Fitting Star Driver into the Studio Bones tradition

The first scene of new mecha series Star Driver sums up the silliness and the peculiarity of the show. We’re dumped in medias res on a scene between two young things, some kind of dramatic conversation. Fans of previous original anime by Studio Bones will of course be quite used to this sort of situation - shows like Rahxephon and Xam’d were enthusiastic in throwing the audience into half-understood conversations. These were self-consciously grown-up series with almost ostentatiously awkward plotlines.

Back in Star Driver the RahXephon fans are starting to get worried. Sure, there’s the comfort of confusion, but this is all wrong. for one thing those character designs are prettified beyond good taste, and that sky, that starry night sky, is just fucking absurd. Worse yet, a gigantic schmaltzy string section kicks in with a utter lack of restraint and a mysterious unconscious boy is washed up on the beach. Seemingly being immersed in the sea has not messed up his hair or made his clothes wet, it’s just sprinkled a charming dew around his head. Star Driver is… it’s… well it looks fairly shit right? What were Bones thinking? All at once, they make that clear.

Galactic Pretty Boy

What Studio Bones appear to be doing here is making the most batshit stupid anime imaginable, in the most ridiculous style feasible. And at the same time they’re playing their old trick of going light on explanations in order to provoke a sense of intrigue. They like mythology there, and this is a mythology of gaudiness.

The early scenes of Star Driver display a disconcerting lack of chronological or geographical coherence. We jump from breakfast to the schoolyard without getting any sense of the look of the island we’re based on - is there a town here, where is the house relative to the school, what happened during the day? In the second half things get odder as characters are introduced in rapid succession talking about things we don’t get and doing things with no apparent significance.

The aesthetics remain gleefully trashy. Flamboyance isn’t alien to this studio (Wolf’s Rain had some damn fruity villains) and the show is, as you would expect, exuberantly well produced. And ridiculous. Dumb highlights were the “gold mine” in which the mechanical equipment is made of gold and the Command Centre scene in which the serious scientists appeared to be refugees from a rather eccentric S&M joint.

Really, thinking in terms of the Studio Bones trinity (RahXephon, Xam’d, Eureka 7) this is a massive departure. The world-building approach seems to have been replaced with a farcical one.

Or maybe it’s best to think of this as a more genuinely youthful show from the Bones writers. When watching the ED I got to thinking about groups of three young friends (MMF…) in Xam’d and RahXephon. Those shows took established friendships and put them through the wringer early on, with the flowering romance excluding one of the guys with ensuing angst. In Star Driver we’re seeing a fresh friendship, one in which the third wheel gracefully steps (rolls?) aside. What we’re getting is first love rather than second thoughts.

That’s probably where calling the hero Pretty Boy comes into this. He’s a sort of Kamina-as-hero, only without the testosterone. A ridiculous exemplar used as the driving force of the story. Frankly he reminded me more than a little of TK from Angel Beats. If there’s intellectual content to be had in this series, I think the, ahem, symbolic power of the innocent pretty boy is going to be pretty much central to it.

I’m not quite sure on this though. I mean, Studio Bones are free to write shiny trash if they like, I just might be a bit too keen to read stuff into their work. I do think that opening scene was a pretty overt nod at the silliness of their premise, a sort of satirical wink at the audience, but at the same time I’d have to admit that what’s really got me thinking about the potential existence of subext in Star Driver is my familiarity with other work by the studio. It’s the fact that, in their original work, Bones are often quite ambitious, and even metatextual, which inclines me to see the shiny silly visuals of Star Driver as some kind of consciously arranged tactic, a tribute to triumphantly giddy and gaudy anime aesthetics.

Still, having expressed a belief that this show has been made as a self-aware intellectually rooted project, I’m not sure I can be arsed to watch it. For one thing I at least think that Studio Bones have a decidedly spotty record when it comes to actually writing anime series. Their presentation of mature relationships has typically been a strongpoint, and I’m not sure that I’m so happy to see them go for a Youthful Spirit Fight On! kind of production. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there’s the not entirely dissimilar Panty, Stocking & Garterbelt to be getting on with, and frankly between these two series there’s no competition.