Cleverly Titled Column: Brain Powerd review

Yoshiyuki Tomino is quite a prolific anime director, being the driving force behind series like Zambot 3, Aura Battler Dunbine, and most notably the original Gundam series and many of its sequels. In this week's Cleverly Titled Column, I'm taking a look at the 1998 anime Brain Powerd, one of his more recent works, which I think serves as good example of some of his characteristic flaws and is probably my favourite mediocre anime.

Brain Powerd is a mecha show, like most of Tomino's works, about a mysterious organic vessel known as Orphan discovered from deep within the ocean. As Orphan began to rise, it caused terrible flooding that wrecked a lot of the world - and now it threatens to rise further, ascending into space and draining all of Earth's life energy as it travels to the stars. Acting to enable this are the Reclaimers, an organisation dedicated to researching Orphan. Orphan's rise led to the spread of Plates, artefacts that birth Antibodies, the organic mecha of the series. There are two types of Antibodies - the Gran Cher, which are more aggressive and in-tune with Orphan, and the Brain Powerds, which clash with Orphan and are thus abandoned and destroyed by the Reclaimers.

The series' heroes are Hime Utsumiya, a girl who discovers a Plate as its Brain is born and becomes its pilot/mother figure, and Yuu Isami, a former Reclaimer pilot and son of the Reclaimer leaders who decides that what his family is doing is wrong and takes a Brain Powerd to rebel against them. The two come together on the Novis Noah, a ship designed as a base for the UN's Brain Powerd operations, and fight against the Reclaimers and Orphan to save mankind.

This is the point where I'd normally link to the OP, but I won't because it's NSFW and totally unrepresentative of the show. The series proper has absolutely no fanservice in it, but for some reason the opening animation consists of all the women in the cast floating around naked in the sky/sea/etc. So instead you can have this nice chiptune-y version of the opening theme from Super Robot Wars J for the Game Boy Advance.

The core problem with Brain Powerd is its writing. I like the overall plot, themes, and characters, but it  doesn't really come together well. The characters' relationships come across awkwardly, and not in the well-written intentional-awkwardness way. Generally they work well when it's being more understated, but it's hard to pinpoint any moments where any of the relationships really progress and characters' views of each other change, even though it does happen. I suppose it sounds like it's just being subtle as I write it, but to me it felt more like it was missing something. In some of Tomino's other works, this awkwardness of character interaction works out well - in Zeta Gundam, for example, it serves well to show the tensions of the cast - but here, not so much.

Another problem is how the main story comes across quite vaguely and hole-y. After finishing the show I didn't feel like I really knew quite how it had progressed, and the ending is pretty confusing, in the kind of way that makes calling the show "Tomino's Evangelion" fairly descriptive.

Of course, I don't think it's all bad, or else I wouldn't be couching my words like I have been. There are plenty of individual story beats I enjoyed, even if I don't think it worked that well as a whole - for example, mid-series a new character shows up who's something of an Antibody collector and has not only three Brains but also a Grand Cher, and the other characters' reaction to "one of the enemy" and the Grand Cher's fight against its siblings makes for a good episode.

The themes of the show manage to come across quite strongly. The main theme of the show is parent-child relationships, which permeates most of the show. Yuu's main conflict is with his sister, and a big part of it is highlighted by how despite being opposed to what they're doing, Yuu really cares about his parents while his sister works under them but despises them enough to change her name. Hime is an orphan, and a lot of focus goes to her role in caring for her fellow orphans on the ship. The Antibodies are like child figures to their pilots, who commonly refer to them as children, kids, and the like, and Orphan is both a mother symbolically (and literally) to the Antibodies and, obviously, has all the symbolism of being called "Orphan". Jonathan, one of the main villains of the show, is entirely driven by issues with his mother. Having all this thematic coherence really helps to give the feeling that the show's about something in spite of the script's issues.

Aesthetically, I can't really say a bad thing about Brain Powerd. Mamoru Nagano's intricate designs are, as always, wonderful, and while this does make them difficult to animate, the way the Brains glide around and make lots of short-range teleports adds a distinct flavour to the action rather than just feeling like the animators are making shortcuts to keep their sanity intact. The character designs are a little odd - just look at Hime in the first image and try to convince yourself that she could just be snapped in half at the waist - but they work much better in the show than in stills and promotional art. The soundtrack's by Yoko Kanno, and that should damn well be all you need to be told to know that it's incredible. Here's an example:

On the whole, I don't think I can really recommend Brain Powerd beyond telling you to go listen to the OSTs on Youtube - the writing's just not that good. If you're curious anyway, it's been released on DVD in the US but not here, and it's out of print now either way now Bandai Visual's closed shop and probably won't be re-released by anyone, but you can find the series on BakaBT.

 Cleverly Titled Column is my weekly (honest) column, where I'll be talking about anime, manga, and tokusatsu (live action special-effects shows) that catch my eye. My main focus will be on the mecha genre, tokusatsu hero shows, and romance manga, but I might branch out into other things if I feel strongly enough that I need to rant or rave about them.