Back Arrow

The world of Lingalind is surrounded by a mystical wall with seemingly nothing beyond its confines. Worshipped as the mother of the land, the wall delivers celestial gift capsules called "Rakuho'' to locations across the continent. Arriving once a month, the capsules contain metallic armbands that allow the wearer to transform into a mechanical being known as a "Briheight." As a result, Lingalind is thrown into constant turmoil by its warring nations, all hoping to strengthen their military prowess by procuring the offerings for themselves.

One day, a Rakuho crash-lands in the countryside with an unexpected inhabitant—a mysterious black-haired man. All eyes are set on this strange newcomer, who calls himself "Back Arrow," when he claims to have hailed from a place beyond the wall—a revelation that can potentially unravel Lingalind's entire dogmatic foundation.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Bi, Shuu Main

Sugita, Tomokazu Japanese

Back Arrow Main

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Ariel, Atlee Main

Suzaki, Aya Japanese

Lean, Elsha Main

Ozawa, Ari Japanese

Namital, Bit Main

Ono, Kensho Japanese

Daidan, Zetsu Supporting

Horiuchi, Kenyuu Japanese

Conrad, Prax Supporting

Komatsu, Mikako Japanese

Forté, Fine Supporting

Koshimizu, Ami Japanese

Sin, Ren Supporting

Han, Megumi Japanese

Rhodan, Kai Supporting

Okiayu, Ryoutarou Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Oowada, Tomoyuki Producer

Katou, Shinichirou Producer

Mita, Keiji Producer

Reviews

Jun 18, 2021

SingleH

Recommended

A naked idiot who doesn’t even remember his own name falls out of the sky, gets called a dumb bastard (a “baka yarou”), mishears the insult, and decides, yup, that’s my name: Back Arrow. And if that didn’t at least make you smile, then you don’t know how to have fun.

Back Arrow feels like it stepped out of a time capsule from the early 2000s, certainly not made with today’s audiences in mind, and it so boldly, delightfully embodies all that makes writer Kazuki Nakashima and director Taniguchi Goro stand out, it’s hard to even tell where one of them ends and the other begins. ... But this isn’t even criticism. Back Arrow holds in its heart all the influences which its old and storied creators carry, but it’s not trying to outdo any of them. It’s not trying to be their newest, greatest masterpiece, and if anything it seems instead to want to refine its predecessors down to their most essential elements and walk away with a simpler, more laid-back, innocent experience. There’s Gurren Lagann in the dialogue, bits of s.CRY.ed in the action, tons of Gun x Sword weaved throughout the entire presentation, and even an energy similar to Goro’s episodes of G Gundam all wrapped up in one creative package, and the result will certainly be a rare treat to any other boomers like me longing for the good old days where anime was more about reckless creativity than it was about chasing trends and optimizing algorithms.

The comedy, the simplicity, the straightforwardness, and the lack of any particularly pretentious elements make this show feel so genuine. So many shows nowadays seem to allocate what little thought and effort was actually put into them toward crafting an attention-grabbing premise to hook the audience, but one which, nevertheless, simultaneously panders to them with all the same recycled tropes which the producers behind the show know the masses will love and pay for, but Back Arrow doesn’t care about having a mind-blowing premise it’ll never deliver on, because it can simply endear the audience naturally with genuinely likable characters and actually funny dialogue, or interest them in its original setting. It doesn’t need to open with that one crazy cut of animation to serve as a promise for the action to come or that one cute waifu who’s merch is available now, because unlike its contemporaries, it isn’t built to go on forever, print as many volumes as it can, or set-up for next season. It’s just a traditional story which gets to have actual character development because the entire story has been thought out from beginning to end.

And I know you didn’t ask for my appraisal of the current anime landscape and are here to read about the naked idiot, first name Back, last name Arrow, but I’d argue the creators feel the same way I do, and they’re way less apologetic about it than I am. The name “Studio VOLN” is an acronym for the phrase, “Visiting Old, Learn New.” Sure, the English is a bit broken, but the intention is clear. This studio is comprised of individuals who either lament the current direction of anime and who wish to return it to its classic roots which they find more favorable, or perhaps individuals who just love retro shit THAT much, and this becomes crystal clear looking through their catalog. After MAPPA devolved into a nightmarish corporate hellscape shortly after its founding, Masao Maruyama and others like him fled the studio they just worked so hard to create to try again, and these individuals went on to make Studio VOLN and Studio M2, where they’re adapting decades old manga like Onihei and Karakuri Circus whilst also helping other equally old men make their own original oddities like Back Arrow, and the last thing they care about is profit.

Much like VOLN’s other projects, this show isn’t exactly gorgeous, but it’s overflowing with artistic soul no matter which way you slice it. Back Arrow is set in a world surrounded by impassably high, impenetrably thick walls whom those living inside revere as godly structures, and to even think about climbing over them is a grievous sacrilege. So when our naked baka yarou falls from the sky claiming to be from the world beyond, tension and conflict begins to stir around him between the two major nation states occupying the world and waging war against one another with Briheights, mechas which manifest from the pilot’s conviction. As if you needed me to tell you, this style of conceptual storytelling is so Kazuki Nakashima it hurts, and considering the fact the different factions are delineated entirely via their costume design, with the Kingdom of Lutoh dressing in Nineteenth Century English, the Empire of Rekka dressing in Classical Chinese, and our main characters from Edger Village dressing in Western Cowboy, Taniguchi Goro’s influence is just as pervasive, but the whole point of this was to talk about the production.

Back Arrow looks fine. The Briheights are 3D, and there’s a ton of ‘em, but the creators really show their experience on this front, as they made all the right decisions regarding CG animation which so many other studios and staffers refuse to learn despite Production IG teaching the world back in 2002 and Studio Orange reminding everyone again in 2017. They didn’t cap the frame rate, the compositing is perfect, and the models aren’t over-detailed, so if you were to take a still image, its simplicity may even make it appear hand-drawn to the undiscerning eye. The 2D animation isn’t mind-blowing, but given the sheer amount of detail in the character designs, the modest fluidity they maintain is honestly impressive. Back Arrow has a beautiful art style, with memorable mechanical design and eye-catching colors, and while the backgrounds can fluctuate drastically in their detail, they always keep the aesthetic in mind and never look as egregiously digital as your average anime’s. Overall, the lack of money and manpower is always apparent, but its visuals nonetheless remain consistently engaging through raw personality & passion.

Nakashima’s beginnings as a playwright really shine through every moment of Back Arrow. Every character is someone you actually want to see and who’s time on screen, just like an actor’s time on stage, never feels wasted. Nakashima has always wielded Chekhov's Gun with grace, and if the conviction-powered Briheights didn’t remind you of Gurren Lagann’s will-powered Gunmans or Kill la Kill’s authenticity-powered Goku Uniforms, then let me assure you he still likes his themes to permeate every element of his stories. Despite Goro’s energetic, Saturday Morning Cartoon, all-ages accessibility, Back Arrow is still far better written than a great deal of anime out there, no matter how old or allegedly mature their target audience, because it actually feels like it was written by a writer, not an otaku who has never left their room and who can only create their hackneyed manga or light novel because real artists such as Goro and Nakashima inspired them to with the legendary works they made all those years ago, many of which aforementioned. While juvenile and increasingly ridiculous, Back Arrow is yet another inspiration I’m truly thankful for.

Nyron wrote an excellent preliminary review for this series which I highly recommend everyone go read. In fact, this review was so good and said everything I wanted to say so comprehensively, I debated even writing my own review. He concluded by describing Back Arrow as an “epitaph written on the grave of better times,” and I couldn’t possibly have said it better myself. The average modern anime fan doesn’t want to watch something smart or heady, but they also can’t just watch a shounen anime with their brain turned off without feeling insecure, and they have to be able to tell themselves it’s somehow above the common masses. They have to be able to say, no, My Hero Academia, Dr. Stone, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t just come off the WSJ assembly line, it has an admirable main character who totally worked for his power and wasn’t just handed his teenage male power fantasy, a real and educational understanding of science which totally isn’t the single most embarrassing and sophomoric display of pseudo-intellect in the anime medium, beautiful artwork which isn’t just Ufotable layering CG and digital effects with enough bloom and post-production filters to give a blind man epileptic seizures, heavy amounts of awesome fight sequences who’s blatant lack of sakuga in-betweens and consistent key animation check is totally just an artistic choice by the animation staff and not a side effect of MAPPA’s well-known crunch time scheduling. Back Arrow doesn’t have any of that vanity, and while I could hardly fault anyone who is simply looking for something more serious, the overwhelmingly negative reception of this show is nothing if not a sign of the times.

Thank you for reading.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jul 22, 2021

ThatAnimeSnobRE

Mixed Feelings

Back Arrow is a throwback to the times when anime were mostly mecha adventures and sci-fi without much of a concern when it came to plot or sociopolitical messages. It’s made specifically for people like me who don’t relate with highschools, moe, or isekai, and we just want to see some damn giant robot action goddammit! Me and an another old-school mecha fan were watching it weekly while it was airing and we had so much fun with it as a blast from the past. It had so many things going on besides the robots action; it included adventure, war epics amongst different civilizations, mystery, ... and even got a bit metaphysical in the last episodes. I kept seeing it as a tribute to Xenogears, one of my favorite videogames from the late 90s.

Nostalgia and personal preferences aside though, it’s not well written at all and it rushes through every conflict and concept for the sake of having a twist in almost every episode. Despite having great variety in civilizations and sci-fi ideas, there is hardly any proper build up and you will barely see something before it’s over and something else comes along. Power ups are instant, the tone changes abruptly from comedy to drama, explanations regarding how something works are given after that something has been used, and the plot twists have close to no logical explanation. The authors were just throwing in as much as they could without bothering to give them the time to get fleshed out, or to make sense, or to last long enough for the people who are supposed to be the target audience.

But as a whole the main issue is the very fast pacing. The show could have easily been three times as long, although that would also mean the animation studio would waste three times as much money on something that very few would bother to watch. Because in case you didn’t notice, mecha have been out of favor ever since the Millennial generation was proven to be more fond of battle harems and school moeshit. Hence why Back Arrow was not given the attention it deserved. It was a tribute to the stuff generation X liked 40 years ago. Since there are very few of us left who still like mecha and not isekai nonsense there was very little incentive to bother much with a project that was doomed to be overlooked by 99.9% of the viewerbase. Also artwork and animation are just above average, thus Back Arrow couldn’t even win the sakuga audience just by being the best possible looking thing of the season.

It’s quite enjoyable if you shut off your brain and you see it as a tongue in cheek type of show that never tries to be more than crazy stuff happening all the time, but I’m not going to call it a good show when its conflicts are resolved in a hurry, most explanations for how something works are made up on the spot, and even then they are something cheap such as ‘he willed it into happening’ or ‘he was brainwashed or he forgot he could do it’. It was a cool one time diversion from the graveyard that is modern anime and that’s it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jun 18, 2021

KANLen09

Not Recommended

I wanna believe in you, the people who brought us the mecha clasic that is Gurren Lagann and other Trigger-style productions that have spanned the last 2 decades. But if I have to absolutely rage-quit with a hot take of this show, it's that Back Arrow serves nothing new to the mecha genre, playing "safe" by the tried-and-true clichés and tropes that anyone who's watched either Gurren Lagann (written by Kazuki Nakashima) or Code Geass (directed by Goro Taniguchi) can appreciate a whole lot, that times have changed, and it absolutely has no right to exist. It's only because of the working business relationship with ... Aniplex that allowed these 2 thriving and prolific people to commit to what they do best, and Back Arrow is the latest in the row of collaboration projects that more than just an exchange in studio (going from Trigger to Studio VOLN, the ones who handled the abject adaptation mess that is Karakuri Circus). If there's any correlating consolation to go by, it's a modern-day Gurren Lagann for the 2020s, made for hardcore fans who still think that they're mentally between the ages of 12 to 18, but without all that finesse of the former. YES, you're not mistaking what I've just said, Sosumi if you will.

The premise of Back Arrow actually started out decently, not just because of the Gurren Lagann-like feeling, but also creating an envisioning of what lies for the 6-month long series ahead. I mean, just take a look at the opening narration (that constantly builds up overtime as the series progresses): "Lingalind, a world surrounded by a wall. The wall enshrouds the land, protecting, nurturing, sustaining. The wall is God, that is the basis of Lingalind. It is worshipped as God." Now tell me that doesn't sound epic enough, even if knowing that this is the familiar laissez-faire progression that both Kazuki Nakashima and Goro Taniguchi likes to set their series best. Lingalind consists of 2 nations: the Supremacy of Lutoh whch prides in intelligence and diplomacy (which is certainly an accurate depiction of the West, US or European), and the Republic of Rekka, honoring valour above all (which as a Chinese myself, the references are also quite accurate to China's long history). Include the ominous figure of the MC: an amnesiac young man arriving buck-naked in a Rakuho capsule, and with his only mission to go "beyond the wall" from the place that he came according to his memory, the stage is set for the current conflict between Lutoh and Rekka to be amplified with this young man's introduction, who calls himself "Back Arrow".

If you're wondering about where the mecha influence came from (since this is a Nakashima-Taniguchi duo project), look no further than the Rakuho capsules, which are sent from an unknown location once per month and land in pre-determined regions of Lingalind, containing provisions and weapons that the people of Lingalind consider gifts from the wall. Some of these capsules contain devices known as Bind Warpers, metallic armbands that allow one to summon and control a giant mechanical armor known as a Briheight. A Briheight's appearance and abilities are tied to one's "Conviction": the thing they believe in above all else. Conviction is also recognized as an energy that flows throughout the world, powering various forms of advanced technology found within Lingalind and granting some people special abilities outside of operating a Briheight. Being defeated in battle while controlling a Briheight causes the user to disappear. This should be bee's knees easy to understand.

As stupid as it sounds though, the characters are meant to be as trepidatiously idiotic as possible, meaning that while character development is absolutely confined to Gurren Lagann standards (but updated for the modern day), at least there's the innocuous feeling that it doesn't stray away from the familiarity that's strikingly similar, yet different, all at the same time. Back Arrow himself is a wishy-washy guy who's meant to be lugged around in the entire conflict of character "lobotomy", streaming from rivals to even his own "kin" of Edger Village. Speaking of Edger Village though, I like how the citizens there are a mix of both traditional and Western culture. The main aides to Back Arrow (Atlee Ariel, Eisha Lean, Bit Namital) donning their different cultural clothing (Atlee in the usual Japanese traditional Kimono, while Eisha and Bit in the Wild Wild West-like cowboy-centric clothing), which shows that Edger Village is a standalone "nation", one that doesn't seek to be ruled by governmental interventions, that's some creative touch right there. Going back to both Lutoh and Rekka, I also mentioned that they are literal anime doppelgangers to real life, with Lutoh pretty much having an European-like government with Princess Fine Forte, the arbiter of love and diplomacy, right down to her "Council of Europe" with right-hand woman Prax Conrad, the Armor Supreme of Lutoh and the various advisors. Rekka on the other hand, looks exactly like China's Forbidden City, right down to its own myriad of characters which resemble the iconic references: Emperor Zetsu Daidan (Qin Shi Huang), Prime Minister Kyo Meiketsu (Cao Cao), Chancellor Tae Howa (Li Si), strategist Shu Bi (Zhuge Liang), generals Bai Toatsu, Goh Zanga and Kai Rhodan (which are the famous brothers of the "Oath of the Peach Garden" Zhang Fei, Liu Bei and Guan Yu respectively), Kai's subordinate Ren Sin (the closest being Diao Chan), and the Four Fiends (which that one is a total "comedic relief" misfire attempt of creating Power Rangers in a Chinese context). Sadly as much as these little touches go, the characters themselves are a whole other story, as they're mainly quite the annoyance to sit through for most of the series, someones begging the question that "Is too much characters a good thing if going by plot alone?". For realism sake, you have two external parties: the Iki Territory (which acts like a catalyst for the Lutoh Supremacy to capture Back Arrow for divulge at the beginning), and the Pretty Boys, which if I'm not mistaking it right, gives an almost sensible and eerie feeling of being LGBT. Man, talk about a culture clash of this magnitude. I can get why the Iki Territory and its nowhere-near-evil "villains" exist, but the Pretty Boys just seem like an afterthought to keep things "fresh" (for about an episode or 2). Even mentioning God's "chosen" servant to destroy the world: Lutoh's Supreme Elect Rudolph Conductore with his assistant Dissonanza, both beings being God-like figures in the Lingalind world, welcome the hedonistic Roman Empire faction to disrupt the course of events in the show. What a mess of a large character cast though, I always see myself gasping at why shows need THAT many characters just to tell easy, linear stories. In the case of Back Arrow, that is honestly, albeit brings some nostalgia, quite average at best. Combine that with the various silly, nonsensical hijinks of the cast of characters, and the interest starts to wane before the good parts can even come. Easily the weakest link of the show overall.

On the side of animation, it's sub-standardly clear that Studio VOLN still has a long way to go with their visual flare, if comparing this to the longer-produced Karakuri Circus and the sole film that is the Pancreas movie, both made 3 years ago. That said, I always gleam on the thought that well-acclaimed directors and producers go out of their way to try something new, and Back Arrow is no different, so props for the experimental features I guess. Just don't expect Trigger levels of animation to boot when watching this one, and you'll be fine.

Everyone loves OSTs yeah? For long-running series like Back Arrow, we're treated to 2 sets of OP/EDs for both the 1st and 2nd Cour, and normally in the typical situation where proceeding OP/ED sets are generally better, IMO my favourite is the set for the 1st Cour with LiSA and Shuka Saito. Even without withholding, knowing that Aniplex (or Sony Music Japan for that matter) has some of the most amazing artistes like Eir Aoi and rockband FLOW that churns out some good music every so often, Back Arrow redeems itself with the one typical ad hominem aspect of the "too many anime" landscape. Huge props to Kouhei Tanaka for the OST though.

All in all, if you're ready to take mecha anime to the next level with reliving the young days of watching non-mainstream anime, then come in for the ride, because Back Arrow sympathizes with the idiocy and the fallacy of "anime fans must have logic to enjoy anime", and is not afraid to show what it can do to exact its own greatness. While I for one, can marr how bad (and sometimes boring) this show became overtime, it's your mindset to think whether this is either another show you'll enjoy and remember for the years to come (like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann), or one that is destined to just become another track record in the résumé and be left forgotten for good.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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