Amaburi (officially "Amagi Brilliant Park", which doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as well) sticks instead to KyoAni's strengths. While it's lacking in drama and shirtless bishounens, as a light-hearted slice-of-life about a group of idiots managing an amusement park, it's well worth a watch. It also has Isuzu, who is maybe, just maybe, one of the most attractive heroines in anime, if hot anime ladies is your sort of thing.
That said, anyone potentially interested in the show should be warned that the first episode is by far the worst. In it, the busty heroine (Isuzu) drags the cynical protagonist (Kanie) to the dilapidated amusement park that she manages, in the hopes that the former child actor, who, by the way, has absolutely zero experience in business management, will save the park from ruin. He begrudgingly accepts the offer, of course, and vows to meet the 500,000-visitors-in-four-months deadline so that the park will not be closed. At the end of the episode, Kanie also receives an abrupt kiss and a random superpower (which is not shown or mentioned again until several episodes later), because, uh, reasons?
Tell me if this sounds at all familiar, because I've seen hundreds of anime which have started off in the exact same way. I almost dropped Amaburi right there, and I'm glad I didn't, as it quickly shows it has little interest in being a serious story. Instead, it treats alcoholic, talking animals and magical powers as being completely ordinary. There's even a group of pirate walruses and a bloody dragon. Amaburi fully embraces its silly fantasy setting and cares not for realism.
But a cost of this silliness is that the show spends more time on the animals and park mascots than it does the human characters. And the mascots (who wear their costumes so frequently that they must be fused to their body) are nowhere near as interesting as Kanie or Isuzu, considering that many of them are based on a single trope. There's an otaku masquerading as some sort of squirrel-thing, an easily-angered shark who turns into a hell-demon when doused in water, a sheep who acts like a street thug, and so on and so forth. Sure, these characters add a great deal of energy to the show and make the park feel more alive, but after their second or third appearance, it's not likely you will appreciate their presence all too much. A few of them even show up dozens of times, and by that point it feels like the show is stretching its jokes way too thin. Granted, though, the commercial scene in the final episode is pretty damn hilarious.
Moffle is perhaps the one mascot who is treated as an actual character and not a running gag. He is introduced as some sort of asshole who punches his own customers when they throw a few bad words his way, and really, he's just an unlikeable jerk towards Kanie until the two start to accept each other's existence. But the reason he is a jerk makes sense: he doesn't want ruffians and other undesirables bringing danger to the park's princess, Latifa, so he plays the role of the jerk in order to protect her. It's hard not to warm up to the little guy by the end of the series.
As for Latifa, she just sort of... exists. Latifa and the park are the two main focuses of the story, except she's absent in everything that occurs in the park and is only ever relevant in the first and final episodes. She's there solely as a catalyst for drama, which means her scenes are, unsurprisingly, the weakest in the show. At least she stands there and looks pretty sometimes, I guess?
Kanie and Isuzu are far more interesting. On the surface, they're both very typical KyoAni characters (the Kyon-like protagonist who sighs and reluctantly does everything, and the big-breasted kuudere prone to hurting things), but there is at least a little bit of depth to their character. Kanie's reasons for quitting his role as a child actor is explained in one short scene, and so too is Isuzu's reason for constantly shooting people with her musket (though why a minor can legally carry a gun to school remains a mystery). The scene where their past is explained is actually handled with a surprising amount of maturity: there's no screaming and crying, no childhood trauma-- the two just accept it and move on with their lives as people normally would.
However, the fact that the two are high school kids and yet somehow able to run a massive multi-million dollar business on their own is inexcusable nonsense. I'm sorry, but 16-year-olds are nowhere near experienced enough to tackle such a huge responsibility. This is especially evident when Kanie makes asinine decisions like charging only 30yen (equivalent to 30 cents) for park admission, with all the rides being free of charge, as if this wouldn't immediately drive the park to ruin with an insurmountable amount of debt. Isuzu also occasionally shows up wearing an office lady outfit, and I couldn't help but groan every single time. If you want to write adult characters then, please, just bloody write them. It's not like it's particularly difficult to make the characters a few years older-- say, 19 or 20-- rather than forcing them to be high school students when it makes absolutely zero sense in the context of the story. It's like KyoAni is deathly afraid of writing characters past the age of seventeen (perhaps they think their fans will set fire to their studio if they dare try). I'm getting very tired of it. The world does exist outside the confines of high school.
The art is about what you would expect from any KyoAni anime, which is to say that it looks great. The sound is much more noteworthy as it is what gives the show the majority of its energy. There's a ton of classy jazz music playing in the background, and the OP is the sort of thing that will get stuck in your brain immediately after hearing it for the first time. I spent a few of my college classes with "MAGIC HEART" screaming in my head and it was both delightful and horrifying.
It's hard to get rid of the feeling that Amaburi is one long prologue to what will probably be a second season. There's subtle hints of romance between Kanie and Isuzu-- the kind that KyoAni loves to expand upon-- and the story abruptly ends with a light-hearted episode that would normally have been stuck in as an OVA. There's a lot of potential for the second season to be superior to the first, and if KyoAni doesn't create one I would be very surprised. And perhaps a little disappointed.
Amaburi is best approached with minimal expectations. If you're expecting another big hit from KyoAni, then Amaburi is certainly not going to be that. If you're OK with just having a few laughs at silly nonsense (and if you're a guy, a few erections from Isuzu's scenes), then you'll probably enjoy your time with the show. It's not a great anime, perhaps not even a good one, but there's more than enough enjoyable content in here to warrant a watch. If nothing else, at least it's not Kyoukai no Kanata.
