Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Anime with protagonists in the military are a bit of a tough sell for me, for a variety of reasons, with only a couple of exceptions. Thus, when I went into Brave Bang Bravern!, the latest from CygamesPictures (and a rare original from them), it was mostly off the strength of its staff. That studio, Masami Ōbari involved as the director, etc. I had no idea what to expect, since all promotional materials suggested that this was going to be on the “fairly realistic war drama” end of the spectrum, as far as mecha anime go. You know, your Gundams and such.
In hindsight, there were several tells that this wasn’t exactly the case. For one thing, there’s that title; “Bravern” does not sound really sound like the name of a robot in that sort of thing. But I admit that’s a dubious imperfect metric (“Gundam” doesn’t necessarily sound like that either). And secondly, Obari is not really known for being involved in anime that are, in basically any way, down to Earth. So this show, with its JSDF mecha brigade protagonist Isami [Ryouta Suzuki], seemed like an outlier.
All this in my head, I went into Bravern a bit skeptical and very unsure of what to actually expect. To the show’s credit, that uncertainty turned out to be intentional. On the other hand, I’m still not entirely sure to what end precisely it’s doing all this, but there’s something to be said for going for broke, and I think there’s some good evidence that Bravern‘s heart is in the right place, as we’ll get to.
As for what it’s actually about, well, we open in the middle of a joint US / Japan / a couple other countries it’s not totally clear mecha training exercise, as one does, where Isami wins the day in-simulation by storming an enemy position by himself, backed up only by US Titanostrider pilot Lewis Smith [Youhei Azakami]. This opening scene portrays Isami as a classic wild gun, loose cannon sort. He goes against orders to do this, and is duly reprimanded, but the narrative seems to paint him in the opening half of the first episode here as a guy Willing To Do What Must Be Done. You know the sort if you’re familiar with any even vaguely macho military fiction.
As it turns out, this is the first of several fakeouts. The characterization of Lewis as a stock cool guy, on the other hand, seems pretty accurate. The show’s opening minutes do a lot to build up a tense but ultimately still friendly rivalry between the two. At one point, Lewis challenges Isami to a mecha showdown, asking if he’s not “brave enough” to accept, in a bit of fun foreshadowing.
The second fakeout dispels any idea that this is going to be a grounded, politically-driven mecha series. Somewhere in a control room, an alarm suddenly blares and a mysterious object appears on-screen. You know the deal here, too, most likely; an invasion from space, they show no mercy. The same bullet points that indie game ZeroRanger memorably pared down to their barest, most elemental form in its opening cutscene. They’re treated with a similar, perfunctory but punchy approach here. The invasion is swift and brutal, some real War of the Worlds shit as the aliens stride in, coldly levelling anything and anyone in sight with their pinkish UFO-mecha. This is about where most people might assume they’ve got Bravern figured out, if they’re entering sight-unseen. Those people would be wrong.
The situation falls to pieces quickly enough that the group who engaged in training exercises early on are left to fend for themselves. Isami tries and fails to save some of his comrades, including his blue-haired girl buddy Hibiki [Yume Miyamoto]. He does not do well, and it really seems like this is the end for Isami right up until the exact moment that one of the enemy’s blazing lasers is intercepted by an equally-bright green flash from the heavens above. Enter the show’s title character, Bravern [Kenichi Suzumura], a giant robot of a very different sort than we’ve seen up to this point.
Regardless of anything else I have or will ever say about this show, the turn-on-a-dime “what the actual fuck” spectacle of what happens here is absolutely immaculate. It’s the best capital A-M Anime Moment of the year so far. It is some absolutely cool as fuck nonsense. Isami goes from a foot soldier to plunged into the cockpit of Bravern, a dyed-in-the-wool super robot in the classic mold and a character in his own right. He has a flaming sword, he fires blasts of green energy, he arrived on a beam of green energy. He has diegetic in-cockpit theme music. It is a few absolutely wonderful, absurd, totally ridiculous minutes, and even if everything else this show does ends up absolutely paling in comparison, it will always have this.
It’ll also always have its actual, real opening credits, which seem designed with that same classic, old-school mentality in mind; a steel aircraft carrier beneath an azure sky, glowing, neon outlines around a cast of menacing, gargantuan robot silhouettes aglow with neon lines that we have yet to meet. It’s awesome. It promises a lot. Delivering on that is going to be the hard part, but it’s a promising sign that, as he sits in Bravern, Isami realizes that when he was a kid with dreams of justice, he didn’t really want to be a spec. ops. guy, a fighter pilot, a tank driver, or even a Titanostrider operator. He wanted to be a hero.
All of that is to the show’s benefit, because from here on out, starting in episode two which I’m also covering here, figuring out what this series even is becomes a lot more complicated. Because, you see, in addition to being a willful juxtaposition of super robot science-fantasy against a fairly gritty invasion story sort of thing, Bravern is also….a BL-inflected comedy.
No, really. Buckle in, because this is where things get weird weird.
When we see Isami at the start of the second episode, he’s being detained by some shadowy group or another and very literally tortured. This is a pretty sharp tonal departure from the end of the last episode, but what’s intercut with it is even stranger; Bravern, attempting to explain the situation to the group of military officials still gathered on the aircraft carrier and them largely not understanding. To be fair to them, his explanations include a lot of shouting his own name, Isami’s name, and doing things like relating his life story like a literal book complete with chapter titles. Also, his fixation on Isami is very clearly meant to resemble a gay crush, and his description of their first time “piloting” together very quickly becomes laden with so much innuendo that the term ‘subtext’ no longer feels sufficient. The show playing this for comedy is….a little blue, to say the least. (As is the show’s apparent intentional juxtaposition here. Isami is literally being tortured, the military officials are being ‘tortured’ by Bravern’s mannerisms. Eh.) Much of this seems designed to raise the question “what if the super robot you were piloting had a thing for you, and he was kind of annoying about it?”
By contrast, the actual situation Bravern’s explaining is pretty dire. The peril invading their world is an alien invasion of bio-machines, spearheaded by eight ships called Deathdrives, each containing a swarm of mecha and a single more powerful unit. One of which, the blue anti-Bravern called Superbia, we meet here. Superbia and Bravern fight, of course. Since Isami is still being detained by some aloha-shirted torturer guy, Bravern comes very close to losing that fight, as he’s noticeably weaker without someone in the driver’s seat.
Isami has to be convinced to get back in Bravern, in true mecha anime fashion, as his, ahem, “first time,” was not had under the best circumstances and he’s still processing all this stuff. (That’s all text, by the way, I am doing very little interpreting here.) At one point, Lewis tries to pilot Bravern instead, sweet-talking to the big red boyscout with talk of how he, too, wants to save the world and everyone on it. This almost works, and we are treated to a delightfully goofy scene where the whole conversation is rendered like something out of an old shoujo series, but Bravern seems to be monogamous. No one gets in him but Isami, and that’s final.
When he finally does get in Bravern, the dynamic duo kick Superbia’s tailpipe, of course. Including a charming, doofy scene where Bravern goes in for the super move kill and then stops himself because he insists that he do a different one this time. It’s charming, it’s very silly, and I think all this taken together maps out Bravern as being focused on, in roughly this order; being awesome, being gay, and being funny. That’s not a bad thing to be, even if the finer details of its themes remain ambiguous. Isami still has military command to deal with, after all.
My bet, if I can try to manifest something into existence here, is that Isami’s emotional journey will be attached to his learning to grow out of this role he’s built for himself as a soldier—one he’s already very much leaving behind as of episode 2—and into the role of a real hero, and there’s one final piece of evidence that might support that reading.
Just when it seems like the second episode could not possibly get sillier, Isami’s clothes explode in the final minutes of its main closing scene, and he is stuck inside Bravern as the episode ends, in an apparent parody of that one Evangelion episode. A ridiculous gag with no further meaning? A symbol of him being forced to shed his “soldier’s uniform” and confront reality as it truly is? Both of these things, somehow? Bravern’s sheer absurdity practically demands this kind of overanalysis, even as it can absolutely just be enjoyed as pure entertainment.
All told, the operative adjective here is definitely “campy.” And there’s a lot that I haven’t mentioned, including our main mechanic character, Miyu [Ai Kakuma], whose interest in Bravern quickly gets into robotfucker territory. (She thinks he’s handsome. Can you blame her?) There’s a pretty great scene where a German official speculates in her native language with one of her cohorts that this whole thing might be some kind of ploy by the Americans, only for her to be loudly reprimanded with Bravern’s absolutely awful German. There’s the show’s bizarre, maybe intentionally funny? art style dimorphism between the men and the women, where the former look like they’re from a relatively grounded military series and the latter look like they’re from a KyoAni production. (Quite possibly also just reflective of the interests of main character designer Jae-Uk No.) There’s a gag where Bravern cuts off a government official by loudly yelling his transformation phrase (obviously, he can turn into a futuristic jet fighter) and flying away. The fact that this thing is clearly heavily inspired by—and might be part of? I’m not clear on this—the Brave series. The fact that Isami and Bravern’s shouts are out of sync the first time they do their finishing attacks. And on, and on, and on. There’s a lot to like here, a lot to be puzzled over, and a few things to take issue with. It adds up to one of the season’s best premieres, and certainly one of its most ambitious.
It’s totally possible that all of this completely flames out, of course. This has happened before. Giving a story tons of slack because it’s weird or absurd can lead to Magical Destroyers situations, or even, in a worst-case-scenario, a Darling in the FranXX. Still, what’s the point of flying close to the Sun if there’s no risk you’ll be burned? Icarus was a chump.
After a supremely homoerotic ED sequence, Bravern‘s second episode features a brief post-credits scene, where Lewis quite literally stumbles over a girl in a crashed UFO-like ship, by implication, this was the pilot of Superbia, and is our local Rei Ayanami. This fairly standard sci-fi twist after such a weird premiere made me absolutely redouble my commitment. More than anything else that’s premiered this season, for Bravern, I will be there no matter what. I have got to see where this goes. Join me if you’re brave enough.
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