Promare: Taste The Rainbow

Promare is a complete and utter visual assault of color akin to sucking on a lollipop sold to you by thumper at burning daisy chella. It's the most anime anime to ever anime, and that's not a bad thing. The scene work is beyond flawless, it's an incredible piece of art that feels like kill la kill and mob psycho had a baby and that baby breathed pink fire while the rest of the world watched from it's blue pallet eyes. Animated by the prolific studio trigger the film is one of those pieces of art where it's obvious a bunch of weirdos were set free to do literally whatever they wanted, akin to kojima and death stranding. While I myself slept on the cinema release, I wish I hadn't. It's a visually stunning film, bursting with over the top masculine flexing and a fistful of, this could only come from japan. It's also on it's way to the states now for your home viewing pleasure. Also let me be perfectly clear with you, this movie, while excellent, is supremely stupid, and that's okay. In fact, there's no way that that wasn't on purpose. Everything doesn't need to be evangelion, and that's a good thing because that show makes me depressed. Some people just want to see giant mechs fighting each other because giant fighting mechs are awesome, and nobody knows that better than director hiroyuki imaishi and writer kazuki makishima who not only made this film but kill la kill and the infamous gurren lagann. Promare is one of those films that had my eyes shaking in their sockets while my brain slowly numbed over as I kept saying, what? It's a perfect example of what anime lovers love about anime, and why the haters hate. So let's get into it. Before we jump into everything I just want to take a quick minute to thank our patrons. Right now we are basically making videos for free thanks to the economy going on a bender. The support has just been unbelievable from you all during these troubled times, and I cannot stress how thankful tyler and I are for your support. You guys are the lifeblood of this passion project and you're keeping us afloat during a crisis so we can continue to make videos. Seriously thank you guys so much, we're currently revamping tiers, goals, and extra content for you, and new supporters who sign up. Now let's talk about promare. The film opens with catastrophe. People all over the world begin to spontaneously combust, exploding into stylized pink flames like they ate too many frito burritos and went on a three week long first date. Half the world's population dies in this event. I like this, it's a very cool way to start out a film. Fast forward 30 years to today and the world sees a new evolution in humanity who become dubbed the burnish. These people can control fire with their minds or something, I don't know, it's not really explained that well, but it's inferred that the burnish wreak havoc amongst the cities, burning everything they can, which explains why the fire department looks like they're the A-team. Galotimus is a new and brash member of said A-team, shirtlessly fighting the burnish flames. This guy is your ultimate shounen protagonist, catchphrase and all. A man being a man, doing manly things the manly way. The entire first scene is a massive spectacle, the macho ass fire team flies into a burning building to save the people trapped inside with action shots reminiscent of kill bill and a sentai flare. It's cheeky, bombastic, over the top, and is kind of an awesome way to glue you to the film. If this is how it starts, how the heck is it going to end? The burning rescue team fight off the fires and the burnish terrorist group aptly titled the mad burnish who caused it. Climaxing with an insane mech battle between galo and the mad burnish's leader, leo foetia. The entire scene from the fires beginning to leo's capture is about 15 minutes of studio trigger showing off the best animation they can do. Camera rotations mixed with bright vibrant colors that encapsulate overly exaggerated explosions of ice, fire, and lights across every scene that are cut up by posed title shots for each character. Also, apparently in this world you can freeze fire, i don't know, it's a thing that kind of eventually makes sense. It was at this point where i realized i didn't really care what this movie was about, i just wanted to see more of this crap. Which is good, cause that's mostly what i got. I'm not a big music for the music kind of guy, i listen for the lyrics, the meaning of things is what draws me in. If you've watched this channel before that should be really obvious by now, but Promare managed to sidestep my own personal artistic preferences with it's bombastic pop art explosion. Anyway, it's only when the terrorist leader leo is finally captured and dialogue resumes that you realize you're still watching a story play out. Earlier i said this movie is dumb, and i still stand by that, but again, it's not dumb in a bad way, it's just very ham fisted. However, that's kind of the point. Promare is obviously a visual spectacle first and a story second, so the story leads to the spectacle and serves only that purpose. The spectacle comes from conflict, so the story sets up as many conflicts as possible to enable trigger to do their thing, which is melt your face off with color, movement, and art. So here's what we got, basically the burnish are more or less normal people with the ability to control fire, but they're treated like criminals just for being born the way they are. They're seen as innately dangerous thanks to the cataclysm from the past and the terrorists fighting for burnish equality. While this is shown more later, the scene at the pizza parlor sets it up. The freeze force, headed by the ironically named Vulcan Heistess, storms a pizza place the burning rescue team is eating at in order to arrest one of the pizza makers for being a burnish. The pizza guy hadn't done anything wrong, he wasn't hurting anyone, he merely made a pizza. Didn't have pineapple on it though so i don't feel too bad for him, but he's forcefully taken into custody and when the owner attempts to plead his employee's innocence, the freeze force arrests him as well for hiding a burnish. Suddenly this free for all of color clashes is mirroring the holocaust. Once the pizza guy is arrested the other customers start insulting the pizza, disgusted by it just because it was touched by a burnish. Like i said, it's ham fisted. The burnish aren't considered human, they aren't given rights, and if you sympathize with them you're just as guilty as they are. It's obvious to even a child that this isn't right. Hero guy gallo doesn't agree with the treatment of the burnish and actively argues against the people hating on the pizza guy. Conflict achieved. As a firefighter, gallo works for the government which is run by his personal hero, governor cray foresight, a man who saved gallo from a fire when he was a boy. The freeze force are the government storm troopers headed by vulcan, who looks like this, and that's what i mean by ham fisted, you got a guy who looks and acts like this on the good side, you know something is up obviously. A side note, there's also a romantic subplot between gallo and another firefighter named, let me look it up, ana ardebet. Her character bio is, a member of burning rescue, she appears to have feelings for gallo and is often by his side. God, this is a main character and a very accurate description of her entire existence. Anyway, the movie is pg13 so no anime tiggles for you. Nah, cause this is all about guys being dudes and robots son, so right when it's about to get with a kiss, gallo drops ana on her face when he notices a light streak across the sky and crash into the ground. Turns out it's the mad burnish leader, leo, who's just made his prison escape with some fellow captives. Gallo finds them but is immobilized and taken prisoner, and while held by them in their hideout he questions the fact that the burnish are having a meal? Despite it only being 30 years since the burnish came to be, the general populace doesn't even know they're human. It's at this point that the holocaust symbolism is brought back in and conflict number 2 is achieved. During his captivity leo tells gallo that his hero and mentor, governor cray foresight, is actually rounding up the burnish and experimenting on them. Gallo doesn't want to believe it, but leo leaves him unharmed with a lot to think about. Gallo brings these allegations to foresight only to have his worst fears realized that the governor is not only experimenting on the burnish, but is actively using them as human fuel for his plan to quote, save humanity. I kind of rolled my eyes at this point because not only has this been done before, and it's obviously an allegory for the holocaust, but it's also more or less the entire plot of fullmetal alchemist who really did it perfectly. Just so you know, if you haven't seen Promare yet i promise i haven't ruined anything for you, but i'm going to mark spoiler territory here. According to governor cray, thanks to the burnish the world's magma levels are rising to catastrophic pressures and will soon erupt. Naturally he doesn't want to be around for this, so he found a planet exactly like earth a couple light years away and has built a ship to take a select 10,000 people to this new planet. However, this ship is run by sucking the life out of the burnish so there's some glaring humanitarian issues with his plan. Meanwhile, Leo's group is found by the freeze force and he gets catapulted into a freaking volcano and turns into a giant dragon and attacks the city of prompolis. At this point i actually felt myself becoming more stupid. I wasn't so much confused about the plot as i was about how long was left of the movie. I couldn't imagine where this narrative was trying to take me. And then the entire film devolves into madness, and i loved it. You see, when something is derivative, or maybe even a little boring, the best thing to do is catch people off guard just as they're about to lose attention. Promare executed this perfectly. As a huge fan of absurdity i was not only excited by this, but it told me a lot about what studio trigger was trying to accomplish with their film. Galo fights with leo to save prompolis, it's a crazy battle with big pink fire dragon, mechs, things are exploding, leo's all angry and going crazy, but it ends with them being thrown into a frozen lake by aina. Because leo is so hot the lake melts, and it happens to be a secret underground lab for an artificial intelligence made from the consciousness of the scientists who designed the freezing weaponry and the burnish fueled warp drive powering the get the frick off the earth ship. Why not? Then promare goes on a brain bender so ridiculous that even galo doesn't bother to follow it, and i legitimately feel like in this scene galo is exactly how trigger felt about the narrative of their film. Who cares? All he wants to do is fight and save the day, and honestly that's all i wanted to see. But i gotta admit, the curveball in the plot is pretty amazing. So here we go. Dead AI scientist proceeds to explain that the burnish aren't controlling flames, in fact, they aren't flames at all. They are fire like beings from a parallel universe. These living flames called promare are a hive mind life form combined into a sentient star powered through nuclear fusion intelligent with an electromagnetic consciousness. The flames the burnish wield are promare and just fractions of energy which seeped through a space time rupture which happened 30 years prior resulting in the cataclysm where people spontaneously combusted. This rift in space time connected earth's core to the parallel universe and the promare enabling humans who can resonate with the wavelengths of the promare to use their energy resulting in the burnish. Those who are super adept like leo feel the need to burn stronger because that's how the promare sustain themselves with nuclear fusion. However, the promare inside the burnish are still attached to the hive mind in the core of the planet which is attached to the star in the parallel universe and can feel the burnish's pain. And seeing as governor krey is going to annihilate millions of burnish for the warp drive, this massive instantaneous flux of pain will send the earth's core spiraling out of control and destroy the planet. Conflict 3 achieved. The last 37 minutes of the movie is complete insanity as gallo and leo team up in a new promare powered mech literally called deus ex machina to take on krey and his getaway ship. However, krey ain't having none of that, and it turns out the bridge of his ship is also, in fact, a mech. A ridiculous battle ensues for the fate of the burnish and the fate of the world, but it turns out that krey is a burnish himself. The most powerful burnish. He defeats leo and gallo and begins to use leo as the sole fuel for the warp drive, and just as all looks lost, the sciency member of the burning rescue team reveals the ultimate trump card. A drill. We watched this movie with our patrons and at this point i think we all cheered and facepalmed at the same time. The amount of masturbatory self referential ridiculousness in this movie was moving to say the least, but it just gets even more insane from there. Using the drill gallo frees leo who is dying but gives him some very intimate CPR and brings him back to life. The two of them jump into the fuel pod together and sink with the burnish in the core of the planet. Using leo's desire to burn and gallo's desire to protect people from said burning, they turn the flames into a friendly fire as they transform the fuel pod to become gallo de leon, a giant mech that's bigger than the entire planet. They punch the planet, which sends the whole thing on fire. The fire turns into a fire dragon which jumps into the sun and erupts, igniting the entire solar system, opening a rift in space time with the promare's desire to burn free satiated. They disappear back home into the space time rift along with any trace of the burnish's power. And that's it. It should be obvious by now that Promare isn't going to be winning any oscars, if you know what i'm saying, but i think that as a film it stands on its own two feet in an awkward stance. The story was exactly what it needed to be for trigger to do what it does best, which is entertain and animate. There's certainly aspects of the movie that could be picked apart and delved into, we could talk more about the holocaust's imagery, inequality, political corruption, but that's not really the point of this video, and that's not really the point of the film either. I think the only reason that stuff was in there in the first place was to give a basis for these ridiculous fights and amazing animation that encapsulates promare. It's important to remember that not everything has a message or necessarily needs one for that matter. Sometimes creators just want to create and do what they do best for their personal audience and not a mass market, and to me that's the most substantial part of promare. It's mech, it's shounen, it's stupid, it's gorgeous, and it knows it. When creation becomes a business, creativity becomes limited. You have to make things to sell them, and to make a profit you have to sell to the widest possible audience, which means you have to appeal to the widest possible audience. Personally i don't think promare does that. Kids will love it no doubt, but for those of us who are older, it really only appeals to the type of viewer who truly enjoys obscenely over the top action anime. And that's me. Crank it to 11, watch it go, throw a couch on the fire, watch it burn. I love that stuff. It was clearly a passion project, created just as much for the people working on it as it's intended audience, and for that, promare deserves a lot of respect. But then again, maybe i missed something. I'm currently in the middle of a resident evil 3 playthrough which has been a lot of fun, i love resident evil. Either way it's about that time to thank our lucky patron of the week, and this week our very special patron is chimerasong. Thank you so much for being an awesome bonsai pop patron, and of course we have to shout out our super saiyan god of the blue, Yamcha Kapoor. As always make sure to follow us on twitter and instagram, that's bonsai underscore pop on both of those. Again, check out our twitch channel, twitch.tv slash bonsai pop. Make sure to watch more of our videos, i know you got nothing better to do, and until i see you next week, take it easy, stay safe, stay healthy, stay chill. I'm mike, this was bonsai pop, and i'll see you next time.