Cannon Busters opens with a bright-eyed, naive young woman and her assistant wandering into a deadly space West landscape. They are looking for a legendary, unkillable outlaw who has a colossal price on his head, and who constantly attracts roaming gangs of murderous scumbag bounty hunters. So far, so Trigun.
The overriding feeling watching Cannon Buster is that everything is overly familiar. It's 2-kewl-4-skewl hero, Philly the Kid, is basically Spike Spiegel with a bigger afro. There's some hokum over-arching plot involving a giant gorilla's bid for World domination which looks a lot like the one from Space Dandy. Then there's the space western setting itself, which looks like every other space western setting ever shown. Also Philly has a car which transforms into a fighting robotsuit, Which is, *sigh*, whatever. The only thing that feels particularly different is that almost the entire cast is black, which is admittedly a welcome change.
I found myself quickly getting bored by the show, and only managed the first 9 of the 12 episode season. There's some good moments of action, and the thing perks up with the introduction of a jolly, if still unoriginal, alcoholic samurai, but I found myself failing to pay attention and I would struggle to recount to you what is going on with the main super-villain plot, which involves a peaceful gleaming city being over-run by killer machines. There's a couple of other issues I can point to, such as the difficulty of wrangling anything other than comedy out of a protagonist who won't stay dead, or the bad decision to involve routine boring CGI robot on robot fights.
So if you haven't watched any of the other anime I've mentioned, you might be more charitable to Cannon Busters. But if that is the case, I'd still sooner recommend you watch this old stuff instead. Cowboy Bebop and Trigun might be starting to look pretty dated these days, but there's far more substance to them.
Anime So What's New?
Cannon Busters opens with a bright-eyed, naive young woman and her assistant wandering into a deadly space West landscape. They are looking for a legendary, unkillable outlaw who has a colossal price on his head, and who constantly attracts roaming gangs of murderous scumbag bounty hunters. So far, so Trigun.
The overriding feeling watching Cannon Buster is that everything is overly familiar. It's 2-kewl-4-skewl hero, Philly the Kid, is basically Spike Spiegel with a bigger afro. There's some hokum over-arching plot involving a giant gorilla's bid for World domination which looks a lot like the one from Space Dandy. Then there's the space western setting itself, which looks like every other space western setting ever shown. Also Philly has a car which transforms into a fighting robotsuit, Which is, *sigh*, whatever. The only thing that feels particularly different is that almost the entire cast is black, which is admittedly a welcome change.
I found myself quickly getting bored by the show, and only managed the first 9 of the 12 episode season. There's some good moments of action, and the thing perks up with the introduction of a jolly, if still unoriginal, alcoholic samurai, but I found myself failing to pay attention and I would struggle to recount to you what is going on with the main super-villain plot, which involves a peaceful gleaming city being over-run by killer machines. There's a couple of other issues I can point to, such as the difficulty of wrangling anything other than comedy out of a protagonist who won't stay dead, or the bad decision to involve routine boring CGI robot on robot fights.
So if you haven't watched any of the other anime I've mentioned, you might be more charitable to Cannon Busters. But if that is the case, I'd still sooner recommend you watch this old stuff instead. Cowboy Bebop and Trigun might be starting to look pretty dated these days, but there's far more substance to them.