This Week in Anime

BNA

Steve
I'll do my best.

Citizens of Earth, the furry agenda is here. Again.

Excuse me that is clearly a street-walking wolf, but then again, as we'll soon see, we're not going to be too concerned with taxonomic distinctions in this particular series The important part is that Boku n—sorry, BNA: Brand New Animal is finally here, and what an unruly Animal it's turned out to be.

Oh yeah I've also been looking forward to the return of that Yoshinari magic. LWA is very high up there on my Trigger tier list, and the prospect of a show starring "Akko but a tanuki" seemed extremely promising.

I wanna crawl into these color palettes and live there. Like Promare before it, BNA exhibits Trigger's knack for consistent and eye-catching visual design. Even the outsourced parts, like the ED by studio Giant Ant, are very good to look at.

BNA really has a lot going for it, in pretty much every sense. I cannot accuse Yoshinari and co. of trying to coast on the success of Promare, because they cram an almost obscene amount of plot, character, theme, and cartoons into twelve heavily ambitious episodes. This animal's got layers. This is actually one case where I wish we had the opportunity to watch and digest this show on a week-by-week basis. There's so much going on and so many wild turns in between episodes that it can be a dizzying experience trying to cram it all in, say, over a weekend so you can help write a conversation-based column about it. Thanks Netflix.

Michiru is pretty much who you'd expect her to be based on my "Akko but a tanuki" description. She's plucky, stubborn, and has an extra heart where one's brain cells would usually be. But she's super likable and easily could carry a show on her charm alone.

That's all well and good, but the secret sauce for Shirou is that he's introduced as big crypuppy. It runs counter to the rest of his character (and in fact I don't remember if he ends up crying again in the show), but it ends up being a smart way to hint at his hidden layers.

Don't forget the innocent orphans!

Michiru flat-out tells them that God is dead!

I refuse to take that pun bait from you when BNA dishes out so much worse on its own.

Yeah, BNA gets extremely real extremely quickly, dashing any cutesy pretense with a promise to look at the many-faceted politics of oppression through the lens of fursonas. This, necessarily, comes with all the caveats inherent to using a blanket metaphor for society's ongoing reckoning of its imbalances, and this is the thing that's gonna make or break the show for you.

However you come down on it, I think BNA's density means it's going to, at the very least, be good fodder for discussion. Unless you're one of those Twitter randos who think all anime is inherently apolitical. In which case, I assume BNA will appear to you as 12 episodes of pure static, because lol this thing is DRENCHED in contemporary politics.

Oh yeah I'd agree that ends up being to BNA's advantage, but it also leaves its core metaphor open to a wide variety of interpretations, and those are not going to be universally charitable. I liked the show, but I'm still digesting it myself. Right now, though, I'd say I'm surprisingly impressed with a lot of individual moments in BNA, even if the big picture is much messier. Like, to go back to the second episode, I really liked how it followed up Michiru's escape and justice-fueled admonishment of her kidnappers with the rawness of this statement.

It's so good. Not only does it address the raw deal that women get, especially on the lower rungs of society, but it also calls out the fact that Michiru is speaking from a place of privilege here. She's obviously not what we'd call a "white savior," but she's part of a long tradition of protagonists inserting themselves into oppressed cultures and coming out as their heroes. BNA still isn't perfect, but this one moment is more cognizant and critical than many entire stories that utilize this trope.

That's one of my favorites too. Just an exquisitely bitter piece of satire about tone deaf and egocentric celebrity activism.

BNA's framing of it is (correctly) off-putting from second one, but the party's hypocrisy gets more blatant as the episode goes on, until it's bluntly obvious that none of these people care about Nina. She's an identity, she's a distraction, but she's not a person to them. She's barely even a living being.

Yeah! Even this is fraught, but it's leagues better than something like Avatar (Cameron, not anime).

A very good boy...for Michiru to dunk on.

But yes, Shirou is a good counterpoint who does know what life is like as a Beastman and consequently sees the world a lot differently than Michiru does. While BNA makes sure to examine and criticize his beliefs as well, it also makes sure we understand and empathize with where he's coming from.

It does get liiiiiiitle too close for comfort to Both Sidesism in some spots, but overall BNA does actually seem to realize how shit of an argument that is. Like, there's a flashback to Furry Jackie Robinson that ends with him beating the shit out of his abusive teammates, but at no point is that violence framed as inexcusable.

If Imaishi wants to spend his allotted episode storyboarding murder baseball and asshole flamingos, then that's his right.

In retrospect, it's wild that we get that heavy thematic inception in the same episode where we meet Jackie, but that's The BNA Experience™.

Jackie is like "what if we made Mako smaller and also a bear" and if you said to yourself "that's genius," you'd be correct.

The baseball episode is one of my favorites, not just because anime baseball episodes are always good (another reason to also watch Dorohedoro, wink wink), but because it hits the wacky Tex Avery stylings of unfiltered Imaishi while also keeping things sufficiently real. Anime is a land of contrasts, and sometimes you wanna see those contrasts crash into each other and make something uniquely beautiful.

Like, you have all that great poignant stuff about poverty, and then you also have Michiru saying this with a straight face. It's so good.

Ah yes, yours and everyone else's circa-2002 Deviantart OC.

Nazuna is here to be an idol, and if that means she's also got to trick people into thinking she's Furry Jesus, then she's gonna goddarn do it.

Now people can argue that Michiru and Nazuna being gfs is just subtext, but I'd respond to that simply by pointing out the giant table that Michiru uses exclusively for pining at this picture.

Snce BNA apparently didn't consider the entire political history of oppression enough subject matter, it also digs into the myriad ways both individuals and societies use and/or abuse religion. Not that you can really divorce the history of religion from the history of oppression in the first place, but c'mon, BNA, you can slow down! You're a single-cour anime, not a PhD thesis.

Nazuna makes for an interesting nexus for all of this, and not merely because she's a pink kitsune girl.

She's the perfect foil for Michiru, because she does fully embrace the savior narrative thanks to a concoction of outside manipulation, personal ambition, and good intentions. This also blows up in her face.

Double spoiler: lots of blood is involved.

So Nazuna and others using the Silver Wolf as a means to their own ends would be shitty regardless of the circumstances, but BNA contrasting that with the hard, blood-soaked path Shirou has had to cross time and again for his people really puts the shameful power dynamics in sharp relief.

Have we mentioned that BNA is A LOT yet? Because it's a lot.

Speaking of things I have mixed feelings about:
this goober.

I certainly agree there! And show (eventually) delivers!

He's a fantastically nefarious villain. He doesn't dirty his hands until the finale, always wears a smug smile, and accomplishes everything simply by virtue of the vast amounts of money and power he controls. Between him and Promare's villain Kray, it seems like Kazuki Nakashima is REALLY trying to warn us about megalomaniacal technocrats.

I think BNA was trying to avoid a big "humans vs. beastmen" conflict as its overall message, which is fair, but I also think it probably would've behooved the narrative and its overarching themes to keep Alan just a bigoted and sociopathic billionaire. There are plenty of real life examples! And they're a huge, if not THE hugest obstacle in the face of actual progress. Like, he could literally just have been a stand-in for any one of those instead of, well,

Hard to hate a climactic battle riding on who's got the biggest "awooo."

And I do at least like that Alan's actually given a motivation—i.e. being a Nazi—instead of the big nothing that Promare did with Kray's reveal. But it comes out of nowhere with no space to properly address it, so it doesn't feel integrated into the story beyond being a twist for the sake of a twist.

To an extent, this will ALWAYS be the fundamental problem with using animal people to address racial and cultural tensions, but BNA is spectacularly bad about it in this one particular way. Good intentions and all that, but stories like this gotta do better. And yet, there are places where BNA sings.

It's a neat show! I didn't expect to get this much out of it to chew on, but I love these big messy anime meals, flaws and all. Plus, it's got Michiyo Murase voicing a scumbag mink girl, so my tastes are sated for the season.

Amen to that!