Twelve years before Promare, Hiroyuki Imaishi was responsible for Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, a longform homage to the super robot genre that cemented his reputation both domestically and, especially, abroad. He’s been a favorite of American audiences in particular ever since, and the man was evidently not content to leave the 2010s with just a single all-decade great under his belt in the form of Kill La Kill.

Let’s get the obvious quality question out of the way: Yes, Promare is as good as you’ve heard. Yes, Promare is Imaishi’s greatest work thusfar. If he never tops it, that’d be completely fair, it’s a monster of a production in the best way possible.

Imaishi has a reputation as a master aesthetician, but his work prior to Promare was often criticized as shallow, sometimes even problematic. The validity of these critiques varied, but it was hard to argue that most of his repertoire was particularly rich in terms of theme or even basic message. Imaishi is known, rightly, as a director for the eyes, not the brain. Promare itself is certainly no one’s idea of a slow-burn psychological thriller or anything of the sort, but there’s a thematic depth here that his prior work only partially had or lacked completely.

In fact, Promare goes in so many different directions that while this is almost certainly not how it did happen, it’s possible (and funny) to imagine that Imaishi became aware of these criticisms and decided to respond by tackling, you know, every Big Important Theme. At once. The chief subjects engaged with here are neo-nationalism in the west (seriously!) and environmentalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given where the studio responsible is from, it handles the latter much better than the former. But, hey, points for even going there in a time when even many American productions feel averse toward making any statements that could be parsed as overtly political.

There is of course one other big thing, which we must discuss before taking any conversation about Promare further. The relationship between its leads; Galo and Lio.

Studio TRIGGER in general and Imaishi in particular have had a fraught relationship with LGBTQ coding in their work. The studio is often (not without reason!) criticized for failing to commit toward any particular viewpoint. This is in part due to how their stories are written, generally with romance, if present, as a peripheral element and thus one left open to interpretation.

Promare does not entirely avoid falling into this trap, but the results are much better here than say, the frustrating “choose your own OTP” ending of Kill La Kill. A few moments early in the film make vague gestures that Aina might also have feelings for Galo, but if she does, they’re not explored extensively, and there’s zero sign they’re reciprocated. Galo’s main relationships throughout the film are with two other men. Firstly his hero-slash-mentor-and-then-nemesis Kray Foresight, and then Lio himself. (Indeed, the film’s female cast is fairly peripheral other than Aina’s sister, Heris, but given the economy of writing a film has to have this isn’t really a knock, just a simple fact.)

The much-talked-about kiss between Galo and Lio does indeed sound like something of a cop-out on paper, given that it is a life-restoring bit of what’s essentially magic CPR. In practice, and in the context of TRIGGER’s wider body of work, it actually feels more meaningful with that fact attached than it might if done purely romantically. Imaishi in particular has something of a bad habit of offing characters at the end of his works in order to build stakes. Kill La Kill had Senketsu, Gurren Lagann had Nia. Here, that’s explicitly defied by Galo’s in-universe lifesaving. It also makes his little suddenly-tsundere mini-freakout immediately after feel cute and endearing rather than like a bit of “ew, gay” comedy, which is a very hard tightrope even for queer creators to walk.

There’s also the matter of Lio’s very feminine “rescued maiden” appearance in the cut that immediately follows. That kind of coding is fairly hard to do by accident.

It still would’ve been nice to get some actual no-room-for-misinterpretation “I love you”s, but this is as much a matter of cultural convention as anything else. It is still a massive step in the right direction.

As for its other themes; neither is exactly handled subtly, but Imaishi’s work tends to be about as subtle as a NASCAR race, so that’s just fine. The obvious ICE analogue being called Freeze Force and having huge-tired trucks that turn into drones is so on-the-nose it’s almost comedic.

Then there’s them having literal black sites, and the awful conditions they keep the imprisoned Burnish in, which are, rightly, much less funny. (Another minor note; it’s kind of crazy that this movie manages to depict something as inherently goofy as being frozen in a big block of cartoon ice as genuinely sinister.)

This doesn’t all entirely work. There’s the classic “X-Men Problem” of using a group with parahuman abilities as a metaphor for actual minorities, and some of this on-the-noseness actually hurts the films attempts to engage with the dangers of fascism. It’s tempting to simply bat the points of “credit where it’s due” and “but it doesn’t entirely work” back and forth for forever, but the succinct way to put it is that even engaging with this stuff at all is still worthwhile, even if not everything hits the target the way it probably should.

The environmentalist theme is dealt with more abstractly, and that’s actually to its benefit. The literal problem that the cast of Promare faces--the spectre of the Earth exploding from simultaneous volcanic eruptions--is not a real environmental problem. However, that layer of abstraction lets the writing work in a very “anime” space while still having the subject feel resonant. You can get away with engaging in a bit of the ol’ Gaia Theory if you’ve got things like Lio transmogrifying into a Krakatoan volcano as a visual metaphor for the term “The Earth dies screaming”. The two are tied together at times as well, in ways both obvious (Kray's entire character), and the subtle, like how the Burnished are literally "processed" in a factory that looks like a design diagram.

Speaking of that sequence; all this talk about theme, theme, theme and we’ve yet to do more than passingly mention the absolutely insane visuals on this thing. In the world of anime, there are cuts, and there are cuts. Promare is filled to the brim with the latter, with many of TRIGGER’s heaviest hitters putting work in. Sequences like this provide a feast for the eyes that keeps any of the relative headiness of the past few paragraphs engaging on a more basic gut level.

Beyond that, Promare also makes heavy use of 3D CGI. It’s an interesting aesthetic choice, and the result is fantastic. Large swathes of Promare actually rather resemble a video game, or perhaps a synthwave album cover, but it must be stressed that this is a positive. Rather than trying to simply imitate traditional 2D animation, the CGI in Promare builds a visual identity all its own. This is most notable in the various sequences that build fire from what are very visibly polygons, it looks great in a way that’s hard to describe, like a realization of what people in the 80s thought animation would look like in 40 years. Even conceptually, “firefighter mechas vs. flame demons”--which is what you can probably boil all this down to if you really have to--feels pretty unique.

Is all this enough to elevate Imaishi and his crew to the level of the all-time greats? That’s for time to say, but if it were, I wouldn’t be shocked. Promare is more than just a very good film, it feels like the sort of film that will be cited as an influence and referenced decades from now. As a new classic--last of the 2010s, first of the 2020s--as a continuation of the Daicon spirit, and just as a damn great action anime, Promare is no flash in the pan. It’s an inferno.

And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?