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Review

by James Beckett,

BNA: Brand New Animal

Synopsis:
BNA: Brand New Animal
For thousands of years, humankind unknowingly shared the world with the Beastmen, beings who could transform between human-seeming forms and more animalistic bodies at will. Over time, the existence of Beastmen became widely known, and the inevitable prejudice and conflict spawned by the discovery led to the creation of Anima City, and independent haven for Beastmen of all species to come together and coexist. Michiru Kagemori was an average human living in Japan until, one day, she suddenly transformed into a tanuki Beastman. With her best friend Nazuna already missing, Michiru had nowhere to go save for Anima City, where she got caught up in the work of Shirou Ogami, an enigmatic and superhumanly powerful wolf Beastman who has vowed to keep the citizens of Anima safe, both from human intervention and their own animalistic conflicts. When Michiru discovers that she is not only the first human to ever have been turned into a Beastman, but that she has incredible shapeshifting powers of her own, she teams up with Shirou to uncover the truth behind her “Beastmanitis” and the conspiracies that threaten to tear Anima City apart.
Review:

When BEASTARS got its exceptional anime adaptation last year, there were plenty of jokes going around about it being anime's very own Zootopia, but people ought to have saved their jabs for TRIGGER's latest Netflix Original, BNA: Brand New Animal. Not only does this series share a surprising number of similar plot points and character beats with its Disney Animation cousin, but it also uses its anthropomorphic cast to explore similar themes of how prejudice can divide and damage, which are ideas that BEASTARS only ever touches on incidentally. When you take the entire twelve-episode season of BNA into consideration, it isn't much of a reach to see it as a the result of simple “Zootopia + anime” calculation. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that BNA is the result of mashing up the broad themes and archetypes of something like Zootopia with the madcap antics of Studio Trigger specifically, so much so that one could accuse it of simply playing as a “Greatest Hits” compilation of all of the company's favorite hallmarks, except, you know, now there are a bunch of furries everywhere.

My strongest takeaway after watching BNA is that its greatest strengths lie firmly in being such an on-brand work for Studio Trigger, though nothing in here will surprise you if you have watched any of the studio's popular efforts. It shares both its gonzo visual style and general distrust of authoritarian conformity with hits like Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill and the recent Promare, and it puts a major emphasis on complicated female friendships like we saw in Little Witch Academia (and also Kill la Kill). It also plays fast and loose with social commentary even as it escalates its action to preposterous proportions, and at this point viewers shouldn't be at all surprised to learn that BNA was written by Kazuki Nakashima, who wrote both Promare and Kill la Kill. Throw in an especially bonkers baseball themed episode storyboarded by Hiroyuki Imaishi, and you've got yourself an anime that is literally impossible to mistake as anything but a Studio Trigger joint. In other words: The show looks and sounds awesome, even when the number of frames actually making it on to the screen is fairly limited. The show features what is probably TRIGGER's best coloring and lighting to date outside of Promare, and there's something kooky and interesting to look at in practically every frame of the show.

As far as the cast goes, Michiru is another addition to the roster of fantastic TRIGGER heroines, managing to balance her plucky resolve with a willingness to open her mind to the experiences and struggles of the Beastmen. Plus, she's got badass shapeshifting powers, which make for some creative action sequences and visual gags throughout the season. Speaking of badasses, Shirou Ogami isn't anyone to screw around with, and while I was surprised with how little the show did with his and Michiru's partnership in the grand scheme of things, he makes for a great hero all the same, dishing out some supremely satisfying beatdowns of his own and spicing up the plot with his mysterious backstory. As far as Netflix's English dub goes, the vocal performances went a long way towards endearing me to the cast, especially Cherami Leigh as Michiru. It took me a while to come around on Ben Diskin's slightly off-center take on Shirou, but he totally sells the character by the end. Some of the translation can still sound stilted and awkward in English, and a some of the minor characters sounded noticeably wooden, but the dub gets the job done, and lives up to the standard set by the Japanese cast.

Really, the superhero-detective angle that I had thought would be the center of BNA's focus is only one component of Michiru's experiences in Anima City, and I genuinely loved how varied and complex her story becomes as the threats to Anima City grow larger and stranger. From breaking out as the city's newest baseball superstar to cracking down on a mysterious cult with surprising ties to her own past, Michiru's life as a tanuki Beastman is eventful, to say the least. The cast of side-characters is eclectic and interesting, too, and half the fun of watching BNA is seeing the crew at TRIGGER obviously having a blast messing around with background characters and stupid animal jokes. That sense of “messing around” is also where my reservations lie, though, because while I wanted to absolutely adore BNA, I found myself slightly underwhelmed when all was said and done, because the show doesn't come together to form a satisfying whole in the way I was hoping it would.

The show's thematic throughline, for one, is both too shallow and overly complicated by the show's own vague worldbuilding. It doesn't use it's “anthropomorphic animals = oppressed people” analogy to say anything more nuanced or specific than “Prejudice is bad”, and even that message fails to land when you consider what the Beastmen are, and how they're treated by the show. Is the fact that they can assume a human form, but choose not to, supposed to be analogous for people who can pass for “normal” but choose to have pride in expressing who they are? If so, then why does so much of the conflict in the show come from Beastmen playing into the stereotypes and instincts associated with their animal forms? Likewise, Michiru suddenly becoming a Beastman and learning firsthand what it's like to live as one basically works as a way to make her more empathetic, but then you start wading into that awfully sticky territory of stories where people are suddenly transformed into a different gender/race/sexual identity and are completely able to grasp the entire experience of living your whole life within the confines of systemic bigotry after, like, a week or two. Michiru is never portrayed as having been particularly prejudiced to begin with, so the effect of her transformation never lands as anything other than a convenient plot device.

Zootopia has gotten a lot of fair criticism for the way it conflates imaginary distinctions between people (like race) with very real, biological distinctions between animals (like being a carnivore vs. an herbivore). I'd argue that BNA is falling into a similar trap here, only it's even harder to parse because the social and biological structures of Beastman society really just feels like a thinly veiled excuse for TRIGGER to draw a bunch of anthropomorphic characters getting into fights and being goofy. Even when you put aside the half-baked social commentary, though, the overall scope of BNA's story just feels needlessly messy. It takes two or three more episodes than it needed to in order to set up the true shape of the plot and all of the parties involved, and the arcs of several main characters, including Shirou himself, just don't amount to as much as you'd expect.

The good news is that, at the end of the day, BNA is a blast to watch, there's no question about it. Despite its flaws, this series is clearly the product of a team that is cutting loose and having a ton of fun, and TRIGGER's sense of playful excitement is as infectious as ever. That said, the world of the Beastmen provided an opportunity to explore some fresh themes and story ideas, and TRIGGER never takes the chance to fully exploit that potential. Instead, what we have BNA: Brand New Animal is a perfectly satisfying serving of anime comfort food: It's pretty, it's familiar, and you'll probably feel good about devouring it all in only a couple of sittings. Anyone looking for a more novel or ambitious effort, though, will have to wait and find out what TRIGGER is planning to make for the next course.

Grade:
Overall : B
Overall (dub) : B
Overall (sub) : B
Story : B-
Animation : B+
Art : A
Music : B+

+ Take everything you've ever loved about a TRIGGER production and toss a bunch of wacky anthropomorphic animals into the mix, Michiru and Shirou make for great and likeable protagonists
Messy social commentary isn't half as deep or effective as it tries to be, recycles plot points and elements from TRIGGER's greatest hits in a way that will give some viewers déjà vu

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Production Info:
Director: Yoh Yoshinari
Series Composition: Kazuki Nakashima
Script:
Nanami Higuchi
Kazuki Nakashima
Kimiko Ueno
Storyboard:
Saori Den
Hiroyuki Imaishi
Daizen Komatsuda
Yoshihiro Miyajima
Kōdai Nakano
Masahiko Otsuka
Tatsuo Satō
Hisayasu Shiba
Shin'ichirō Ushijima
Yoh Yoshinari
Episode Director:
Saori Den
Tatsumi Fujii
Noboru Furukawa
Motomasa Maeda
Yoshihiro Miyajima
Tomoyuki Munehiro
Masaoki Nakajima
Kazuma Ogasawara
Masahiko Otsuka
Yuichi Shimohira
Takahiro Tamano
Unit Director: Noboru Furukawa
Music: mabanua
Original creator: Kazuki Nakashima
Character Design: Yusuke Yoshigaki
Art Director:
Genice Chan
Masanobu Nomura
Chief Animation Director: Naoki Takeda
Animation Director:
Sushio
Aoi Abe
Kanako Abe
Shigeo Akahori
Hiroki Arai
Genice Chan
Fei Chen
Jia Mei Deng
Shimon Dohi
Kazuhiro Fukuchi
Tetsuya Hasegawa
Haruka Hinata
Nyki Ikyn
Masamichi Ishiyama
Reo Itoyama
Ryū Kanazawa
Yūto Kaneko
Sayaka Kobayashi
Meng Yun Lin
Yun Liu Liu
Shiori Miyazaki
Mayumi Nakamura
Midori Nakamura
Hamuto Natsuno
Masaki Nishikawa
Masaru Sakamoto
Asami Shimizu
Michelle Sugimoto
Yue Sun
Naoki Takeda
Emi Tamura
Kenta Yokoya
Yusuke Yoshigaki
Sound Director:
Masahiko Otsuka
Hiroki Urakari
Director of Photography: Nozomi Shitara
Executive producer:
Yukio Haruyama
Isao Kanagi
Masahiro Kosugi
Shingo Kunieda
Akio Nomura
Keiji Ota
Masahiko Otsuka
Ryū Utsui
Producer:
Eri Isobe
Yuka Okayasu

Full encyclopedia details about
BNA: Brand New Animal (TV)

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