Review of Fire Force

Anime’s had a lot of ups and downs over the course of 2019, but I don’t think this year will ever give us a better reason to say “careful what you wish for” than Fire Force. Another story from the author that brought us Soul Eater, brought to life by the talented folks at David Production? With a healthy glug of Blue Exorcist thrown in for good measure? You could practically hear me salivating at the thought when it was first announced. But then it actually started airing, and within three episodes, I realized I’d just wished upon a monkey’s paw. Fire Force is agoddamn catastrophe, one of the worst shows I’ve had the misfortune to suffer through this year. And it’s a catastrophe precisely because of all the reasons it seemed so exciting at first glance. It’s a mangled, twisted effort composing all the worst tendencies of everyone involved in its creation, so much obvious ambition and talent squandered on a hackneyed, juvenile, amateurish, thoroughly unpleasant endeavor. I’d say it feels like it was made by a twelve-year-old, but that would be an insult to twelve-year-olds, because as someone who was writing fiction back when I was twelve years old, I can guarantee that as sloppy an author as I was back then, my stuff was eminently more thoughtful than this.

The story? It’s a few hundred years after a great fire-related catastrophe that shook the world to its core, and now, society has been rebuilt around protecting humanity from the scourge of spontaneous human combustion. Humans have begun exploding in flames for unknown reasons even since that catastrophe, turning into mindless beings of destruction called Infernals that only seek to burn the world around them. To combat this scourge, there exists the titular Fire Force, an elite squad of firefighter-soldiers who, well, literally fight fire with fire, blasting their way through fire demons and their acolytes with pyrokinetic powers that range from simple fireballs to summoning lesser fire elementals to breakdancing an inferno into existence. Shinra Kusakabe, our hero, lost his family to a rampaging Infernal as a child, and he’s just joined up with the Fire Force to help fight back against the flames. But it’s quickly revealed that, of course, everything is not as it seems, there’s a conspiracy at play behind the seemingly random combustion incidents, and the Fire Force itself may be a part of it. So Shinra must work closely with his fellow members of the 8th Company to uncover the secrets behind the fires threatening the world, all while honing his own skills to become the best fire soldier he possibly can. A simple enough premise, but one rife with potential for engaging characters, worldbuilding, and action alike. If I was a producer and you sent me that pitch, I’d be stupid to not at least ask for a first draft.

So how did it all go so goddamn wrong? Well, like I said above, the creative forces that got me excited for Fire Force ended up being the very forces responsible for its downfall. And to explain why, I need to talk about Atsushi Ookubo, Fire Force’s original Mangaka.

Ookubu is not a talentless writer. I’m a huge fan of Soul Eater, for its creative aesthetics, strong sense of purpose, and everything about Crona. But as much as I love Soul Eater, I also acknowledge that its quality is unevenly dispersed. There are some things it does very well- action, aesthetics, nightmare fuel, emotional character writing, theming- and some thing is does very poorly- exposition, worldbuilding, tonal consistency, obnoxious fanservice, cheap gimmicks. It’s a show that works because it’s got enough unique, worthwhile strengths that they offset its consistent weaknesses, but it’s never able to fully escape having those weaknesses. At its best, Soul Eater is a riveting, exciting, hype-you-up action spectacle with fantastic moments of catharsis and a soaring treatise on the nature of overcoming fear. At its worst, it’s a ten-year-old problem child hopped up on Pixie Stix trying to annoy you into giving it attention. It’s probably been a while since some of you watched Soul Eater, but do you remember how obnoxious the characters were back in the first few episodes? They were all defined by surface-level catchphrases they would repeat ad nauseum in lieu of actual characterization. Soul wanted to be “Cool”, BlackStar called himself “Big”, DK was obsessed with “Symmetry”, and they would repeat those phrases over and over again to the point of annoyance. They didn’t feel like characters so much as gimmicks, reduced to that one obnoxious trait they would pound into the ground until it lost all meaning.

Of course, as the show went on, all these characters did flesh out into more complete characters, and they would use those catchphrases far less often as they developed more interesting nuances to explore. But that tendency to write characters as obnoxious gimmicks was still an obvious struggle to get away from. And unfortunately, whatever effort Ookubo put into restraining himself in Soul Eater obviously didn’t go into Fire Force, because this show is essentially what would’ve happened if Soul Eater never developed beyond those gimmicks. Shinra’s told he must choose between being a “Hero” or “Devil”, but that conflict is conveyed solely other characters repeating the words “Hero or Devil” to him over and over again while he keeps saying “I’m a Hero” over and over again. And that’s the extent of his characterization, unless you count coming up with purposefully-stupid attack names on the fly as characterization. I wish I was exaggerating, but that’s seriously all the character Fire Force’s protagonist is ever given beyond the most generic “I must fight for my family” backstory imaginable.

And I can sum up the entire cast in similar ways. Maki is a musclebound girl who’s self-conscious about not being feminine, and her entire character is attacking people because she mistakenly thinks they’re calling her “Gorilla Cyclops.” Captain Obi is a friendly, loyal jock. His lieutenant Hinawa fights with a gun. Iris the nun is such a ditz that she can’t even tell two similar-looking people apart by their very different voices. Arthur Boyle, Shinra’s would-be rival, is so comically stupid that he forgets to fight with his dominant hand. Also, he thinks he’s a knight and praises loyalty. I know it sounds like I’m punking you with these brief descriptions, but that’s seriously all there is to them. I’m honestly astounded how flat this show’s entire cast is; not a single person feels developed beyond a single dimension, no one has unique motivations or interesting backstories, and in lieu of developing them, Fire Force just pushes their gimmicks so absurdly far that they cease to feel human in any sense of the world. It’s annoying, it’s aggravating, and it just makes you hate every single one of these cheap emojis masquerading as people. Arthur’s stupidity, in particular, is so overplayed that you start to wonder if Ookubo based him off someone in his life he had a grudge on and wanted to get back at. He doesn’t even feel like a rival, despite the show constantly insisting he and Shinra hate each other’s guts; everyone is so flat and lifeless that the only time they feel like rivals is the rare occasion when the story suddenly remembers they’re supposed to be rivals and throws in a random conflict where their rivalry is getting in the way and they need to learn to work together, despite this never being a problem unless the show suddenly decides it is.

And then there’s Tamaki. Dear sweet fucking lord, Tamaki might be the worst thing to happen to anime all year. Her gimmick is that her fire powers make people involuntarily molest her, because isn’t it funny when female characters are sexually assaulted and degraded for our enjoyment? Isn’t that just fucking hilarious? And it doesn’t even make sense within the context of the show, because every time it happens, Tamaki just acts like any other anime tsundere who gets accidentally groped, screaming “pervert” and slapping the offender around, but, like, wouldn’t she know? If we’re actually supposed to believe this Lucky Lecher bullshit is a part of her life, wouldn’t she know it isn’t the guy’s fault when they pull her panties down by mistake? Wouldn’t she be at least a little sued to dealing with this issue and kinda be over it by now? Wouldn’t her reactions to suffering this bullshit be anything other than the same fucking dogshit overplayed tropes that all anime have? Apparently not, because the only reason Tamaki exists at all is to give the humiliation perverts something to masturbate over, so it doesn’t matter how illogical the actual mechanics of this all are as long as she’s reduced to tears and blushing and has her tits jiggling around, often right in the middle of an otherwise serious action scene. Hell, let’s have all the female characters have moments where they’re stripped and/or sexually degraded as the camera leers at them dropped right into a supposedly dramatic moment. Because who cares about actually treating your story with a degree of respect when you can pander to the lowest common demoninator and sell a million fucking dakimakuras off of the most sexist garbage since Fairy Tail?

But hey, I hear you saying, I don’t care about all that character and plot stuff, I’m just here to see cool action shit blow up real good. Well, if that’s what you’re here for, you’re gonna be disappointed to. Yes, Fire Force has moments of absolutely breathtaking spectacle, where the fire effects and momentum and color design (seriously, this show’s color game is on point) are so pitch-perfect that they kick your ass ten different ways to Sunday, action scenes that stand among the best of the year... some of the time. The rest of the time, this is one of the most incoherently directed shows I think I’ve ever seen. Shots cut in and out without purpose, the camera lingers meaninglessly for shots that drag on far too long, there are so many weird, random, disconnected cuts that completely ruin your orientation in the scene, characters jump between poses in a single cut, and a lot of the action just doesn’t have any sense of flow or momentum thanks to some seriously incomprehensible editing that completely takes you out of it. It’s also a depressingly static-looking show most of the time; there is so little actual motion in the average episode of Fire Force- no character movement, no camera movement, no environmental details shifting- you’d be forgiven for assuming your computer wasn’t stopping and starting throughout. Let’s be honest, David Production has never had the most fluid animation, and their work on Jojo’s has been successful mostly thanks to the strength of its dynamic camera angles and strong blocking of scenes. But Fire Force doesn’t even have half that level of skill, and the whole thing just becomes an impenetrable slog of disconnected shots, inconsistent action, background art so cluttered the unmoving characters are nigh-impossible to spot in it, and laughably botched attempts as Shaft-style artsy directing that only highlight how artless the entire damn affair is.

I realize I’m kinda describing this haphazardly, but that’s how the entire show feels. Everything is so half-baked and underthought that it all ends up wrapping back around to infuriating and you end up hating the whole damn affair. Tone comes and goes without any consideration for time and place, characters’ gimmicks become so stupid and Flanderized that they completely destroy any sense that these people could actually exist as functional human beings, the pacing drags on and on with nothing of interest happening, Ookubo keeps loading the cast down with more and more cardboard cutout gimmicks desperately trying to fool you into thinking they’re characters, motivations shift on a dime, and there’s no fucking consistency to any of it. A villain’s introduced early on monologuing about her superiority, then Shinra punches her and she instantly turns to the good side and falls in love with him. Once again, I cannot stress enough that I am not exaggerating for effect; this is seriously how it plays out in the show. How am I even supposed to react to that? How am I supposed to make sense of writing this utterly broken and thoughtless? I say again, even I, writing at the ripe young age of twelve, put more thought into my characters and plot than this. I know Ookubo’s capable of better, so he has no excuse for how abysmal this turned out.

But I think I’m gonna have to cut my rant short there, because otherwise I’ll be going for another ten paragraphs. Bottom line, Fire Force is a complete disaster, a baffling, obnoxious, often infuriating waste. It’s annoying to watch, it’s exhausting to think about, and it’s tragic to consider just how much obvious talent and effort, from color designers to animators to especially voice actors (god, Aoi Yuuki does not deserve this), is being pissed down the drain on a show that can only squander them. Just watch the best action cuts on SakugaBooru or something, because that’s the only part of this mess worth engaging with.