Music in Movies Monday: Promare

I manage to talk about this film AGAIN

When we first watched Promare, in August of 2020, adrift in my in-law’s basement and drunk on always stocked-up wine, you’d have thought we were watching a spectator sport.

I say this with all the sincerity I can manage, but anime might’ve kept Quinn and I sane during the worst (?) bouts of COVID lockdown when we were one another’s main source of company. Embarrassing, maybe, to admit, but there’s no denying that we grabbed on and held tight to the medium. Prior to we’d been more the one-a-year type of viewers. First, shortly after college, we binged Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and then, in the following year, Cowboy Bebop, chasing it down with Samurai Champloo. We gave Attack on Titan a chance but it couldn’t keep us. We found ourselves falling head over heels for My Hero Academia later (per my suggestion), holed in our Newburyport apartment in the first home of ours that felt as such.

By the time I’d discovered the absolutely addictive Haikyu!! I felt poised to fall off the deep end into a medium that had, quite frankly, intimidated me up until this point. There was just so much with so many people claiming certain ones to be the best and perfect places to start to the point where I’d lose interest only through being overwhelmed by opinion.

Then COVID happened, I began working from home (my inlaw's home) and 5 pm took on a new meaning or goal post to speak. My work day over, I’d maybe move to a different room or even sit outside. Maybe go on a walk if feeling any modicum of ambition. But really, the routine was to finish work, make food, and earn our permanent residency on the downstairs couch.

We watched a lot of anime. From smaller titles like the quirky and sweet Princess Jellyfish to the Studio Trigger property Gurren Lagann at the request of our friend and the tonally absurd Parasyte. We got worse once we moved to Portland, COVID and isolation still raging, and we began being seasonal viewers as we devoured everything and anything that caught our interest, from sports anime like Run with the Wind and Tsurune to slice-of-life romances like Love is War, My Love Story, and Horimiya.

You need comfort in what seems like the prequel to the end days? Well, I think I found our fix with endless episodes of pure, escapist, bliss.

But back in the basement, the first time we watched the film Promare, also from Studio Trigger, we were smacked in the face by the adrenaline rush that was the score for the film by Hiroyuki Sawano. Despite a general world-weariness at this point, we were glued to the television as the vibrancy swirled and angular, crisp artistry rebelled against convention. It is, by far, one of the best examples of a score perfectly molding to the will of the film only to in the end further embolden the story's intent.  

Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, the film is set 30 years after a cataclysmic event introduced the appearance of Burnish, a race of flame-wielding mutants who accidentally destroyed half the world with their fire. Following a dumb of mind, good of heart firefighter as he faces down a new group of mutants, the film wades into pools of combating intolerance of the unknown, all while the visuals combust in sugar rush bursts.

The film is currently on HBO Max. If this isn’t typically you’re type of film I’m not going to argue too hard about watching it since it is hyper-active and dizzying on many visual fronts. The sense is that it’s meant to be a sensory overload, submerging us fully into the chaos and complexities of the world.

I will say though, that after watching it the first time, we very soon made Carly watch it as well. Then, months later, we roped our friends into a night of watching and later still, brought my youngest sister to the theater to see it on the big screen when it played through Fathom Events. Frankly, I can’t remember the last time a film has motivated me to see it so often, without any actual deadline attached to it, in such short periods of time.

It’s a whirlwind concoction of pure spectacle, aided by a gleefully bombastic, deliberately sincere score of heightened emotional responses. It is, by far, some of the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in years.