You’d think an anime with the mad premise of having historical figures — famous and obscure — become weapons of killing intent would be insane, nonsensical, and fun. Nobunagun is very much the opposite of those 3 words. Some decent characters, aesthetic choices, and the premise aside, this anime is right in the middle of slogsville, and that’s a shame since the potential is there.
Title: Nobunagun
Genre: Fantasy, Supernatural
Studio: Bridge (JP), Funimation (US)
Creator: Masato Hisa
Director: Nobuhiro Kondo
Series Composition: Hiroshi Yamaguchi
Music Composer: Yukata Shinya
Original Release Date: June 2, 2015
Title: NobunagunNobunagun’s heroine Sio Ogura is a school girl loner that’s knowledgeable about the military. That gets the attention of a popular student in her school, Kaoru Asao. While on their school trip to a location in Taiwan, Kaoru attempts to befriend Sio, which only leads Sio to be confused, and yet strangely happy at the same time. Her happiness gets shattered when a horde of alien creatures appear and start destroying everything. When Sio discovers Asao about to be eaten by one of them, she picks up a ball left by an unknown man (who was able to fight those creatures but expended too much energy), and the power within the ball channels the spirit she felt when she was dreaming the morning of the trip — that spirit is the legendary Oda Nobunaga. She uses that power, which involves looking completely sadistic and shooting at things with guns, to save Kaoru, and, after getting help from other people just like the unknown guy — revealed to be E-Gene Holders — she stops the creatures from destroying anything else.
Some time later, a “supranatural” organization called DOGOO announces to the world that they’re defending Earth from the creatures they call Evolutionary Invaders (EI). They want Sio to join their stable of E-Gene Holders, train with them, and fight the EI in order to prevent the world from being swallowed by them. Sio is not sure she likes being the center of attention though. Going from being alone to having the spirit of Nobunaga plastered all over TV and to the nation, her life has changed completely. So how does she decide if she wants to join DOGOO or not? By listening to her apparent new best friend Kaoru and how Kaoru even got interested in Sio in the first place — yes, it involved her knowing the exact specifications of something military related. From that moment on, Sio decided to join the organization, and fight alongside the eclectic group of E-Gene Holders fighting to stop the EI.
I don’t know what Masato Hisa was on when they came up with this idea, but it’s quite inventive: use the past of historical figures as weapons and have them kill things. Japanese studios using Nobunaga in everything has been completely overdone, but at least he gets paired with a good cast of characters — Jack the Ripper, Isaac Newton, Gandhi — so it’s not just him. It also doesn’t dwell into the history books of him that much, only when it wants to make Sio look cute yet dangerous. Also of note is this is a good way to learn about lesser, or at least figures I never knew about, like Francis Vidocq and John Hunter.
The aesthetic, at least early on, is neat. You have in one shot a military palette surrounding Sio as she awakes from dreaming about Nobunaga, then you have petals covering all of the students except Sio later in the same episode. The characters are exaggerated compared to their historical counterparts, so it makes perfect sense to see famous Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa take scantily clad bikini shots of a copy of a young Japanese school girl and act like it’s not a big deal. Nobunagun provides a fascinating combination of a history lesson with creature killing, paired with unrelated personalities almost half the time.
That’s why it’s a shame when that’s all it turns out to be: a history lesson that doesn’t run with its absurd premise. As each episode continued, the more I began to realize that we have these super cool personas that are just exclusively fighting some unimaginative EI. How did these creatures come into existence? Who’s their leader? This, while knowing how strong the E-Gene Holders are, only makes things boring. There’s nothing crazy that happens, aside from seeing an undead ship called Musashi blast EI’s towards the army. The premise should pray upon what it’s got and do something with it — like have them get sent off to another dimension to face weirder creatures, or meet a final boss controlling these things. Maybe it doesn’t have to go into another dimension, but Nobunagun feels uninspired — the premise is there, but there’s no real motivation, more of a focus on discovering cool historical figures as spirits that fight monsters every week. Unless you can be creative it doesn’t work. Not even Stardust Crusaders was immune to this, but to its credit, it became creative with how the fights went on. Nobunagun just has its main character shoot a gun at an EI without her using her AU ball.
Another detriment is the action. In addition to having an unfun adventure, the fights are boring and unmemorable. The second episode where Sio shoots a lot of EI after Newton weighs her down was nice, but not much else in the series really tops that. And when it’s not a lot of action, there’s a lot of meandering dialog that tries to either be funny or informative. It succeeds at neither. This makes watching the episodes more like a race to see how much more I can take before tapping out, and by about episode 6, I lost the desire to care about what happens to everybody.
It also has this scene for some reason
The BD/DVD release of Nobunagun is nothing noteworthy, with a standard commentary track by the dub cast (Episode 1 and Episode 13), separate Openings and Endings, and U.S. trailers. Only J. Michael Tatum as St. Germain was the one voice actor that made me wish he was planted in the Japanese sub, as the English dub is poor. To be honest, neither language seemed good, which may have been more hampered by the scripts than anything else, but the English adaptation team attempted to base their voices off the historical spirits. For example, with Jack the Ripper being born in London, he would have a British accent. Still certain Wayne Grayson’s Brooklyn accent impression for Joey Wheeler is the “best” accent I’ve heard of in a dub. I’d give points for being creative, but this only made me wish I could switch back to the not so good sub three episodes in.
All in all, Nobunagun is not terrible. It’s not good either. It’s just forgettable. Here’s to yet another work that had a neat idea and forgot to have fun with said idea.
