Bubblegum Crisis

The year is 2032, seven years after the Second Great Kanto Earthquake decimated Tokyo. Now, the city is reborn as MegaTokyo, built from the labors of mechanical beasts known as "Boomers." Originally created to benefit humanity, the mysterious corporation known as Genom now produces Boomers with incredible destructive power as a new type of advanced weaponry, capable of disguising themselves as humans.

The AD Police is a new special unit to counter the ever-increasing Boomer-related crimes. Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of crimes and disparity in strength, the AD Police poses little opposition to the Boomers. A mysterious vigilante force known as the Knight Sabers, wearing powersuits more advanced than the military, is the citizens' only hope for protection. Led by Sylia Stingray, Priscilla "Priss" Asagiri, Nene Romanova, and Linna Yamazaki, these beautiful girls take out any Boomer that steps out of line.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Asagiri, Priscilla Main

Oomori, Kinuko Japanese

Romanova, Nene Main

Hiramatsu, Akiko Japanese

Stingray, Sylia Main

Sakakibara, Yoshiko Japanese

Yamazaki, Linna Main

Tomizawa, Michie Japanese

McNichol, Leon Main

Furukawa, Toshio Japanese

Largo Supporting

Sogabe, Kazuyuki Japanese

Chang, Reika Supporting

Hashimoto, Maiko Japanese

Sylvie Supporting

Takamori, Yoshino Japanese

Mason, Brian J. Supporting

Ikeda, Shuuichi Japanese

Stingray, Mackey Supporting

Sasaki, Nozomu Japanese

Oobari, Masami Director, Storyboard, Mechanical Design, Key Animation, Animation Director

Akiyama, Katsuhito Director, Script

Takayama, Fumihiko Director, Storyboard

Gouda, Hiroaki Director, Storyboard, Animation Director

Reviews

Aug 8, 2007

YourMessageHere

Recommended

Given that this is Bubblegum Crisis\' 20th anniversary year, I\'m going to start with some historic background. In 1987, amid the boomtimes in the west, the rise of Japanese industrial and corporate power appeared to be potentially endless and the west seemed unable to match it. Japan, and much of the first world was getting rich quick and advancing technologically in leaps and bounds; but at the same time, other countries were still stuck in a past age, unable to keep up. For the first time socioeconomic concepts like the multinational corporation and the global market became realities, and the division between ... the first and third world had never seemed wider. While some revelled in the abundance, others feared it.

Science fiction, ever the barometer of public fear, reflected this in books and film. Alien, in 1979, brought the world a vision of space travel in the future that for once was filthy and corrupt and run by giant corporations with no morals. The seminal Blade Runner stunned 1982 with the visually amazing concept of a huge, grimy neon tech-sprawl future LA of totally mixed ethnicity and robots that behave more like humans than humans do. And William Gibson’s famed 1984 novel Neuromancer gave the world a fevered, lavish nightmare of clashing technology and humanity embroiled in a tale of global tech businesses up to no good, in the process giving this burgeoning genre a name: cyberpunk.

Where one media succeeds, others will follow. Cyberpunk anime was as inevitable then as live action western versions of anime have become now. Bubblegum Crisis was the leading edge of that cyberpunk anime, taking the elements that worked for the rest and expertly marrying it with many of the elements that make anime unique. Today, Bubblegum Crisis is one of those \'classic\' titles that anime fans need to know about, a Terminator or Star Wars of the anime canon. Even though its popularity in Japan was only a fraction of the reception it enjoyed overseas, it’s my contention that without Bubblegum Crisis there’d have been no Akira film.

But is it any good? On one hand, detractors can say that this is a messy blending of many things that have already been done; a Blade Runner city with a flavour of Neuromancer-come-Alien-come-Aliens dystopian griminess and high-tech evil and full of Terminators and Robocops, filtered through that anime staple, mecha. This is largely true, but doesn’t matter. Outside anime, nothing so ambitious could ever work; but within the totally created universe that’s only possible in animation or CGI, and only really practical in animation, it not only works but excels.

Originally planned as a series of 13 OVA episodes, it eventually ran to only 8 episodes, and some key plot points were altered because of this. Another 3 episodes were released later in an OVA series called Bubblegum Crash, using elements of the 5 unmade episodes that never made it originally. Each is largely self contained, but both multi-episode arcs of storyline and a loose overall plotline are also present. Being an OVA, the time period and hence staff is not as fixed as can be seen with a TV series, the net effect of which being that pretty much every episode is different from each of the others, with different emphases and different priorities. On top of this, half way through, some key decisions were reversed about the planned death in episode 5 of a character who, in hindsight, clearly stands out as the main protagonist. Plus, the eventual premature demise of the series stemmed from the two owners of the franchise, Artmic and Youmex, taking each other to court. DVD releases nowadays seem so snarled in legalities that the horrendous dubtitling is almost forgivable. So, it’s a total mess, basically.

But like I say, this doesn’t really matter. What Bubblegum Crisis does so well, well enough that it relegates these things to positions of secondary importance, is cool. BGC may not have a very sure idea of what it wants to be and do, in a general sense, but it does it with irrepressable style; everything about BGC is very cool. Kenichi Sonoda, who went on to be the man behind Gunsmith Cats, designed the characters impeccably, including their incredible sleek hardsuit armour, which look like what Lamborghinis and Ferraris would look like if they were shaped like women. Various other mechanical designs, by Aramaki Shinji, later to be mechanical designer for Evangelion and director of Appleseed 2004, largely borrows from much of early \'80s sci-fi, and frankly looks fantastic. There’s a very brash, colourful, in-your-face ‘80s vibe also driving the general design ethos, which might sound ghastly but is in fact perfect for crumbling, self-digesting neon dystopias. Much of the visuals are, as mentioned, lifted from Blade Runner and run through a series of anime design quirks. Animation is by no means stunning generally, but gets the job done, and when you factor in the fact that this is from 1987, it really has some very nice touches.

No review of Bubblegum Crisis is remotely complete without mention of the music. BGC is famous for its music almost as much as it is famous for popularising women kicking arse. Synth-rock songs that are as artificial and processed as the nutrasweet in diet coke, tunes painstakingly designed to be catchy and memorable, are the order of the day; it is hard to express how much raw fun it is. It\'s also archetypally \'80s, overblown and brash - and outside of BGC, I generally hate \'80s stuff. The songs especially manage to encapsulate that B-movie feeling; like the irrelevant pop songs at the end of a film that was cheesy but still really entertaining, they are driving, infectious ballads with amazing powers of mood-lightening. Many have noted the similarity between the opening of the first episode and the start of the 1984 film Streets of Fire; but the integration of the music into the story in BGC is much smoother. And, while I love the music, it\'s immediately obvious it\'s the kind of thing that\'s likely to provoke strong responses that won\'t be positive for everyone - a gamble any series that relies so heavily on music must make. Even if you\'re not keen on the sound, though, there\'s no mistaking the skill, high production values and copious amounts of effort behind it.


By having the rock singer character as one of its toughest protagonists is a move that trumps Streets of Fire\'s equivalent role in every way. BGC\'s other characters are far from original by modern standards, but it\'s worth remembering that they set many of those standards themselves. These are archetypes, not stereotypes; those that set the trend, not those who follow them. No-one looks down on Dirty Harry, just because he spawned a thousand maveric cop characters.

It can\'t be denied that there are some fairly major things wrong with BGC. For one, it\'s almost totally episodic, with no real overarching plot and little other than the strong, well rounded characters to link one episode to another. For another, the characters may be strong and extremely charismatic, but they don\'t really change much or develop like they should. For a third, it suffers from the lack of an ending; the last story just stops like any other, and you reach for the last disc...and it\'s just music videos (also real fun). These problems are at least addressed in the 1999 remake, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, but at the expense of design, music and general coolness. What the remake did not fix, however, is the basic implausibility of the whole thing. Bloodsucking robots, transforming motorbikes and mecha-tentacle beasts strain one\'s suspension of disbelief unpleasantly at times.

Nonetheless, Bubblegum Crisis, or, to give it its full title, \'Bubblegum Crisis MegaTokyo 2032: the story of Knight Sabers\' (yes, BGC was in fact the origin of the now-common phrase MegaTokyo - another example of its wide influence), remains immensely enjoyable popcorn anime, and remains fascinating for anyone interested in the history of anime. After 20 years, that\'s pretty damn impressive.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jan 27, 2009

Beatnik

Recommended

Containing what might be one of the best opening 7 minutes of an anime ever, this OVA opens with a montage of the future, a dark sprawling Mega-Tokyo.

Immediately Ghost in the Shell comes to mind, some scenes look almost identical, the Oshii vibe so thick, the possible influence on the man (and even Shirow himself) is made more and more questionable throughout the OVA with many stylistic choices bringing the GitS franchise to mind.

After the introduction of the various comings and goings of the city, a concert suddenly begins, introducing a blonde wigged character Priss, and is intercut with the appearance of a boomer wrecking ... havoc. The direction and editing, and hell even the music are all excellent and ensure the OVA gets off to a cracking start. 80's cyberpunk at its best!

The story follows four plucky young women with nothing better to do in their spare time than to don cyber-outfits and blow crap up, preferably those pesky rogue boomers who keep appearing all over the city. The combined IQ of these four women finally figures out that Genom corporation, which apparently "accounts for 68% of the world's cars", might have something to do with these incidents and so Bubblegum Crisis delivers 8 episodes of pure unadulterated fun in a way only 80's anime can.

Mega-Tokyo, 2032. This is the future, but seen from the eyes of the 80's. Each decade's vision of the future is idiosyncratic, and so each decade produces strange and brilliant works of genius or garbage, with Bubblegum Crisis firmly in the strange and brilliant camp, albeit lacking both genius and garbage, though still retaining quality production and vision. Plenty of great directorial choices, POV shots, pans, zooms, it's all dynamic and makes up for the dated, yet still decent, animation.

No matter the humour or clunky dialogue or 80's sprinkled aesthetics in hair styles and clothing, this is cyberpunk at its peak. Everything associated with the genre is present, the connective nature of society, the paranoia of having satellites hovering above your head with the capability of blowing you up, biotech suits, corporate power run amok. In a sense Bubblegum Crisis is more cyberpunk than a lot of cyberpunk anime out there which sometimes jettison a lot of the genre's traits and settle for dystopic hijinks with the occasional robot AI thrown in. Bubblegum Crisis revels in the genre and doesn’t leave anything out.

The anime came out at what might be seen as cyberpunk's peak of influence and exposure in the mainstream, and as such is worth a watch for its historical significance, in terms of impacting the genre of cyberpunk in anime and also being a window to the time. It's so classy it even has time to throw a shout out to The Third Man!

It's flawed, but packed with so much creative ideas and flair, you can't help but bop along to the 80's tunes. Each episode starts with a cinematic musical montage of 80's soft rock/pop and narrative-advancing imagery. This isn't on-par with cyberpunk like GitS, you have to accept the humour and gaping plot-holes as part of the charm, or you'll just not be involved and will tune out. The AD Police are written as what a 12 year old imagines the NYPD are like, complete with the gruff black police captain arguing with the rookie cop.

There's lots of subtle visual flair in this OVA, the directors knew what they were doing. (Except for episode 5 and 6. That director probably went to the school of Koichi Mashimo, though he wasn't helped by the screenwriter for those episodes either) Too often in post-millennium anime there are tons of 'arty' shots that are meaningless and the camera either flies around the place like a steadicam-operator on crack, or pans laboriously across the screen as if directed by an old age pensioner, but back in the 80's/90's they knew how to pace episodes just fine while choosing narrative-coherent viewpoints to the action. I guess I'm harping on about that old cliché of modern day anime being too shallow with emphasis on looks rather than content, but considering that this anime is packed with very clichéd jokes that were old even back when this was released, the argument is kind of moot.

If you want to go extra deep you could propose that Bubblegum Crisis is yet another exploration of the relationship between man and machine and clearly veers on the side of external mechanics and views bio-implementation, or to be simple about it: cyborgs, as a threat to the world. Even though boomers are technically robots, though the distinction is rarely made clear especially when they all have such charming personalities, their humanoid form isn't a random creative decision. Boomers, anyone associated to them, and augmentation in general are clearly bad for your health and the only way to make the world a better place is to jump into exoskeleton mecha-suits and be a master of cybernetics, not a slave to them. It's possibly an archaic almost Luddite philosophy, especially in the 21st century where bio and nano-technology is getting more and more traction. Yep, I just analysed an anime with 'bubblegum' in the title.

But you get the gist, Bubblegum Crisis is consistently entertaining and has very good direction to boot, and its shortcomings can be seen as part of the package; a conscious decision and not a by-product. You're meant to laugh at the ridiculousness of the entire premise, especially the glorious last episode's tribute to the character of Nene, and you're meant to lap up the universe presented because you're a cyberpunk fan. The damn anime's called Bubblegum Crisis!

If you're not grinning while watching this, you're in a crisis of your own and I suggest you chew some gum to get over it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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May 5, 2021

SCLFI

Mixed Feelings

Bubblegum Crisis has one main issue, and that is focus. The focus of the budget seemed to have gone towards the aesthetics, many of which happen to be lifted directly from Blade Runner, and while the aesthetics are certainly good, you need more than that for a series to thrive.

So, accounting for the absence of focus towards other areas, the one that is most negatively affected is the story. With that said, it is an action series, which are typically sparse in story for the obvious reason that if you have to regularly include action sequences, then that’s going to subtract from the available time ... to produce a story. Bubblegum Crisis seems to have all the intent to set up a story with the makings of something like Robocop, i.e. an action series that actually has a well thought out and multi-layered story, but calling the story surface level would be generous – the issue with Bubblegum Crisis’s story is not that it is too generic or too black-and-white, the problem is that there is almost no story in the first place. The basic premise is that robotic people named Boomers are knocking about, mostly hiding in plain sight with the rest of society, and some of them do a competent job of hiding in plain sight, looking like just like regular people, whereas other people are built like The Terminator. In general, there appear to be a wide variety of models of Boomers, some of which don’t attempt to hide at all and just look completely like regular robots, and it seems the majority of Boomers seem to exist for the main purpose of beating the shit out of people, although when it comes down to it they’ve probably got more in common with people from Ancient Greece than people from the 1960s, considering they all insist on fighting naked. In any case, the Boomers don’t really serve much narrative purpose apart from the fact they exist, these particular robots superficially resemble humans, but there’s not any particular reason for it. They’re largely lacking in any actual humanity, there isn’t any reason for them to keep that fake human flesh on, they aren’t wrestling with a sense of self-awareness, or perhaps mistreated on account of being Boomers, or anything at all. They’re just robots who appear to enjoy committing terrorism, because I guess that’s what robots like to do.

But, what’s more critical than an absence of story, is that there is not a huge amount of consistency in the small story that is told. While in the majority of the episodes, it’s kind of small, there are some wherein it becomes a huge focus, and the main characters, the Knight Sabers, are vaguely developed. Not much to say about the main characters, they’re women, they wear these combat suits and fight the Boomers. However, once or twice, they do try and develop these characters, by trying to get them to talk about their feelings, and it just does not work. A series needs consistency to work, you wouldn’t want something to completely change genre halfway through, and the same goes for subtler things like the episode composition. When it changes from finding and killing Boomers to the main characters talking about their fear of abandonment, it’s a less than welcome paradigm shift. And, that’s the main issue, there is not much consistency, while sometimes the episodes are good, nothing astounding, not something that’s going to permeate my psyche the way Robocop did, but the kind of thing you can tune in to with a chippy in one hand and a drink in the other, and just have a good time. But it does not consistently offer that experience, and that’s the issue, it’s not consistently good, yet it’s not consistently bad either, which leads to a conflicting feeling. And, I wouldn’t necessarily object to them changing the tone or the pacing now and then if it was actually integral to the central questions the viewer may have. A major one that comes to mind is how society evolved into the way it is, to which you’re given “a war happened”, and that’s it, or how Boomers cultivated into the way they are, or who the Knight Sabers are, their backstories aren’t particularly compelling, and neither are they. Soldiers who begrudgingly fulfill their duty to kill the Boomers, and there’s not a huge amount else to say about them, as for their backstory, the most you get is that they also happen to be rockstars, but that certainly doesn’t correlate to their character, there’s no sense of rebellion you’d expect from a rockstar, they don’t even make musical puns when they fight, it’s a detail as insignificant as their blood type. They don’t tell you any of these basic details, but they throw in a ton of pointless side characters, like some photographer who appears in the last episode, who is about as important as you can typically expect a character introduced in the last episode to be.

The aesthetics are certainly impressive, the visuals of the city look great, and there were some legitimately cool looking robots once or twice, although this is somewhat held back by a poor budget, it’s an action series but they don’t seem to have the budget to properly orchestrate action sequences, most certainly not the sort that involves them jumping around like crazy, so it can feel a bit disjointed at times. And, while I’m typically opposed to any more than one music video put into a single series, Bubblegum Crisis just barely gets a pass for having music that’s a lot better than usual.

In summary, Bubblegum Crisis is a shit sandwich with some nice sprinkles on the top. It’s got a couple good parts, and some decent ideas that could probably work if they were elaborated upon, but it’s got some major problems, and even with its good points, they are held back by its shortcomings, resulting in a work that ranges from mediocre to somewhat good, depending on which episode it is.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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