Burst Angel Season 1 Box Set — anime dvd review
Episodes: 1-24, plus Burst Angel Infinity
Genre: Anime, Action
Burst Angel is a show that has little right to be as decent as it is. The series’s entire appeal seems to hinge on the most terribly cliched anime stereotype imaginable: big-eyed, scantily clad, massive-mammaried girls, wielding big guns, and fighting cyborg menaces in giant robots. It’s everything that makes anime hard to legitimize to the non-viewing public. Even the back of the dvd case emphasizes its eye candy content over its actual story. So why, oh why would any self respecting fan want to watch Burst Angel? Let’s analyze its components.
First, the story. Burst Angel has almost nothing in the way of story. It’s a sci-fi western with a group of busty gun-slinging females as its cadre of cowboys, and a yuri subtext to please the male fanbase. Differentiation in character personalities never extends much further than their bust sizes. There’s Jo, the flat-chested stoic gunslinger. Meg, the perky young redhead/love interest to Jo, Sei the authoritatively endowed leader, and Amy, the pre-teen hacker, and the only 
one with even a smidgen of personality. Sure, there’s also Kyohei, their culinary-student turned private chef and an male apprentice cook to round out the mix, but for the most part he just provides a window into this realm of female flesh.
Over the course of the series the girls see a number of adventures, each of which spans two episodes. Each pairing attempts a sort of cross-pollination of genre tones and motifs, from the series’s primary Sci-Fi/Western to more exotic parings such as occult highschool/cyberpunk. There are a number of film references to be found as well, from a mech nicknamed “Django” to your usual Blade Runner motifs, to a whole slew of Hong-Kong action film sensibilities. Yet, regardless of tonal and genre experimentation, the actual storylines vary very little, most often seeing the girls protecting tokyo from rogue robots, wreaking havok across Tokyo due to possession by a mysterious glowing brain. Further establishing the sense of routine is the fact that each odd episode sees a cliffhanger involving Meg getting kidnapped, tied up 
(most often in a fan-service bondage kind of way. We’ll touch more on that later), and Jo rushing to her rescue. (In fact, this is such a primary setup for the series that the art for the original DVD box-set depicted just such a situation.). It’s sort of fun and kooky for the first few episodes, but by the third or fourth outing grows exceedingly tiresome.
But assuming you keep watching, you’ll eventually be rewarded with a legitimate over-arching story. It takes about half the series before even a hint of this happens – episode 14 marks the first occurrence of an actual backstory –, but you’ll actually discover a reason for the plague of rogue robots, a vast conspiracy of infinite proportions, Jo’s possible origin as a genetically-engineered supersoldier, and Jo and Meg’s chances at happiness… But then again, it’s a pretty big time investment before receiving a narrative payoff.
My main gripe is that, at its core, Burst Angel isn’t as adult as it would seem to like to be. The setups would be perfectly at home in a children’s Saturday morning cartoon show, so light on complexity as to allow extensive multi-tasking (ie: laundry and house cleaning) through the majority of an episode, and doing so without any chance of losing track of the story. In fact, it would be a totally awesome children’s show if it wasn’t for the fan-service going so totally out of control. It starts off innocently enough, with the usual mild shots of bouncing bosoms and glimpses of white panties, but toward the middle of the series turns completely inappropriate, with shots of groped flesh and pulsating camel toe. Again, I have no problem with such “adult” visuals (I enjoyed Witchblade and half of Shuffle! after all), but if if a series is going to rely on such extensive and immature
fan service, at least balance it out with a more mature narrative — something I actually care to pay attention to! As it stands, however, Burst Angel is essentially a children’s show that children shouldn’t be allowed to watch.
So with all potential positive aspects of the story completely nixed, could there be anything worthwhile about Burst Angel? Well, actually there is. You see, what Burst Angel lacks in maturity and narrative complexity, it (somewhat) makes up for in action – and not necessarily in the places you might thing. Despite its set of attractive, gun-slinging heroines (well, two of them), the real stars of the show are the giant robots. These cell-shaded giants engage in some truly awesome battles, with 3-D destruction perfectly embedded in their two dimensional world. My favorite of these depicted a huge shootout involving a speeding train (also rendered in 3-D), a huge gorge, a tiny bridge, and loads of bullets. Awesome.
Many of the episodes boast some funky tunes that I really enjoyed.
So, back to my original question. Why would any self respecting fan want to watch Burst Angel? I’d definitely have to go with the action, music, and some of the artwork. The story is bland, the characters negligibly defined, and the fanservice a little too gonzo/perverse/annoying to be sexy, but the action and visuals succeed on almost all fronts. Despite all my criticisms, I did have fun watching the series – I even enjoyed a large part of it. But with that said, it’s not something I could ever find myself watching religiously outside of a review assignment. However, if I had a spare afternoon and lots of laundry to do, it just might suffice.
Note: Also included in the set is the Burst Angel “movie”, Burst Angel: Infinity. I use the term movie loosely, as the film is less than a half-hour long, and features a storyline that seems to have it’s candidacy for a regular season episode rejected due to not being fleshed out to any legitimate degree. Yes, even less fleshed
out than the stories in the actual series. The disc does include an extra “Battle Record” that compiles all the action sequences from the entire 24-episode run into a single hour and a half sitting though. Pretty nice.
The DVD
All the Burst Angel Discs plus the Burst Angel “movie” in one box. If you’re going to check out this series, this is definitely the way to go. The box includes 4 slimline dvd cases, each containing 1-2 discs, and featuring uncensored versions of the Funimation Burst Angel desktop wallpaper as the insert artwork. The set boasts an impressive list of extras, including Japanese cast interviews, staff commentaries, CGI artist interviews, original trailers, the aforementioned Battle Record extra, textless opening and closing animations, outtakes, a special on character designer Ugetsu Hakua, alternate opening and closing animation, and more interviews. Good stuff.
All in all, the Burst Angel Box Set is a very nice offering. I’m just not sure the series warrants as nice a treatment as it’s received. But again, if you’re at all curious about Burst Angel, this is the way to see it.
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