PROMARE

It's the official English physical release today and THERE STILL WASN'T A THREAD, so as is my wont, I'm fixing that.

so let's talk about our burning souls and all, yeah?

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Nael's ACTUAL impressions: oh god I watched it last night FINALLY and I never want to stop watching it. I was a little surprised but in retrospect unsurprised that the animation in the shorts and the beginning wowed me more than the later part, but now that I've slept on it I realize that it's because that has more character animation rather than the mech animation, which is just more compelling to me.

also Lio is not only my fave and INTENSELY my type, but he's also Transition Goals, oh my god, I love him SO much

I also really appreciate Galo as a departure from the Standard Imaishi Protagonist, in that he's entirely aware that he's a total hothead and actively goes off to cool his head somewhere when he gets the chance! He's self-aware! I love him!

 

Fun movie. Peak Trigger with none of the Trigger down time that their tv shows can get bogged down with. Also Galio has like. Helped. With my weird dysphoria and internalized transphobia/toxic masculinity blocks with DUDE ROMANCE. So I am like. Very personally fond of it since it is helping me unravel some shit and sort through it all.

Also the mechs. Mechs are good. Love me my mechs. It's really good to be so hype about mechs again. And like have them be Anime Mech hype. I like Gridman but Gridman mech hype is more tokusatsu mech hype. They're still mechs and still kaiju, but they move different than stuff in anime typically does. They move like people in rubber suits, which I loved about it. The mechs in Promare though move like anime mechs and in ways that only anime mechs can move. Gridman is a love letter to mecha in toku, but Promare is a love letter to mecha in anime.

also the fucking sing-along is edited like a shipping amv and i am still not over that

 

what singalong, what?

also re: mechs, I don't even go to mech anime, but gurren lagann was a love letter to mech anime, and promare is a love letter to the raw passion that was there in gurren lagann. literally that's what it's all about. so it's not surprising. I feel like it's also kind of a look at what TTGL's mech animation would be like if it came out today - I remember the really impressive rotating angle shots in the first like, three episodes of kill la kill, and promare really brings those home in full, where they got abandoned in klk for #BUDGET!!!! reasons

 

There's a sing-along for Inferno that was shown after the showing of the film when I saw it in theatres. Is really super cute.

 

:[ it's not on the dvd release. weeps

 

IT IS NOT? D:

Aww...I was hoping it would be on it because it was really cute...

Are the interviews on it?

 

they are! I haven't watched them yet though.

also god can we talk about how the promare fire isn't technically fire but actually nuclear fusion and so it's no wonder the area seems to be a wasteland outside the city, not so much directed because it burned, but because it probably also got Irradiated to Fuck in the superfire?

 

This is a thing I had not thought about because I kind of just go OOH PRETTY COLORS :D HEART EXPLOSION :D :D :D when I watch the film. That is a really neat point though...Because it is nuclear fusion! That is something I like about Trigger projects...Little details like that being a thing. Even if people like me don't notice because we're too busy going OMG THEY NAMED THE ROBOT HOLY SHIT.

speaking of robot naming. the like. text popping up on the screen and galo naming stuff on the spot is one of my favorite parts of the film. it's just really fun and cute and HE IS A ROLE MODEL AND A FRIEND.

 

And it's fantastic writing too! Because it's an established character trait from early in the film (he gives the pizza gathering a dumb name! he gives all his shit dumb names!) and it's ultimately used as a characterization tool for another character as well, because Kray H A T E S those dumb names and after the Reveal, every single time Galo does a dumb name you can just *see* Kray's Pissed Off go up a notch

like, I've never seen someone work a weird quirk into another character like that before and it's just. so good....

 

It's really good. I like how his tastes for flair and what not are something that like Lio humors in like a sweet and heartfelt kind of way. Like yes he is like 'are you serious about the robot not looking hot' but he still goes out there and makes it look sick as fuck. In a way that fits really well with like meshing together their specific kinds of Extra in aesthetic.

Speaking of Lio...I like how very anime manly he is even though he looks how he does. Like fuck. Life goals there.

 

LIO FOTIA IS TRANSITION GOALS

i also love how he's like... on the one hand he's very clearly thoughtful and insightful, and he cares deeply about his people. But he's still headstrong and not perfect in the execution of that, and also he's incredibly expressive and not above showing exactly what he thinks in a way that pings as like... correct for his apparent age. He's a shithead teenager still.

I also love that he and Galo have a similar major flaw - they're both way too willing to mouth off to power. With Galo it's temper and foot-in-mouth heart-on-sleeve that he's willing to admit to being a screw up with, but with Lio it's way more peak millennial "what are you gonna do, kill me?" It gives their interactions a really good bounce.

 

Yes! They are very similar but very different! Which is really fun with them...It gives them nice ways of bouncing off one another like you said...

I love the way he's introduced in the film too. Just sitting there on his fucking fire throne all imperious like. He may be a bit less of a goofball than Galo but he still has a flair for the dramatic. Very extra in his own kind of way.

AND HE MAKES GALO HIS PRECIOUS JAPANESE FIREMAN STICK THING I AM FORGETTING THE NAME OF RIGHT NOW. WHICH IS VERY SWEET OF HIM.

I like how the ice is all very square in how it looks and how the fire is all triangle-y...Helps give the two sides of things these very appealing looks to their elements they use. And it makes them incredibly visually distinct from one another. In ways besides just color. And it's very easy for the brain to just kind of absorb that.

 

Oh yeah, and in fact specifically, foresight is square, burnish is triangle, and burning rescue/galo/humanity is round - that's explicitly a thing said by the team. (That's why the trademark food is pizza - because it combines triangle and round.)

Lio is incredibly dramatic. I don't know if you've seen the shorts? but his introduction in episode side lio is equally dramatic.

 

I saw the shorts, yes! Those were shown before the film when I went to see it. Though I at first interpreted that as like. 'Did you see art of Lio in shorts' and was like 'boy have i'.

 

boy, you should share with a man -

but yeah he's just! so much! and the slow motion pointy feet when he faces off against Galo, and the "descending a staircase that turns into his bike as he goes" bit and just...

 

I saw them months back so I'd have to go and dig them up sadly...Do not have just on hand right now...Sorry.

AND YEAH. HE IS REALLY EXTRA. He's just...Classier about it I suppose. That is not quite the word I want. But. Still. There is something very different between their extra varieties.

Also outside of them...I like the cast of characters in general. We don't spend a lot of time with them, sadly. But we do get a strong sense of like what they'd be like in, say, a full series about these characters. Which I like! But sometimes it makes me wish we had like that because I do want to see them all and get to see them doing wacky things together. Like half the fun of Kill la Kill was getting to see that big cast of goofy weirdos interact and change over time. But I do think that like being able to have this strong sense of how this cast might interact over the course of a 26 episode series says good things for how defined they were in a feature film's worth of time (and two shorts).

 

YEAH I think that's why I've immediately jumped off into the fanfiction pit - not because the ending is unsatisfying, but just because one movie's not enough content about these guys. I need more.

 

I'll just leave this here

edit: dammit xenforo y u do this. it's a meme edit I did

 

also, I found a bunch of translations on promare secondary material while browsing twitter. I collected the links I found in my blog thread, which is also pretty full of me babbling about the movie in general--probably useful to drop them here for anyone who's interested

 

Y'all got me to watch it too :D I'm repeating myself, but I really liked how Promare is very much Gurren Lagann, turned up to eleven and literally set on fire.

Is anyone here aware of Arc System Works and their work on the video game side on doing anime cell-shading in 3D? Ever since Guilty Gear Xrd I've been jonesin' for an actual anime studio to take a crack at cell-shaded limited animation 3D and I am really very unsurprised and delighted that Trigger, who already are phenomenally talented at utilising limited animation to its fullest and have had a lot of success with utilising 3D, were the ones who finally nailed it. The transitions from 3D models to hand-drawn animation go by very fast and even when they happen right in your face, they're masked by the excellent aesthetic choices all around.

It's also very interesting how the more traditional, hard-edged, non-flexible 3D animation is used alongside the limited 3D. The former shows up most prominently with the Burning Rescue and Krayzer X, as well as a lot of the environments, and the latter with Promare-related things, which gives them a wild feeling from the start. It goes against the aesthetic language of anime -- that's not how you expect 3D things to move, so for me it really heightened the strangeness of them at first.

I also really think they did a phenomenal job with the effects work in general. On the rewatch I plan to focus on when the shift from using perfectly uniform square lens flares and lighting pops to the triangles typical of Burnish fire (I have a feeling it coincides with the cracks starting to show on Kray), which themselves eventually start bending and breaking until they form the Promare-specific star-shapes c: I also thought the emphasis on an overall cool (lol) palette -- the lack of warm reds and oranges is honestly really noticeable -- and the shift to ever cooler colours was an excellent stylistic choice that payed off really well with the liquid fire effect of the finale. Lio's fire and Galo's ice finding a common expression like their goals finding a common solution is the kind of visual storytelling that makes me go out of my fucking mind, tbh.