Growing up, I wasn’t the biggest fan of giant mecha anime or giant-sized battles in general. Not saying I didn’t like them; actually, a lot of them were pretty good, however just not something I would ever recommend to my friends. I grew up with Power Rangers, Godzilla movie adaptations, various Gundam series, and Gurren Laggan. Now, as an adult, I’ve grown to love how much fun, and action-packed these types of anime/media are.
PROMARE IS Colorful, Action-Packed, and more importantly a very fun to watch animated film. PROMARE not only stays true to its roots of everything Studio Trigger but also created something very unique while paying homage & adding many Trigger references from past media from the company. Promare tackles so many different issues & constant day to day problems like genocide, & advance technology within the a form of government.
What Is Promare?
PROMARE IS a 2019 Japanese animated film co-produced by Trigger and XFLAG. The film is written by Kazuki Nakashima & Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi which both previously worked together on Kill La Kill & Gurren Laggan. The main artist/designer for everything in the world of PROMARE, such as various character designs were done by Shigeto Koyama. If you know any of these talented individuals; you’ll understand how powerful PROMARE is to Studio Trigger’s history.
PROMARE begins during a modern-day setting where random people around the world impulsively combust into flames, starting massive fires that wreak chaos on earth. This is known as the Great World Blaze, which claimed the lives of half the world’s population. The rest of humanity fights to rebuild and create defenses against the fire-users called the Burnish. Time skip thirty years later, our main blue spiky-haired character Galo Thymos works for Burning Rescue, an organization dedicated to battling Mad Burnish as the sowed to terrorize the city with fire. It’s firefighter’s vs fire demons.
What Makes PROMARE so Unique?!
PROMARE is inspired by many things in cultural history, which play various important roles throughout this animated piece. The Main Protagonist of PROMARE is heavily influenced by an early Edo Period in Japan that created buke hikeshi (samurai Firefighters). The Protagonist is unique because his main goal is to put out fires and rescue people. In the huge scope of anime, there isn’t that many genres or series that tackle the concept of firefighting, the only other recent popular one you may know of is Kodansha Comics Fire Force.
One thing that keep me interested throughout PROMARE was the animation and art style. The film starts with a lot of vibrant colors and resembles a style of vaporwave. Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s. It also combines early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos. At this point picture CD Project Reds Upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 with futuristic firefighters. ONE of the coolest things in my opinion about the film is Trigger’s colorization of Fire. In Most animation fire is perceived to be either blue or red-orange, here in the film the burnish fire is more resembles cool colors such as blue, green, and purple which is a complete contrast of how we’ve been seeing fire for so many years in reality & media.
You might have seen some trailers for PROMARE and went “Man I hope this CG doesn’t suck”. I’m going to be honest with you CG in anime bothers me because how it switches from 2D to 3D animation a lot and it sometimes take me out of the immersion that is created with any piece of media. PROMARE however, is CG done right. It’s not distracting, it’s all action-packed and even watching the movie in English subtitles, you can pay attention to everything on screen well. In this film, both techniques (2D & 3D) depending on the scene, were always intermixing the two. Whether it’s hand-drawn or 3D, the difference is only the style of output.
The Most Studio Trigger Thing EVER & It was beautiful
PROMARE is an anime film that shows the history of everything Studio Trigger has created. From various series such as Gurren Lagann, & KILL LA KILL, Studio Triggers wonderfully portrays that within this animated film. IF you like fast-paced high exhilarating action with Fire Fighters, samurai references, fighting fire humans, all to end up saving the world this film will be perfect for you. I think anyone who loves anime, action, and vivid designs YOU WILL LOVE THIS FILM a lot!
