Promare

Hiroyuki Imaishi is one of the most charismatic and important directors of the anime scene. While my knowledge of the medium is not as encyclopedic as some of my peers, I still recognize him as one of the most prominent and characteristic voices. One that has been working since decades ago and whose work has led him to found one of the most celebrated anime studios around, which first started around his overall vision.

Hiroyuki Imaishi, in contrast to most other directors, is cool. As a concept, Imaishi's work isn't concerned with subtlety. It wants to impact you emotionally on a more basic level.

Narratives could be said to be constructed on two different axis: intelectually impactful and emotionally impactful. Most of the works of Imaishi beforehand like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill could be said to be a good mixture for both ends. They are benefited by a longer-running format that can help to develop characters across arcs. Promare doesn't have that luxury as a movie, being confined to an hour and 50 minutes. Imaishi's approach then was to create something that resonated more emotinally at each point. And yeah, it achieves this objective without that many issues.

The soundtrack is booming and full of instruments blaring at full power. Vocal tracks accompany action shots to string our hearts. And the rule of cool is in full effect at all times. Robots battling, characters striking powerful poses at all times and title cards appearing out of nowhere just for the sake of the style are a handful of signs of Promare being one of the purest destilations of this director's style.

A style that can also be easily observed through the animation. I love how Imaishi completely understand and dominates the art of purposefully limited animation to create impact and/or comedy. He's great at moving his characters using the medium of animation in silly but completely adequate and perfect ways. Still, Imaishi also shows his understanding of animation through the use of 3D in incredible ways to add angles and movements to action scenes that intensify each scene where it is used. The shader work in this case is particularly commendable, with the fire effects and the robots looking particularly memorable thanks to all of them.

Now, I've talked how Imaishi's style can be easily perceived on a visual level, but I also think the overall story reminds me a lot of his previous work. Understandably so, since the screenplay is from Kazuki Nakashima, the same writer behind Gurren Lagann. This time, the script tackles the topic of global warming in confrontation to the "burning spirit" of human consumption. It's somewhat predictable, specially when it comes to how it tackles its villains, but it's still effective. The overall theme of how we need to unite our need to create (which drains our resources) with a need to stop the incessant waste of our resources is good but doesn't necessarily impress me as much. It's a purely emotional message that solves most problems with a "Deus Ex Machina", which is fine, but it's very similar to what Gurren Lagann already did.

All in all, if anything, I'm just impressed by how much of Imaishi is in this project. I still got some spots left in his overall filmography and series (from Dead Leaves to Luluco and Edgerunners) but for what I've seen from his overall spirit, this is a perfect encapsulation of everything he aims to put into his anime in almost two hours of film. On its own, it's an estimulating spectacle that achieves its main purpose perfectly. It's a great entertaining piece that may not be as deep as some of the director's previous body of work (mostly, on account of its shorter format), but it's still very much highly recommended.