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Jan 8, 2023
Maybe this is a bad idea. Writing this review, I mean. I've already made it clear that I think Bubblegum Crisis 2032, the late 80's OVA, is my favorite goddamn media product and has been for the past six years or so, right? Of course I'm going to be disappointed in any reboot that tries to not only do different things than the OVA, but does so on what's clearly a fraction of the budget. Why should you listen to me? Ah, but who am I kidding, when was the last time bias or decorum stopped someone on the internet?
Fuck this. It's time for a
...
reckoning. I was hurt by this anime. It's time to hurt the fuck back.
Bubblegum Crisis 2040 is the only anime I have watched tip-to-tail that I didn't just find bad in a way that I could laugh or scratch my head at. This anime made me angry, truly, terribly angry, a rising anger that bubbled up the second the show used a shitty repeating frame cycle for a backflip as early as episode two, then reused it for episode three. It doesn't just shit on the promise of its premise, it heaves out its own innards, every liter of black bilious blood and square inch of rancid green intestines, on what made Crisis good in the first place in exchange for chasing the hype of being an evangelion clone, with all the psychodrama and Deep and Flawed characters that entails. It is the kind of anime where the final building block in the romance between one of its heroines and the cop who's been chasing after her is when he saves her from attacking animated clown dolls, and thinks that this is it, this is how a woman falls for a man, when they're saved from FUCKING CHEAP-ASS CLOWN DOLLS...
Whew. Okay. Attempt Number Two. Let's break it down by different parts of the show, as one used to do on this site. Maybe that will stifle my rage a little.
Story: Spends one cour on robot-monster-of-the-week stories, with the actual plot seeming to build at something of a slow burn, until the real antagonist pair comes to the fore and this ostensibly cyberpunk-ish story becomes a rote robot-zombie apocalypse. The first cour has almost no bearing on the second cour's plot, you could cut so much cruft from that first half and focus more on the actual villain(s) of the show, but 2040 has no sense of its own narrative priorities. Almost every major story that advances the plot will be streeeeched out over two episodes when it's clear there's no need to do so, leaving us on annoying rug-pull cliffhangers everytime without a sense of satisfaction that anything has been resolved as the plot chugs along.
It's also thematically muddled as hell. One gets the sense, multiple times, that the show is trying to Say Something about the Boomer robots and their place alongside humanity, but ultimately none of it makes any sense, especially since Boomers themselves possess bullshit matter-morphing powers that turn them into Resident Evil monsters that are then the zombie-pawns of the Big Bad who wants to destroy humanity for reasons that change on a dime, reasons that even when they're being exposited in the penultimate episode make no goddamn sense. Why is this whole plot happening? What is the point? Why can't the Sabers ever be allowed to stop the robot apocalypse, or at least slow it down, only for plot-convenience to hinder them at crucial moments because the writers can't let anything be resolved, any victory that the Sabers have any agency over occur? No, seriously, the Big Bad fuses with one of the characters, decides She's God Now, and then fucks off into another dimension in the course of five minutes. What was the point, 2040? What was the fucking point? Oh, wait, there was none, you just wanted to sound Deeeeeep without having a cursory understanding of your own ideas. Which... wasn't that the promise of 2040? That it was supposed to have a deeper, more put-together story than its more fragmented predecessor? Oh boy is that not the case.
Characters: Infuriating. For all the insistence that 2040 is a more feminist show than 2032, 2040 seems far more willing to snatch away narrative agency from its characters, _especially_ Sylia Stingray. Jesus, I could write an entire essay on the character assassination she undergoes. Suffice to say that the cool-headed leader has been replaced with an alcoholic hysteric damsel with Other M-level daddy issues, who attempts to plan her war against the villains but is pathetically outplayed every goddamn time she tries to do something that might be cool. I felt bad for her in a metanarrative sense, because the writers clearly thought that making her a less competent Misato Katsuragi was somehow creating a Deep Character.
The rest of the characters aren't done much better. Linna Yamazaki goes from a money-crazed yuppie in 2032 with a big heart -- which is cliché but at least it's something -- to a total blank slate. She acts as the audience surrogate for the first few arcs -- because apparently we needed this show's premise fucking spoonfed to us over the course of four or five episodes -- before being seemingly forgotten entirely as a character besides one episode where she goes home to the country and then comes back to save the day. Priss Asagiri, the gal who snatches the protagonist spotlight from her, goes from hotheaded and loud and scene-stealing in 2032 to sullen and silent and honestly kind of boring. The only Saber who doesn't get character-destroyed is Nene Romanova, and that's mostly based on the fact that she was the token moe character in 2032 and needed a plot-power glow-up, not staying about the same as her old self. As it is, the only ways they can make her useful in 2040 are points where she... rewires an electrical grid to stop a monster-of-the-week? You would think a hacker would be cooler in this show, but nope, no, nyet, sorry, go fuck yourself viewer.
And the antagonists! They were right to kill Mason off in the first few episodes of 2032, his position in any narrative is inherently kind of boring, so 2040 keeping Mason around is... well, it makes sense, but like everything else about this show it doesn't fucking work. Jouji Nakata goes a great job voicing the bad guy, bless him, but Mason seems to never be hindered by anything right up until the last act where the REAL Big Bad shows up and fucks around with him, so there's no sense of him being anything other than a plot device. Oh God, and his motivation! Big Bad Galatea just *explains* it in one exposition dump, and it's a motivation, yes, but it's the most angsty, stupid motivation I've seen in anime! And what're Galatea's ultimate motivations for unleashing robopocalypse? Like I said, even when it was explained to me point-blank I began understanding it as 'Boomers have surpassed humanity', which we've all seen before haven't we, and eventually ended screaming 'THAT'S NOT HOW EVOLUTION WORKS YOU DIPSHITS!' at my computer. We've all been there, haven't we? No? Good, I hope not.
Art & Animation: You know, you can say a lot of disparaging things about Bubblegum Crisis's story, say that it's undercooked, throws you in at the deep end and expects you to swim, but at least it looks really fucking cool while doing it, leveraging all the money of the bubble economy to deliver brilliant cityscapes, fast-paced fight scenes, and wonderfully articulated mecha and character designs. It's really 80's, but definitely in a way that's aged well. 2040? Like I said, they resorted to tawdry animation loops in the middle of ostensibly high-budget fight as early as episode 2. Not a good sign, right? Well, yeah. Every part of Megatokyo looks cheapened, plasticized, from the hardsuits to the vehicles to the backgrounds to the Boomers. Oh God, the Boomers are just fucking awful. I don't know what possessed the designers to crib from the weird matter-absorption powers that Boomers had in 2032 for only one goddamn episode -- oh, no, wait, I do, budget concerns. This way Boomers can just attack by shooting tentacles at our heroines, our heroines can fail to adequately damage a Boomer in any fight, they can do some bondage stuff for a bit, and then some x-factor finishes the fight in a way that doesn't feel earned. Like, ever.
Again, it's baffling, because 2032's fight scenes are excellent, big and explosive and fast-paced in a way nothing in sluggish 2040 is. Could they just not get the money to make it work? Had BGC's star as a franchise faded so fast that they just couldn't get the money? I wonder. Certainly the turn of the millennium was not a time for big-budget franchises. But all the same, I can't forgive that the primary medium of action and motion in this anime is tentacles.
Music: 2032 had some of the most iconic 80's J-rock this side of Macross. I don't say that lightly: Konya Wa Hurricane, Mad Machine, Say Yes... all these sung tracks all hold up to this day. They feel big, loud, and cool, which is the point: Crisis was meant to sell music as much as it was meant to sell itself.
Now, I could forgive 2040 for not going for that golden standard, it was always trying to do something different, but the music we actually get in its stead is... yeesh. It's bad. It's droning, pulsing, techno every time, techno that never feels like it syncs well with the action that's going on but instead just exists because they needed an action track. I don't have much to say here, just that losing such a crucial part of the original 2032 experience feels so disappointing.
Overall: Goethe once said that criticism of a work should focus on three things: What is a work trying to do, does it succeed, and was it worth doing. Bubblegum Crisis 2040 wants next to nothing to do with the old Crisis, and maybe it knows what it wants to do in its stead, which is try to make a cyberpunk Evangelion with all the Depth and Darkness that implies.
Does it succeed? Fuck no. It would need a far more liberal budget to spend on actually interesting action scenes, it would need to give us interesting and competent characters, it would need to know what it wanted to say before it went and said it.
Was it worth doing? Maybe. Stand Alone Complex remains iconic for those who've seen it because of its excellent sense of itself and what it's trying to do, but that's not really cyberpunk Evangelion, and it isn't really Bubblegum Crisis either. But the sheer magnitude of Crisis's failure to deliver an exciting or interesting cyberpunk-superhero-action story, its almost willful need to suck, will remain in my mind for a long time, as something I can consider with ease whenever I want to feel rage, and then despair.
Don't watch this fucking anime, folks. You won't come out of it happier, or wiser.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Nov 13, 2022
I did not come into Cyberpunk: Edgerunners with high hopes. In fact, had it not been on the list of things my university's anime club was going to see, I would not have watched it at all. Trigger's over-the-top minimal-frames style combined with the idiocy of its writing staff was one factor, but even as a fan of cyberpunk as a genre 2077 was an immensely disappointing game, a game whose story was defined by taking absolutely zero risks and acting instead as a greatest hits of genre tropes. I expected about the same. And in certain parts in the middle of the story, I
...
got that.
But imagine my surprise at that first episode, a first episode which dives deep into the unaffordability of existence in Night City as a normal person, where everything has a price and those prices add up. Sure, David's mom has the destined-to-die-anime-mom hair, but the show did a good job showing the fallout of her death, the futility of everything David Martinez, 17-year-old loser, was trying to do - what lead him, in the final shot, to scream 'BOUT TIME I CHROMED THE FUCK UP!'. Certainly there's a show in there that we see in episode 2, where David, alone in the city, wanders around trying to get by and find a purpose, but we don't really get to see it, because by episode 3 David's joined a merry band of Edgerunners to commit cyber-enhanced megacrimes for easy money.
And that's the show, really - David and his gal-pal Lucy and a bunch of other characters with great designs and almost no backstory or characterization beyond an adjective or two go around Night City and fuck shit up. Or, well, maybe not. There's juuust enough of a character and narrative arc for David and Lucy independent of everyone else that grows on you, subtly, to the point that it's easy enough to understand and care for them even when they make bad choices. Things change, people die (okay, everyone dies, but you knew that going in, didn't you?), and one starts to actually feel emotions from the show, which is more than could be said than for most of Trigger's fare.
Everything else outside of plot and characters is a mixed bag, mind you. Night City still looks ugly and unlikeable as a cyberpunk setting; said setting is still the most generic shit ever, unable and unwilling to say anything new about the world; fight scenes are a mix of interesting spatial exercises (episode 2) and generic exchanges of one guy shooting and a bunch of guys dying (Episode 7), and you can't figure out which ones are going to be which; the music's largely lifted from the game itself and isn't very good... yeah. Also Trigger's excessively cartoonish style seeps into the anime at the worst times, which is annoying because the anime normally tries to do better by the viewer than, say, Kill La Kill. So... yeah.
I think my overall impression of Edgerunners, coming in with Marianas Trench-low expectations, is 'pleasantly surprised'. It's janky, but never boring. Its characters are flat, except for the two leads we really come to care about. Its world is rote genre stuff, but executed with juuuuust enough visual flair to make you want to keep watching. You won't be disappointed by it... but you won't be amazed by it.
Watch Bubblegum Crisis 2032 to see how it's done.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 28, 2022
Okay, so I haven't *actually* watched all of Ranma 1/2. And, uh, I have no intention of doing so. Forgive me, MAL Jesus.
But honestly? I wouldn't recommend trying to watch all of it either. I wouldn't even trying to watch what you watch *in order*. Ranma is 161 episodes of seriously varying quality, but like Rumiko Takahashi's big hit before it, Urusei Yatsura, it doesn't matter if you watch the whole thing or not. A few dozen highest-rated episodes oughta do it.
It's like... Look, Inuyasha has a plot, so I'm told. A plot that plods along at a filler-stuffed pace not unlike Naruto, but it
...
has a plot. Ranma 1/2 has a very amusing setup, and very amusing characters, but to say that it has a plot just ain't true. As is the case in a lot of Rumic stuff, you have to reset to zero at the end of a manga arc. But I won't deny that the setup is great: Cocksure martial artist teen Ranma Saotome turns into a girl when splashed with cold water, a boy again when hit with hot water, is raised by a dad who makes Gendo Ikari look like Will Rogers, and to top it all off he's a harem protagonist with a bunch of bickering fiances who can't stand each other! Stupid martial arts techniques pop in and out of relevance; Ancient Chinese doohickeys with magical powers appear for an episode before being forgotten; every teenaged character in the anime is horny for another character, leading to constant romantic tension and goofy fights. The plots write themselves, which is probably why it was the biggest thing in anime fanfiction in the 1990's.
The catch is that while it's good shit, it's usually the same shit over and over and over again. Ranma doesn't become less of an idiot, main heroine Akane Tendo never becomes good at martial arts or stops being the worst sort of tsundere, and while they're supposed to be the main romantic plot-driver in the anime I could never find that I was sold on them as a couple. So while plots write themselves, you aren't going to get a wide variety of plots, or plots that build on each other, or, well, anything of narrative significance at all, really.
The question you have to ask yourself when watching Ranma, then, is Does That Matter? Do you just wanna watch a proto-harem show with some of the most legendary voice talent of the nineties for the sub, that under no circumstances can find the energy to take itself seriously? Or do you want something that cares a little more about story? Because you have to meet Ranma on its own, very low terms, to enjoy it, and even then that's not always guaranteed. So that's why I'd recommend doing what I did, which is watch a few episodes here and there on late and lonely winter nights and enjoy it for what it is. Don't be like my roommate who watched all of it and now has sworn it off forever. Don't become that sort of person.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jul 21, 2022
There are two really good ways to describe this manga. One is who it's by and the genre it's tackling: It's a super-robot manga by Kenichi Sonoda, legendary girls-with-guns mangaka, the guy behind Gunsmith Cats and Riding Bean. Maybe that means something to you - myself, I know Sonoda mostly through his seminal character work for Bubblegum Crisis 2032. I stopped reading Gunsmith Cats right around when the lesbian brainwashing rapist became a major character. I wish I was making that up.
Anyway, the other way to describe Cannon God Exaxxion is that it is the anti-Evangelion. It's like this:
Teenage protagonist? Beats other kids up at
...
school for harshing his granddad's name, and Gets In The Robot without much hesitation or feeling emotionally traumatized - there's an alien invasion to fight, after all!
Mad Scientist Parental Figure? He's wacky as hell, all spikey hair and hot-blooded determination to smash them goddamn space-monkeys back to whence they came, even fewer questions asked than his descendent!
Mom? Still around, and can turn her hair into a nanotech hardsuit! Love interest? Mentally stable and the outcome there is never in doubt! The mech? It's not a metaphor for returning into the womb, instead it has a giant antimatter-powered cannon that extends out from its torso! Some might even say, with a name like Exaxxion, that it's kind of phallic! The aliens? They look like humans and they're mostly pretty evil! Exaxxion is good, clean, wholesome fun.
Except, well, y'know, there are some complexities. Some reasonable hard-ish technobabble, nanotech and antimatter and antigravity, is in play, but what's really interesting is the PR war between human resistance and alien occupier, as the latter attempts to convince humanity that no they *aren't* going to commit omnicide and that the guys with the giant robot are the *real* baddies. Not a whole lot is done with this plot line, especially since the manga kind of wraps things up in what feels like the equivalent of a season and a half of anime instead of a full two - like Sonoda either lost interest in the series or Kodansha made him taper it off and go back to GSC, I dunno. But it's there, and gives texture to the story in a way that most other manga don't try to do.
The other trouble is that Dark Horse published most of this back in the early aughties - five out of seven volumes - but now has no plans to finish, since that was largely a Studio Proteus / Toren Smith translation as surely as Gunsmith Cats was. Your best bet is to find a scanlation site and read it there - admittedly, in the later half, the quality of said scanlation starts to drop and then craters pretty badly, almost like English wasn't their first language, but just getting *an* ending is better than no ending.
It's a pity, because this is hands-down one of my favorite manga considering how effortlessly it taps into my fanboy Id, how easily it makes me squeal and snigger with glee. This is a manga that deserves your time, your attention, and deserves better overall.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 15, 2022
So! GITS-SAC_2045 ain't so great. It's okay, but it's too silly to reach the heights that the original Stand Alone Complex did. I blame two things here.
One is Shinji Aramaki being one of the directors of the new GITS. No offense, but the man makes silly cyber-action, stuff where the plot isn't really the point the way it was in Stand Alone. I love the guy's work, he was a big part of Bubblegum Crisis, but GITS ain't for him.
The other is a writer by the name of Junichi Fujisaku, who wrote may of the original SAC's best episodes, and based on the stand-alone (heh)
...
SAC light novels he wrote, probably was one of the best minds in Production IG's stable of writers for the series. He is not on SAC_2045's staff. Instead, he's making this comic, a monthly adventure which wrapped up its first arc a few months ago.
I can't say much about the new arc - going to Africa is dangerous territory for the series to explore without coming across as cringey, but time will tell. That being the case, this series makes a convincing argument that Fujisaku was one of the main minds that made good GITS stuff. It's... that damn good.
Sure, Motoko isn't in it, but that's no gaurantee of non-quality (Innocence, Solid State Society, the 1.5 manga). Instead, we follow Togusa, Batou, and the rest of the gang plus a young psychic (they exist in Shirow's work, don't make a big screaming deal out of it, it's nothing new) as they work to uncover a murder mystery that then, in classic SAC fashion, turns out to involve a wide-spanning conspiracy involving bio-enhanced test-tube kids, weird cults, shady corporations, and even some sinister Chinese influence.
So... The art style may not look Shirow, but it tracks pretty close to the fairly realistic design of SAC; the plot may not feel Shirow, it's a little too long-running and deep-reaching compared to the more vignette style of the OG manga, but it sure *feels* like a good cour of SAC-style content; the story has moments that shouldn't work but do time and time again just by leaning on the strength of its characterizations. It really does feel like a modern classic for GITS fans, even if it never quite plumbs the philosophical depths that everyone praises the series for getting into.
In other words... go read it if you like Ghost in the Shell and want some franchise content that doesn't equate depth with fucking 1984 references. Jesus Christ, if this had been animated as new GITS content things would be great, I'd be happy, we wouldn't be having all these problems SHINJI ARA-FUCKIN-MAKI.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Oct 25, 2020
I’m actually glad that most reviews of Crash! are generally more positive than I thought they would be - I’ve seen this iteration of the franchise shit on so many dang times, even by Kenichi Sonoda himself, and it baffles me that this show has a lower rating overall than 2040. 2040 is terrible! Sure, Crash ain’t perfect, but I will say this much: In spite of having many of the strengths of its prequel series Crisis cut away from it - like any sort of lasting canon around character development, high-quality art, consistently good 80’s music, Priss’s VA, etc etc etc. - Crash! does
...
its damnedest to play to the strengths of Crisis rather than the weaknesses, and for the most part it succeeds, even managing to pile up some stuff that I wish the original series had managed to play around with.
A bit of context before I get going, though: Bubblegum Crisis was made by 3 companies in a joint venture, but Crash was the result of all those companies parting ways and one of them (ARTMIC) trying to continue the series without key elements and the long-term timetable the series usually had. They put 3 episodes out in six months before one of the other companies (Youmex) sued them into bankruptcy, etc. So that’s why, amidst all the copyright issues, GENOM isn’t mentioned, Priss’s VA is different (but not necessarily worse if you ask me!) and only the vaguest sense of continuity carries over, because they couldn’t explicitly reference episodes whose rights they didn’t technically own. Regardless:
Story: Story has never been the franchise’s strongest suit, in no small part because of the seat-of-pants production methods even the original series went through, with directors changing almost every episode towards the end of the original OVA’s run. And that’s fine, actually. Like most superhero stories, BGC is at its best when it lets its characters play to their archetype and run around and kick ass and blow stuff up in a generally cohesive narrative background. And for the most part Crash! achieves this. The four Sabers are still largely themselves. Sylia may be a little softer in her methods, Priss may be more generically grumpy (she apparently hates Boomers now for some vague reason despite having gotten pretty close to banging one), but now Nene - yes, Nene, the cute hacker one - is the moral glue who keeps the team together in the first episode, which is refreshing! It takes the best parts of her character from Scoop Chase and builds on that moral pride she has as an ADP desk jockey, the kind of pride Priss and Linna just don’t have. (Oh, and Linna gets a bit more development of her money-crazed character. She’s one-note, yes, but it’s a good kind of one note. Like I said, playing to archetypes). The whole first episode is cliche, but in a good way, in that it’s the Sabers getting back together to kick some powersuited merc’s to the curb with minimal bitchiness from the involved parties. It’s not hitting the emotional highs of the back half of the original series, but it’s getting there.
The second episode plays to a strength of Crash! that Crisis actually doesn’t have. Namely, it focuses intensely on Boomers. Boomers were always just kind of there in Crisis, the issues around killer robots and the like coming in and out of focus based on what the director that time around wanted to focus on. Here, though, they’re everywhere, an integral part of life not just as Terminators which pop out of their skin, but as civilian labor. GENOM’s absence notwithstanding, this makes sense, provides a grounding, however weak, to the world that wasn’t really there in Crisis. Episode 2 focuses on a cute little super-intelligent Boomer who as far as continuity goes makes no sense - weren’t Boomers already pretty much Turing-Test-passable? - but the action scenes that he as a MacGuffin cause, with Priss and him running around Megatokyo’s underground trying to dodge a gang of Boomer terrorists and getting into various exotic firefights, are worth the goofiness. Hell, if you take it alone, I’d argue episode two is the best of the bunch.
Episode three, on the other hand, tries desperately to a) be all hardsuit-action, all the time, b) tie up the loose story threads previous episodes of both Crisis and Crash! were generally content to leave hanging, and c) bring back Largo for the second fucking time. It’s a mess on most levels - the action scenes aren’t exciting, the plot outline is barely coherent, Sylia almost gets turned into Instrumentality by Largo, it all kind of feels like the ending of 2040 and not in a good way. The less said about Melt Down the better.
Art: Crash’s art isn’t as good as Crisis’s art. Not even close, on several levels. Megatokyo feels more utopian-futuristic and less gritty and grimy the way the initial parts of Crisis did, though admittedly the city did seem to slip towards that more optimistic aesthetic over time; color is darker and less vivid; the whole art style feels barebones, lacking the detail of an OVA put together with more time and money. Some say the mecha designs, having been done by a toy designer instead of Sonoda and company, are lacking, but I actually like the new Hardsuits and the Knight Wing, and to a lesser degree the new Boomers (especially Largo’s final-boss forms). Admittedly, the action scenes in which they are involved are significantly less kinetic, more the usual low-budget firing-all-weapons-at-enemy-while-they-dodge-in-another-shot kinda stuff, but even then getting the Sabers hardware that can actually wreck their foes pretty hard - even for dear, sweet, precious Nene - is a good trend, one that 2040 completely ignores to its detriment. I personally like Geo Climbers’ running firefights between Priss and various breeds of terrorist Boomer, but your mileage may vary there. You won’t get anything as cool as Priss vs. the crab-mech from episode seven, but I think you’ll be surprised.
Sound: Sound effects are still generally okay, but the magic of 80’s music has been swapped out for a generally more early-90’s sort of synthesizer-jazz mixed with overwrought dramatic pieces that try to emulate Danny Elfman’s soundtrack for the Burton Batman movies. The few vocal songs that Ryoko Tachikawa, and eventually the other Sabers, aren’t bad, though, they’re just not really well-integrated into the episode openings as they were in Crisis. More’s the pity, too. Musical openings were always one of the series strengths if you ask me.
Overall: I guess the most I can say about Crash is that it isn’t as bad as everyone thinks it is. Even with less budget and less bottled-lightning magic available to ARTMIC under a time crunch, Crash still manages to hit the highs of what is good about Crisis: Cute girls in power armor whooping Boomer ass in high-octane fight scenes mixed with sci-fi slice-of-life. And really, what more could you ask for in a series, even one marred by episodes as nonsensical as the third one? Well, if you like 2040, you might say ‘deep analysis of the relationship between man and machine’.
And you would be wrong. So. Fucking. Wrong.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 19, 2020
Okay, so Bubblegum Crisis isn’t the greatest anime of all time. It’s not even the greatest cyberpunk anime of all time. It’s not even the greatest cyberpunk anime of the eighties, because critical opinion placed that crown firmly on Akira’s head long, long ago. And yet Bubblegum Crisis, not Akira, or Ghost in the Shell, or even Evangelion, is far and away my *favorite* anime out there - nothing else even comes close. Admittedly, I’m something of an obsessive person. I’ve been latching onto sea-tossed fandoms like a memetic lamprey for years. But why BGC?
Because it’s fucking awesome, that’s why. Because it’s a synthesis of
...
things that I like in this point in time. Because its open-endedness, its willingness to focus on action and put all the existential stuff in the backseat, the sense of what BGC could have been rather than what it is, make it more than the sum of its parts.
But that’s a fairly vague reason. Let’s ignore the sum and focus on the parts first.
Story: There’s admittedly not a lot of story or super-deep psychoanalytic shit going on in BGC. There are Boomers, which are like Terminators with big meaty muscles. There is a megacorporation that produces them. There are some cute anime girls who don cuter power-armor to wreck their shit. There are some Miami-Vice-meets-Robocop police dudes who dick around and get their shit kicked in by the Boomers.
Of course, the synthesis of these disparate elements could have all gone together in a very bad way (Lookin’ at you BGC 2040). But each episode - there are only eight, and three of them are barely TV-episode length - generally does its best to not require deep viewing and following the plot to enjoy the spectacle. There is a metaplot running between episodes, but it’s diluted by the fact that the creators clearly had no idea what they were doing at first, and the fact that the director’s seat kept changing after the original trilogy of videos. You have to dig into wacky fan speculation to get mileage out of the plot, and that’s fun don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as engaging overall as, say, Stand Alone Complex, which in my mind sets a high bar for thrilling conspiracies and weird cyberpunk shit mixed together. But plot is only one half of a compelling narrative, which brings us to the...
Characters: Some may say that the original four Knight Sabers are all to some degree stereotypes. I think there was another review awhile back that argued that they were more archetypes, more forerunners for the character molds that have become so essential to anime nowadays. (Supposedly a proposal for a BGC ‘Hot Springs’ episode mutated into Tenchi Muyo, the godfather of harem anime. Wacky, eh?). And indeed each main character has their own thing going on - a distinctive voice, distinctive character design, distinctive behavior. They play roles, yes, but those roles are always interesting and compelling and aren’t as shallow as they seem to be at first glance.
In particular I love the character of Sylia Stingray, the cool-beauty ‘big sister’ of the Sabers. Her voice is Yoshiko Sakakibara at her best, somehow warm and loving yet stone-cold cool at the same time, not the brutal villainess of Haman Karn nor the resignation of Shinobu Nagumo. No, Sylia Stingray is sort of what happens when you cross James Bond, a Bond Girl, and a Bond Villain all in one package. She’s beautiful, capable, knows what’s going on for the most part, is implied to be some sort of cyborg, and isn’t afraid to stab her enemies in the throat. Also she runs a lingerie shop as her secret identity. There’re very few other characters like her in anime and that’s a pity. Also Priss is fun to watch smash her way through obstacles and occasionally get her shit kicked in. All told BGC’s characters may not be vividly realized portraits of pain or emotional melodrama, but they have depth to them. It’s like how a few choice strokes can be a landscape in the human mind as much as a photorealistic painting can be. The characters of BGC work because they are a few strokes placed very well.
Art: 80’s cel-shaded awesomeness - explosions and lighting and lasers and color mixed in with urban grunge, the kind of stuff it takes a real budget to show off. Mecha range from simple yet elegant (hardsuits) to hideously baroque (the Hyperboomers from Episode 6) but for the most part they all feel like they’re inhabiting the same high-tech high-octane universe. Sure, Megatokyo goes from being a gritty Streets of Fire-y hellhole to a brighter, cleaner urban sprawl over the series. Sure, the art style changes to reflect which director is in the seat this time around. But, again, each episode mostly stands on its own as a collection of awesome set pieces, plot be dammed. They don’t make em’ like this anymore.
Sound: Okay, so the sound effects aren’t necessarily memorable. But BGC indulges itself in the style of 80’s MTV music videos, especially in the iconic opening sequence of the first episode. Hardcore 80’s J-Rock, some of it using the vocals of the Sabers themselves, pops and crackles through the beginning and end credits of every episode, each time a selection of unique songs. You can tell that part of the revenue from the OVA was trying to get people to buy the soundtrack on tape. Hell, the voice of Priss ended up being a real singer instead of a voice Actress. You haven’t lived until you’ve listened to her belt out ‘Konya Wa Hurricane’ intercut with a Combat Boomer wrecking the shit out of a whole bunch of cops. If nothing else, watch that sequence, you’ll be surprised how much it makes you want to watch the rest.
Enjoyment: This is an awfully vague category, so I’ll use it to talk about the BGC fandom - or what’s left of it. See, BGC was a big deal in the 90’s, especially during the hot times of the VHS boom. Even after Sailor Moon took the West by storm, even after Evangelion upended weeb’s conceptions of what anime was capable of, people still wrote a good deal of BGC fanfiction and posted it on their Geocities or Usenet forums. Much of it is bad, yes, but there’s so little of it compared to the vast seas of shit that dominate fanfiction today, that the good stuff floats to the top easily. And that good stuff is usually consistently good, because it was written by adults who got weirdly into the series’ metaplot and tried to wrap up its unexplored threads to varying degrees of effectiveness. Really, though, the reason BGC is so good for fandom is because it builds its world and its plot in those same broad strokes. It’s up to readers and writers to interpret, elaborate, accentuate what’s there to make more comprehensive stories, ones that aren’t just mashing two characters together to make them kiss.
(By comparison, say, Ghost in the Shell is a more complete work, yes, but it doesn’t have the same spark of manic vitality that lends itself to writing fanfic (at least I think so). No wacky mecha, no melodrama, no flawed characters, just Tom Clancyesque cyberespionage and tactical combat.)
What else is there to say? Bubblegum Crisis is a product of its time, yes, that’s why the Vaporwave gif makers of the internet have latched onto it without appreciating it, but it still holds up remarkably well today. It has the stuff hobbyist fandom used to look for in anime, and seems to have forgotten today, as our collective taste is drowned in a sea of VTubers and gacha games. It’ s lightning in a bottle, a cool concept backed up by cooler design work to make a series that, like many of the action movies of the eighties, has a sort of iconic feel to it, something that, once you put in Konya Wa Hurricane, cannot be denied.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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