Tiger & Bunny Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
Tiger & Bunny debuted in 2011, an era before the superhero industrial complex had fully taken over Hollywood. The Marvel Cinematic Universe only consisted of three films. Andrew Garfield was yet to become Spider-Man. It’s safe to say that Season 1 of the anime had a lot less competition than it does now. Conversely, the long-awaited second season of Tiger & Bunny is competing with over a dozen superhero stories releasing just this year. Luckily, Tiger & Bunny Season 2 stands out by giving us a character-driven world that places intimacy ahead of action sequences.
Tiger & Bunny is an anime about superheroes based in Sternbild –– a fictional city based on New York. In this world, superheroism is a salaried occupation. Employed superheroes are featured on a program called Hero TV, where they compete by performing heroic acts like saving lives and catching criminals. Like any job, you can be fired from superheroism if your numbers aren’t up to snuff. The cast is pressured to perform effectively or get the boot, causing a constant tension between commercialization and selfless heroism.
The show centers on Kotetsu and Barnaby, a superhero duo with identical powers. Kotetsu is an older, more traditional superhero that prioritizes saving lives above meeting quotas. Barnaby, on the other hand, is younger and more focused on earning points. Their values clash throughout the first season. By Season 2, this dynamic has mellowed to an extent. The pair is more closely coded as a couple. Kotetsu and Barnaby have graduated from the original buddy-cop dynamic to an old married couple stage. Bickering is the norm, but there’s a clear level of trust between them. They can now wordlessly perform actions like setting up and executing joint attacks.
Character work is what Tiger & Bunny does best. Barnaby, for instance, spent the first season single-mindedly focusing on finding the person who killed his parents. To reflect his focus, Barnaby’s apartment was bare of all furniture, save for a single chair. Having caught the killer at the end of Season 1, Barnaby has begun filling his apartment with plants. It perfectly reflects how clueless he is in actually decorating his home, while doubly showing how he has been able to let go since the first season.
Side characters receive equally thoughtful attention. Season 2 has added a “Buddy System” to Sternbuild‘s superheroes, requiring that every character is placed in a duo. This leads to some unlikely pairings like Fire Emblem and Sky High, which allows for some self-reflective interactions that weren’t available in the first season.
Weirdly, many of these duos feel coded as couples, much like Kotetsu and Barnaby. It’s unclear if every partnership is seen as basically a romantic relationship. This could be an attempt to cash in on the many fan creations inspired by the first season. Whatever the reason, it adds strangely sexual energy to some episodes that feel at odds with some previous developments.
This season adds three heroes: He Is Thomas, Mr. Black, and Magical Cat. These characters are seemingly designed as audience stand-ins and human plot devices. Mr. Black and He Is Thomas parallels Kotetsu and Barnaby, reflecting their Season 1 personalities. The contrast is nice for reminding us how far the characters have progressed, but the trio robs the original cast of valuable screen time. Kotetsu and Barnaby are well developed, but I wish they had more time to shine.
Season 2’s story, meanwhile, is weaker than that of the first season. Many episodes lack narrative tension. One-off adventures go nowhere other than teaching the cast an important lesson about communication. In the first season, Kotetsu’s powers and ranking were both waning. He could plausibly lose his livelihood at any moment. Lunatic, a vigilante who kills criminals, was also running amok. Every criminal could be executed in a flash, circumventing the justice that heroes are there to uphold.
In Season 2, tension is primarily caused by the looming threat of Fugan and Mugan, two villains en route to Sternbild. They’re heralded by a flashforward in the first episode that depicts a cornered Barnaby. During their journey, Fugan and Mugan defeat heroes across the globe, but their progress is almost exclusively seen via post-credits scenes. The actual fights between the pair and those they defeat are scarcely shown otherwise, making it difficult to gauge their strength or feel anything when the heroes are defeated. The pair seems to be framed as an incoming disaster, but they lack weight in the grand scheme of the story. It’s difficult to be afraid of characters that were almost entirely developed off-screen.
On the bright side, however, Season 2 has a fantastic English dub. Almost everyone from the original cast returns. The English dub cast perfectly sells Sternbild as the New York City stand-in it’s intended to be. Wally Wingert’s Kotetsu is fittingly bumbling while remaining steadfast, and John Eric Bentley’s portrayal of Fire Emblem is particularly great. Rather than leaning on unfortunate queer stereotypes, Bentley’s voice for Fire Emblem is realistically balanced, and the usage of Emblem's they/them pronouns in the English dub is refreshing.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/PV3Bdzp
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