Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040

Bubblegum Crisis 2040 is quite an oddball series, it was something I really enjoyed watching simply for the fact that it's rather unique and there's just not a lot out there quite like it. Simply put it was a nice break from your everyday typical anime, harem, mecha, comedy, fantasy, whatever.

2040 is an indirect sequel to the original Bubblegum Crisis (sometimes with the additional "2032" or just "OVA" thrown at the end there). They're alternate versions of each other therefore nothing is really connected, other than the fact that they're different stories with some of the same characters in the same setting and whatnot. ... Because of this I'll make a few comparisons here and there between the two. The biggest difference between them is that the OVA was mainly episodic based and 2040 is not, containing more of a single overarching plot.

STORY: The year is obviously 2040 where Tokyo has been reborn after a devastating earthquake that took out the majority of the city, to rebuild such a complex place once again humans needed something to help them. A powerful company by the name of Genom comes into play here and introduces the "Boomers", humanoid mech's built with the sole ideal to help rebuild and restore the most technological advanced city in the world, in which they ended up calling Mega Tokyo. These Boomers came in many packages, some would look like giant trackers of sorts that handled construction, while others would look totally identical to human beings, handling jobs such as a receptionist and whatnot. However being built in such haste the Boomers were not without their fault and at times, went berserk causing chaos and destruction throughout the city, but Genom had such a strong hold on Mega Tokyo that nobody could bring about the end of the Boomers construction. In an attempt to stop these outbreaks the Advance Police Forces, or AD Police for short, was born. Genom ends up taking things even further by diving into illegal trade and develops combat Boomers and various other things, eventually becoming quite an issue. Can the AD Police alone stop this crisis?

In comes Sylia Stingray, daughter of the infamous Dr. Stingray who helped build the foundation of the Boomers in the first place. However, she wants nothing more than to see the end of their production and very existence for unknown reasons. She is an incredibly wealthy billionaire with a close friend Nigel whom is an incredibly skilled engineer and mechanic. She gives birth to the powerful mobile armor dubbed "Knight Sabers" that can only be worn by a very select few women. Fate eventually brings all these girls together in an effort to fight against the Boomers. Originally it was nothing but a friendly competition between the AD Police and the Knight Sabers, but eventually things start to go deeper. What really caused the earthquake that happened many years ago? Is their a source to all the Boomer outbreaks? Where exactly do the Knight Saber suits come from? What is Sylia's true motive? All these questions eventually come into play as the story becomes more than just straight up action against Boomers.

But that's also where the series slightly derails, about a 3rd or 4th of the way in they throw the philosophical card at you and the show ends up trying to be "deep". Luckily, it doesn't seem to go too over the top with this and doesn't try to shove tons of silly ideas or anything down your neck. The ideals and questions presented are nothing that'll really make you scratch your head over, but at the same time they shouldn't completely bore you out of your mind either. Regardless I clearly believe they could've taken a different route and thrown out the last arc of the story here for something much better. The main thing I got out of these last parts was the emphasis on self discovery.

CHARACTER: The character development is definitely a huge improvement compared to the OVA and overall done very nicely. However (I'll blame the last story arc), you are kind of left wanting to see them develop a little more towards the end, like they were just a little unfinished or something. But anyways, each main character here definitely has their own traits: Priss is the rogue whom does as she pleases and doesn't like people holding her back, Lina comes off as the strong willed girl who will do anything to get to the top, Nene is the odd and spunky younger one that should never be underestimated when it comes to the technical stuff, and Sylia is the cheerful yet oh so mysterious leader whom might leave you in the dark at times, but you'll get your answers eventually. Okay, so they all don't sound incredibly interesting on paper here but they certainly do change throughout the series mainly for the better and the odd bunch does manage to eventually cope together very well, they make an excellent team. At first the series focuses entirely on the rookie Lina and I actually liked this direction, however the focus later shifts back to Priss and is handled pretty smoothly, but it's almost annoying that in the end Lina is the one character that you're kind of left wanting to know more about, not to mention she ends up being "alone" unlike the rest of the crew. Also I have to stress the fact that while Priss may seem like the typical ignorant "I don't speak to you because I don't care" kind of character done way too much in anime, she does soften up a bit and let out emotions, she does develop and change. Also, every character got a makeover and in all honesty I prefer them all over the originals, just simply put I guess. Though yeah, Lina's headband was awesome.

Aside from this a handful of other characters return like the mysterious villain Mason, Sylia's younger brother with a lost past, and most noticeably the head of AD Police, big shot Leon whom loves to hate the Knight Sabers. Just like the rest of the main chicks here, Leon's character gets fleshed out a lot more here than it did in the OVA and even in the spinoff AD Police Files. There's actually a lot of humor revolved around him and Nene's interactions (with her being a AD Police operator of sorts). Just don't call him "Leon-chan"! And overall, you can expect some great humorous moments throughout the show. Some might be really cheesy at times, but they never feel too tacky or pointlessly thrown in. Along with this you can also expect some romances though the scenes with these elements are a hit or miss, some worked, and some just felt really awkward.

ART/ANIMATION: In all honesty I was really impressed with the animation here and the character designs mainly for its time and for being a full length normal series. I really don't think there's a lot of late 90's early 00's releases that faired too well in the art/animation department. This was the time when some companies were trying new things, some were throwing in horrendous CG (at the time especially), a lot of the hand drawn detail was being lost, but none of that is really the case with 2040 here. They did an excellent job with the fight scenes, never throwing in some of those annoying panning images, or repeating scenes relentlessly, and this isn't an older show where you'll get the characters mixed up or anything like that, I'm sure we've all seen some of those?

Being a cyberpunk series one should definitely expect a darker, futuristic, more downbeat, gritty setting and they definitely nailed that aspect pretty well. The atmosphere is easily there. Overall though, it's not quite as inspired and incredibly detailed like the original OVA. I'm assuming it could be because of budget differences with this being a longer series or just the fact that, a lot of older cyberpunk shows are superior when it comes to the art and detail even compared to newer releases, a lot more hand drawn stuff when into them. If you're expecting some epic Blade Runner-esque influences here, well you'll see some here and there, but influences are not nearly as prominent as they were in the OVA and other older cyberpunk anime. All in all, the series manages to give off a great darker and even sometimes depressing vibe, which is good enough.

Boomers/Mech Design: Unfortunately this is another slight downfall when compared to the original. The Boomer designs in this one were really not that inspiring at all and rather generic, even when they got bigger and more powerful, they weren't that detailed or interesting as the stuff you'd see in the OVA. In the OVA there was typically a single super powerful Boomer per episode and they were always incredibly detailed and really creative, but here you could almost classify all the enemies as just "typical robots" or whatever. After watching the OVA and then this afterwards, this was probably one of my biggest disappointments actually. The same can be said about the Knight Sabers second suits that they end up getting here towards the end of the show... not to mention the way they had to put them on, was just downright weird.

MUSIC: Everyone who knows anything about the Bubblegum Crisis OVA series knows that it was pretty infamous for having a rockin' big hair styled metal soundtrack with tons of vocal tracks that, while aged and so "totally 80's", really gave the series a lot of its charm and character. Sadly, this is where 2040 suffers quite a bit. Fans of the original going in expecting anything to match up to "Hurricane Tonight" or whatnot will probably be very disappointed. Yes, Priss does have a few vocal tracks here and there and while they're certainly fun, they don't stand out very much on their own unlike a lot of the tracks from the original OVA.

The actual background OST here is mainly a mixed bag. I thought some of the darker and slower tracks typically played at more dramatic, mysterious, or emotional segments fit the mood pretty well, but there's really nothing offered here in this department that manages to be really memorable when it's all said and done. It's certainly not bad but, after something like Bubblegum Crisis' OVA you'd surely expect to find a top notch OST here and sadly that's not really the case.

MAIN ISSUE? At times the show probably could've taken itself a little more seriously and done well, instead I thought there was an issue with a few scenes that just ended up being anticlimatic. This happened a lot during difficult situations or when the Knight Sabers took on incredibly powerful Boomers, when you think all was lost, they sometimes end up doing something that seems so incredibly simple you'll wonder why they didn't do so in the first place. But hey, overall this is really just one of those fun laid back shows that's all about the action, the quirky characters and odd humor, and the cool setting. So I wouldn't say that's a huge deal if you go in with a cool head here.

OVERALL: Bubblegum Crisis 2040 was again, a really great break from the norm with some solid production value to back it up. If you're a sci-fi buff that likes a lot of action, especially when it's women kicking some ass, with a fairly straightforward plot that won't make you think too much, then you should definitely be in for a treat here. If you liked the original OVA any bit at all I highly recommend watching this series as well to compare the two. They both have their ups and down when you pit them together but if you liked one at all, chances are you'd get some enjoyment out of the other. Bubblegum Crisis and its sequel are excellent series that surely inspired other cyberpunk anime that followed them, not to mention several spinoffs including stories revolved around the AD Police and Parasite Dolls stemmed from here, while both aren't groundbreaking in anyway, it does go to show how successful the OVA and 2040 were. Good ol' sci-fi anime.

In a reboot of the original series from the 1980’s, Bubblegum Crisis had the background to become a top series. Along with the work from Studio AIC and director Hiroki Hayashi, both whom worked on everything Tenchi from before could go in either direction from classic to bust much like Tenchi.

Set in a futuristic society compared to the likes of Blade Runner, manual labor is done by organic robots called Boomers. These Boomers are made by a corporation by the name of Genom. One fateful day, office worker Lina sees one of these Boomers rage out of control and morph into some crazy monstrosity. Her ... goal from the beginning was employment in the big city and join some Boomer fighting group called the Knight Sabers. Needless to say she ends up joining this group to fight the rogue Boomers as well as escaping the specific police division created to also stop raging Boomers.

The series as a whole still mostly holds up animation wise and plenty of action makes Bubblegum Crisis palatable. Music, plot, and characters are mostly forgettable unfortunately. Music and sound just have not aged well or is better stuck in the late 90’s as the techno-rock fits the show but not the test of time. A plot that just seems to be put on the back end, and suffered from many filler-like episodes until the last few to just wrap up the story hastily. Where Bubblegum Crisis should have been strong in its characters is the most disappointing aspect. The series never develops them properly, and much reasoning behind character’s actions are left with simple reasons with fairly dull results. Lina as the main character gets some backstory, but due to the rest of the female team having almost none makes the viewer just not seem invested enough either with the story or the Knight Sabers.

Basically, this new Bubblegum Crisis is ok for an action series, ok for some strong female characters, fine for attempting a decent plot, and fine as an anime. It’s different in regards to most other anime, but is just missing something in order for it to make the jump from fine to good.

Maybe this is a bad idea. Writing this review, I mean. I've already made it clear that I think Bubblegum Crisis 2032, the late 80's OVA, is my favorite goddamn media product and has been for the past six years or so, right? Of course I'm going to be disappointed in any reboot that tries to not only do different things than the OVA, but does so on what's clearly a fraction of the budget. Why should you listen to me? Ah, but who am I kidding, when was the last time bias or decorum stopped someone on the internet?

Fuck this. It's time for a ... reckoning. I was hurt by this anime. It's time to hurt the fuck back.

Bubblegum Crisis 2040 is the only anime I have watched tip-to-tail that I didn't just find bad in a way that I could laugh or scratch my head at. This anime made me angry, truly, terribly angry, a rising anger that bubbled up the second the show used a shitty repeating frame cycle for a backflip as early as episode two, then reused it for episode three. It doesn't just shit on the promise of its premise, it heaves out its own innards, every liter of black bilious blood and square inch of rancid green intestines, on what made Crisis good in the first place in exchange for chasing the hype of being an evangelion clone, with all the psychodrama and Deep and Flawed characters that entails. It is the kind of anime where the final building block in the romance between one of its heroines and the cop who's been chasing after her is when he saves her from attacking animated clown dolls, and thinks that this is it, this is how a woman falls for a man, when they're saved from FUCKING CHEAP-ASS CLOWN DOLLS...

Whew. Okay. Attempt Number Two. Let's break it down by different parts of the show, as one used to do on this site. Maybe that will stifle my rage a little.

Story: Spends one cour on robot-monster-of-the-week stories, with the actual plot seeming to build at something of a slow burn, until the real antagonist pair comes to the fore and this ostensibly cyberpunk-ish story becomes a rote robot-zombie apocalypse. The first cour has almost no bearing on the second cour's plot, you could cut so much cruft from that first half and focus more on the actual villain(s) of the show, but 2040 has no sense of its own narrative priorities. Almost every major story that advances the plot will be streeeeched out over two episodes when it's clear there's no need to do so, leaving us on annoying rug-pull cliffhangers everytime without a sense of satisfaction that anything has been resolved as the plot chugs along.
It's also thematically muddled as hell. One gets the sense, multiple times, that the show is trying to Say Something about the Boomer robots and their place alongside humanity, but ultimately none of it makes any sense, especially since Boomers themselves possess bullshit matter-morphing powers that turn them into Resident Evil monsters that are then the zombie-pawns of the Big Bad who wants to destroy humanity for reasons that change on a dime, reasons that even when they're being exposited in the penultimate episode make no goddamn sense. Why is this whole plot happening? What is the point? Why can't the Sabers ever be allowed to stop the robot apocalypse, or at least slow it down, only for plot-convenience to hinder them at crucial moments because the writers can't let anything be resolved, any victory that the Sabers have any agency over occur? No, seriously, the Big Bad fuses with one of the characters, decides She's God Now, and then fucks off into another dimension in the course of five minutes. What was the point, 2040? What was the fucking point? Oh, wait, there was none, you just wanted to sound Deeeeeep without having a cursory understanding of your own ideas. Which... wasn't that the promise of 2040? That it was supposed to have a deeper, more put-together story than its more fragmented predecessor? Oh boy is that not the case.

Characters: Infuriating. For all the insistence that 2040 is a more feminist show than 2032, 2040 seems far more willing to snatch away narrative agency from its characters, _especially_ Sylia Stingray. Jesus, I could write an entire essay on the character assassination she undergoes. Suffice to say that the cool-headed leader has been replaced with an alcoholic hysteric damsel with Other M-level daddy issues, who attempts to plan her war against the villains but is pathetically outplayed every goddamn time she tries to do something that might be cool. I felt bad for her in a metanarrative sense, because the writers clearly thought that making her a less competent Misato Katsuragi was somehow creating a Deep Character.
The rest of the characters aren't done much better. Linna Yamazaki goes from a money-crazed yuppie in 2032 with a big heart -- which is cliché but at least it's something -- to a total blank slate. She acts as the audience surrogate for the first few arcs -- because apparently we needed this show's premise fucking spoonfed to us over the course of four or five episodes -- before being seemingly forgotten entirely as a character besides one episode where she goes home to the country and then comes back to save the day. Priss Asagiri, the gal who snatches the protagonist spotlight from her, goes from hotheaded and loud and scene-stealing in 2032 to sullen and silent and honestly kind of boring. The only Saber who doesn't get character-destroyed is Nene Romanova, and that's mostly based on the fact that she was the token moe character in 2032 and needed a plot-power glow-up, not staying about the same as her old self. As it is, the only ways they can make her useful in 2040 are points where she... rewires an electrical grid to stop a monster-of-the-week? You would think a hacker would be cooler in this show, but nope, no, nyet, sorry, go fuck yourself viewer.
And the antagonists! They were right to kill Mason off in the first few episodes of 2032, his position in any narrative is inherently kind of boring, so 2040 keeping Mason around is... well, it makes sense, but like everything else about this show it doesn't fucking work. Jouji Nakata goes a great job voicing the bad guy, bless him, but Mason seems to never be hindered by anything right up until the last act where the REAL Big Bad shows up and fucks around with him, so there's no sense of him being anything other than a plot device. Oh God, and his motivation! Big Bad Galatea just *explains* it in one exposition dump, and it's a motivation, yes, but it's the most angsty, stupid motivation I've seen in anime! And what're Galatea's ultimate motivations for unleashing robopocalypse? Like I said, even when it was explained to me point-blank I began understanding it as 'Boomers have surpassed humanity', which we've all seen before haven't we, and eventually ended screaming 'THAT'S NOT HOW EVOLUTION WORKS YOU DIPSHITS!' at my computer. We've all been there, haven't we? No? Good, I hope not.

Art & Animation: You know, you can say a lot of disparaging things about Bubblegum Crisis's story, say that it's undercooked, throws you in at the deep end and expects you to swim, but at least it looks really fucking cool while doing it, leveraging all the money of the bubble economy to deliver brilliant cityscapes, fast-paced fight scenes, and wonderfully articulated mecha and character designs. It's really 80's, but definitely in a way that's aged well. 2040? Like I said, they resorted to tawdry animation loops in the middle of ostensibly high-budget fight as early as episode 2. Not a good sign, right? Well, yeah. Every part of Megatokyo looks cheapened, plasticized, from the hardsuits to the vehicles to the backgrounds to the Boomers. Oh God, the Boomers are just fucking awful. I don't know what possessed the designers to crib from the weird matter-absorption powers that Boomers had in 2032 for only one goddamn episode -- oh, no, wait, I do, budget concerns. This way Boomers can just attack by shooting tentacles at our heroines, our heroines can fail to adequately damage a Boomer in any fight, they can do some bondage stuff for a bit, and then some x-factor finishes the fight in a way that doesn't feel earned. Like, ever.
Again, it's baffling, because 2032's fight scenes are excellent, big and explosive and fast-paced in a way nothing in sluggish 2040 is. Could they just not get the money to make it work? Had BGC's star as a franchise faded so fast that they just couldn't get the money? I wonder. Certainly the turn of the millennium was not a time for big-budget franchises. But all the same, I can't forgive that the primary medium of action and motion in this anime is tentacles.

Music: 2032 had some of the most iconic 80's J-rock this side of Macross. I don't say that lightly: Konya Wa Hurricane, Mad Machine, Say Yes... all these sung tracks all hold up to this day. They feel big, loud, and cool, which is the point: Crisis was meant to sell music as much as it was meant to sell itself.
Now, I could forgive 2040 for not going for that golden standard, it was always trying to do something different, but the music we actually get in its stead is... yeesh. It's bad. It's droning, pulsing, techno every time, techno that never feels like it syncs well with the action that's going on but instead just exists because they needed an action track. I don't have much to say here, just that losing such a crucial part of the original 2032 experience feels so disappointing.

Overall: Goethe once said that criticism of a work should focus on three things: What is a work trying to do, does it succeed, and was it worth doing. Bubblegum Crisis 2040 wants next to nothing to do with the old Crisis, and maybe it knows what it wants to do in its stead, which is try to make a cyberpunk Evangelion with all the Depth and Darkness that implies.

Does it succeed? Fuck no. It would need a far more liberal budget to spend on actually interesting action scenes, it would need to give us interesting and competent characters, it would need to know what it wanted to say before it went and said it.

Was it worth doing? Maybe. Stand Alone Complex remains iconic for those who've seen it because of its excellent sense of itself and what it's trying to do, but that's not really cyberpunk Evangelion, and it isn't really Bubblegum Crisis either. But the sheer magnitude of Crisis's failure to deliver an exciting or interesting cyberpunk-superhero-action story, its almost willful need to suck, will remain in my mind for a long time, as something I can consider with ease whenever I want to feel rage, and then despair.

Don't watch this fucking anime, folks. You won't come out of it happier, or wiser.