Cannon Busters
I know, I know. Three reviews about anime in one week. Pure happenstance. I’m not auditioning for a job at Crunchyroll, I assure you. I’ll have a couple of good SF books up for review in the next week, and a documentary about religious zanies seeking to control this country. But for now, Cannon Busters.
This is an original for Netflix series, and when I realized it was mecha, I nearly blew it off. I find mecha to be boring, ridiculous, overblown, or all three. Watching a Yugo transform into a hulking five-meter tall robot samurai gets old when it happens three times in one episode, eating up 15 minutes of run time, which saves on animation but costs in patience.
I was watching one character who was screaming in rage at Philly the Kid, resident antihero (more on him in a minute) and he reminded me of someone: Stinkmeiner, from the fabulous Boondocks series that aired on Adult Swim. I got curious and looked the show up. LeSean Thomas.
Right. Credits include Boondocks, Black Dynamite, Korra the Avatar. Wrote the original comic books for this series, had full creative control on the series.
Black Dynamite reminded me a bit of those blaxploitation movies from the seventies, but it was funny as hell and well-animated. Aaron MacGruder’s Boondocks is something of a legend—you either love it or you hate it. Granted, if you hated Boondocks you probably won’t like this one, either. Come back next week. Good books to read about then.
Philly the Kid is immortal. He can be killed, and is frequently is through the series (his body has a self-tatooing tally that is slowly covering him in numbers). He is also utterly amoral, depraved and contemptuous of others. He has absolutely zero interest in saving the world. He drives a land yacht. Really, a land yacht. It’s a 1959 Cadillac, only this one is at least fifteen times bigger than anything that rolled off a Detroit assembly line. It’s so big the trunk serves as a cabin (sleeps four). It runs, not on gasoline, but on coins with the number 25 stamped on them fed into a coin slot about where the radio should be. He is joined by two robots. S.A.M. a mindlessly cheery friendship droid who just wants to be friends with the whole wide world(!) and Casey Turnbuckle, a maintenance droid who shares the features of R2D2 with every annoying kid sister in the history of anime. If they sound irritating, they are, and as you can imagine, Philly doesn’t handle irritation well. The reason his only companions are robots is because he has a body odor like a corpse flower in full bloom, with matching personality.
They are joined by a drunken old bum who smells nearly as bad as Philly, a combination of Shigurui and Uncle Ruckus, named 9ine. He may be a disgusting old bum (who at one point admits that he’s only 30) but the drunker he gets, the more bad-ass he is as a samurai warrior, and he’s pretty damned drunk to begin with.
About the mecha: the ‘59 Caddie can become a fifty-foot tall raging bull. Annoying as I find mecha, I have to admit this one is pretty cool. They don’t overdo it. The other mecha is S.A.M. who turns out to be the title character, a hyper weapon known as a Cannon Buster. We learn, as time goes on, that she, like Philly, is a relic from a time when magic ruled the world.
S.A.M. was a friend surrogate to a lonely princeling in a land that is, one day, attacked and invaded by a fierce usurper. Bodyguards whisk the princeling away (what was his name? Buttercup? Ach! Doesn’t matter) leaving the friendship droid (and megaweapon) left literally sitting up in a tree. You would think that if you really wanted to protect a prince who is on the lam, you would want to bring his pet hydrogen bomb who loves him along for the ride. Oh, well…
The series is funny, vulgar, takes lots of unexpected twists and turns, and is well populated in a crapnatz world and well-drawn and animated. It’s being touted as a ‘black anime’ but aside from the skin color, the characters could all be of pretty much any ethnicity.
Promising start to Netflix’s promised deluge of in-house anime.