BanG Dream!
BanG Dream!（バンドリ！）
When Kasumi Toyama was out camping as a child, she heard the rhythm of the "Star Beat" while admiring the starry night sky. This sparkling, heart-pounding sound left a lasting impression on her, and since then, she has constantly been seeking to rediscover that exciting thrill. Now, as a newly enrolled student of Hanasakigawa Girls' High School, Kasumi is more determined than ever to find that long-lost sensation again. She attempts a myriad of school club activities, and even considers taking up a part-time job, but none of these feel suitable for her. That is, until she chances upon a star-shaped guitar in the storage room of an old pawn shop. It leads her to a live house, where she is captivated by watching a live performance for the first time. Spurred from the adrenaline, she instantly decides to form a band without even really knowing why. However, such a venture requires her to confront various hurdles with new friends she makes along the way, all in her pursuit to encounter that twinkling, heart-throbbing ardor once more. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
Synopsis
When Kasumi Toyama was out camping as a child, she heard the rhythm of the "Star Beat" while admiring the starry night sky. This sparkling, heart-pounding sound left a lasting impression on her, and since then, she has constantly been seeking to rediscover that exciting thrill. Now, as a newly enrolled student of Hanasakigawa Girls' High School, Kasumi is more determined than ever to find that long-lost sensation again. She attempts a myriad of school club activities, and even considers taking up a part-time job, but none of these feel suitable for her. That is, until she chances upon a star-shaped guitar in the storage room of an old pawn shop. It leads her to a live house, where she is captivated by watching a live performance for the first time. Spurred from the adrenaline, she instantly decides to form a band without even really knowing why. However, such a venture requires her to confront various hurdles with new friends she makes along the way, all in her pursuit to encounter that twinkling, heart-throbbing ardor once more. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
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Trailer
Reviews(20)
RiverRode
April 22, 2017
It's become a common trend in recent years for an anime project to spawn an idol group - it boosts the popularity of the franchise, and provides another avenue for profit. However, according to Takaaki Kidani, founder and president of Bushiroad, the company responsible for the BanG Dream! multimedia project, the era of idol anime is coming to an end, and band shows will be the next big thing. Which is interesting, because despite technically being a band anime, BanG Dream adheres incredibly close to the idol formula. You can buy albums and character songs for BanG Dream. (Shouldn't the focus be on the instruments?)You can go to a concert and see the voice actors perform live. And it's not just concert tickets and CDs that BanG Dream is trying to sell you; the multimedia project also includes card games, headphones, several manga series, and a mobile game. BanG Dream is an extremely commercial project, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself. However, it becomes a problem when the pursuit of financial interest comes at the expense of creativity. Everything about this anime is designed to be safe and inoffensive. There's nothing new or risky here that could potentially alienate consumers; just trends and tropes that have proven themselves to be successful thrown together into an amalgamation that's sure to sell. It's something that nobody is going to hate, but that nobody is going to love either. Rather than creating something that's only okay for everyone, it would have been better if they had created something that will be at least one person's favorite. Sadly, making a good show seems to be secondary to making good money. There's not much that's more generic in anime than a story of a high school student trying to start a club for one of their interests. With that premise alone, you already have a fair sense of the events that will go on over the course of the series: In the first two thirds of the series, it'll be necessary to recruit more members, and of course they'll all have some issue that needs to be worked out before they can join, and once the group is finally completed in the final third, there will be some last challenge to overcome. But genericness aside, there's also the issue that the series is loaded down with fluff. There are so many scenes that don't accomplish anything, when there's so much that needs to be accomplished. It would have been possible to tell a much better story in much less time if the staff actually cared enough to write something interesting, but as it is, the story is generic and insubstantial. Scenes that don't accomplish anything doesn't refer only to the half-developed plot; character growth was only sorely lacking. The characters start the series well within the lines of clearly defined archetypes, and over the course of 13 episodes, they never really go beyond that. There's the occasional scene that will hint that maybe some growth is going on, but it'll never result in lasting change. This results in a tragic absence of sincerity. No matter how absurd a situation characters are placed in, it's still possible to relate to and care about them if their actions and emotions feel genuine. Here, the situation isn't all that detached from ordinary life, but these characters are so flat that it's near impossible to connect with or be invested in them. Perhaps another aspect of this is that the characters aren't visually appealing. BanG Dream relies heavily on CG for its performance scenes, and this causes the characters to look really unnatural, especially their faces. And even when the show isn't relying on CG, the use of stills and pans is abundant. Over the course of its run, there were two occasions on which episodes were delayed by a week, and it also started two to three weeks into its season. It's not unreasonable to expect that this extra time would be put to good use for making sure that everything actually looked good, but apparently CG was passable, and the staff couldn't be bothered to go beyond that. After watching a certain amount of anime, you begin to pick up a few words and phrases: youth, dreams, bonds, excitement, you get the idea. These are the types of words that make up the songs from BanG Dream - no real depth, just a barrage of platitudes and banalities. At least, that's how the lyrics are for the opening and ending themes. As for all of the other songs that are sung over the course of the show (like five?), they're left untranslated. It's probably no great loss, though official releases ought to get into the habit of translating song lyrics. Despite being a band show, it seems that the music really wasn't all that important. None of these factors on their own would necessarily ruin an anime. A solid cast could compensate for a lousy story, and some people won't care how a show looks or sounds as long as it has something interesting to say. The problem is, BanG Dream doesn't have any strong suits; everything about it is derivative and half-baked. It doesn't have anything new to say, and exists only to make a profit off of an existing trend. It projects a future for the industry where creativity is shunned, and the only thing that matters is marketability. This is everything that is wrong with the industry. Good riddance.
