I have limited love in my heart, or indeed enthusiasm. All of that enthusiasm shall be directed towards Bravern. There will be no enthusiasm left for anything else in this post. You have been warned.
Bang Brave Bravern
Episodes watched: 3
I cannot stress enough just how much I love this show, and I now must atone for missing it completely in my season preview. It’s set at a military base in Hawaii where there’s an international exercise going on, until suddenly aliens attack. There’s mechs and it’s all very Real Robot with a lot of attention paid to military life, chains of command, stuff like that. Then a Super Robot shows up, insists the main character pilots him, and then starts yelling attack names while super robot music plays in the background. As in literally in the background. It plays out of the pilot’s cockpit while the poor guy goes “where the fuck is that music coming from”.
Bravern is incredibly tongue-in-cheek and very much a love letter to mecha anime, and it’s full of very silly little details. Things like the military commander getting confused by why his radar has shifted from showing dots to a big mecha face with BRAVERN underneath it. Or the part where Bravern delivers a speech to the unified military commands about how great his pilot is and they all sit there for half an hour getting increasingly exasperated and bored. Then you get the ending of two mech pilots stripping in the rain and singing a soulful duet. It has some problems sure, like how all the female characters suffer from Shirobako Face Syndrome, but I love that this thing even exists and I’m so very excited to watch more. Please give it a shot, it’s absolutely worth your time.
The Witch and the Beast
Episodes watched: 1
I just spent the past few paragraphs gushing over magical girls Bravern, and that unfortunately means all my goodwill has been used up. Witch and the Beast is disappointing, because there’s definitely something here. It reminds me of early Fullmetal Alchemist. Tall guy and short angry guy travel to town to uncover why local hero is actually bad and reveal it all to a naive teen girl who idolises the hero. Their personalities are fairly one-note, but what do you want, it’s only one episode. It’s the visuals that are disappointing. Not the artwork, which is fine. It’s hard to screw up what was inherently good art from the original manga.
The directing though is what kills it for me. The pacing is atrocious. We barely get to know characters before the completely obvious twist happens. The action directing is bizarre. They will show someone starting to move, then do a series of strange cuts to specifically not show any of the movement, before cutting to the end scene. Anime is full of this stuff, but it’s normally done much more elegantly than it is here. If this kind of stuff is happening in episode one, then I have little faith in the rest of the series. It’s one of those series where I could see it improving after a weaker first episode due to the story being rushed and a bit one-note, so maybe I’ll return to it some day if it starts getting rave reviews. However I don’t like the studio working on it and this first episode was enough for me to leave it to one side for now.
The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil
Episodes watched: 1
Another series that was killed by subpar directing, except this time it doesn’t even have a solid art foundation to build from. Here at least they can blame the awful character designs as having been there in the original manga. The supposed beautiful angel looks like she’s 12 years old and has zero distinguishing features about her. The same could be said about the main guy too, who is the blandest looking spiky-haired shounen protagonist. He looks like a near carbon copy of the main guy from Blue Exorcist.
There is a string of good jokes towards the end of the episode that tie into this season’s theme of BDSM because yes that’s where we are with anime. But judging by the tone of the trailers and the opening credits, extreme BDSM jokes will give way to a more meh romance anime. It’s just very shouty and mostly not very funny nor well made, which has dissuaded me from checking out more.
Bucchigiri
Episodes watched: 2
I imagine this is what it feels like to be a female anime fan when anime chucks a load of ladies with their tits falling out on screen. Like a big, fat blaring sign saying “get out, this isn’t for you”. Bucchigiri feels shallow in its characterisation in a way that makes these people feel manufactured. I can’t buy their relationships because they don’t feel like they created a person. They feel like they were designed to fit stereotypes. The guy with a chain across his face who apparently has a tongue too long for his own mouth. Or the childhood friend who is sitting over the main character as he waits for him to wake up.
I noticed it in episode one, but there was an energy that I wanted to at least give a chance. However it really started to bother me in episode 2, to the point that I couldn’t take a single thing it did at face value, or evaluate it based on how it was supposed to fit into the story. It exasperate any problems I have with obnoxious characters on top of that. I like the show’s energy, but I don’t care for its story or characters, and I have a suspicion the creators don’t care about either the story or characters on their own merits either.
