urst Angel begins with a hefty bang, as would-be professional pastry cook Kyouhei takes a detour down an alley to avoid a street squabble and winds up in the center of a far more explosive conflict: A wanted criminal and a white-haired, scantily clad, glowing girl attempting to machine-gun each other into submission. Between them, they destroy Kyouhei's moped in a hail of bullets, and he flees in terror. So when he later responds to an ad seeking a cook, he's a little horrified when one of his would-be employers turns out to be the white-haired psychopath, a girl named Jo.
She lives in a gigantic tanklike vehicle along with three other girls: aggressive but soft-hearted cowgirl Meg, sneering computer whiz Amy and their more mature and reserved leader, Sei. Together, the four women are an elite bounty-hunting/mercenary team, and given their intrigue-filled lives, it's no wonder they don't have time to cook for themselves.
Kyouhei seems like a natural central character for an anime series—as a helpless, hapless male surrounded by brash, aggressive women, he fits nicely into a long anime history. But he actually takes a minor role in the first four episodes of Burst Angel. Not that any of the female characters are particularly prominent either. They don't need too much individual character development, given how readily they slip into close approximations of the four protagonists of the original Bubblegum Crisis. (Though given the series' emphasis on strategically skimpy outfits, they have to stick with a single giant mecha for heavy weaponry instead of relying on personal cyber-armor.)
At any rate, whiny Kyouhei and his too-familiar employers are all upstaged by Burst Angel's action sequences and the girls' danger-packed missions, which never stop at simple success. In spite of all Jo's level-headed skill and unswerving drive, every time they attempt to retrieve a new target, something gets in the way and the plot gets complicated ... and very, very bloody.
Not quite the same old Crisis
Burst Angel uses a number of tactics to avoid being a straight-up Bubblegum Crisis clone, set in a more bullet-intensive age. Some of them work, and some don't: The addition of Kyouhei, for instance, doesn't do much except introduce some extra sniveling into an otherwise action-oriented series. He's like the obligatory annoying squeaky mascot, Ryo-Ohki, except he says "Can I go now?" instead of "Meow!" And an attempt to tack on a Cowboy Bebop-like western theme via Meg's 10-gallon hat and an intermittent homey voiceover evokes The Dukes of Hazzard as much as it summons up Trigun. Then there are the thoroughly impractical costumes, which dish up the fan service in heaping spoonfuls, but never seem like something a woman would want to wear to a firefight, unless she was planning to waste time stuffing her anatomy back under wraps after every leap, roll or draw.
But in the successes column, there's the series' political backdrop: The series takes place in a violent post-earthquake Tokyo where ordinary citizens can get gun licenses, and in spite of a line about how rigorous the background checks are, half the populace seems to be armed. Supposedly, the Recent Armed Police of Toyko (RAPT) are taking center stage in the fight against crime, but they mostly seem to be somewhere near the bottom of every plot Sei and her team encounters. The stories are complicated and meaty, which leaves little time for Kyouhei's kvetching and Jo's obligatory macho-girl posturing. And Burst Angel also succeeds visually, especially through its the CGI animation tricks, which make for dynamic and liquid-smooth movement, especially when the mecha take center screen, or the action speeds up to a blur or slows down to a floating crawl. The shoot-'em-up action isn't always believable, but it's certainly exhilarating.
The initial Burst Angel DVD barely scratches the surface—the supplementary material explains more about the characters' mysterious past and the series' overall themes than these first four episodes do. But the involved storylines and hints at a much larger conspiracy give the series plenty of room to stretch from here.
So ... three of the four women on this show have names from Little Women: Jo, Amy and Meg. Where's Beth, and how did Sei happen to replace her?
— Tasha
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