Winter 2024 Anime: Bang Brave Bang Bravern

Synopsis

In the future, humanity wages war with giant humanoid weapons called Titanostriders. Isami Ao of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force and Lewis Smith of the United States Marine Corps meet on the battlefield in Oahu, Hawaii. An enemy aircraft attacks, scattering their forces. To survive the battle and save their friends, unlikely comrades must find the courage to defeat this new threat. (From Crunchyroll)

Comments

Caesar E.S. (The Indonesian Anime Times)

I KNEW IT. I knew it, I knew it, I knew Cygames Pictures were up to something when they revealed the first PV for the show. It featured grounded, real-type robots yet accompanied by an upbeat theme with trumpets blaring. Not to mention the show’s title itself, Bang Brave Bang Bravern, which is an odd choice for what at a glance looks like a military-style robot show. Turns out they pulled the old bait-and-switch with this one, making the show’s premiere one of the most surprising anime first episodes in recent memory.

Not that Cygames haven’t pulled this sort of thing before — notably, both Akiba Maid War and The Marginal Service also had similarly vague PVs that said nothing about what those respective shows were actually about. In any case, it looks like the third time’s the charm as it seems to have worked at creating a considerable buzz for the show online. Bang Bravern isn’t exactly your standard “real robot” anime, but a straight-up super robot show, an absolute rarity these days. It feels like a spiritual successor to the Brave series, but for adults. It makes perfect sense now that this show is directed by Obari Masami, the “natural-born robot master” of anime, who himself prominently worked on many Brave series shows.

And it’s perfect. That’s exactly what the latter half of the episode feels. It has everything you would ever want from the kind of show that it has revealed itself to be; from hot-blooded one-liners to dynamic robot poses to finishing moves with attack names that need to be screamed out, and a bombastic theme song with the robot’s name in the lyrics, with the added bonus that the actual robot itself sings it (Bravern, voiced by Suzumura Kenichi). The opening animation has silhouettes foreshadowing the enemy generals and what seems to be a rival enemy robot to our titular hero. I can’t gush about it enough. Everything about this show just feels right.

As a robot anime fan, I never thought I would see an anime like this get made again, and I’m sure that many share this sentiment. Yet here we are, and I’m so happy to see that it’s being made with such quality & care, and with a director who himself established, even invented many of the visual languages of the genre at the helm. That means he’s free to use as many visual references to his past work as he wants. But that also means that he understands what gets people’s blood pumping when it comes to robot anime, and I can’t think of anyone better to do the job.

I’ve written at length before how, while robot anime isn’t dying per se, the kinds of shows that are being made seem to be limited to the more “real robot” types of mecha, as 3DCG lends itself more to realistic and grounded depictions, while fully 2D animated hand-drawn robot anime these days are limited to shows by studios such as Sunrise, BONES, or Trigger because there’s just not enough people who can animate robots by hand. And yet Bang Bravern has managed to show that it can be done, that a dynamic “super robot” feel can be expressed in TV animation using the right application of 3DCG and sprinklings of well-placed 2D animation, with Obari himself stating that “3D + hand-drawn = the best & strongest”.

Even if you’re not at all interested in robots, Bang Bravern is still a rare opportunity to see someone whose name is synonymous with the genre itself getting carte blanche to show the peak of his craft and the best of what the medium has to offer, along with staff who are clearly as passionate and as excited about the whole thing. It certainly also helps that illustrator Kamokamen‘s character designs look very appealing if you’re more interested in the humans of the show. 

I’m over the moon. I’m looking forward to seeing more of what this show brings.

Bang Brave Bang Bravern is currently airing on Aniplus Asia and will stream on Crunchyroll starting 18 January 2024.

Facts and Figures

Screenshots and Trailer

The Indonesian Anime Times