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redscullyrevival · 6 years

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2011: Tiger & Bunny

For me, 2011 was an amazing year for anime. So many of my favorite shows popped out of this one year it’s kind of disgusting.

Mahou Shojo Madoka Magica, Hanasaku Iroha, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, No. 6, From Up on Poppy Hill, Wandering Son, Nichijou, my sweet baby Mawaru Penguindrum! What Am I to do?! Well. I don’t even know how to begin talking about Nichijou and I’ve talked plenty on Penguindrum so lets give another equally loved show the spotlight today!

Who is down for some Kamen Rider meets slice-of-life-lessons mixed with a healthy dose of X-Men and NASCAR racing?

I was on board with Tiger & Bunny the day it was announced as a project. My boy Masakazu Katsura on character design? A live action script writer named Masafumi Nishida being brought in? Big O king himself Keiichi Sato directing? I was signed up! I was ready! And I was not at all disappointed.

Tiger & Bunny is about reality star superheroes who gain points for their heroics during Live TV broadcasts and who vie for funding and resources from sponsors. The supers’ costumes are plastered with the logos of (real world) corporations and are dominantly featured in the show’s openings (which can make for an odd experience if you’re watching the censored versions on Netflix) and the characters often find themselves at odds with what kind of hero they’d like to be verse the kind their sponsors and TV producers want them to be.

It’s a good fuckin’ set up isn’t it?! Oh my god.

A older hero (Kotetsu Kaburagi AKA Wild Tiger) and a rookie hero (Barnaby Brooks Jr. AKA “Bunny”) are teamed up by their sponsors and the two have to learn to compromise and collaborate while saving the day, the efforts of which start to carry over into their private lives as they grow as people.

Kotetsu is a veteran of Hero TV who holds old fashioned notions on the superhero lifestyle but possesses a well balanced moral center due to his years of service. He is the “old man” but has a solid grasp on why he does what he does as his days of doubt have already come and gone, but Kotetsu’s glory days are increasingly getting behind him.

Barnaby is Batman if Batman were blonde and a much more stable individual although still, you know, pretty jacked up. Barnaby is emotionally closed off and simply does the hero thing as a means to an end; finding his parents murderer. Through his partnership with Kotetsu Barnaby begins to open up and truly consider for the first time what kind of person (and hero) he wants to be.

I cannot stress enough how wonderful it is that Tiger & Bunny is a show that has adult characters who grow and that they do so through a mutual give-and-take mentorship, friendship, and if you ask me romantic relationship. And that’s just the two main characters!

Tiger & Bunny has one of my absolutely favorite extend cast of characters in anime; they’re a diverse, layered, sympathetic bunch whose interactions and relationships as co-workers, competitors, friends, and found-family is the foundation the show rests on. Another key aspect of the series is that every character’s superhero identity relies on outward stereotypes (their superhero identities are crafted by corporations afterall) which are simplified reflections of the characters actual identities.

I’ll do my best to explain as Tiger & Bunny doesn’t draw a hard line with it, but this is a series that dips in and out of the the personalities and lives of the heroes as filtered though the simplistic picture TV captures and then their real lives and personalities.

For example, the sexy hero Blue Rose is sponsored by Pepsi NEXT because they want to capitalize on the association of her ice powers in reminding folks how tasty a nice cold Pepsi can be. Blue Rose is instructed to act cold and dominatrixy so as to fit into Pepsi’s campaign and we see that off camera she is also a bit cold - but we learn that’s because of conflict within herself.

Karina’s dream is to be a singer so she took the superhero gig because she was told she needed to make a platform for herself, build a fanbase, and put in some company time before being trusted with the budget of a true artist. As Blue Rose Karina gets to sing the closing theme to Hero TV and have mini concerts, but while she does her best to please the sponsors her full heart and attention isn’t exactly in being a hero. She complains about her catch phrase and is a teenager who is very aware of how the camera roams over her corporate designed costume. She misses out on time with her friends and her family doesn’t entirely understand her choices even as they support her in her goal.

Karina Lyle, like all the cast members, works through her problems while the audience comes to understand that there are parts of her that are similar to her hero persona but that her persona isn’t a complete representation of who she is.

This duality is pushed even further to the point where it is built into the literal presentation of the series.

When the characters are suited up, logos polished and on display, the series takes on the camera work and focus of what a show like Hero TV would probably actually be like but will drop out of that style mid fight to highlight characters real feelings and concerns - only to slip back into that heightened style once again. It’s hard to describe and it isn’t something the series does only when literally showing us things through the show-in-the-show, Hero TV.

Tiger & Bunny fluctuates between two kinds of Visual and Tonal Coding™: The structured posturing of what superhero media is like and what we all expect and then the wavering hesitant nature of being a human being with responsibilities and an inner understanding of oneself.

I have plenty of other things I want to talk about but if you watch the first three episodes of Tiger & Bunny you’ll start to get a feel for what I mean! It’s a very clever, subtle, tactic the series uses to compare and contrast it’s many characters with their superhero personas and is what gives the show such an enjoyable dynamic feel.

Because of this show’s characters and their wonderful duality this is the first and only time I’ll make this kind of comment: I do not suggest the dub of Tiger & Bunny and not because it isn’t good (it’s well cast and acted) but because the English script ignores the nuances of how characters address themselves because English can’t help it and the official translations don’t address any of it.

Nathan Seymour (AKA the hero Fire Emblem) uses the gender neutral I/me pronoun "watashi" and informal feminine "atashi" for themselves which is hard to express in an English script as English doesn’t have gendered I/me pronouns. For those watching a sub there is still a lot of guess work if you even have the ear to pick out how Nathan refers to themselves because the character absolutely displays Japanese media stereotypes and as such Nathan can be seen to fall into the onee category with their dialogue being onee kotoba.

I could get into this but I’ll just say again that this is a series where stereotypes are pitted against people who can fall into them but are shown to be more than them and Nathan is absolutely a part of that. The most thrilling and moving aspect of the second Tiger & Bunny film, and I’d argue of the entire franchise, is when the story goes into Nathan’s history and shares a considerate journey with identity - but what if you never make it there?

At the end of the day who you are and what you know is going to define whether Nathan Seymour is a believable agender queer POC character or a strange flat stereotype - which isn’t anything special as that’s how all characters from everything are experienced and defined.

If you want to get deep into this kind of conversation I suggest starting with Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People by Shigeko Okamoto and Janet S. Shibamoto Smith. And if anything at all has caught your interest about Tiger & Bunny I full heartedly endorse giving this series a watch.

#age anime #tiger & bunny #tiger and bunny

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