Bubblegum Crisis

Premise:

Four cool and cute vigilante ladies with power-armor fight evil robots while a uselessly heterosexual cop makes passes at their leader and embarrasses himself.

The Positive Side:

Bubblegum Crisis leaves nothing to be desired on the visual front. The animation is gorgeous and expressive and delivers that kind of texture that only the best of pre-digital anime provides. While the music very much sounds and feels like a product of the 80's, this isn't a negative. You can feel the passion and polish put into the original songs, and unless you categorically hate all 80's music for some reason, it's hard not to find the performances at least a little bit charming.

The four members of the Knight Sabers feel very much like distinct and likeable people. Their behavior is consistent enough to sell their defined traits, but we see them in enough different situations, giving according reactions, that they don't feel limited to two-dimensional traits. Priss feels more like a woman we can believe in because we see how she behaves when she's fucking up the evil robots, or getting her shit kicked in, or blowing off the annoying advances of Officer Fuckboi, or recovering from the injuries of a prior encounter.

Also, while this is pretty thoroughly an issue of personal taste, I don't think I could give a proper show of appreciation for Bubblegum Crisis without mentioning that I appreciate a combat-centric anime allowing its women to be unquestionably combat capable. So many battle anime released far later than BC have insisted on making their women pushovers who rely on men to bail them out, so seeing women who are perfectly capable of winning their own battles is a breath of fresh air.

The Negative Side:

As much as I would love to hold up Bubblegum Crisis as a beacon of sapphic anti-capitalist revolution decades ahead of its time, its themes are severely undercooked. We are shown early on that corporations are evil as fuck, and cool, that's a cyberpunk standard and a fine thing to say about the world. The problem is that after showing that Genom fucking murders people, we get this dumbfuck monologue in the last episode where Sylia explains into the camera that the solution to evil corporations is to make sure they continue to exist but like... don't... expand too much. Because something something balance. You can't just overthrow the murder-robot corporation, where would we get out smartphones and Playstations? Huh? Nobody in BC has smart-phones anyways? Oh well. Centrist liberalism is a pretty damn lame conclusion for a cyberpunk story to land on, in any case.

The nature of the robots is another thing that feels like its just a little bit undercooked. We get the idea about halfway through that sometimes Boomers aren't just killer machines, they are capable of being people who yearn for freedom and human rights and are capable of love... as long as they're cute girls. And only if they're cute girls. No robots who are not also cute girls ever show any sympathetic qualities. I'm not gonna say I dislike a show having cute robot lesbians--in fact every show would be instantly better with the inclusion of cute robot lesbians--but the implication that personhood is available only to the attractive is pretty gross. Further, once the Cute Robot Lesbian arc is over the show seems to lose all interest in doing anything further with the idea that Boomers are an oppressed people seeking liberation.

Also Sylia's teenage brother watches her undress against her will repeatedly. Like. That doesn't connect to any greater scale over-arching issue but holy shit it is uncomfortable, unfunny and unsexy, and I sure do wish it wasn't there.

Final Verdict:

There are much worse uses of your time than watching Bubblegum Crisis. It's not a master-piece and it's not nearly as thought-provoking as it very easily could have been, but if you like badass ladies, 80's animation or fun scifi action scenes, Bubblegum Crisis is definitely worth a look.

...Dirty Pair is better though lmfao.