderer of her father Isshin Matoi. Her search leads her to enroll in Honnouji Academy, a militaristic high school ruled by the student council president Satsuki Kiryuin and her Elite Four through the power of a fabric called Life Fibers. Following a failed attempt to challenge Satsuki on her first day, Ryuko stumbled across a sentient sailor uniform in an underground complex beneath the ruins of her father's home. She names the outfit "Senketsu", later learning that he is a pure Life Fiber clothing called a that increases her abilities while transformed. Satsuki responds by donning her family's Kamui Junketsu at great risk to her well-being, accepting Ryuko's challenge if she can defeat the two-star student club presidents that would target her. Ryuko is joined by her hyperactive classmate Mako Mankanshoku, a no-star student who lets Ryuko move in with her impoverished family, and her homeroom teacher Aikuro Mikisugi, who is actually an undercover agent of the anti-Life Fiber paramilitary organization .
Ryuko later gets her chance to confront Satsuki when she reorganizes their student council through a battle royal and king-of-the-hill event known as the Naturals Election, requiring her to first defeat each member of Satsuki's Elite Four. But the event is interrupted by Nui Harime, a member of the global run by the academy's director and Satsuki's mother, Ragyo Kiryuin. Harime reveals herself as Isshin's killer while revealing the other Scissor Blade, provoking Ryuko into a rage that causes an unstable fusion between her and Senketsu, which nearly kills her. She is only stopped and defused from her Kamui when Mako intervenes. Ryuko becomes reluctant to wear Senketsu soon after while learning that Satsuki used her to refine the Goku Uniforms for the upcoming Tri-City Schools Raid. Harime, having been banned from the academy, tricks Ryuko into putting Senketsu back on before shredding the Kamui to pieces, driven off by Satsuki before she could kill Ryuko. As Satsuki commences the Tri-City Schools Raid to annex the remaining independent schools in Kansai, with its actual purpose to locate and destroy Nudist Beach's base, Ryuko follows to retrieve the pieces of Senketsu's body that Satsuki gave to her subordinates.