Girls Bravo is not particularly groundbreaking, it’s not particularly… well, good. I enjoy it, but I only enjoy it because I enjoy fanservice and harem bullshit. What makes it remarkable now is just how easy it is to watch compared to its contemporaries.
The first half of the 2000s was an awkward period for male-targeted romance anime, where Rumiko Takahashi copies had gone out of style, and boring Love Hina likes were dominant. This era produced almost nothing watchable, even fondly remembered shows like Shuffle! feel painfully boring now.
Before now I’ve never been able to make it a single cour into one of these, and most are two cour. The sole exception to that is Gainax’s weird 2001 hidden gem Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden — itself a bit too original to explain the era’s conventions.
What makes Girls Bravo so unique is its lack of originality in characterization and plot, and great production. Aspects of Girl’s Bravo’s production range from good — like its soundtrack and voice acting — to great — like its direction and animation. The only bit you might find annoying is Tomoko’s voice (I’ve watched enough anime that I find this kind of voice charming, but that’s unlikely to be anyone else’s experience).
The direction is quietly fantastic, economically cutting around movement when needed, and going all out at other times. Oftentimes an episode will have an A and B plot, and sometimes they intersect in a single shot (character in B plot is in background, character in A plot is in foreground and such). The amount of animation in backgrounds here is kinda insane from a modern perspective; this technique’s mostly been abandoned in modern TV anime — especially trash harems. It’s refreshing to see here.
The fanservice is quite good. This production came at the tail end of TV anime’s free nipple era, and most episodes start with a shower scene, so there’s that. It doesn’t leverage editing and direction to excite the viewer in the same way some modern anime do (think that one scene from Chainsaw Man); most fanservice is limited to showing the viewer a tiddie or implying the main character saw something, but it’s good for its era. There are occasionally moments where it gets impressively, hilariously shameless. Like, there's this one scene where the female MC just fellates a banana for almost a full minute, while the old man selling her that banana rants about his love of fruit. In moments like that the show is genuinely funny.
The overarching plot and setting involve more fantasy themes than I expected. There’s space travel, ghosts, teleportation, and magic. It’s never exactly clear how any of this works, and in a comedy show like this, it doesn’t need to be. To briefly explain the plot, there’s two planets, Earth, and Seirin, a planet exclusively populated by women. It’s possible to move between these planets by teleportation using bathtubs (or something, don’t really understand how this works). Our MC is allergic to all women except the female MC Miharu, who has strange magic powers.
Its individual episode plots are good enough, and as you’d expect of this era, occasionally delve into incoherence. Episode 7’s plot goes: the gang needs to find the main girl’s sister a husband, so they head outside with no plan. After being spotted by a rich girl stalking the MC, they walk by a show advertising Honda motorcycles, so the childhood friend character hatches a brilliant plan: the girls will go on stage to advertise the motorcycles, then leave, put on animal costumes, and just kinda walk around. Around this time, this show’s stock loli character is out luring men by sitting on a park bench and crying. Then all the men (one of which is a big yakuza dude) get a text message from the rich girl, containing a picture of the stock shy girl character, so then all the men go after the main group. A bunch of men surround our characters, so they run away. Then the rich girl’s brother — this show’s stock weird pervert character — shows up and leads the stock loli back to the MC’s house, where he tackles the shy girl into a bathtub, causing all three of them to teleport directly into the main girl’s sister’s bath on Seirin, who reprimands them and sends them back.
That explanation ran longer and sounded even more incoherent than I expected — but it doesn’t quite feel that weird as you watch it. Insane plots like this are a staple of this era’s comedy anime, and I love them here, even when they’re a vehicle for product placement.
I should qualify this praise by once again stating, this just makes the show watchable. It does exactly the uncomfortable things other anime of its era do, including loli fanservice and joking treatment of sexual assault. There’s a stock pervert character whose entire personality is sexual assault, things can get real uncomfortable.
Most of the characters aren’t developed past their basic archetypes, and the MC is exactly the annoying wimp you’d expect. Further explaining the girls’ personalities seems kind of pointless because they really are just: airhead mascot character, violent childhood friend, shy girl, rich girl, and child. You might also be able to count the weird shrimp thing in that… point is they’re conventional and boring.
This all makes the show worse, but it also makes it valuable. Girls Bravo is a perfect encapsulation of its era, good and bad, in a uniquely watchable package. I didn’t always love it, but it never bored me. It never drew out will-they won’t-they tension beyond its welcome, it never bored me with an episode plot. It is — if nothing else — a history lesson.
Maybe I’ve spent too many words advocating for a show I don’t even like that much, but to anyone interested in this era, or in better understanding current male-oriented romance anime, this is a must-watch. If you don't have that specific sort of academic interest in harem anime, and don't like trash harem generally… it’s probably a skip.
