A new Trigger anime? By the director of Little Witch Academia, the other Quite Good™ Trigger anime? And the screenwriter of Gurren Lagann? Nice! Does it know the way to go to show us the brand new world? Let’s find out!
BNA doesn’t mince words from the start: it knows what its themes are and what its message is. It’s not interested in subtlety, and that can work in its favour actually–not all thematic exploration has to be done subtly, and I can get behind a powerful message over subtlety if it’s emotionally resonant enough.
And for a while, it works. The characters work nicely to further the show’s themes while still working individually as characters–they were fun and light. I liked their dynamics and interactions and even in the face of the quite heavy subject matter the show pondered they kept the tone light and fluffy, which I liked.
But again, this worked for just a while.
There’s a point–and it’s amazing how accurately I can pinpoint out the exact moment when it happens–where it all falls apart and actively starts working against everything it was building towards. At that point, it feels like a royal mess of unnecessary plot twists for the sake of having plot twists and it doesn’t help that the finale is an overloaded mess of action sequences with little impact in an effort to wrap everything up at once, with… mixed results, to say the least.
It’s heartbreaking, to say the least, that the last few episodes mangle the show’s message and themes so badly, because it could’ve been such a powerful show otherwise. And, to me at least, it’s kind of a courtesy to not butcher your message and themes when you’re not being subtle about them. The way they just rushed the plot at the end was just shameful.
The show has its merits. The music is pretty good, and like always Trigger just knocks it out of the park in the visuals department. And if nothing else Anima City is a great setting that I could see myself getting lost into even if, like everything else, it got muddied towards the end.
So, in summary, BNA: Brand New Animal is a show that has the spark of life and many good ideas, but ultimately cannot see them to completion and stick the landing. Instead, it merely squanders the potential of its early episodes and ends up as just kind of decent.
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