65 were impressed.
15 coughed up blood at the sight of the terrible CG
15 got bored of the generic and slow plot
5 had trouble immersing themselves with these characters
Cannon Busters is an original Netflix animation adaptation of a graphic novel of the same name by the studio Satelight. An anime adaptation being made from an American graphic novel is already pretty notable, but when the author of that source material is LeSean Thomas who worked on projects I loved like The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and The Legend of Korra (okay maybe love is strong for Korra) I had high hopes for this project.
Cannon Busters has some good bits, but I found the show rather overwhelmed in its own mediocrity. Character designs were very solid in most places and goofy as hell in others. Philly the Kid, S.A.M., Casey Turnbuckle, 9ine and others all had pretty solid designs, but a few characters like Odin the royal bodyguard had the head the size of a softball on top of the Incredible Hulk’s body and that just looks goofy. Our main antagonist Locke just came off as strange and feeling out of place design-wise. He really felt like some generic villain from a different genre squatting on in on this show.
The animation on this project looked pretty good in a lot of places, but the show was really bogged down in most action sequences with it’s jarring use of low-grade CG. Sora Yori and other shows get away with a bit of light CG but when the main action sequence on the foreground of your scene is clunky low frame count garbage it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth. A wise man once said that “no genre has suffered more at the hands of modern CGI than mecha anime.” and that is really exampled here.
One of the main characters Philly the Kid had some good character dynamics in regards to his relationship with the other main cast and it gave a bit of a unique angle to the shows revenge plot, but otherwise the overarching story was so bland and generic I had a had time really investing in it.
I feel like the show tried to do the kind of stand-alone episodic adventure type of shtick and it performed okay with the repair droid Casey Turnbuckle’s stand alone episode breaking out of the rest of the shows mold to present the viewer with some high grade feels. My advice however would be instead of sitting through 8 episodes of mediocrity for that payoff please just watch Space Dandy and get that sort of masterfully orchestrated narrative pretty much every episode.
On the topic of Casey Turnbuckle, her character is an absolute delight and I love her even if she couldn’t save her show. Shiori added yet another cutesy character to her repertoire with Casey, but as with her performance with Nanachi in Made in Abyss, Izawa really stole the show. Hinaki Yano had her debut (from what I could find on MAL) with her role as S.A.M and despite how I feel about the show she did a great job and I hope she gets more roles soon. Lastly the OP and ED were at least unique. They were very different from regular anime and felt a bit out of pace but they weren’t bad tracks.
Cannon Busters was okay it just doesn’t present the viewer with anything new in an already massively oversaturated genre. Satelight has a large body of work with a few shows that underperformed like Mouretsu Pirate’s. I’m afraid Cannon Busters is just another face in a sea of decent-not-great anime.
