Jul 24, 2024
Sonoda's style has been translated well to cleaner, modern sensibilities. It's very refreshing to see. The sound design is nice as well: sometimes if you close your eyes you will imagine you are watching a better anime. Unfortunately you are not watching a better anime, you are watching Bean Bandit (2021).
It's easy to blame the runtime, but plenty of shorts - professional or otherwise - manage to tell tight, compelling narratives in a similar amount of time. Unfortunately, this desperately needed to be run through a few script revisions to trim the fat and focus on the core concept. A tiny bit of setup, a
...
high intensity car chase / gunfight, and then a dramatic standoff that ends on a cliffhanger could've been a great way to pitch a full series. Instead we get boring vomit, pee, and loli jokes that take up about half of the runtime, married to uninspired, weightless action. All Bean Bandit himself even does is kick someone in the balls and get run over. Thrilling.
It seems likely that this OVA fell into the trap of setting an "enticingly low" funding goal (15 million yen), with the hopes that it would convince people to pledge, hopefully build up a bit of traction, and then exceed the goal a few times over to end up on a reasonable budget. Instead it just about grabbed 130% of the initial goal and, rather than taking the humbling and just delivering something decent, we got a short that somehow can't even make somebody getting hit by a car feel impactful. Don't waste your time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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