What is The Magnificent Kotobuki?
It’s a show I don’t think many people of heard of. Heck, this is my job and it managed to fly under my radar until now, no pun intended. It’s an anime original, which is usually interesting, a sort of Aeronautical/Flying Ace themed variant on the Western, what with the show starting in the spitting image of an old-timey saloon.
In its pitch, it promises a sort of military action adventure. In its style, it promises a sort of “cute girls doing cute things” overtone and we can just all hope that it pans out more like High School Fleet than the Mecha Musume shows.
In its delivery, it gives a surprisingly smooth yet still somehow awkward mix of cel-shaded CG animation and traditional. This is… not generally a good look. I forgave it in Shikizakura and it does at least look like more of a deliberate choice here than the budget shortfall there or… whatever the hellspawn of incompetence was getting up to in Ex-Arm, but there’s still a distinct oddity to CG and 2D characters inhabiting the same space as each other. The blends that work best are typically ones like the later Macross shows like Frontier using CG for mecha action but sticking with more traditional human characters.
But while looks do matter for a show, I’m of the opinion that writing tends to be a bigger issue, and that means we can find gems that are rough around the edges as well as beautiful-looking trash, so it would be unfair and unkind to judge The Magnificent Kotobuki without first digging into its plot. How does that go again?
Our five-girl band seems to currently be aboard a sort of zeppelin aircraft carrier, evidently as mercenaries, and let’s check in with the tropes. It seems that this time our main character squad will be the Eccentric Aces. If you had money on the Loveable Losers I’m afraid you have lost your bet, but those who instead wagered on the Angst-Ridden Overpowered Crew, having gotten the power scaling right, can go double or nothing on the next round.
After they casually fend off the attentions of a 2D “ace” mercenary who of course they rank by an order of magnitude and whose crew will obviously die jobbing for the main characters, Air Pirates attack and the 2D gang dies jobbing for the main characters. The 2D gang in their middling planes outperformed by elite air pirates in advanced Zeroes amount to nothing, so of course the girls in their old clunkers can take down the same air pirates like it’s nothing. They leak a little damage through to the big Zeppelin, but that’s not portrayed as a terribly serious matter.
What might be a serious matter is that the main-character-coded girl (you know, the eccentric among eccentrics and pancake-loving reckless motormouth who wears red), Kylie, spots one of the retreating pirates with a particular insignia painted on its wings, which apparently she has a beef with. This grudge match boss pirate is of course not to be defeated in the very first episode, so she actually gets outflown and takes some damage to let us know purple snake guy means business, even though he just sort of flies off after firing a few warning shots through her wings rather than blowing her up.
At least this little excursion did get us personality from one of our lead characters (albeit the one who established the most personality out of the gate in their previous scene) and show us the wasteland world beneath the clouds, as evidently this one has a surface. And WWII-era Japanese planes. And a dodo bird in formal military dress. Excuse me?
Also the Dodo can fly and is evidently the captain.
I have never been on hallucinogens but I have to imagine it would feel something like this worldbuilding.
In any case, they make it to their destination, a random patch-of-green town in the middle of the infinite desert, and we can be done with the tutorial – I mean first episode. Yeah, a weird lot of the flying scenes in this are done in first person. Not all of them, but enough to notice. It does give you a good sense of motion, but at the same time the limited window on the world is a bit claustrophobic and combined with the CG does sometimes feel like you should be picking up a controller.
They shortly hear of a big new job. Before it, we pick up team member #6, a fast-talking little brat. We meet her when she’s brawling in the street with grown adults (and winning, of course). We then meet the client for this urgent triple-wage trip, an ambassador who is about as much of a rude, unpleasant fast-talker as you could imagine, openly contracting this zeppelin because she hates it. So I guess she’s okay if pirates rip it a new one coming for her.
Really, everyone in this show talks just a bit faster than seems natural, similar to Occultic;Nine, and pretty much everyone other than the guy I thought was the zeppelin captain until we met the dodo and one or two of the girls is some flavor of jerk.
We do find out in some of the fast and jerkish monologuing that, evidently, the world didn’t used to be such a desolate place, with some event ten years ago causing widespread ruin while the last three years alone have seen certain countries get their populations slashed in half. If we weren’t busy being asked to laugh at the antics of quirky pilot girls, this would be some serious apocalyptic business. But for us, we lose another no-name jobber squad, deliver the unpleasant VIP, and move on. It’s basically a “monster of the week” equivalent, which will be a recurring theme for the show.
Another episode, another contract, another group of jobbers decimated, but this one at least introduces a recurring element with a particular band of corporate-styled air pirates called Elite Industries, who were after a special plane that they do manage to hijack. Their boss even manages to shoot down one of the Kotobuki, not that there’s much in the way of lasting consequences.
In fact, despite the down-to-earth nature of most of the aerial dogfighting in this show, there’s a staggering lack of consequences. It doesn’t go so far as to always show pilots ejecting (though we do witness a few parachutes in this episode), but pretty much all of the takedowns are wing hits leading to gradual smoking dives that you can believe someone would survive.
In any case, they track down Elite Industries to their lair, which the designated “sexy one” of Kotobuki infiltrates as an exotic dancer, drinking most of the goons under the table post-show before bonding with the little girl Ukyo-e artist the eccentric CEO dotes on. She even models for a painting.
When the cavalry arrives, the CEO’s right hand man turns on him, with the majority of the bad guys mostly fighting themselves. Little girl wants the lunatic boss saved from the mutiny, though, so I guess he’s supposed to be alright in this.
They do this pretty easily and it seems he and the artist girl will give up the piracy gang, but the mutineer leader pointedly gets away.
We then meet up with the obnoxious politician lady again. Her problem is a meeting with, you guessed it, another fast talking weirdo, and one that she can’t stand. He also turns out to be an ace pilot in the inevitable pirate attack. What does this have to do with anything? Not much
They also casually drop that this world doesn’t have oceans anymore. What is this, the Age of Strife? A dead desert earth where even the oceans have vanished ruled by struggling factions of techno-barbarians clawing onto anachronistic tech, it does kind of fit the bill.
Believe it or not, though, before you can fanfiction your way out of the “what the heck?” side of this worldbuilding, we do get some actual lore. In the next episode, Kylie is sent alone to pick up the squad’s pay, but on her way back she encounters that nemesis of hers from episode one, the one with the purple snake painted on his or her wings. Purple Snake outflies Kylie and shoots her down, seemingly with a shockingly precise and pointed little shot that leaves her stranded on a mesa with a busted engine and the scrap to repair it if she can.
Mind you, we have no idea who Purple Snake really is, what that pilot is like, or even why Kylie hates Purple Snake so much, but this is the Kylie backstory episode initiated by a dogfight with Purple Snake so… we learn nothing about Purple Snake or the grudge Kylie has and instead focused on her childhood bond with an old mentor. This does subtly seem to suggest the lore is that this is a parallel world that war-era Japan reached through a portal, building factories and from them planes before most of their citizens went back through the vanishing portal (old mentor being the one left behind, it seems) but it’s sort of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it that old mentor came from our world or another world at all given that they use different names for things; the real hint is that he’s got familiar books on his shelves. Otherwise I’d just assume the creators really liked WWII era Japanese planes and that’s why they’re the primary ones to exist.
And then… on with something completely different! Firefighting with a bomb! Oil monopolies! There’s some idea that these extra-badass pirates might kind of be a recurring villain and that “Yufang” (Earth/Japan) and the connection to it might be important to someone somewhere along the line, but we are more or less just doing sidequests here. Technically this episode was “development” for the member of the squad who acts like a robot but she still acts like a robot.
After that, once again, something different. This one seems to tie into some of the metaplots, but they’re so slow burn it hardly matters: Kotobuki transports an ultra-rare fish, and the zeppelin gets boarded in the process so we see some slightly different action. It’s nice, but most of it doesn’t seem to build to much. We already knew that there were these extremely competent and military pirates hanging around, and we don’t learn anything new from them since that smiling fast-talking magician-politician who gives off obvious antagonist vibes has the prisoners (of which there are many on account of the airship squad evidently using rubber bullets exclusively person-to-person) whisked away.
After that do we get some meat to the main plot? Well, finally, I can say yes, as the eccentric mentioned just above, Isao, seems to be making his move to unify the scattered settlements we’ve seen through a mixture of bribery, charisma, and violence where necessary. There’s also more about that portal in the sky, the Hole, and how another one could open up, which he seems to be interested in. So I guess he is the antagonist. Honestly, even though I said he had antagonist vibes it was mostly because he was too nice on the surface in a world where everyone is some degree of jerk.
And, critically, at the dawn of Episode 10 when it seems like we’re finally going to be starting one on the main plot, we’re still fairly lacking in motivation. I don’t mean just for Isao. Now that he’s playing his hand rather than fading into the background like all the nobodies who were important for one episode each, we can assume that while maybe he has something more on his mind, something that would be actually interesting, he wants to seize power and control. And even though his power grab seems to come with nice things like driver licenses and unions, a show with as many Spaghetti Western elements as this one isn’t going to go for a safer and more sensible world over one that’s in any way more free. It’s like if your main characters are pirates, part of the appeal is that they don’t do that.
The motivation I mean is Kotobokui. Their desire to resist Isao isn’t framed as being nearly so high-minded, and they didn’t even care to do it for most of the show. Heck, they’ve even done a few jobs for the guy. They’re mercenaries; they’ve had their own red tape from the start, not to mention military discipline, and while Isao is kind of a manipulative scumbag he’s not really doing anything that evil and his demeanor is still that of a fool, with natural fool qualities as well as artificial that mean he doesn’t have a menacing presence.
Plus, while it’s assumed of the genre that this show is touching, we’ve never been particularly invested in the whole spirit of freedom for most of this show. We’ve had focal episodes for most of the characters, even if the focus was often homeopathic, and none of them really made a strong stand. One member, Emma, outright says that this is just how she can make money while our main character, Kylie, likes flying but abjectly needs to do some soul-searching regarding being aimless in life. Plus, they fight pirates and do (properly compensated) do-gooding so much that they feel more like they stand for law, order, and security than wild freedom.
Contrast this with the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where all three leading characters have some reason to rebel against the system – because they don’t fit in nicely, because it gets in the way of their dreams, or in Jack’s case because he’s just plain nuts. Heck, contrast this not just with a Western but with a parody Western. In the film Blazing Saddles, the characters care about what’s going on. Sure, being sheriff is just a job for Bart, but he approaches it with gusto. And somehow the intentionally funny Hedley Lamarr is more intimidating (in an extremely similar antagonistic role) than Isao.
Well, at least we’re in it now. It seems Isao is after the portals and, since one is opening right over the home town of the Kotobuki squad, he’s intent on forcing that town to bend the knee or get bombed into oblivion. In the resulting fight with his bombers, Purple Snake shows up helping to fight the new baddie, though this doesn’t balm Kylie’s nerves at all. After the battle, she fails to dogfight her nemesis, but gets to come face to face with the enigmatic ace.
And just who is this intimidating presence who episode one was basically blown on introducing and who our main character has this incredible yet unexplained grudge with?
Some lady.
Seriously, this chick got no development. She’s just another unpleasant person who talks fast and gets up in people’s faces but… um… she wears hotpants and has purple eyeshadow? She’s just some weird free agent type who explicitly just does what she wants when she wants and doesn’t care about or have any connection to Kylie at all. At least not on the personal level, they do get out that Kylie’s old mentor evidently taught her too, but it’s a pretty weak payoff for the whole rival setup.
Well, it gets Kylie’s arc over with as she bonds with her fellow student of Ol’ Sab, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
In any case, the portal blew up in the battle, leaving Isao with a grudge against the village that defended itself because… he couldn’t accept them being alive in its general vicinity? During an episode break he gets to burninating the countryside at a bunch of other places we haven’t seen, offending a bunch of other zeppelin-based PMCs we’ve never met, just so we can have something resembling a grand alliance against Isao right at the end.
Naturally, they fly right into a trap. Isao even comes out to play personally, flying a Shinden (which you might know as the cool plane from Godzilla Minus One, a plane of which two prototypes were made and none were flown). In the air battle he betrays and shoots down the leader of Kotobuki, reveals that he killed Kylie’s mentor, shoots her down, and reveals he was the one who shot down and crippled the brother of the Kotobuki girl who acts like a robot. Last minute tying the bad guy to everything, I guess.
Somehow, Kotobuki and all the jobbers we met before the penultimate episode survive to make a heroic last hurrah. Since an attack on an outlying factory got so many faceless mooks removed from play, clearly they can pull off a raid on Isao’s core city, where another portal begins to open.
Well, despite running into a jet fighter, they largely make progress. I’m not sure what their main goal actually was on the attack; the secondary seems to have been stopping Isao from gaining a portal because screw him, an effort for which they turn the carrier blimp into a guided missile.
Isao, however, comes out to play in his Shinden once again. And once again he shoots down basically all the protagonists, even though they all manage totally safe and uninjured emergency landings. Kylie gets a few hits on him at the end, and his greed causes him to fly at and get sucked into the collapsing portal when it gets bombed. Once Isao poofs, all his minions immediately give up and the show just sort of plays us out.
So, let’s break it down.
Left to right: The Robot (Kate), The Main Character (Kylie), The Brat (Chika), The Snob (Emma), The Sexy One (Zara), and The Tough Leader (Reona).
There are elements of this show that aren’t just good, they’re outright amazing. The folks behind this show must have really loved aviation. The sound design, the dog fights, the visuals of the planes and the way the scenes in them focus on the little mechanical aspects of piloting – all of these are an absolute love letter to the topic, and there is value in that. Absurdities (and the need to keep a main cast alive in an incredibly high turnover role) aside you’re not likely to find a more grounded take on aerial combat. It’s just a shame that the creators who crafted these scenes and designs with such love couldn’t manage to put the same kind of effort into the plot, characters, and storyline.
But then there are other elements, like the characters, that are substandard or worse. And I’m sorry, but I happen to rate character and story a little higher than I do cool flying scenes. The Magnificent Kotobuki isn’t the worst show in the world, but it feels distinctly rough. Normally we’d probably call something like that “unpolished” but frankly it’s the opposite idea here. The polish on the show shines, the little details have been made right, but the basic form of it is misshapen. There were efforts to introduce elements, weave in hints about where the story was going, and make it feel like everything tied together, but they weren’t as good as they are in other, similar shows and weren’t as good as they needed to be in order to support this show.
The biggest issue is likely the one I got sarcastic about several times throughout this review, the fact that almost every character in this show is a shouty unpleasant fast-talker. Having one character, maybe the lady politician, who is chronically rude and also spews out words like her voice actress really needs to run out of that recording booth the instant her line is done could be fun. When everyone does it and most of them do it a fair chunk of the time, it’s just annoying and, well, unpleasant.
But the fact that there’s no plot for way too long is another big deal. I get that we introduce Isao’s rival really early, and Isao not too long after, and that we’re told later on that the spooky super-pirates tie back to him as something sinister, but that’s not what the show feels like, or what the experience of watching it is. We’re just doing battle of the week mercenary missions until, oops, suddenly we care that this guy is poised to win a diplomatic victory in a game of Civilization so I guess we’d better stop it. The concept of the portals is pretty half-baked as well. It’s introduced pretty late in the game and becomes the MacGuffin since we never actually care what the holes do or where they lead. Could be nothing, could be everything, who cares, blow ’em up so the jerk can’t use ’em.
This show seems to want to be compared with something like High School Fleet: cute girls, military hardware, and unlike Girls Und Panzer, actual stakes. But High School Fleet had fun characters that it was nice to spend half an hour at a time with, and they had some actual chemistry between them which is more than I can say for any of the Kotobuki besides the vague to homeopathic implication that Reona and Zara might be a couple – which if it was meant to go that route is still pretty passionless. At least they talked to each other like human beings, which is more than I can say for the rest of the squad.
For me, and it actually kind of hurts to do this, The Magnificent Kotobuki is a D+ . It has bits and pieces that are worth watching, but the overall production simply isn’t. This one doesn’t fly high in my book; I think most viewers wouldn’t be hard pressed to find better fare.