PROMARE

DESCRIPTION

CAST

SPECIAL ActionPromare: SIDE Galo
SPECIAL ActionPromare: SIDE Lio

REVIEWS

• 

  heychrisfox

  95/100
  A visual feast and action spectacle takes an otherwise cliché story to a completely different level.

  A visual feast and a high-octane journey. Far and away TRIGGER's best production to date, and excels on its own and against its peers as if it's not even breaking a sweat. The sheer, lush visual spectacle on display takes what is otherwise a story steeped in cliché to a completely different level.

  

  Anime films are kind of on a different scale. It's easy to get enraptured by the higher production value that's allowed to a cinematic piece. Everything is going to look better and feel more cohesive than a typical television anime, because more is banking on getting people in the doors of the theatre and paying the ticket price.

  That needs to be stated to emphasize just how above and beyond Promare takes all of its baselines. The art and animation on display here is basically indescribable. Every scene is in motion, a natural consequence of a theme surrounding fire. But they took that mere concept of motion, and applied it to every scene. The swinging cameras on the CGI fights give an incredible sense of scale and momentum without disorienting the viewer's vision, and every fight feels coherent, even when the entire screen is awash in explosions, fire, and tumbling figures. It really needs to be emphasized that words can only do so much to explain any of this. The level of what is shown rather than what can be told is on a totally different scale here.

  

  The presentation and animation itself is just inventive, when it comes down to it. Beams of emergency lights that extend out in lines rather than as light. Lens flares given a transparent, square-like pixel quality. Fire that's essentially moving fractals to create the sense of motion. Into the Spiderverse levels of camera swings and perspective shifts around 3D models. Dynamic character-name cards that erupts stylishly whenever someone is introduced, even sometimes interacting with the rest of the scene and getting knocked out of frame or burst by the action. Promare brings an insane level of creativity and panache to the table. If a series like Violet Evergarden can capture the beauty of nuance in a scene, Promare takes that same intricacy of animation and concept in the complete opposite direction to just show how COOL everything can look. The film has a few lulls in the story, which are necessary for the breakneck speed the film, giving the audience a much needed break before the next 20-30 minutes straight of uncompromising combat. But even in these slower scenes, the visualization of a room with brightly coloured triangles, capturing a simple life before a flood of chaos, or a heartbreaking moment of camaraderie that is as fleeting as the last embers of a fire, the remarkable level of detail and creativity is immeasurable.

  

  Another thing that's required to mention is the daring color palette present. Fire is so instinctive for our eyes to see, but Trigger went with a very bold choice of choosing a mix of magenta/turquoise, and pink/blue for any fire on display. This, along with some expected color theming on display in any good Trigger production, and you get something that is purely and unabashedly unique in all execution. Lush really is the word of the day, as the entire film is a visual feast, with so much to visually take in that it can be a little exhausting. Couple that with the heart-pumping music of Sawano, and you get a visual and audio explosion that can't be shred from your mind.

  

  The story, surprisingly, is the film's weakest point. This is mostly due to the stiff cliché of its basis. Although the world-building is extremely creative in its imagining of a science-fiction world altered by a tremendous fire-war, all of this design is surface level. You can easily forget what the importance of the city is beyond something to be lit ablaze and to have tons of buildings ripped apart during the action set-pieces.

  

  The characters are also fairly weak in design, but this tends to work in the film's favour. Galo is simple, dim-witted, and the generic protagonist (let's not mince words, he really is Kamina from Gurren Lagaan, even though that's just a meme). Lio is sassy-naughty boy who wants the world to burn at any cost. But despite these one-note characters, they act as idealized foils for one-another, both to compare and contrast each other's views at different points during the film. The central premise hidden in the film is fairly predictable as well, but because of the two lead protagonists being extremely fleshed out in their clichés, any other characters simply need to bounce off of their strong personalities for instantly fun dialogue or action. There are also a surprising amount of side-characters, and although none get fleshed out, all get a moment or two in the spotlight, which is all that's really needed to advance the plot forward.

  

  In the end, complex storytelling is not what Promare is about. Promare is about seeing just how far anime can push the medium of animation and execution in every sense of the word. And what small faults exist are completely eclipsed by the sheer magnitude of adrenaline-fueled action and artistic talent on display. It takes a simple premise, and let's it blaze like a supernova with its raw energy, and leaves you with nothing but its unrivaled passion where its fire once stood.

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• 

  planetJane

  94/100
  For Studio TRIGGER's last of the '10s; a blaze of glory.

  All of my reviews contain __spoilers __for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

  ---

  

  Twelve years before Promare, Hiroyuki Imaishi was responsible for Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, a longform homage to the super robot genre that cemented his reputation both domestically and, especially, abroad. He’s been a favorite of American audiences in particular ever since, and the man was evidently not content to leave the 2010s with just a single all-decade great under his belt in the form of Kill La Kill.

  Let’s get the obvious quality question out of the way: Yes, Promare is as good as you’ve heard. Yes, Promare is Imaishi’s greatest work thusfar. If he never tops it, that’d be completely fair, it’s a monster of a production in the best way possible.

  Imaishi has a reputation as a master aesthetician, but his work prior to Promare was often criticized as shallow, sometimes even problematic. The validity of these critiques varied, but it was hard to argue that most of his repertoire was particularly rich in terms of theme or even basic message. Imaishi is known, rightly, as a director for the eyes, not the brain. Promare itself is certainly no one’s idea of a slow-burn psychological thriller or anything of the sort, but there’s a thematic depth here that his prior work only partially had or lacked completely.

  In fact, Promare goes in so many different directions that while this is almost certainly not how it did happen, it’s possible (and funny) to imagine that Imaishi became aware of these criticisms and decided to respond by tackling, you know, every Big Important Theme. At once. The chief subjects engaged with here are neo-nationalism in the west (seriously!) and environmentalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given where the studio responsible is from, it handles the latter much better than the former. But, hey, points for even going there in a time when even many American productions feel averse toward making any statements that could be parsed as overtly political.

  There is of course one other big thing, which we must discuss before taking any conversation about Promare further. The relationship between its leads; Galo and Lio.

  

  Studio TRIGGER in general and Imaishi in particular have had a fraught relationship with LGBTQ coding in their work. The studio is often (not without reason!) criticized for failing to commit toward any particular viewpoint. This is in part due to how their stories are written, generally with romance, if present, as a peripheral element and thus one left open to interpretation.

  Promare does not entirely avoid falling into this trap, but the results are much better here than say, the frustrating “choose your own OTP” ending of Kill La Kill. A few moments early in the film make vague gestures that Aina might also have feelings for Galo, but if she does, they’re not explored extensively, and there’s zero sign they’re reciprocated. Galo’s main relationships throughout the film are with two other men. Firstly his hero-slash-mentor-and-then-nemesis Kray Foresight, and then Lio himself. (Indeed, the film’s female cast is fairly peripheral other than Aina’s sister, Heris, but given the economy of writing a film has to have this isn’t really a knock, just a simple fact.)

  The much-talked-about kiss between Galo and Lio does indeed sound like something of a cop-out on paper, given that it is a life-restoring bit of what’s essentially magic CPR. In practice, and in the context of TRIGGER’s wider body of work, it actually feels more meaningful with that fact attached than it might if done purely romantically. Imaishi in particular has something of a bad habit of offing characters at the end of his works in order to build stakes. Kill La Kill had Senketsu, Gurren Lagann had Nia. Here, that’s explicitly defied by Galo’s in-universe lifesaving. It also makes his little suddenly-tsundere mini-freakout immediately after feel cute and endearing rather than like a bit of “ew, gay” comedy, which is a very hard tightrope even for queer creators to walk.

  

  There’s also the matter of Lio’s very feminine “rescued maiden” appearance in the cut that immediately follows. That kind of coding is fairly hard to do by accident.

  

  It still would’ve been nice to get some actual no-room-for-misinterpretation “I love you”s, but this is as much a matter of cultural convention as anything else. It is still a massive step in the right direction.

  As for its other themes; neither is exactly handled subtly, but Imaishi’s work tends to be about as subtle as a NASCAR race, so that’s just fine. The obvious ICE analogue being called Freeze Force and having huge-tired trucks that turn into drones is so on-the-nose it’s almost comedic.

  

  Then there’s them having literal black sites, and the awful conditions they keep the imprisoned Burnish in, which are, rightly, much less funny. (Another minor note; it’s kind of crazy that this movie manages to depict something as inherently goofy as being frozen in a big block of cartoon ice as genuinely sinister.)

  

  This doesn’t all entirely work. There’s the classic “X-Men Problem” of using a group with parahuman abilities as a metaphor for actual minorities, and some of this on-the-noseness actually hurts the films attempts to engage with the dangers of fascism. It’s tempting to simply bat the points of “credit where it’s due” and “but it doesn’t entirely work” back and forth for forever, but the succinct way to put it is that even engaging with this stuff at all is still worthwhile, even if not everything hits the target the way it probably should.

  

  The environmentalist theme is dealt with more abstractly, and that’s actually to its benefit. The literal problem that the cast of Promare faces--the spectre of the Earth exploding from simultaneous volcanic eruptions--is not a real environmental problem. However, that layer of abstraction lets the writing work in a very “anime” space while still having the subject feel resonant. You can get away with engaging in a bit of the ol’ Gaia Theory if you’ve got things like Lio transmogrifying into a Krakatoan volcano as a visual metaphor for the term “The Earth dies screaming”. The two are tied together at times as well, in ways both obvious (Kray's entire character), and the subtle, like how the Burnished are literally "processed" in a factory that looks like a design diagram.

  

  Speaking of that sequence; all this talk about theme, theme, theme and we’ve yet to do more than passingly mention the absolutely insane visuals on this thing. In the world of anime, there are cuts, and there are cuts. Promare is filled to the brim with the latter, with many of TRIGGER’s heaviest hitters putting work in. Sequences like this provide a feast for the eyes that keeps any of the relative headiness of the past few paragraphs engaging on a more basic gut level.

  Beyond that, Promare also makes heavy use of 3D CGI. It’s an interesting aesthetic choice, and the result is fantastic. Large swathes of Promare actually rather resemble a video game, or perhaps a synthwave album cover, but it must be stressed that this is a positive. Rather than trying to simply imitate traditional 2D animation, the CGI in Promare builds a visual identity all its own. This is most notable in the various sequences that build fire from what are very visibly polygons, it looks great in a way that’s hard to describe, like a realization of what people in the 80s thought animation would look like in 40 years. Even conceptually, “firefighter mechas vs. flame demons”--which is what you can probably boil all this down to if you really have to--feels pretty unique.

  

  Is all this enough to elevate Imaishi and his crew to the level of the all-time greats? That’s for time to say, but if it were, I wouldn’t be shocked. Promare is more than just a very good film, it feels like the sort of film that will be cited as an influence and referenced decades from now. As a new classic--last of the 2010s, first of the 2020s--as a continuation of the Daicon spirit, and just as a damn great action anime, Promare is no flash in the pan. It’s an inferno.

  ---

  And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?

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• 

  Honksea

  60/100
  A return to a more endearing Studio Trigger, but not without its flaws.

  The appeal of such a visually impressive movie is undeniable, and well, Sawano will be Sawano, but I went into Promare already expecting these things, and I'm sure anybody else would know as well, so it is more worthwhile to talk about what actually goes on in the film than its already obvious aesthetic brilliance.
  Trigger is a studio I am extremely critical of personally, I can't deny this bias (I took personal offense to how Kill la Kill ended and couldn't even get through all of FranXX, wondering how such an incompetent studio could've created the beauty that is Inferno Cop and the original LWA OVA), but even so I was able to see positive aspects in Promare. I am of the opinion that Trigger is a studio which does a pretty good job of wacky comical moments, but falls flat whenever it tries to tell a serious story. The most fantastic example of this imo is Kill la Kill, which was pretty endearing and funny, but then went for this super serious end section which was honestly a complete abhorrent mess that ruined the show overall. While Promare sort of does the same thing, it never felt like it started burning edge as fuel nor completely abandoned its lighthearted vibe. It managed to diffuse a lot of moments that could've become overly serious with comedy, which is well-placed in a film that doesn't go all-in on story and focuses more on aesthetic and atmosphere.
  Promare has many moments that are reminiscent of Trigger at their best, with the lighthearted comedy and zany scenes that don't make a lot of sense, like in Inferno Cop or the first third or so of Kill la Kill. Honestly even the more focused storytelling parts don't hesitate to make quips, and while some of it missed the mark for me, I never felt like it abandoned the theme of a light-hearted story full of comedy elements, and never lost its way. But, herein I suppose would lie the issue with the film:
  It is clearly quite narrative heavy, and honestly, none of the twists or storytelling elements wowed me by any shape or form. Some of the twists are downright corny and beget a sigh, it falls prey here and there to some less desirable tropes such as deus ex machina, and while the characters were, for the most part, entertaining, most of them other than Galo and Lio remain archetypal.
  Overall I think the show succeeds at setting a good mood, is very stylish, has great music placement and animation, but if anything, as a story it's a little uninspired. For somebody wanting something cool to watch, without engaging brain too much, there is entertainment to be found here. Rule of cool overall wins over in my opinion. Also Rukia should've had more screentime. Ciao.

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