DESCRIPTION

CAST

MOVIE ActionKouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai: Kanzenban
MANGA ActionKouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai
ONAKouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai Gaiden: Oozora no Harukaze Hikoutai
NOVEL ActionKouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai: Kouya Senichiya

REVIEWS

• 

  CountZero

  90/100
  An anime with some of the best aerial action and production I've seen in years.

  (This review originally appeared on my Blog, and contained links to a review that is not on this site yet.)
  If you’d read my review of Area 88, you may recall that I gushed over the gorgeously depicted dogfights in that show. Since then I’ve been looking for something that scratched that itch. Not necessarily with the amount of grit that Area 88 did – but still, something that had exciting, tense fighter dogfights. The Winter 2018 anime season brought me the thing that I’d been waiting for. Specifically, it brought me The Magnificent Kotobuki, from the writer and director of Shirobako and Girls Und Panzer. Now, the series had some difficulty taking off for some fans because of the stylistic choices the director made. However, once it got airborne, in my view The Magnificent Kotobuki became a fantastic action anime.

  Sorrynotsorry.

  Airships of the Sand Sea

  The Magnificent Kotobuki is set on an unknown desolate planet. The society on the planet has something of diesel-punk tech level. Pilots fly World War II-era aircraft, and airships traverse the sea of sand.

  The show itself focuses on a squadron of mercenaries – the Kotobuki Squadron. The squadron made up a cast of female characters who fit the various Cute Girl archetypes. There’s “wildcat” Kylie, Kylie’s best friend Emma, petite-girl-with-inferiority-complex Chika, cold calculating smartass Kate, glamorous hard drinker Zara, and leader Leona. The group works for the Oni Group, a trading company lead by Miss LouLou, are based out of the airship Hagoromo, commanded by Commander Saneatsu.

  The series starts out with a pretty basic premise, with the squadron mainly going up against air pirates. As the series goes on, political tensions between the various settlements start to grow. The crux of these tensions are “holes” in the sky – portals to another world (our Earth). At some point in the past, a group of people called the Yufang came through some of those holes. They introduced a bunch of technology to the wasteland and then left. Supposedly, those “holes” stopped appearing as well. When it starts to come out that these holes starting to show up again, tensions shift from quiet disagreement into an open-air war.

  Hairy Furball

  This leads to some of the big strengths of the show – the dogfights. Magnificent Kotobuki has some of the best-realized dogfights I’ve seen in an anime. Because the show uses World War II-era airplanes instead of the modern fighter planes used in Area 88, how characters fly helps provide further characterization. In Area 88, the differences came through in the types of plains the characters flew. Here, the Kotobuki Squadron is all flying the same kind of plane, so a lot goes into how they use it. Some people use more flashy maneuvers, some people are more direct in their maneuvering, and so on.

  The dogfights are animated extremely well. The planes are rendered in CG, as are most vehicles in anime these days. However, what Kotobuki does is use this to give the fights a dynamic camera, using perspectives where the camera is locked on to the plane’s tail through various maneuvers and other sorts of perspectives that you can do in cel animation, but with a lot of work and which you can’t easily experiment with.

  Even more impressive though, is the sound. This is probably the first new anime I’ve watched as it aired since I got a soundbar on my TV, and would go on to watch with my parents over their home theater system with even better speakers. Had I listened to the show over my TV speakers, the experience would have been greatly diminished. The frames of the aircraft creak with the strain of the maneuvers. Wind whistles through the guidewires across the top of the plane. It’s a gorgeous soundscape that really immerses you in the action in a way that I never really had before.

  Turbulence

  However, not everything in the show quite works. In particular, the director made a choice to animate the lead characters in CGI, while animating the supporting cast by hand, with some exceptions on both cases. Viewers have had mixed responses to this, and considering that the studio responsible for The Magnificent Kotobuki was also responsible for the 2016 Berserk series, this is understandable

  I did not have any problems with this style. Neither did my parents on our weekend anime nights. However, I have noticed that a lot of other very prominent anime critics (including Arkada) have not had the same reaction.

  There are significant chunks of the show’s worldbuilding that are implied instead of shown. Director Tsutomu Mizushima and writer Michiko Yokote trust the audience to fill in the gaps. However, if you’re struggling to stay invested due to problems with the animation, you might not be up to that.

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• 

  FoundOnWeb

  90/100
  Girls und Panzer meets Porco Rosso.

  In another dimension, or astral plane, or something, exists a world named Ijitsu, that looks a lot like Australia -- mostly howling wilderness. It used to have an ocean, but a wormhole of some sort opened up, destroyed the oceans, devastated the countryside and dumped a lot of military technology (including every type of Japanese WWII fighter), plus curry, rice, and pancakes, onto them. This all happened courtesy of the Yufang, who appear to be alternate timeline Japanese.

  

  A town like Alice

  Now the people of Ijitsu live a hardscrabble existence in a scattering of tiny outback towns, tied together with zeppelin flights and bepestered by air pirates. The six girls who are part of the Kotobuki Squadron* fly escort off of one of the zeppelins, fighting off the air pirates and making sure their cargo, or passengers, make it through safely.

  

  Carrier based aircraft

  Unfortunately, there's a shadowy organization, the Brotherhood of Freedom Union, led by Isao, the mayor of the biggest city on Ijitsu, a guy who can smile and joke while ordering the destruction of entire towns, and who wants to exploit any new holes that appear and use that technology to take over the world. The Union employs dozens of fighter units and is systematically intimidating all the small towns to join up. The Kotobuki Girls are not really interested in this. As with Firefly, they just want to find a job, find a crew, keep flying. Of course, they get dragged in, end up as part of the big final battle, and are instrumental in destroying a newly opened hole and the death of the mayor.

  

  Girls at war

  Got that? Good. Now ignore it. The heart of the anime is the flying, and everything else is just an excuse. Every episode has a multiplane dogfight, and every dogfight is of heart-stopping intensity. Along the way we get to see all of these WWII fighters in action, plus some machines that never made it into the sky on our timeline -- the Kyushu J7W1 Shiden, of which only two were ever built, and the Nakajima G10N Fugaku heavy bomber, only ever seen on the cover of model airplane boxes.

  

  The bomber that never was

  I suspect that Director Mizushima is doing what Miyazaki was unable to do in The Wind is Rising, celebrate the warplanes of WWII without having to insert an extended apology for Japan's role in the war. Even though he ended the film before the start of the war, Miyazaki was still criticised for not saying enough about it. But if you have Japanese fighters shooting down Japanese fighters on an alternate world on an alternate timeline there's no way you can be guilty of glorifying the Pacific War, right?

  

  George and Betty

  Meanwhile, we have the Kotobuki Girls. Each of the six has her own personality and her own reason for flying.

  

  Come as you are

  They are portrayed in 3DCG, and are not quite ready for prime time -- their faces are stiff, and their movements seem more like those of marionettes. Be that as it may, they are all individuals, and you find yourself rooting for them in all of their fights.

  

  Fight's on!

  And the heart of the series is the dogfights. You see the action from all sides, and from inside the cockpit. You hear the clang of bullets hitting metal, and you hear the creak of that metal stressed to its limit.  At the end of every episode, I had a bad case of the leans, from following the planes as they pulled g's.

  

  Another kill for Kotobuki

  The ending is a magnificent swirling fight in and over the capital city, and under the newest hole. Parts of it make you think of the trench run in the first Star Wars.

  

  Turn right at the next intersection

  In the end, Kotobuki sacrifices their zeppelin to close the hole,

  

  They'll never catch this dirigible!

  the good guys win, and fly off into the sunset.

  

  All's right with the world

  From a flying standpoint, anime artist's license excepted, I have two complaints about the air battles.

  First, it’s too hard to tell what’s going on. All of the fights are big, multi-plane furballs,  presented as a series of vignettes featuring one-on-one engagements (sometimes with a saving intervention), but there’s nothing that gives a good view of the overall structure of the battle. In Garupan, you always had the feeling that you knew where everyone was and that you knew how the fight was rolling out. Not so with Kotobuki. Now, air battles are notoriously hard to follow. You dive in, you engage an enemy, and suddenly you are alone in the sky; or an enemy jumps you, you dive away from them, and when you recover, the fight’s move on. But usually there’s some preliminary structure — “You draw off the fighters, you go after the bombers” — even if it breaks down on contact.

  Which brings me to my second complaint about the flying. There’s no sign of any real teamwork. In WWII, the US developed a number of leader/wingman concepts, which gave us a significant advantage over the Japanese, even though our fighters were outmatched by the Zero, one on one. In Kotobuki, everyone piles in on their own, and if they see a chance to help a team-mate they will. That’s good team spirit. It’s not good team work. As a result, The Kotobuki Girls are protected mostly by plot armor.

  

  Preflight check

  From a drama standpoint, if I have one complaint, it's that the action is all bloodless, at least on the Kotobuki side. Josh Whedon once said that if you have a fight and nobody important dies, people just say "Oh, look. They're shooting." That's the way Kotobuki is.

  Despite that, I'd still call it magnificent.

  *Kotobuki, 寿, A Yufang word meaning good fortune, congratulations, or long life, but we don't find out about that until the end.

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