Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Is Cannon Busters Worth Watching?
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2092 |
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The timing of this landing on Netflix was good when it landed, I have my vacation the following week and this will be one of the series I intend to marathon on my time off (mostly be watching series and playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses). Virtually everyone I know has said the show is great so I'm really looking forward to it, the trailer was awesome and I loved the song in it (that's apparently used for the OP).
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doubleO7
 Posts: 1069 |
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So, did the Kickstarter pilot never materialize and instead got picked up by Netflix for a full series, or did they actually put something out prior to the Netflix show?
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Sakura Shinguji
Posts: 190 |
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The Kickstarter pilot was completed, and at various intervals made available for streaming.
The Kickstarter rewards however have yet to materialize, and LeSean has basically been ghosting the whole thing for the past several years. Says a lot. |
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nemuyoake
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Seriously?! It's like a scam, then... |
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Amibite
Posts: 196 |
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The comment about "anime needs more people of color" was a bit funny because it basically feeds into the ever-growing mindset that Asians are not people of color and no longer considered a minority by Americans.
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steelmirror
 Posts: 342 |
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WatcherZer
Posts: 272 |
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It was a fun series for referencing 90's/2000's anime though sometimes pushed a bit far past homage into ripoff (The cannon busters being essentially Buster Machines but created with magic rather than Degeneration Reactor). 9ine is an obvious Son Goku ripoff visually but thrown into a 47 Ronin/Seven Samurai backstory. Various elements of Cowboy Bebop
Its storytelling and feel felt a lot like the Saiyuki/Saiyuki Reloaded series with visuals from Legend of Korra. One horrible continuity throughout the series was Bessie scaling it kept getting bigger and smaller in different shots (sometimes the rear seats were just behind the front, sometimes there was a massive gap, sometimes the driver was so close to the ground that the internal cabin couldn't exist sometimes it was so high up you needed a long ladder to get on board) and particularly bad is the intro where its just a normal sized car but still has the ladder on the side! Only saving grace for Bessie was the detail that the screen always showed which episode half you were on, e.g. 1a 7a, 7b, etc... |
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gridsleep
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Did you ever watch all the gruesome ways Capt. Jack Harkness dies in Torchwood? Cannon Busters is a mishmosh of everything.
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nargun
Posts: 924 |
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Japanese people are not "people of colour" in japan. [Nano's key in nichijo and what it represents for her relationship with the professor is a stand-in for ethnic-minority status: fight me]. |
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j_plex
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This blatantly avoids the issue. Anime depicts plenty of Asian people - as it should though Koreans are a notable exception - and plenty of white people but it jumps through crazy hoops to avoid depicting black and Hispanic people. This is actually something that is getting worse with time rather than better, as a lot of the anime series of the 80s and 90s i.e. Dragon Ball, Cowboy Bebop, Bleach, Naruto, Gundam, Black Lagoon, Full Metal Panic etc. had important black and Hispanic side characters. These days an anime can be set in a part of the world that is heavily/mostly black-Hispanic and not have so much as a single blackground character that isn't white (whether actually white or ostensibly Asian characters that have blonde or red hair and blue eyes). Or worse ... a show that is allegedly about "global" politics only to find out that "the world" is Japan, China, Russia/eastern Europe, India, a western Europe and America that has been cleansed of all nonwhites ... and that's it. No Latin America, Africa (or Korea). That said, the solution IS NOT more projects like this - which I will not watch - or Gen:Lock, which I will also not watch. I am not a "cultural appropriation" guy at all (how many forms of music, painting, cuisine, literature, calligraphy and other forms of art would exist WITHOUT appropriation) but instead of us hi-jacking their form and making "our" anime the way that we think that it should be made - taking an eastern form and using it to address western cultural and political issues - we should just address our desires for diversity or whatever in our own media. Just like Disney grabbed some stuff - though in fairness only some imagery, scenes and settings and not themes and plots - from Kimba The White Lion to make The Lion King, the goal of the people who made Gen:Lock and Cannon Busters should be to improve upon the garbage that is now on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and what they have done to She-Ra (the very thing which drove a lot us to anime in the first place). |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4364 Location: New York |
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I’ve said it in the other thread, but the problem with this show is the creator had no one to tell him “no.” No one to tell him to stop referencing something or to hold off on a concept for later. It’s the equivalent of a teenager watching Toonami in 2002, some anime on Encore, and then making his own comic. “Oh, we need ninjas! We need a big swordsman like Guts! And we need robots! And we need...”
Etc, etc. There’s no flow, no cohesion. Even if he wanted to use the ideas, he needed someone to say “this doesn’t fit, dump it” or “this clashes with the aesthetic, save it for later.” |
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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That's fairly consistent with my observation that Jews are whatever race a speaker feels deserves what it has least or ranks worst in his personal hierarchy. As for the show, it was quite clear by halfway through the intro sequence that the show was a dumping ground for random references, pastiches, and some ad exec's idea of what in-group coding for nerds looks like with little actual storytelling or artistry. I made it through half an episode. |
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MesousaGaby
 Posts: 71 |
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Surprised you didn't mention something regarding 9ine's flashback...he actually kills a little girl without flinching.
A subversion of "infant immortality", or just incredibly forced, especially when they go nowhere with it? |
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luisedgarf
Posts: 656 Location: Guadalajara, Mexico |
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The problem here is a cultural one. Japanese are notorious from not always acting proactively when it comes with foreigners with money and power, especially Americans. Had the animation studio being French, Russian, Mexican or from any other western country, this kind of stuff wouldn't had materialized in the first place, since it would had being rejected in his face. That's also the reason why the series was broadcasted in Netflix exclusively and not on Japanese TV. I doubt the Japanese audiences would had to tolerate this from beyond than one episode. |
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Ensaru64
Posts: 52 |
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That's the entire goal of Cannon Busters as a series. If you've followed the conversation of its pre-production, its creator, LeSean, wanted to make a series that's a hodge-podge of different genres and pop culture. Here's the thing: there's already an anime/manga that proves that this already works, and it's Kekkai Sensen (Blood Blockade Battlefront) and written by the same creator who made Trigun. It has the gung-ho feel and everything but is set in a modern day setting with a mishmash of genres and pop culture. While watching Cannon Busters, I couldn't help but wonder how much it pales in comparison to the fantastic Kekkai Sensen. I've read the 1st chapter of the Cannon Busters comics and despite how hard it was to read its busy and claustrophobic art-style, the plot had a steady flow. I believe this was poorly adapted into the second episode of the anime, and everything since thereafter was a bunch of poorly paced narrative decisions. So I believe the issue is less of throwing every idea into the pot and more of not giving ideas the time to flesh itself out. The series felt the need to focus on 2-4 plot threads every single episode when they could've simply focused on 1 or 2 plotlines at a time and not have the main characters splitting up every episode, fragmenting the plot. |
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