Tow Ubukata is probably the most interesting bad writer working in the anime industry today.

If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, well, it is. You can accuse Ubukata of many things, from overuse of Proper Noun Macguffins to contrived asspulls to character motivations that flip and flop on a dime (and also, you know, domestic violence that one time). One thing you can't accuse him of, though? Being boring. I don't think I've watched a show he's written that's been anything less than magnetic, even as it trips over itself and ruins its best ideas with shoddy craftsmanship. Who else would follow up Psycho-Pass by saying, "Okay, but what if the Sybil System could judge itself and what kind of plot would make that happen?" Or decide the best idea for a RWBY spinoff was trying to make its awful racism subplot actually work? Or whatever the hell was going on in Bye Bye Earth? The dude's work just has ambition. And I'll take that kind of messy. overconfident face-planting over a thousand bargain-bin isekai any day of the week.

By those standards, Moonrise is probably the most "normal" anime Ubukata's been involved with for a while. You won't find any of Bye Bye Earth's sheer surreal mindfuckery here, nor the awkward clash of an already existing IP forced into another writer's style. It's just a straightforward space opera about Politics and War and Classism and all those good things, with all the flashy animation Netflix and Studio WIT can afford. And as such, it's probably the purest example of Ubukata's strengths and weaknesses as a writer I've seen. Big ideas, awful pacing, information presented in all sorts of confusing and out-of-order ways, surprisingly clear-headed in the themes it's exploring even as its convoluted plotting makes it hard to care. It's a big dumb popcorn spectacle that works when it's showing off the animators' sheer talent and falls flat the more plot threads it piles on. And honestly? I can't be too mad about that.

So here's the premise: it's the future, and humanity has finally started colonizing the moon with the increased ease of space travel. Unfortunately, we've also delegated most of our species' desicion-making process to an omniscient AI called Sapienta, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that its "objective" decisions made for the supposed good of mankind have no issue letting huge chunks of that same mankind suffer and die for "the needs of the many." Thus, the moon's population has been suffering under oppression for many long years, stricken with poverty and fascism and forced control from an unfeeling machine program that sees their misery as a dispassionate side effect of running an efficient interstellar society. Which means it's time for the people of the moon to rise up (Eh? Get it? Cause it's the name of the- yeah, you get it), under the leadership of the amusingly named Bob Skylum, and start a revolution for freedom from Sapienta's tyranny.

Our protagonist, however, isn't involved with any of that. At least at first. Jack Shadow's down on earth, after all, and he's living a spoiled rich kid's dream life, getting wasted and gambling his days away with no sense of greater purpose. But then the moon's rebellion breaks out, and the collateral damage from the destruction of a giant space elevator includes Jack's adoptive parents, his home, and any semblance of the life he once knew. On top of that, a mysterious message makes it seem like one of his very old friends is part of the Moonrise movement... and if that's true, then this revolution is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone suspected. So Jack joins the army- along with some of his rich friends and the girl he refuses to commit to a proper relationship with- to track down who's behind this mess and get some good old-fashioned revenge. Only, of course, it turns out things are even more complicated than they expected, and not just because of how convoluted the storytelling gets.

But make no mistake, the storytelling IS convoluted, and Moonrise's fatal flaw is just how bad it is at communicating information clearly. Like, let me run you down the first few episodes. After a pretty straightforward episode 1, episode 2 spends half its time on an extended flashback to Jack's life before meeting his adoptive family, which is a huge lore dump with big implications for the nature of the war... but doesn't actually tell us why this lore stuff matters until many episodes later. And then episode 3 has a big timeskip past Jack and his friends training to jump right into their time fighting in the army, expect then episode 4 flashes back to their time training so it can try and make you feel sad about a guy who just died, expect we don't even see who died until the flashback ends and we return to after the timeskip halfway through the episode.

Woof.

Thankfully, the show is mostly linear from there and never hits you with a time-jumping wombo combo like that again. But that's a really dumb, needlessly confusing way to structure the beginning of a story. It makes you grope around in the dark for information you feel like you're supposed to have about characters' motivation and worldbuilding, but that information only arrives after the moment it would've been emotionally satisfying. And that, sadly, holds true throughout Moonrise. Time and again this show holds critical pieces of information out of reach, cheaply trying to build suspense by just not telling you what the characters are trying to do or how much you should expect them to know. But when you don't tell the audience basically anything, it doesn't just make it hard to understand what's happening until after the fact, it makes it hard to care. Why should I care about any of these twists if I wasn't given the necessary context to understand what aspects of this world or story they're even twisting in the first place?

And that's especially bad for Moonrise, because this is NOT an easy-to-follow plot even laid out straightforwardly. It's got artificial life-forms, giant sentient amoebas, robot hiveminds, and all sorts of wild sci-fi nonsense complicating its war narrative. It all basically shakes out once you have the full picture of what's going on, but trying to understand it while you're neck-deep in it makes you feel like your head's spinning. This also means the characters get pretty lost as well; for all the time I spent with Jack and his crew, I could tell you very little about any of them beyond surface details. Who's more on Earth's side? Who's more sympathetic to the moon? Why? How do they all relate to each other? I don't know, and I'm not sure Moonrise does either. Jack especially feels stuck between two different characters Ubukata wanted him to be; a sheltered rich brat forced to confront the harsh reality his privilege blinded him to, or a furious revenge-seeker who risks destroying himself in his quest for blood. At times he's one, at times he's the other, and never do they feel like parts of the same person. Which, considering he's our main character? Not great!

Thankfully, what IS great is the spectacle of it all. Director Masashi Koizuka clearly relished the chance to spread his wings after carrying Attack on Titan for so long, and he makes this space opera as over-the-top operatic as possible. The swooping camera, the hyper-dramatic lighting, the scores and scores of spaceships, the anti-grav capes that let the hand-to-hand combat feel just as kinetic and propulsive as the best of AOT, it's all breathtaking. Episode 3 in particular is nothing but wall-to-wall action, and I doubt a single other episode this year will match it for sheer sakuga. I normally shrink from the "turn your brain off" defense- if it's so dumb you need to stop thinking to enjoy it, then it's not worth spending time on- but god damn if I wasn't happy to turn my brain off and holler like a madman whenever the fighting kicked up. Give this team an actual coherent script to work with and there's nothing they won't be able to accomplish!

Ultimately, I had fun with Moonrise, and I even appreciated its perspective at points. At its best, this show is very sympathetic toward the plight of the oppressed, and it understands the moral necessity of standing up to authoritarianism even when it comes with a cost. But Ubukata's writing just isn't coherent enough for those themes to be more than window dressing, a thin layer over a mess of hodgepodge tropes and awful characterization (I didn't even mention the shitty love triangle, because of course there's a shitty love triangle). It's a show that's fun to watch when it's firing on all cylinders, but also one that won't leave any lasting impression a week after you've finished. Does that make it the worst thing in the world? Nope. But Ubukata is clearly trying to create works of art that are worth sticking around, and I just hope one day he refines his craft enough to make that a reality. Because I would definitely prefer to live in a world where Moonrise ended up the next Gundam, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes, instead of a mostly enjoyable piece of junky, disposable Content(tm).