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Evan: Oh man, this ship just keeps on sinking! For the second entry in AniMayday, our collection of bad anime reviews in celebration of the beginning of May, we've got Elliot's mini-review of the awful 2004 anime series Girls Bravo.
My pick for May Day is Girls Bravo — a truly wretched piece of dross. I was roped into watching this show when it was presented at a University Anime Club showing, with the chairwoman reassuring us that it was “a real cute show!” She even did a little joyous hop after saying “cute.”
She lied! This show was not cute at all, and instead was so terrible I had to leave the room for fear of having my mind rotted away. To sum up the show, it’s a harem comedy. Loser guy who looks like a girl goes to magical land full of nothing but women, meets a dumbass priestess lass and brings her back to the real world. Suddenly everyone in the show is after his junk and wacky hijinks ensue.
I honestly don't have anything against harem comedies — done well they can be really funny, and it is a shame that most examples of the genre, like this show, are lazily produced. The harem itself is full of forgettable interchangeable characters orbiting the most useless excuse for a person ever created. Every piece of lackluster comedy falls flat or comes off as creepy, as do the show's frequent ecchi elements, which feel forced and pandering to an embarrassing degree. You may have already seen the animated gif of the main heroine “taste-testing” a banana, which is so blatant in its pandering that you’ll want to bury your head in your hands.
Even together these elements would not normally be enough to make me run away from a social gathering, but the final straw is that the show is entirely without charm of any kind. Utterly devoid of any hint of love, warmth or thought in the final product, it is clear that the creators of Girls Bravo did not give a damn about what they were creating.
This show is a truly wretched piece of garbage you should stay away from as best you can.
5 comments:
i like it.. no matter how much it is "terrible" .. i enjoy it to ridiculous extent for ridiculously outrageous reasons.
-smendes
I'm sorry to admit this, but I agree with smendes. Not to say that GB even passes for what can be considered good anime, but its dub work (not sure if the sub was adhered to or forsaken) lends to its humour, which is set-up and written quite well (albeit very over-the-toppish) whenever the Fukuyamas are involved.
et tu, Ink?
Well, I can see how a dub could take the show from being merely sleazy to genuinely amusing and over the top. Did you see the show with the dub too, smendes?
I only had the option of watching the sub, and so perhaps I missed out on the series' redeeming value. :(
I've got to agree with Ink and smendes. I really enjoyed the show. I think that the problem is that you seem to be under the assumption that this show was intended to be a normal harem comedy. Personally, I tend to view it as a tongue-in-cheek over exaggeration of a harem comedy, which is where I find the humor. I certainly am not going to rail at you or defend the creepier elements of the show. But, frankly, I think you missed the intent of the creators.
If the creators intended to make a send up of harem shows, then they failed. I came into the show with only knowing that the show was "cute" according to the words of my person who showed it to me. That's all. Girls Bravo quite simply did not have the brains to rise above the creepier moments and generic tropes it exhibited, at least in subtitled form.
Even taking the show as a parody, there are much better examples of such an endeavour.
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