Promare is the hottest and most personal cartoon I've seen this year. It's flamboyant, imaginative and candid humor style is refreshing to me. As a hot-blooded movie, its cliché story still gave me full of positive energy.
The story of the movie is actually simple: there is a multidimensional alien creature Promare in the form of fire in the core of the earth. They mutate some humans into Burnish, and suggest that they set fire to communicate with Burnish. Burnish was captured alive by the villain government as an energy source. Lio, the leader of Burnish, and Galo, the protagonist of the mecha fire brigade, did not know each other, and finally joined forces to defeat the villain to save the world and save the universe.
The story is based on fire, but the raging flames inside are not the red flames we are familiar with, but the jumping pink wrapped in fluorescent green. Triangles and polygons are layered, rapidly changing, and combined to form an abstract flame, which is connected into an unpredictable sea of fire. Various highlights of yellow, green, red, blue, white and shiny metallic black collide sharply in the changing scene. Conflicting full chromaticity, fast-paced fighting action and progressive music, constantly breaking the audience's audio-visual expectations. The protagonist and the villain have many rounds of high-energy confrontation, and finally explode the universe, breaking through the boundaries of the audience's imagination.
The personality of the movie is also reflected in its emergency-stop insertion of characters and moves. No matter how urgent the juncture or how intense the fight is, as long as new equipment and moves appear, the story will stop abruptly, freeze the hand-painted character/equipment/movement map for three seconds, and add a bold and capitalized title. This rough and direct announcement is inherited from Trigger's two previous animations. The production team interspersed high-quality hand-painting in the animation, tame the audience's aesthetics arbitrarily.
The film not only subverts traditional colors, conventional imagination and coherent narrative, but also humorously deconstructs the routine of "love, courage and hope". The protagonists Galo and Lio were thrown into the ice lake by their companions to calm down, but they accidentally encountered the hologram of Professor Deus. As a Non-play Character (NPC), Professor Deus not only tells the protagonist the ins and outs of things, of course, he must bring out the big killer, Deus ex Machina, to help the protagonist defeat the villain (otherwise the drama will not go on!). At the end of this cliche plot, the protagonist seriously asks the key question.
Protagonist: "What if we lose?" Professor: "The earth will be destroyed." Protagonist: "Why did you choose us?" Professor: "I didn't choose you, I just saw you just passing by."
I and the rest of the audience were ready to be taught "Love, Courage and Hope", but were taken aback by Professor Deus' casual answer. From Gundam to Pokémon, which protagonist with a halo is not the chosen one? And the protagonist of saving the earth in Promare is just a lucky passerby? In fact, most of our encounters in reality are just passing by, so why bother to deceive ourselves through movies? The production team easily pierced everyone's narcissism as the protagonist, knocking on their heads and telling us that they just happened to meet, and no one is the chosen one. wake up!
It is also worth remembering the music that is full of pictures in the movie. The theme song "Inferno" shines brightly and keeps going forward. Lio theme "Ashes" is sad and helpless, but it reveals the determination to fight the last stand and the hope that gushed out. Galo theme "Gal-othy-mos" is fast-paced and full of oriental charm.
Students who like to learn English can also learn about the two English keywords in the movie. The theme song "Inferno" is translated as raging fire. Inferno is derived from the Latin infernus, which means "lower world". Dante describes his journey to hell in a chapter called "The Inferno" in The Divine Comedy. Inferno is also referred to as hell, the fire of hell. The killer in the movie is called Deus ex machina, which means 'god from the machine' in Latin. In ancient Greek dramas, actors who played gods would go on stage through some devices (slings, cables, etc.) and resolve irreconcilable plot contradictions, allowing the plot to continue to develop. The production team bluntly told the audience that they were relying on 'god from the machine' to promote the plot, and it was frank enough.
Finally, I would like to ask a question to my friends who have watched the movie: If you had a choice, would you be Burnish or an ordinary human being?
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