What do you expect when you’re told that there’s a show, by Studio Trigger no less, about a girl who mysteriously turns into an animal person and so travels to a city fully of animal people in search of the truth, ultimately getting wrapped up in a conspiracy? Sounds like pretty on-brand madness, right?
BNA surprised me. It does, ultimately, have the fingerprints of the studio all over it, to the point where I don’t think that it’s really out of place in their filmography, but there’s ultimately a lot more to it.
The story does start out as described. Michiru Kagemori is a formerly human teen girl, now stuck as a raccoon furry with no idea how she ended up this way and one idea of what to do about it: go to Anima City, a place that’s a refuge for Beastmen and, because of their better understanding of the species, might be able to identify what happened to her and change her back.
There’s trouble just getting to Anima City, though, as Michiru has to dodge anti-beastman hunters, gets fleeced on her way in by a weasel (really mink, getting frustrated every time Michiru calls her a weasel) beastman named Marie, and ultimately being robbed at the celebratory festival she stumbled into. This rough-and-tumble introduction to Anima City and generally jolly kicking of Michiru while she’s down ends (for now) when she meets Shirou Ogmai, a wolf beastman sort of vigilante detective type, who stops some terrorists and helps get Michiru more or less situated. She’s still out her wallet, though, and with it her ID and the proof of her prior humanity.
The search for her things sees Michiru, acting against the advice of cooler heads and with the help of Marie, working to teach children in a shady orphanage in the bad part of town, hoping that the matron’s favor will help recover her wallet, since said woman has ins with most of the pickpockets and the like in the city. Though she’s not there long, Michiru takes her job seriously and actually tries to teach the kids how to read, kind of bonding with them in the process. This ends when the matron is pressured into selling the adorable little kids, presumably into slavery. Michiru manages to do a lot of the heavy lifting on saving the kids (discovering she has some stretchy/partial shapeshifting powers in the process. The subtitles never really say it, but she’s clearly being based on the mythical Tanuki rather than a common raccoon). Shirou appears and finishes the job, including arresting the matron for her crimes, and in the process Michiru does get her ID back, finally proving that she was human and that something happened to her in order to make her what she is now.
So, that’s two episodes and we’ve gotten a fairly reasonable look at terrorism, extortion, child trafficking, prejudice, and organized crime. These are the kind of themes that pervade this show, and the treatment of them is… I feel exactly what the creators wanted out of addressing the topics.
BNA is not, I don’t think, a show with a message. Especially with some of the later turns of the story, I don’t think anything here – the Beastmen or the troubles that Anima City faces – work as or are meant as metaphors for anything in real life. Anima City may vaguely resemble some sort of ethnic (multi-ethnic, really) enclave, but the Beastmen aren’t and can’t be and shouldn’t have to be representative of any particular group. There’s even some moderately good exploration of Beastmen later as their own thing, in ways different from anything human. On the other hand, the topics themselves are very ‘real’ in how they feel. Like any down to earth and gritty social or crime drama (or the news), more bad actors are driven by greed, ignorance, necessity, or even simply a sort of social inertia. The issues within the society of Anima City, like issues in real life, can’t be solved simply with the stroke of a pen or a well-placed fist; most things, both good and bad, have deep roots that won’t respond quickly to attempted solutions.
On the whole, this is sort of the way I like it. There’s good material here, but the fiction is in control, and we relate to the material by bringing our experiences or knowledge to it. There are honest topics that you could convey a message about, but not a sloppily hammered-in message. A lot of the early parts of this show are just a girl, mired in the underbelly of her new home, trying to get by without a good understanding of the unwritten rules of her environment.
The third episode gets us a little plot, though, as it involves a terrorist bombing plot against the Sylvasta Medical Center, an advanced facility owned by a major conglomerate that represents Michiru’s best hope. An attack does happen despite some efforts from Shirou and Michiru to stop the main threat. Shirou is able to determine that the real explosion was an inside job, facing off against a Rhino beastman who enters a powerful berserk state. We, as the audience, learn a few things in the process. First, what frightened the doctors and saw them destroy the evidence was noticing Michiru, a fact that the characters don’t get. Second, Shirou appears to be some kind of immortal, healing perfectly from what ought to have been lethal injuries like they never happened.
This is kind of a big deal, but also falls by the wayside for a bit while we continue getting used to Anima city’s ugly parts, including an episode where Michiru befriends a crime boss’s sheltered daughter (and said daughter, a dolphin Beastman, almost drowns attending a human party) and one where she joins a team of baseball-playing bears, facing down against rigged games for sports gathering, extreme poverty, and the fact that Anima City Baseball has devolved into blood sport (yeah, there are still some things in these early episodes that scream Trigger).
The events of those episodes, in the grand scheme of things, don’t particularly matter, but both the crime boss, Flip (glimpsed earlier) and the runt of the Bears, Jackie, become touchstone characters.
Then, at the halfway point of the show, we introduce more of the plot when Michiru comes across her old friend, Nazuna, who was transformed and afflicted before Michiru herself. Nazuna, a fox (clearly angling for Kitsune) Beastman with enhanced shapeshifting abilities like Michiru and a knack for controlling them, now lives a somewhat charmed life as the figurehead of a cult dedicated to her as the “Silver Wolf”.
The Silver Wolf was a topic that came up in BNA before Nazuna’s appearance, but it didn’t really have much weight until then. Given his color and abilities we had a vague sense that this figure (glimpsed by Michiru in episode 1) is actually an additional full-beast form for Shirou, as well as having the understanding that the idea of the Silver Wolf (and not so much any particular, present entity) served as a frequent object of worship for Beastmen.
Nazuna’s group, however, are a little different. They’re a highly motivated group and essentially a cult of personality, over which Nazuna seems to hold a massive amount of influence with her act… or does she? She has an advisor of sorts, Boris, who seems to have a kind of creepy in interest in Nazuna and is implied to possibly be the real guiding power of the Silver Wolf Cult. Add in to the fact that the cult represents a fairly large bloc of Beastmen seeking to move in to the already overcrowded Anima City and it’s a recipe for much of the conflict in the show’s second half.
Nazuna is a slippery character. She’s clearly an excellent actress and proficient liar, so it’s hard to get a read on what’s ‘real’ about her or what her personal agenda might be. One minute she seems like a normal girl caught up in troubles that are bigger than her understanding, the next she seems like a cruel schemer who might be a villain in her own right. Sometimes she comes off as Michiru’s old friend, and sometimes it seems like she never even remotely liked Michiru. Even Michiru herself has trouble getting to the bottom of it, though Michiru desperately wants to reconnect despite being creeped out by Nazuna’s cult.
Steadily, the cult’s influence grows with suspiciously convenient event after suspiciously convenient event, also drawing fully in a character who was lurking in the background until this arc: Alan Sylvasta, the man behind Sylvasta Pharmaceuticals and what would seem to be a human ally of the Beastmen if he didn’t feel so consistently slimy. It’s clear from Episode 3 if nothing else that Sylvasta, as a company, has its fingers in the dark side. And, it’s clear from his appearances and introduction that Alan is probably part of that. However, neither the viewers nor the characters have the clues to put everything together until the bitter end.
On one side, Sylvasta seems to be chummy with the Silver Wolf Cult. On another, one of the previously arrested Sylvasta doctors gets a visit from Boris and promptly enters an even more intimidating and uncontrolled berserk form, which Shirou has to take his full Silver Wolf form in order to counter, getting us (as this is explained to Michiru) the first version of the story of how that came to be: Ages ago, Shirou lived in a city called Nirvasyl, which was like a medieval Anima City in that it was an urban gathering of all sorts of Beastmen. However, a human warlord destroyed the city and only Shirou survived, inheriting power from the spirits of the fallen Beastmen to avenge them and protect the future of their kind.
On the other side, Michiru (with a big misunderstanding mercifully glossed over) finds the real connection between her, Nazuna, and Sylvasta – they were transformed by a botched blood transfusion, courtesy of Sylvasta, and Alan is working to fix it. In the mean time, he and Nazuna hit on the Silver Wolf Cult idea to give Beastmen something to believe in and draw solace from that wasn’t rooted in human kind, a sort of reform or revival to the low-key Silver Wolf spiritualism we saw elsewhere in Anima City.
That mechanism of control might be more important than it would seem. After an encounter with another berserk Beastman ends with dart drones appearing, tranquilizing the guy, and hauling him off, Alan is found again… and gives a different account of the fate of Nirvasyl. By Alan’s reckoning, which seems to be correct, the humans only cleaned up after Nirvasyl fell to what’s now known as Nirvasyl Syndrome: a cascading chain reaction of the berserk transformations we’re now seeing in Anima City, brought on by the stress of Beastmen living in a contained urban environment. Anima City could fall the same way, but Alan has a solution: the cure for Michiru and Nazuna could be deployed to ordinary Beastmen, turning them into humans so their minds won’t degenerate and enter the seemingly irrecoverable Nirvasyl Syndrome state. As overpopulated as it is, the city is on the brink, so something has to be done… but quite naturally, Shirou (and others, like the Mayor) find the idea of the Beastmen being turned into humans an unacceptable solution.
Shirou vanishes, setting up the fact that he’s going to be working against Alan from the shadows. The Mayor goes to visit human politicians with a plan to dismantle Anima City and scatter its population to save them without the vaccine but ends up getting arrested for her trouble. Nazuna, on the other side, is getting ready for a big concert event to keep the Beastmen happy and calm while things are put into place, and Michiru is roped into helping her even though she’s deeply conflicted about the whole situation.
Of course, it’s not that simple. On the advice of Boris (and Alan through him, it would seem) Nazuna plans to reveal her humanity in the middle of the event. However, Shirou recognizes that being told they’ve been misled and betrayed would trigger Beastmen more than the idea that their idol/cult leader is human would soothe their fears of becoming human – possibly setting off the Nirvasyl chain reaction. He informs Michiru of as much, resulting in a huge chunk of the penultimate episode being dedicated to communicating that to Nazuna, relying on the very strained trust between Nazuna and Michiru to convince her to not pull the trigger on the reveal.
In the end, Nazuna gets the message and backs down, but Boris manages to expose Nazuna as a fake anyway, starting a berserk Nirvasyl Syndrome rampage throughout the city. In this, Shirou breaks down, realizing not just what’s happening right now but also the truth that Nirvasyl, his home, did in fact fall to internal strife and not the action of humans, leaving him adrift and forced to face up to the fact that he held centuries of unjustified (or not as justified as he thought) hatred. Shirou succumbs to Nirvasyl himself, attacking Michiru for a nasty penultimate-episode cliffhanger.
If it seems like this show is ending in a whirlwind, that’s because it is. The final episode opens with Shirou regaining his self as apparently the blood of Michiru (or presumably Nazuna) could treat Nirvasyl without the nasty “turn to human” result. You know what else apparently treats Nirvasyl? Hearing Shirou, the true Silver Wolf, howl. Michiru, Nazuna, and their allies work to broadcast a recording of Shirou’s howl to the city while Shirou goes to confront Alan.
Now, in everything up to this point, Alan has seemed like a normal human, and as such he wouldn’t normally be able to go one round with Shirou; Beastmen are stronger and tougher than humans, and Shirou is pretty badass by Beastman standards. However, you must remember that this is a Trigger show, if the extreme high gear the show kicked into wasn’t reminder enough, and social drama or no you can count on this studio to give us a good final boss fight, not just an arrest (or jolly beating) of a corporate sleaze.
To that end, Alan reveals his true nature: he’s a “Pureblood” beastman, scion of a secretive cabal of the same, heir to the true destroyers of Nirvasyl, while all the other’s we’ve known are the products of intermarriage and thus, to Alan, impure. This also means that he can transform into a giant golden Cerberus-wolf with the ability to howl lasers from all three mouths.
This happens entirely in the last episode. Is it possible to jump the shark in such triumphant style that it wraps around to actually being cool? Because that’s what I feel like happened here. This is absolutely insane, but some turbo mode insanity is very welcome.
In any case, Alan is exposed and defeated, Anima City is saved, and Michiru decides that at least for now she’ll stay the way she is, helping introduce humans, now welcome there, to Anima City.
Looking back on it, BNA has some distinct similarities to another show I’ve looked at: Dorohedoro. Both shows feature main characters searching for the cause and cure to a mysterious affliction they suffer that’s transfigured their appearance. Both shows take place in an urban environment that’s familiar to modernity for that fact, but which is actually fairly alien thanks to its strange culture. Both shows show the struggle of a character coming face to face with the dark underbelly of it all (if there’s anything BUT dark underbelly in the Hole) and deal heavily with themes of organized crime. Both shows take a major thematic turn about half way through, Dorohedoro when the magical world is finally accessed by Caiman and BNA when Nazuna appears with her cult, changing the nature of the show in both cases from one that’s episodic and exploratory to one that’s more plot-driven. For shows that would outwardly appear to share very little, they have a remarkably similar structures and energy.
In a sense though, this does reflect somewhat badly on BNA. BNA is much stronger in its early episodes – the first two thirds and especially the first half. While I welcomed the ending of BNA and all its Trigger-brand lunacy, I have to admit that other than raw enjoyment factor it is a lot weaker than the social drama. Dorohedoro’s quality is solid all the way through. In BNA, the characters can be a little hard to get behind. Michiru is bone-headed and quick to action to a fault, and that can sometimes make her annoying to watch when she walks into an obvious mistake, even for understandable reasons. Playing alongside her, Shirou is pretty much purely the gruff guy, and doesn’t get a ton of development. He’s a perfectly passable character, but he’s nothing to really write home about. Nazuna is an interesting study, but she’s so hard to pin down for so long and comes in so late that she can’t really carry the show. The cast of BNA works for what it is, but isn’t a marked strength. Dorohedoro, on the other hand, has an insanely memorable cast that’s almost always a joy to watch. Caiman and Nikaido, are good of course, but so are Shin and Noi, and to a lesser extent most of the other characters, down to the one off supports like Caiman’s boss for his day job in the magic world.
It’s not really a crime that BNA doesn’t stand up to Dorohedoro one on one, because Dorohedoro was a great show, but it does set the upper bound for BNA.
In the end, I think BNA is worth about a B. It’s not in the A-range because it can’t go all the way with anything it does. It’s not the insane detective story of the ending, it’s not the character-driven drama of the cult segment, and it’s not the social drama of the opening. It’s all of them partially. It’s not lower because all of those parts do work. The social drama is very real and very effective without being pandering. The study of Nazuna and her life as a cult figurehead, and the relationship between her and Michiru is strong, and you really do feel how hurt Michiru is when things go badly. And the big Trigger twist ending at least does pull out all the stops to put some fun madness on screen – unlike, say, Kiznaiver that had a significant failing in that department. Really, in a sense, this feels like Trigger’s attempt to do something meaningful, like they tried in Kiznaiver, but having learned from that failure and their many successes that they also need to be true to the inherent weirdness and originality of their setups. In that way, it sort of lands between Kiznaiver and Dorohedoro, a little closer to the latter in quality, and the grade reflects that. I’d recommend BNA to just about anyone, but not totally without reservation.