What do you get when you cross Kill La Kill with Promare and toss in a little Beastman DNA for good measure? Six pilots and half of a plotline.
BNA is dazzling, sleek, and tremendously fun to watch. Character designs are striking, the episode-to-episode stories are engaging, and it contains all of the charm you'd expect from Trigger. It's for-sure worth a watch, at least in part due to how its brevity and breakneck pace keeping you from getting bored. The viewing experience is an easy 7.5/10.
-HOWEVER-
That doesn't stop it from being a jumbled mess of half-baked ideas and a strung-together story that takes half its runtime to get going, though. It starts off feeling almost episodic, as our protagonist, Michiru, lacks a real, concrete goal to work towards. The focus instead is on her misadventures across Anima City, the episodes themselves varying drastically in tone and content.
First she's thwarting a child-trafficking scheme, next she's playing extreme baseball for the worst team in the league, then she's going to an out-of-town party with a new character who makes a single cameo after that episode. You get the faintest hints of a real arc sprinkled here or there, but it's never the focus. In general, it's hard to get a sense of where all of this is heading.
As for characters, Michiru is a plucky tomboy with a good heart who tries to overcome her natural prejudice against the Beastmen and figure out her own place in the world as a Beast-Human Hybrid. She's earnest to a fault, headstrong, and has a case of chronic hero syndrome. She functions as an effective audience surrogate while remaining enough of an actual character to grow and develop. She's not quite dynamic or complex enough to carry the show on her own, however...
...and neither is her brooding, enigmatic vigilante friend(?), Shiro, the next most important character after her. What focus he receives at first is largely (and deliberately) superficial, and he vacillates between "too cool for school" to "bastion of righteous anger." While this has the effect of hammering home how little Michiru actually knows about him, it also makes it harder to become invested in his character. He's intriguing, but not all that compelling at first.
It's not until a certain fox is introduced that we get any especially complex character dynamics. Her arrival coincides with the start of the show's actual plotline, but she doesn't show up until halfway through the season. She's accompanied by a serious tonal shift, and it almost feels like a different anime. There's a real sense of whiplash, and the show barrels through its last 6 episodes without giving you much of a chance to stop and catch your breath.
All in all, the episodic nature of the first 6 episodes coupled with the whirlwind plot of the last 6 leave the show feeling poorly structured and messy. More than anything else, it needed another 6-12 episodes to establish a stronger foundation for both its plot and its fairly undeveloped cast of side characters.
Unmistakably Trigger
What do you get when you cross Kill La Kill with Promare and toss in a little Beastman DNA for good measure? Six pilots and half of a plotline.
BNA is dazzling, sleek, and tremendously fun to watch. Character designs are striking, the episode-to-episode stories are engaging, and it contains all of the charm you'd expect from Trigger. It's for-sure worth a watch, at least in part due to how its brevity and breakneck pace keeping you from getting bored. The viewing experience is an easy 7.5/10.
-HOWEVER-
That doesn't stop it from being a jumbled mess of half-baked ideas and a strung-together story that takes half its runtime to get going, though. It starts off feeling almost episodic, as our protagonist, Michiru, lacks a real, concrete goal to work towards. The focus instead is on her misadventures across Anima City, the episodes themselves varying drastically in tone and content.
First she's thwarting a child-trafficking scheme, next she's playing extreme baseball for the worst team in the league, then she's going to an out-of-town party with a new character who makes a single cameo after that episode. You get the faintest hints of a real arc sprinkled here or there, but it's never the focus. In general, it's hard to get a sense of where all of this is heading.
As for characters, Michiru is a plucky tomboy with a good heart who tries to overcome her natural prejudice against the Beastmen and figure out her own place in the world as a Beast-Human Hybrid. She's earnest to a fault, headstrong, and has a case of chronic hero syndrome. She functions as an effective audience surrogate while remaining enough of an actual character to grow and develop. She's not quite dynamic or complex enough to carry the show on her own, however...
...and neither is her brooding, enigmatic vigilante friend(?), Shiro, the next most important character after her. What focus he receives at first is largely (and deliberately) superficial, and he vacillates between "too cool for school" to "bastion of righteous anger." While this has the effect of hammering home how little Michiru actually knows about him, it also makes it harder to become invested in his character. He's intriguing, but not all that compelling at first.
It's not until a certain fox is introduced that we get any especially complex character dynamics. Her arrival coincides with the start of the show's actual plotline, but she doesn't show up until halfway through the season. She's accompanied by a serious tonal shift, and it almost feels like a different anime. There's a real sense of whiplash, and the show barrels through its last 6 episodes without giving you much of a chance to stop and catch your breath.
All in all, the episodic nature of the first 6 episodes coupled with the whirlwind plot of the last 6 leave the show feeling poorly structured and messy. More than anything else, it needed another 6-12 episodes to establish a stronger foundation for both its plot and its fairly undeveloped cast of side characters.