So, I suppose I should start by explaining that title. You see, I’m something of an old hat at National Novel Writing Month – a challenge to write 50,000 words (the minimum definition of a novel) in the month of November. In recent years it’s presented more as a vehicle for actual storytellers, but back in the 00’s when I first encountered it, it was a much looser group with a big focus on getting participants to create all those words in such little time, like that was the big challenge.
One piece of advice that was passed around in the day was that, if you ever felt like a scene was stalling, you should just have ninjas attack. No rhyme, no reason, just ninjas, because surely you would get a lot of words down describing the ninja attack and then making sense of why and how ninjas suddenly appeared. By the time you explained your way out of the outburst of nonsense, you’d be many words ahead and ready for the next crazy thing to propel you forward. Bubuki Buranki feels for all the world like it was written by a teenager adhering to that rule with the kind of wild zeal that only youth can provide and then produced and edited by consummate professionals who had to somehow make all the outbursts work without disrespecting the “source material”.
So, our story begins with a pair of twin kids living with their family (the mother of whom is a ‘witch’ of some description, and her mystical abilities passed to the of the twins) on a floating island, high above the world. On the Floating Island, a great destructive power lays sealed and dormant, but before you can say “Cave Story!” a crisis occurs and the kids are sent to earth along with one of the slumbering giant robots, Obu.
Years later, the brother of the twins is now a young man, Azuma. Azuma is entering the city of “Incredibly cluttered walled dystopia, Japan” and aims to meet up with his childhood friend (from after the fall I guess), Kogane. Kogane has some friends of her own, including a strange animate artifact (a Bubuki, properly) that acts as a giant right fist when she needs to fight, and three other teens with their own Bubuki. While the Bubuki look like weapons, trinkets, or… whatever Righty is and can be used in their current forms, they’re also the limbs of the Buranki (giant robot like thing) Obu, and since Azuma has the heart (a small mystical techy orb), Kogane and her friends want to team up with him to form Obu properly and stick it to the tyrannical de-facto ruler of this hellhole, Reoko Banryuu, a girl who looks their age but has actually been around for decades, and who gained prominence after Azuma’s mom did something that silenced all the Buranki on the surface, meaning that right now only Reoko has the power to fight off rogue Buranki that fall from the sky.
In case you were wondering, this does all basically get out in one episode, two at the outside. This despite the opening on the Floating Island having a solid pace with a real mysterious feel that does, and this is to its credit, kind of evoke Cave Story’s feeling of exploration as well as its setting.
So a few things to notice about this show right at the outset. It’s already, like I said, throwing more stuff at you pretty much whenever you thought you could catch your breath. It also expects a great deal in terms of suspension of disbelief, as we are wandering blind into a world where giant robot creatures with detachable limbs that become seemingly unrelated objects, which are passed along human bloodlines with all sorts of crazy rules to them which you tend to be made aware of as they become relevant.
The show, however, is also gorgeous. Bubuki Buranki is a fully CGI anime, and it really shows what can be done with the medium. CGI in anime is a pretty mixed bag, ranging from the unfathomably heinous presentation of Ex-Arm to the troubled visual work of Shikizakura to Knights of Sidona working admirably within the strengths and weaknesses of the medium… to Bubuki Buranki here giving its absolute all every frame in order to fully animate the vision the creators clearly had.
There are, I suppose, some places where Bubuki Buranki is likely making concessions to its use of CGI, but they’re not ones I can fault. Reoko’s not-so-secret secret police all use identical models since they’re wearing face-concealing mask helmets… really crazy and creatively hideous ones, even if it’s still a standard uniform. And other than that… the backgrounds look great. Something CGI often skimps on is, ironically, the depth of the scenery. Reoko’s walled city isn’t somewhere we spend the whole show, but it’s as creative and insane as something out of Gurren Lagann or a Trigger production, a realm of fog and greebles… and vibrant color.
Let it not be said that Bubuki Buranki, even when things are dark, is anything but colorful. The show is extremely high-saturation, figuratively and sometimes literally glowing with fluorescent brightness against the deep shadows. It’s a very unique visual style, and I think the glow effects are captured by CGI in a way that traditional animation would struggle to achieve.
On another topic, the character designs are… idiosyncratic. They are very loud, and perhaps because getting subtle facial expressions in CGI is a bit of a struggle (with many looking like blank stares) most of the characters go really big, overacting just about every scene in an enjoyable way. This is especially notable in the bad guys, who all sport their own unique forms of psycho grin and other major stock expressions that really do play with how hammy the scenes themselves tend to get, especially during season 1. On the whole, the visual aspects make the show very fun to watch.
In any case, the kids put Obu together… and proceed to get trounced by Reoko and her fiery Buranki, Entei. Reoko doesn’t get to finish them off, and they get Obu’s core material onto an absurdly over-the-top train with the aim of following a secret path that will lead them back to the floating island where they can find Azuma’s mom and answers about just about everything. Along the way, they’re attacked by Reoko’s team – they don’t control the true limbs of Entei, but they do have substitute Bubuki of their own and invoke the “Bubuki Battle”, a formal series of 1-v-1 contests between matching limbs with for the stakes of controlling the Obu Bubuki. Reoko’s henchmen are all colorful loons with connections to their opposites. Since both sets of characters will be relevant (Azuma’s permanently and Reoko’s now and again) it makes sense to introduce them.
On Right Arm, we have Kogane, as previously mentioned – cute and cheerful aside from her ability to go absolutely berserk against her opposite. Why? Her counterpart is Shuusaku Matobai, who has a gangster look and feel, wields a gun-type Bubuki, and who Kogane believes murdered her father, though the flashbacks to the event are suspect. (It does turn out that Matobai and Kogane’s dad were actually friends, he was not responsible for the man’s death, and he’s tried to secretly protect Kogane… but only late in season 2 is this revealed)
Left Arm goes to Kinoa Ougi for team Obu, with twin swords as the form of her Bubuki. She seems like the most balanced of the lot – kind of a spitfire, but not prone to berserk like Kogane – except when her connection to Reoko’s left arm, Souya Arabashiri, comes into play. Before she teamed up with the rest of the Obu team, he took advantage of her, manipulating her feelings to where she was hopelessly in love with the older man before he tried to kill her and steal her Bubuki, which was the whole point for him. Of Reoko’s team, he seems the most twisted.
On Right Leg, we have Shizuru Taneomi (Bubuki form: sniper rifle). She is a usually quite quiet weirdo who only Kinoa seems to actually understand. However, she’s something of a combat savant. Akihito Tsuwabuki, Entei’s Right Leg, was her former teacher, and there’s still a deep respect between the two despite them being presently on opposite sides.
Lastly, Left Leg gives us Hiiragi Nono (Bubuki: a spear he doesn’t take good care of at first). Hiiragi is… a hard one to watch at first. He plays the perpetually angry and sour, generally nasty, and usually contrary foil to nice guy lead Azuma, repeatedly grumping about how he should be in charge – that whole song and dance. The show mercifully has him grow out of it, but I honestly kind of resented this kid’s screen time at first. He also clearly has a thing for Kinoa. His counterpart is Zetsubi Hazama, the vain and manipulative token lady of Reoko’s “Four Kings”. Their connection is the weakest of the four – Zetsubi, under an assumed identity, cared for Hiiragi and helped him with his current mission, fully intending to betray Team Obu to Reoko. As she does. It’s much more recent and less serious than Kinoa’s past.
The results of the Bubuki Battle show a win for Team Obu, with Reoko’s minions forced to retreat with their tails between their legs. It takes some getting there, though, almost playing out as a tournament arc in miniature. This will also be the only time the conceit of a Bubuki Battle is ever used. In fact, it’s not even mentioned again, because we need another ninja attack to make sure the audience doesn’t get a good chance to come up for air after that round of fighting.
Specifically, the team runs into an American stereotype called Epizo. As possible American stereotypes go, I’ll take him: he’s overweight and not terribly bright, but he has the energy and general lack of actual malice of a particularly rambunctious puppy. The team puts up with his antics for a bit before he reveals he’s the heir to a Buranki Heart, just like Azuma, and that he (and his team of insanely colorful American Bubuki-users) hope to take Obu’s heart to allow their Buranki to live again, since apparently either hearts or non-stopped-status on them are fungible. He and Azuma fight it out, and Azuma actually gets a couple good lessons about being an anime protagonist with spirit, causing them to part on essentially amiable terms. They’re also set upon by the sinister Russian team who have the same plan with more actual malice, led by a really nasty piece of work and consisting of his twin sisters (who seem almost incestuous in their regard for him) and a couple of also-rans with scary skills.
At the end of this conflict, Epizo instructs Azuma to break/open the Heart, and in so doing be accepted into Obu’s brain, giving the team a new “command bridge” vibe rather than riding on the outside of the big robot as it ascends to the heavens, returning to the Floating Island. On the Floating Island, Azuma’s mom convinces Obu to give him back and everything seems like it’s going to be okay… briefly.
Obu’s ascent, it seems, opened the floodgates for other forces to reach the Floating Island, with various groups snatching Buranki Hearts in order to restore some of the controlled ones on Earth, Reoko’s goons attacking again, and everything ending up on fire with the Island losing its loft, all set to crash into the sea. Again, I think I’ve seen this bit before, but that’s okay. The worst possible disasters are stopped as Reoko’s minions deal with their internal conflict, and the Floating Island crashes less than disastrously, sinking beneath the waves of the Pacific, with Reoko actually helping avert catastrophe (though she still clearly does have a deep grudge against Azuma’s mom). Azuma and his friends are presumably alive, but Mom may or may not be okay and there are clearly quite a few things not resolved here.
The second season of Bubuki Buranki is… different. It doesn’t quite change genres, but it might go so far as to swap target demographics and it certainly completely reinvents itself when it comes to tone and content. The first season was… fun, above anything else. It had an upbeat energy and while some of them could be legitimately threatening, the villains (except Reoko) all had their clown moments to kind of defuse the situation. Season 2 still looks the part but is ultimately darker, more brooding, and dang depressive at times, as though the writers suddenly decided that what they really wanted to create was a moving tragedy for adults rather than high-flying action for teens. This can be seen perhaps most clearly in their openings. The opening for season 1 “Beat Your Heart” is a wild, crazy, and overexcited piece with vibrant music and fast-paced action. The opening for season 2 (which has an extremely long title that would make it easier to just search out “Bubuki Buranki S2 OP”) has a deliberate though still not slow pace and a serious operatic majesty and melancholy in both its sound and its visuals, and especially in the combination of the two.
The show is still very prone to throwing some new nonsense whenever it feels naked, but in season 2 you get a lot more time to breathe and really take in particular scenarios before they’re pushed aside for the next bout or next crazy thing to happen.
The season starts after a time skip – we pick up months after the Floating Island’s descent in Hong Kong, where the group is getting back together. Perhaps more of interest than that reunion, though, is the reunion of Azuma with his sister Kaoruko. She’s got a chip or three on her shoulder regarding the whole thing with Azuma and Obu’s Heart and is incredibly devoted to their mother, believing wholeheartedly that mom is still okay if only they could reach her. She might have the chance, though, as she’s serving as a Buranki heart herself (summoning a blackened Obu with alternate Bubuki limbs) under the auspice of Guy Valery Abeille, a man who pulls the strings of an international organization currently working to coordinate all the various national Buranki teams that have awakened in the wake of the raid on the floating island. This includes Epizo’s team, the Russians, the Chinese team that Kaoruko (seemingly his personal protege) is working with in lieu of their normally very abusive Heart, and a British team led by the kind yet sickly Laetitia Nilgiri Swanson.
I’ll just come right out and say it, but Guy is the main villain of Season 2 (and the show as a whole) and he’s… of a very different stripe than the antagonists in Season 1. At least until the last couple of episodes where he unleashes all his pent-up scenery chewing, Guy has a very calm and reasonable demeanor. He also spends all the time up to that point without any superpowers of his own. He doesn’t wield a Bubuki, he can’t form and ride around in a Buranki, he doesn’t have any weird magical abilities… he’s just an older fellow with charisma, connections, and money to get the job done… and boy does he ever get the job done.
At the risk of getting ahead of myself, Guy is a lethally effective villain. He spends most of the season holding all the cards, and often revealing more that we didn’t even know he had. I guess it’s standard that the leads aren’t allowed to foil the convoluted evil master plan at stage 1, but Guy really plays it up for menace once you realize just what he is. It takes a while, after all. He starts as Kaoruko’s dubious backer and then seems… generally reasonable in most of his early appearances. Even once you’ve gotten the idea that he’s probably our bad guy, you have to wonder how bad he really is. After all, Reoko, our previous chief antagonist, was quite humanized, and that process continues unabated into Season 2, so you think maybe the show, in keeping with Season 1’s tone, is going with more of a white-and-gray morality. There’s even one excellent scene where Azuma and Guy meet face to face, with Guy unaware (or playing unaware) of who and what Azuma is, given that they hadn’t met before. He gives Azuma a lift and comes off as a cool uncle or doting grandfather sort of figure in their conversation.
It’s all a ruse. Guy is the kind of villain where the writing is lulling you into a false sense of security so it hits harder when it’s revealed just what depths he will sink to and how savage he really is. Again at the risk of getting ahead of myself, it’s eventually revealed that Guy wants to destroy all the Bubuki and Buranki and the bloodlines they’re tied to, believing that the presence of these beings (which have an extraterrestrial origin if the second season’s “Gentle Giants of the Galaxy” subtitle wasn’t enough to guess as much) polluted and corrupted humanity. This means he, essentially, sees most of the other characters in the show not as people but as vectors of disease, so he’s not going to be giving their humanity a lot of respect. He covers it well, and it feels legitimate that so many other characters hold him in high regard and listen to him, but that only tends to lead people to tragedy.
In any case, the first arc involves sparring (mostly verbally) with Kaoruko and getting Team Obu back together. During this time we dig into Kogane’s past trauma and unpack it, and start to see the first of Guy’s manipulations while everyone tries to get back on their feet.
Towards the end of this arc, the Russians have clearly outlived their usefulness (losing spars with Team Obu), and we get the scene that really makes the new season’s new tone clear: They find one of their own dead, and we get a brief but intense game of lethal hide and seek, at the end of which it’s finally revealed that one of the sisters has been brainwashed. She fights back against it, but her tears can’t stop her limbs from following through and killing her beloved brother just like she killed her sister and their (and I use this term loosely) friends before turning her weapon on herself.
In this fairly sudden sequence, the Russian Team is stone dead. And to be fair, I don’t think anybody liked the Russian team. They were unpleasant and mean-spirited… but they were unpleasant and mean-spirited like childish bullies, and the leading brother seemed to finally be letting Azuma’s friendship speeches get to him, suggesting they could turn over a new leaf. They made fine, if petty rivals to our heroes and kind of felt like they’d get the Team Rocket treatment of being bypassed on threat and belittled into irrelevance, but kept on as comic relief. And quite suddenly for initially unknown reasons, they’re butchered. That’s season 2 showing its true colors.
Meanwhile, that sequence with Kogane leads to Team Obu teaming up with Reoko’s goons. They’re worried because Reoko, who they all really care about in a non-psychotic manner, has been missing since the events of the island’s fall, so they want help trying to find and rescue her and since Guy is involved (being the one holding her captive as he seeks Entei’s power for his design), Azuma and the gang seem like the only decent people they can turn to, since the other Buranki are all caught in Guy’s web.
This brings us to a raid on Guy’s fortified island base, with the goal of rescuing Reoko (And Kaoruko, not that she’s expected to know she needs to be rescued). On the way there, though, the team’s airship makes a pit stop and they encounter an intelligent and communicative Obu-style Buranki who drops the backstory of the setting.
Evidently, the Buranki were travelers from across the stars, who came to Earth hoping to terraform it into a new home. When they arrived, though, they found a world already teeming with life and decided it wouldn’t be ethical to wipe out the pre-existing life in order to create their own world. Apparently unable or unwilling to otherwise continue their journey, the Buranki settled down, taking up modes of life that could allow them to coexist. Some of them slept, and eventually their brains rotted, resulting in the hostile Headless Buranki that have been minor enemies throughout the show. The others changed into their current form, able to enter symbiotic relationships with human bloodlines in the form of Bubuki. I’m not even remotely sure how this whole thing is supposed to work but… giant robot person space magic. It happens. I guess we do get an answer that the union with humans is possible because some Buranki-derived particles have entered the biosphere (presumably part of that mothballed terraforming tech) and the people who can wield Bubuki are those who have been changed by said, for lack of a better word, contaminant (which Guy is very unhappy with) but it’s still convoluted as hell.
We then actually reach Guy’s island. There, the group encounters the loyalist Buranki teams. Epizo isn’t exactly one of Guy’s loyalists, but he’s fallen in love with Laetitia, who is both personally loyal to Guy and promised a way to gain an immortal body like Reoko’s. Epizo decides that love is worth fighting for, Azuma… really doesn’t fault him for that, and mostly due to Laetitia’s own extreme competence, the rescue attempt is rather difficult, with only Reoko being recovered at first and Kaoruko taking a few more episodes to really turn around and link back up with her brother.
During this time… it’s actually impressive how much chemistry they give Azuma and Reoko. I’m not sure if they were aiming for romantic chemistry or not seeing as, time-stopped as a teenager his biological and mental age (it’s established that she doesn’t move forward in either) or no, she’s literally the age of his mother, but they really play off each other surprisingly well, perhaps because of how friendly and accepting (almost unnaturally so) Azuma is compared to Reoko’s isolation from anything resembling normal.
We get a couple things this arc. For one, it’s possible to pull out Bubuki powers at Buranki scale. That’s cool. For another, we get some of the history of Reoko and Azuma’s mom. They were extremely close friends in their school days, but Reoko had a terminal disease and her outlook on the world steadily soured until she was ready to go out in a blaze of glory. Azuma’s mother confronted and won handily against Reoko and Entei (destroying Entei’s limbs), but spared Reoko’s life and, in fact, caused her to become the immortal being she is now before taking her prisoner over the whole “went on a Buranki rampage” thing. It’s clear that Azuma’s mother saw this as a mercy, that Reoko would live even if her quality of life was very poor (her immortality having a few bugs as well as the issue of being a prisoner), but Reoko saw it as cruel or even sadistic to be kept alive in that way, resulting in the massive grudge she bore with her when Azuma’s mom retreated to the Floating Island and left Reoko the heart of the only Buranki still able to act.
We learn that Guy’s plan is to awaken and control Deus Magna, the “god” of the Buranki. Deus Magna’s body is, essentially, the Floating Island, which now exists sealed in a magic barrier beneath the sea. Its head is currently in the form of a comet that will soon arrive, and when the head and body are united, whoever controls Deus Magna would have some very destructive ultimate power. Doing so, however, is not trivial.
As part of preparing for the arrival, Guy tries to remove any factor that could get in his way. Laetitia and Epizo (and their teams) fight team Azuma again, and when Azuma gets the upper hand, Laetitia is given instructions to go through the “break heart, enter head” process that is supposed to make her something like Reoko. The others know enough though to know that, without the power of physical regeneration that Reoko was granted thanks to it being part of Entei’s nature, this will just kill her. There’s a mad scramble to abort the process… which would have been successful if one of her closest retainers wasn’t brainwashed by Guy to finish the whole situation off, resulting in her gruesome death and pretty much just breaking Epizo, denying Azuma potential allies. Guy is, for once, a villain who seems to recognize the danger of a good friendship speech.
Ultimately, it comes down to a battle at the sunken wreck of the formerly floating island. The barrier is breached, the island awakens as Deus Magna, Guy goes full ham as he takes the most giant of all giant robots you’re likely to see (standing practically from the ocean floor to space), and everyone left tries their best to fight against the serious problem of scale. Reoko ends up trapped and forced to act as part of Guy’s bridging system, Azuma goes in to help, and we get some Deus Ex Machina to deal with Deus Magna.
First, we get some pretty sudden and complex backstory that the spirit of Azuma’s mom from the present traveled back to when she beat up Reoko and Entei and became Entei’s core, which is why Entei thereafter was much more willful than other Buranki, and that in this stable time loop she’s been looking after Reoko the whole time and managing her immortality. Ultimately, Entei and Obu in the present are able to fuse with Reoko and Azuma acting as twin hearts, with which they’re able to go super and take out Guy and Deus Magna with him, saving the world.
There’s one more episode of epilogue material, because the writers felt a sudden need to bring this climax down to earth from the near-Gurren-Lagann space to which it had catapulted itself. A year later, the leads hadn’t seen all that much of each other as a group; their journey is over, the world is at peace… and it’s not quite sitting well with them. It’s not all bad, though, with Hiiragi and Kinoa dating and Epizo traveling the earth looking for a way to awaken the true Heart left to him by his mother, but it’s also not sunshine and roses: while Reoko is finally both mortal and healthy with the departure of mom’s spirit from Entei’s heart, she also lost pretty much all her memories in the process. It’s not the worst she could have suffered, since it was established that her brain was degenerating death by death before and she’s stable now… but she’s also under house arrest for the many ‘crimes’ she committed as Reoko the Tyrant (which have been implied to be mostly protecting the world with a sour disposition, trumped up by the fear she inspired in normals), crimes she doesn’t remember and isn’t even aware of. Her old crew is taking care of her and it seems that Azuma visits often for her to Tsundere at him, but she’s once again in a cage and she’ll probably never leave it, seeing as she’s now a normal girl the world is terrified of.
As the time ticks by, though, Team Obu meets up again. Somewhat bored with living ordinary, they decide to take a few weeks off and go on an adventure, flying off into the night for whatever they’ll find out in that big beaurtiful world they saved. As they fly, the audience (and Azuma himself it seems) sees a phantasmal image of Reoko beside him, suggesting that she might somehow be with them in spirit or fated to be properly reunited all the same. The bittersweet and final end.
So, that was Bubuki Buranki… if it wasn’t clear by now that this show was an absolute roller coaster, I haven’t done my job terribly well this week. But what does that mean for its final grade?
On one hand, the show does have a lot of amateur elements in terms of its writing and storytelling. Constantly throwing in ninja attacks is a great way to keep things moving when you’re in high school and trying to write fifty thousand words of prose in a single month, but it doesn’t actually make for good or consistent or well-paced stories, which is why I think that kind of advice doesn’t get bandied about much.
There’s a certain degree of innocence to Bubuki Buranki’s faults. To the show’s credit, it does capture the avidity with which a minor will tell the “awesome story” they came up with, the passion and madness that make it feel great to the person doing the telling and that are normally quite hard to get across to a different viewer. It’s not exactly nostalgic, but it is charming in its own way, and there’s a good deal of clever polish around the rough edges to make that presentation land.
That said, Bubuki Buranki can’t exactly be forgiven its faults even if they come from a very honest place. The pacing is schizophrenic, taking several episodes on the Bubuki Battles (with half-decent character discovery), in a way that feels deliberate, only to immediately throw a new scenario on the board with the arrival of Epizo. This is even more pronounced in season 2; because it’s now suddenly aiming for an operatic tone rather than a wild and crazy one, individual scenes often want to linger… but the plot as a whole still has a lot of twists and arcs to work through, they can’t quite get the time they need to warm up and cool down. The character writing is also… scattered. Reoko’s team initially comes off as a pack of psychopaths. By the end of Season 2 the show wants them to be the cool parental figures… even the guy who took advantage of a teen girl for the purpose of getting close enough to murder her. That’s kind of a big deal, show. Matobai gets away with a lot because it’s clear he didn’t actually do the things he was accused of, but even he was still a pretty big jerk in the first episodes.
Speaking of character writing, the show suffers from overload pretty bad. I think by the end I kind of liked Azuma, Reoko, and Epizo. The rest were… they were there. We got such tantalizing base building for our real lead characters during the Bubuki Battle arc but very few of them actually managed a well-constructed growth arc after that. I guess Hiiragi learned to be less of a jerk but the rest of Team Obu? Not much. They’re pretty forgettable and only sort of stagger forward. I especially think it’s kind of a gutterball how Kogane falls by the wayside after Matobai joins the party. There are moments, but not enough.
This is because lots of time has to be spent on other things. It has to be spent on Epizo, and he brings his own team with him, who are all given their own quirks and intricacies, like one of the girls with limb duty clearly having a crush on him and being jealous that his fat, idiot rear is going after the British girl. And, for a character who mostly serves as the objective of a character who shouldn’t even quite rate as secondary, she gets a lot of time dedicated to her, and she brings her team with, especially the retainer who is ultimately brainwashed into killing her. The Russians spend a lot of time talking themselves up and seeming to go through something, but that’s brutally cut short. The Chinese team (who appear for the endgame, not that they really matter) also demand at least some screen time and… you can sort of see how it bleeds away from the characters we should be focusing on.
When the show was just Obu and Entei, a heroic five against a villainous five with anyone else being very much incidental, it could sort of sustain. But as it added more and more it bloated, and every character suffered for that.
And, in terms of tone, the whiplash of season two is a bit… odd. I do think it was probably trying to emulate Gurren Lagann, which went more dramatically operatic and sometimes melancholy than one would think, with plenty of notable character deaths and some sad realities that all the drills in the universe couldn’t pierce, but it can’t quite catch that lightning in a bottle, especially coming off the first season that spent most of its runtime as a good deal sillier. People forget that Gurren Lagann, for all its over-the-top cheese and comedic episodes, showed it knew how to do drama right from the start and continued to show it regularly throughout the running time.
And, of course, there’s the storyline where after an episode of mystery we’re thrust into a dystopia, then a tournament arc then the sudden appearance of this clowny rival, and then an entirely different rival group, and then we’re trying to stop a massive scale disaster where everyone is working on dfferent agendas. We take a time skip, pick up loads of new characters, learn about this new manipulative villain, find out backstory about spacefaring giant robot people, do a jaibreak into heavy drama and sorrow, watch something about time-travelling souls, have a big robot finish against the villain who’s gone full raving doomsday villain, and then enter an epilogue that’s aiming for earnest and bittersweet. It’s all over the place even in a very short summary of the movements.
But, while I’ve now spent quite some time calling the show out, it is still quite watchable. If you sit down with Bubuki Buranki and want to be entertained, you will be entertained. It’s colorful and it’s crazy and in that sense it really does do what it set out to do. The action is consistently good. It’s dynamic, varied, and well-choreographed. At the end of the day, Bubuki Buranki is an action show, and should therefore live or die more on the quality of its action than other factors. Not that over factors don’t have some importance, but the action matters a lot.
And I do think it was calculated, somewhat, to be more of a “crazy dream” experience to hook people on raw emotion than a well-constructed story to stand up to someone picking holes in the logic. That’s a choice the creators are free to make, and it comes with pros and cons in how audiences are likely to relate to the story.
All said, I think I’ve got to give Bubuki Buranki a C+. Part of me wants to give it a much higher grade, because I’d actually strongly recommend it… if and only if you’re looking specifically for what’s on offer. While there’s a degree to which any show can be hated if you go in wanting to hate it and all but the worst can probably be enjoyed if you really force yourself to develop some cinematic Stockholm Syndrome, Bubuki Buranki’s experiential style exaggerates this factor. If you’re open and receptive, you might love it. If you’re cynical and closed-off, you’ll probably find it absolute drivel. That makes it easier to recommend than rate highly. And another part of me really does want to skewer it, and find an excuse to give it a non-passing grade for all that it evokes the worst of amateur efforts as well as the best.
Between the two. I lean more towards generosity than spite. Bubuki Buranki is a fun roller coaster, but it is also a deeply, deeply flawed one. If that’s not something you can accept, don’t get on the ride.