Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be continuing our exploration of Studio Trigger’s latest production, the characteristically high energy Brand New Animal. BNA’s first episode had some clear strengths and weaknesses, and they broke down largely how you’d expect, given the staff involved. Hiroyuki Imaishi himself offered a dynamic storyboard, full of the angular, energetic compositions he’s known for, and elevated by Trigger’s remarkable collection of in-studio animators. It’s still a joy just to see this post-Gainax crew bring characters to life; their sense of cartoonish energy is second to none, and felt like the strongest part of that premiere.
On the negative side, this show is still being written by Kazuki Nakashima, meaning the plot felt simplistic and predictable wherever it didn’t feel disjointed or incoherent. Nakashima has handled series composition on nearly every Imaishi production, and his writing has disappointed me on all of them. He has no understanding of character writing beyond hot-blooded energy and basic tropes, he has only the barest understanding of narrative structure or momentum, and he never gives an indication that he’s thought deeply about anything, or grappled with the idea of thematic intent on a level beyond “wouldn’t it be cool if this happens.”
Nakashima has made it this long because he generally writes shows whose narrative is “what if the protagonist punched everyone,” so pairing him with a production that’s clearly attempting to discuss societal prejudice seems like an incredibly dicey proposition. But we’ll see how it plays out, as we explore another episode of Brand New Animal!
Episode 2
Opening right where we left off, with Michuru staring at her fuzzy paws and declaring she used to be human
My immediate question here is, why does that matter? I don’t see why it’s more compelling to make her someone that used to be human – I suppose that could put her in a “bridge between worlds” position eventually, but I’m not sure why it’s being treated as a hook here, because it doesn’t carry any dramatic allure with it
Then again, Nakashima not understanding how to make people invest in characters is far from a new development. Through all his stories, rather than humanize characters through their complexity or weaknesses, he generally just makes them do awesome or wacky things, and assumes the audience will fall in love with a character who does awesome or wacky things
Wolf guy tells us that racoons have striped tails, therefore Michuru is a tanuki. The more you know
I’m still not sold on how this show’s aggressive color palette limits its visual options, but I like how the splashes of texture on the backgrounds here add a bit of personality to these block colors
Oh my god, the policeman is actually a hound dog. On the nose maybe, but still funny
Wolfman reverts to his human form, but Michuru apparently can’t
Wolfman explains that the festival was special, and people here normally stick to their human forms. Wonderfully expressive response from Michiru, as her whole body deflates at this information
“I thought everyone here would always be beastmen!” “Don’t say something a human would say.” Sharp response, there, though Michuru following up with “But I am human!” kinda undercuts it. If this is a story about prejudice against minorities, making the heroine someone who suddenly became a minority just kinda muddles the metaphor – it feels more like an arbitrary plot hook than a thematically appropriate choice. I suppose we could be digging at the complex nature of of how “minority identity” is a fluid construction, but I haven’t really gotten that impression so far
Apparently she suddenly transformed a year ago
“Humans are humans. Beastmen are beastmen. You can’t ever change that.”
Great sense of volume to Michiru’s hair, even in these brief cuts like her bowing to Melissa
Michiru believes her student ID will prove she’s a human, in spite of her fur and fluffy tail. Her conflict is already starting to feel pretty tiresome
But her wallet was stolen, so her ID is missing
“Things that are lost in Anima City are never found.” This show is having a hell of a time grappling with the awkward consequences of framing animal people as an oppressed minority – “they’re wacky animal people, so they’re inherently duplicitous!”
Oh my god, of course the self-serious wolf man has a crow companion
Ah, Shirou is the wolf man
He’s a social worker? Yes, his gruff, dismissive personality and penchant for beating the shit out of criminals definitely convinced me he’d be great at this job
“I only brought you here because I had my own work to deal with. Handle the rest yourself.” There’s that natural social worker attitude!
Two massive beastmen get in a fight at the front of the line, and Michuru asks “aren’t there any rules here?” “Sure are: might makes right.” Of course, because beastmen are naturally confrontational and violent! So I guess the metaphor is shifting from incoherent to gleefully bigoted pretty quick, huh
God, that’s so fucking bad! Like, I already had a rock-bottom opinion of Nakashima’s writing, but we’re immediately going to “here in the minority city, we all fight out our problems like the animals we are?” It’s like he saw the potential for a fun “people as animals” gag here, and just didn’t even spare a thought for the larger metaphorical implications of canonizing that behavior as inherently true to their nature, particularly in a story where animal forms are being used as a metaphor for racial difference. Does he ever think? Does he just write everything one fight scene at a time, never considering any of the scenes that come before or after? Is he trying to aggravate the part of my brain that interprets textual clues, by intentionally making every scene incompatible with every other scene? I don’t even think he was trying to make a bad point here, he just never has any clue as to what point he’s actually making. GODDAMNIT NAKASHIMA
Michiru spies her wallet thief, while Shirou meets with the mayor
And now she’s run into Mary the Mink, from the boat
She offers a hint, telling Michiru to head to Rabbit Town, and ask for Gramma Gran
A bunch of tough-looking ladies take her to Gramma Gran. “Don’t act dumb. Anyone in a gang knows that changing into a beast is the same as ringing the bell.” So even in this town, everyone sees changing into their beast form as a regression to their inherently violent nature? Has Nakashima ever met anyone who experienced oppression as a result of their fundamental nature?
In exchange for returning the wallet, Gramma Gran asks Michiru to teach a class of kids how to read and write. How am I supposed to critique this show’s narrative structure, when every Nakashima production is just a series of disjointed “and then this happened” setpieces?
Apparently she runs a nursery for all the children of her working girls, who were abandoned to Rabbit Town. Nice to see at least one person offering a sympathetic perspective on this city’s inhabitants, and acknowledgment of their difficult social conditions
She’s actually very good with kids! Charming sequence of her teaching them to write their names
Welp, now Shirou’s investigating Gran, so I guess everything is terrible
It seems Shirou has become a sort of Batman-style figure as the Silver Wolf
Kusakabe, a representative of the yakuza, meets with Gran, and calls her workers a bunch of bitches. That’s how you know this is a serious story for adults
I do like Kusakabe’s leader Flip’s extreme Big Goon design
Ah, so Gramma Gran is selling these children on the black market. Of course
“Not that I’d expect better from a woman. You leak all over the place.” The yakuza say these lines as if they’re setting up a contrast with the non-misogynist locals, but the locals are also terrible child slavers, so it just ends up contributing to this pit of self-seriousness vileness. And it’s not like this show is particularly serious tonally most of the time, so we’re just left with a bunch of unpleasant cartoon characters
And the kids are actually all refugees, whose parents were separated from them on the way to Anima City
“The weak need to prey on the weaker if they want to survive. That’s the kind of place this is.” I remember when Parasite made that point, after an hour and a half of establishing the poignant humanity and desperate circumstances of its central family, and framed it as a grand human tragedy. Parasite this is not
At least we get some dynamic Michiru poses, as she looks for an escape route. The show still has plenty of dynamic poses!
“You finally made it here, but don’t expect anyone to give you anything. You have to reach it, with your own two hands!” This isn’t really a prejudice-relevant theme; it’s a shonen theme, essentially just a version of “try your best.” It’s remarkably tone-deaf to append that theme to a story about people who are being persecuted due to their societal position, but if your only narrative tool is a shonen hammer, every story looks like a shonen nail
Now her arms have extended to stop the crane, because she has vaguely defined tanuki powers that are capable of solving any dramatic issue, so long as the author wishes it so. Giving characters abilities like that means your conflicts will never have any sense of weight, because the cast can always just solve them through inventing new powers, but Nakashima has stuck to that model for fifteen years, and he’s not stopping now
“Let me know when you’ve faced the cold, hard reality of what it’s like to be a woman living alone among beastmen.” Once again, there’s a flicker of a genuine point here, about how poverty naturally hardens people, and makes it easier to discount them in the future. That’s a very important point, and I could easily imagine a version of this episode that effectively supported it, and contextualized things like the earlier beastman brawls in the context of that framework. But this show is just too tonally disjointed and clumsily written to get there; characters frequently act like over-the-top cartoons purely for the sake of dramatic farce, everyone’s vileness has been turned up fifty degrees in order to emphasize how serious this all is (while simultaneously making it impossible to sympathize with their perspective), and the intended theme is just appended at the end here, in spite of not really being supported by the text. Once again, Parasite this is not
Oh hey, she got her ID back!
And Done
Woof, that was terrible. I had my misgivings about the first episode, but this one basically reveled in all of Nakashima’s failings as a writer, from his weak characterization to his inability to imbue conflicts with stakes. But most frustratingly, it stretched Brand New Animal’s central metaphor in all sorts of incoherent directions, with both its racial and gender politics feeling incoherent whenever they weren’t being outright misguided. I don’t think Nakashima means to offend; I just think he doesn’t really understand much about societal prejudice, and is incapable of translating what he does understand into a coherent, consistent metaphorical statement. This show’s lead writer is incapable of grappling with its thematic subject matter, resulting in a show that leaves me alternately infuriated and exhausted. I guess you have outdone yourself in a certain way, Nakashima.
This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.