Anime 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.
Anime The worst I can say is that it could have been better
Luckily that's not the best I can say.
While BNA does leave a lot to be desired, the things it does well are on point.
On the downside, the story does not live up to previous Trigger works I have seen, like Kill La Kill or even Little Witch Academia. The characters sometimes have moments where they act strangely out of character, but after the moment passes it is never mentioned. The ass pull at the end is an ass pull, one that I feel like they could have avoided. And at the risk of sounding like saying "I want more!" I feel like the season could have benefited from a few more episodes, cause things happen FAST.
That said, there is a lot right. World building is pretty smooth, minimal exposition dumps. Main and supporting character designs are all on point, even on a lot of the background characters. (Sorry Rufus, there's a new top Mole Rat in fiction.) Music is fun, even if (again) it is not at the same level of previous works. And of course the animations are all stunning. I'm not even sure if I spotted any repeated frames anywhere.
All in all, even if this just an attempt to reel in some furry money I feel it was at least a quality attempt. Though there probably won't be another season, I hope there will be supplementary material, or at least a manga. I tend to judge how much I like something based on if I want to watch it again and I will probably watch it again, if not in the immediate future.
I highly suggest giving it a watch.
Anime Trigger's weakest show so far
I usually enjoy Studio Trigger's shows, but BNA left me mostly cold. To me, the main problem is that it tries to tackle too many real world problems at once (racism, inequality, human and animal trafficking, drug abuse, terrorism, religion and cults' influence on people, unethical science etc.) without really expanding on any of them since the series is a mere 12 episode long, and also half of it is occupied by the usual cool and flashy Trigger fights and battles (plus a comedy episode that feels really out of place with the rest). Also the metaphors don't really work in making Anima City into a parallel to the real world, with the result that it comes off as a dumb anime version of Zootopia. And the "shocking twist" ending is quite stupid and looks like they just wanted to wrap all the dangling subplots up and call it a day. The characters also are fairly bland and generic, with Michiru being the usual ditzy but plucky and headstrong Trigger tomboy heroine, but without ever having Akko or Ryuko's charm (also she just stops caring about her main goal, turning human again, halfway through the show), Shirou being the typical mysterious brooding loner we've seen a thousand times already, and the Big Bad as the Nazi-esque genocidal whackjob who feels everyone else is beneath them. It's not a terrible anime, the animations and soundtrack are cool as expected of Trigger and it has some nice ideas every now and then, but for the rest it is forgettable and kind of convoluted in parts. With Cyberpunk Edgerunners Trigger has shown that they are able to make a cool-looking show that can deal with serious themes at the same time, so with BNA they probably did not know who the target audience was going to be, dealing with themes that are too serious for kids but in a way that makes it too dumb and unrealistic for adults.