Promare and Ending With A Bang

~By Naren Varadarajan

Promare is an absolute blast to watch (literally, in a sense). It’s filled with plenty of bombastic action sequences, zany, over-the-top characters, and beautifully fluid animation. Adding to this, the soundtrack is simply phenomenal, and if nothing else, is worth listening to on its own merits. Given everything I’ve just outlined, what’s not to love?

A lot, as it turns out. Promare isn’t boring by any means, but is something far worse — disappointing. It undercuts its own strengths, resulting in a rather mediocre, by-the-numbers story. Normally, this wouldn’t matter. I mean it’s not as though, looking at Promare, you’d watch it for its story. The frustrating thing is that it shows promise early on, hinting toward a surprisingly nuanced plot that deals with some rather serious issues.

The central conceit of the film, set in the city of Promepolis, is that there exist ‘Burnish’, people that can manifest and control flames. The Burnish are framed as a sort of oppressed class, as we see them routinely being rounded up, captured, and killed. The protagonist, Galo, is introduced as being a ‘firefighter’, someone whose job it is to put out any fires caused by Burnish, and fight them if necessary. Right off the bat, we see innocent Burnish being singled out and killed despite doing nothing wrong. Galo, a rather idealistic wannabe hero, is forced to grapple with the idea that all he’s really doing is feeding into a culture of fear that escalates tensions between Burnish and everyone else.

Hell, there’s even a group of terrorists called ‘Mad Burnish’, who fight for Burnish liberation, and who Galo ends up having to arrest. Him finding out that they aren’t cartoonish villains makes for some decent drama — it isn’t perfect by any means, but it does help give the ridiculous action some emotional weight. I certainly wouldn’t expect any film to deal with the subject of oppression and state-enforced violence in the span of two hours or less, but I was really excited to see what Promare had to say, regardless.

Of course, we then find out that Kray Foresight, the man in charge of Promepolis, has secretly been using Burnish in his experiments, hoping to build a spaceship. Why? Well, when the Burnish appeared, they apparently razed down most of civilization, with Promepolis being the only large settlement that survived. Making things worse, their very existence is destabilizing the Earth’s core, meaning that the planet could literally explode at any moment. In true Elon Musk fashion, Kray thus seeks to take to the stars in search of a new home, using the Burnish as fuel for the ship.

Which…okay, I could still see as being some kind of commentary on how labor is extracted from the oppressed, often to the point that it kills them. It’s slightly weird that this universe’s version of global warming is directly caused by the Burnish, but I’m even willing to look past that. After all, there is something to be said for how those in power are insulated from the consequences of their own actions, and will sometimes sacrifice anyone they deem unequal merely to keep their comforts.

Then comes the reveal that Kray is actually a Burnish himself, and that the Burnish actually come from some kind of alternate dimension. In perhaps the most anime of final showdowns, the film ends with a battle between Galo and Kray in space, going out with a literal bang as the entire solar system explodes. With this ending, Kray’s reveal, and there being multiple dimensions, anything the film could’ve said falls apart. It’s not that stories that are wacky, or out-there can’t make good points — they absolutely can. The point is that not everything needs to end with an interstellar, inter-dimensional showdown to be satisfying.

So…why? Why would Promare choose to end like this? There is the rather obvious lens through which this ending can be looked at — that big action movies need some kind of grandiose final battle, since that’s just what sells.

While that’s certainly one way to look at things, I think things become clearer when looking at the studio behind it all: Studio Trigger. The staff at Trigger are perhaps best known for their work on shows like Kill-la-Kill and Gurren Lagann. Both these shows are every bit as zany as Promare, and both end up escalating their action to increasingly ridiculous heights. Gurren goes so far as to end with two characters literally throwing galaxies at each other as though they were frisbees. If you’ve watched either of these shows it should be glaringly obvious that Promare is a kind of spiritual successor to them. Not as part of some weird extended cinematic universe, but stylistically, in its direction and themes.

Promare wants to be just like Gurren and Kill-la-Kill, it wants to end in the same way, because that kind of ending has become a Trigger trademark at this point. In doing that, it fundamentally misunderstands what gave those endings weight. If Gurren’s ending didn’t have the setup it did, and didn’t encapsulate the series’ themes as well as it did, no one would have cared. What’s one more overblown fight, when compared to the millions that already exist? Gurren became as popular as it did because it used its ridiculousness to make a point, about free will, and unjust hierarchies. It isn’t some deep, philosophical text, but it does convey its message effectively. Promare isn’t really there to say much of anything. It doesn’t do anything with its themes of oppression and class, but is satisfied with the aesthetics of having those themes.

Maybe it isn’t fair to compare a film to a TV show. Granted, they are different mediums that pace their narratives very differently. I do think though, that Promare could have been so much more. Instead of ending with a bang, all it did was fade away silently into the background.