Trigun Stampede

Studio Orange director: “Man, I was watching this piece of trash Boomer anime the other day and all my buddies around me were laughing at it. Then it suddenly struck me. This is an absolute tragedy! This old piece of trash actually has all the elements there to be a masterpiece and it’s simply being handcuffed by all this hackneyed anime bullshit! Imagine if it cut out the stupid comedy, extra characters, pointless romance sub-plot, pointless fanservice, and just really doubled down on the psychological drama and grimdark elements. Those Zoomers who laugh at this shit right now and dismiss it will have their mindsabsolutely blown! They don’t even know! We’re gonna break this series free from its chains that have been holding it back and by God it’s gonna COOK!” Me: “Say no more! I know exactly what anime you guys are talking about. You don’t even need to say it! God, it’s hard to be an Elfen Lied fan in 2023. People just don’t get it, but you’re clearly seeing what I’m seeing! Studio Orange: “Elfen what? Bruh, I was talking about Trigun! Me: “….are y’all serious?!” Welcome to Studio Orange’s well intentioned albeit often baffling attempt to “fix” Trigun by giving it a darker, grittier reboot that completely does its own thing and often flat out gives the finger to the original manga and anime. We all know Trigun is a Boomer anime with a cult following, but what is Trigun exactly? Trigun is a Space Western that at its core is a love letter to old cowboy movies. It takes place in a bizarre, steampunk setting on this desert covered alien planet that a colony of human pioneers have been stranded on. So, you have a mixture of crazy science fiction stuff and aliens with 1860s technology and old west gun duels. This is admittedly a silly premise. The original series and the manga are fully aware of this. The manga started out as a screwball action comedy that was published in a shonen magazine, but it went on hiatus and returned in a seinen magazine with a much darker and more serious tone. This gradual shift is emulated by the 1998 anime adaptation that starts out very funny and wildly entertaining before taking a more somber turn. The 2023 anime by contrast is a much more serious affair throughout. The first episode at least tries to capture some of the zaniness of the early manga and the 1998 anime, but if those were cranked up to 10, Trigun Stampede turns it down to maybe a 4 or 5. Then there are children being killed in just the second episode of Stampede and the comedy never returns. Trigun Stampede very clearly feels like the fun element and comedy was an impediment to the franchise’s quality. I feel like this is a deeply misguided take on the franchise. The comedy and fun elements of Trigun actually compliment the ridiculous setting and whole “Space Western” thing, which would be a mistake to simply make dead serious. The gradual shift from lighthearted to serious also works in the series’ favor by making the serious moments really stand out and giving them an added punch. To be fair to Studio Orange, there are series that have comedy that feels completely tacked on and the inclusion of these scenes does nothing but hurt the series. That’s a common problem in old anime. I joked in the opening paragraph about Elfen Lied in particular suffering from this, but Ashita no Joe part 1 suffers from this! Even some really good anime have this problem. It’s just that Trigun is NOT one of those series! Another massive departure from the source material and original anime is that Trigun Stampede never once feels like a Western. The original anime has over a dozen shots directly ripped from old Western movies. In one of the very first episodes, you have this longshot of a creaky windmill which is taken directly from 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. There’s another shot from an early episode taken directly from the 1964 film Fistful of Dollars. The original anime is shot and framed like a Western. The soundtrack feels like a Western. Vash and Knives end up settling their differences in an old-time gun duel that feels straight out of a Western. The 1998 anime is proud to be a Western. Trigun Stampede has Knives hook Vash up to a supercomputer and hack into him using his weird tentacles in order to ascend to the “higher dimension” and make contact with the “Wave Existence”, Capital G God in order to give his fellow artificial life forms souls so that they can have freewill. I’m sorry, but what the FUCK is this?! The team behind Trigun Stampede has clearly played Xenogears before and watched Evangelion but I don’t think anyone on this production team has watched a Sergio Leone film, let alone loves those types of movies. There’s a weird scene in Trigun Stampede where a young Vash draws a parallel between Humanity settling space and the American pioneers of the old west, but this idea of a space western is brought up in Stampede only to be immediately ridiculed and dismissed. This is a thing that reboots do when they’re trying to be more “mature” and “gritty” than the original. It’s that trailer scene in X-Men 2000 when Wolverine snarks “What did you expect? Yellow spandex?” Trigun Stampede is a pure science fiction with weird JRPG pseudo-religious stuff that has zero interest in being a Western. Yet another massive difference can be found in the main protagonist Vash, who in the manga and original anime acts like a complete and utter goofball. He starts out as this Looney Toons character, but then you find out that it’s simply a persona that he shows to the public to hide his pain and loneliness. The real Vash underneath the goofy mask is a suffering, Messianic figure who doesn’t want others to have to share his burden. He essentially treats Humanity like a parent would treat their small child. This makes perfect sense given that he’s a 120+ year old alien with Godlike powers. Vash in Trigun 2023 is a much weaker and more vulnerable character. He’s not super OP in combat and emotionally he’s kind a mopey emo boy for almost the entirety of the series. Trigun 2023 believed they were making him more human and relatable, but I don’t feel like it worked exactly in the way that they wanted. If anything, it just made him much more forgettable. Most of the cast got shafted in Trigun 2023, but Meryl Strife easily got it the worst. Meryl in the original is a short tempered, no-nonsense girl boss who can hold her own in a gun fight, has hilarious chemistry with Vash as the straight man to Vash’s shenanigans and is also a romantic interest for Vash. Meryl in the 2023 reboot is basically April O’Neil from Ninja Turtles. She’s this naïve reporter lady who is simply looking for her big scoop but ends up largely being a spectator with no real agency and doesn’t really contribute much. Milly was entirely replaced by a grizzled old reporter named Robert DeNiro who is only 3 weeks away from retirement and is getting too old for this shit. Why is he named DeNiro? He should clearly be Danny Glover! Fucking Stampede can’t even make the right actor jokes. Although it is mentioned in the last episode that Milly exists in this universe and may appear if a sequel ever happens. Wolfwood is given a lot less time to shine here and just feels like a very watered down, shittier version of the original character. His motivations in Stampede are also a lot dumber. Wolfwood in the original series was raised in an abusive household and murdered his own father, thus becoming an orphan. He was then raised by one of Knives’ super soldiers as a possible successor and uses the skills he acquired as a gun for hire to finance an orphanage. Wolfwood is basically a sleeper agent since he’s in contact with someone who works for the main villain, but he doesn’t directly work for the main baddie or know his plans. He ends up refusing to go along with the main villain’s plans and to the end stays loyal to his orphanage and his friends despite his wrongdoings. Wolfwood in 2023 exists solely as a delivery boy to bring Vash to his brother Knives, which honestly makes the rest of the Gungho Guns and Legato completely pointless in the 2023 anime. Knives in 2023 didn’t intend for any of his super soldiers to kill Vash or force Vash to suffer by having to kill one of them, thus preparing him for their final duel. They are literally there for no reason. Wolfwood works directly for Knives and clearly knows that Knives will use Vash’s energy to do something absolutely apocalyptic and almost certainly wipe out Mankind, but he’s delivering Vash to Knives all for the sake of the orphans…whom Knives will kill the second he makes the delivery. Did they even think about this? Insert Biff Tannen and/or Omni Man clip. Now it’s FINALLY time to say something nice about Trigun 2023. They actually tried to make Knives a more complex character whose love for his brother Vash is just as strong as his hatred for Mankind. Knives’ motivation for hating Humanity is much more fleshed out in 2023 and he’s given a level sympathy that he never got in the original. In the last 20 years of movies and TV media, we’ve come to expect for villains to have more relatable motivations. Everyone wants to write MCU Thanos or Toguro from Yu Yu Hakusho and not the cackling madman who is just an asshole for the Hell of it. Knives in the original anime is an artificial life form who was created to serve Humanity, but from the beginning looked down on Humanity as his inferiors and wants to wipe us out. He’s a very solitary figure with a God complex and not a lot of love in his heart for anyone. OG Knives is basically just Sephiroth from the original FF7. That type of villain works best when you don’t see a lot of them. They’re this shadowy figure with unknowable motivations whom you are never asked to empathize with. All you know is that they’re going to be hard to stop. This is the Lovecraft approach to writing antagonists, and it’s widely considered antiquated. Trigun 2023 had an interesting take on Knives and I appreciate that they made the effort. The animation is..fine if you like Studio Orange’s approach to CG. This series had a budget. They put effort into it. It has some scenes that are very visually impressive. It also has some scenes I think looked like dog shit, but I digress. The music is fine. It’s definitely not iconic like the original anime’s OST, but it serves its purpose adequately. I also appreciate that while Orange’s vision of Trigun was radically, fundamentally different, they did keep it consistent. It wasn’t grimdark one moment only to be goofy the next. They didn’t go full science fiction one episode only to backtrack. They fully committed to their own interpretation of what Trigun should be. When you consider Trigun 2023 to be its own series that’s loosely inspired by Trigun, it begins to look a lot better. Instead of a replacement or a reboot, we can see this series as a sort of “spiritual successor” that takes some concepts from the original while comfortably being its own thing. That’s the takeaway point at the end of the day. I think it’s a horrible adaptation of Trigun that fundamentally misunderstands what made Trigun so beloved in the first place and why it worked. However, it’s also not a bad anime when you examine it in a vacuum and stop thinking about the original. If it didn’t have the Trigun name, I would say this is an above average anime that I could comfortably recommend to friends. It’s fine. It’s perfectly serviceable as a seasonal anime in 2023. That’s why I’m still giving it a 6 out of 10. It doesn’t deserve to be crucified simply because it’s not the original. The original already exists. It’s not going anywhere or being replaced on every streaming site and store shelf. If you’ve never seen either version of Trigun, I would definitely check out the original first, but you can also give this one a watch. If you hate old school animation and you’re only interested in new stuff, you can watch Trigun 2023 and just not worry about the original.

Never written anything in MAL, but this awful anime made me write a short review.. This is one awful anime.. In general CGI isn't great and in general a terrible art choice, but here it looks like the most generic, boring and lifeless thing ever, they also changed how Vash the Stampede looked for the worst. He is such a boring/blend looking MC now... On top of this they also left out Milly, although she is mentioned once, who had a pretty big role in the original anime and was somewhat of a crowd favorite. There is reason for Vash the Stampede's (the1998's) womanizing/goofy character, his past was pretty bad and its his way of coping with it.. In the 2023 reboot he is portrayed as always gloomy while looking like a zoomer with his terrible 'trendy' hair and way to big glasses.. There are more things to talk about, but i can just leave it at it's a terrible reboot in general.. Stick to the Trigun anime from 1998, that one is actually good compared to this IMO.

The original 1998 anime adaptation of Trigun is one of those rare beasts that grew big in North America after flopping in Japan. In fact, it became so successful in America that it spawned a side story movie more than a decade later. Even more surprisingly, after another decade, we're getting this reboot, with the source material having sat finished on the shelf for over 15 years already. One quick glance at any of the pictures related to Trigun Stampede is enough to tell you that the makers have struck out in a completely new direction in terms of aesthetic. I can't say I was tookeen on the new style, but since the 1998 adaptation was one of the first anime I watched and enjoyed as an adult, I decided to check it out despite my reservations. For old times' sake. The resulting experience was … interesting, to say the least. I'll be honest, my impressions of the 1998 version is etched deeply, and perhaps because of this, I couldn't help but compare this new version against the original at every turn. Unfortunately, Trigun Stampede does not hold up well in these comparisons, at least not for the first half of this season. First, let's get the elephant out of the room and into the open: the CG. I'll preface this by saying that I did not think much of character designs of the original, with their blush lines making them look like children's sketches; nor do I consider myself as someone anti-CG who would shudder at the mere thought of using CG in anime. So it's as much of a surprise to me that I soon found myself yearning for the hand drawn look of the original that I felt lukewarm towards to begin with! The CG has polished away the rough edges of the original design, but it's also over polished away a lot of the visual flair that gave the original personality, as well as the aesthetic that so suited the dusty, grimy wild west feel of its world. Beyond the art style, movements such as how hair sway and how the characters move feels too smooth and so deeply rooted in the uncanny valley that they distracted me from focusing on the story. The CG is especially ill suited to the goofy antics and over-the-top gunslinging action inherent to the franchise. Even Vash's red trenchcoat - so iconic in the 1998 version with its plethora of straps and buttons - becomes just an unremarkable looking red trench coat in Stampede. The only place I can think of where the CG does well is in animating Million Knives' weaponry, as it had the effect of giving them an unsettlingly alien and phobia-inducing creepy quality. It's obvious that Trigun Stampede was deliberately made to distinguish itself from its predecessor, and the visuals was just one of the ways that signalled this intention. One of the producers even said that they wanted to attract new audiences with Trigun Stampede, but to me the show actually does the opposite. The backstory involving Rem was perhaps THE major emotional climax as the 1998 Trigun entered its final straight; here, it's revealed in the opening episode. Moreover, the major players all appear early on with their ulterior motives laid bare as the outline of the plot is sketched out. That takes a lot of the tension out of the story, meaning there's no sense of mystery; no hook in the plot to reel the audience in; the characters haven't even been built up enough to make you care about their backstories yet! The only way I could see it working was if Stampede was intended for people who've seen the original and are just here to see the characters they know and love in a retelling of a story they're already familiar with. And even in this, I think they fall short - I'm pretty fond of the original Trigun, but I spent disappointingly long stretches of the first half of Stampede feeling bored. The characterisations also mostly misses the mark: Wolfwood, who was so effortlessly cool in the original, just comes off as someone trying too hard to be cool here; the newly introduced Roberto de Niro fits so snugly inside the archetypical jaded senpai mould that the only remarkable thing about him is his name - and most disappointingly, he's not even voiced by Robert de Niro in the dub! One of strengths of the 1998 Trigun was how well it juggled the goofy humour with the pathos; in Stampede, the balance feels out of whack as it discarded most of its goofy side and ramped up the angst instead, and the little goofiness that remained feels forced and out of place. It's not even very good angst: there's a lot of shouting but the lacklustre character chemistry and the unremarkable script meant that it felt more annoying than anything else in my emotionally detached state. The strongest emotion I felt while watching the first half of Trigun Stampede was nostalgia, and not in good way for this new instalment. As the series touched upon familiar characters, familiar references and familiar features of this imaginative world, it evoked in me an appreciation of how well conceived the original concept was, and how much better it was done in the 1998 adapation. Almost the only improvement Trigun Stampede makes comes from the writers realising that, as much as "Knives" makes for a badass antagonist name, it's a ridiculous one to give to a child. So here, they made the main antagonist's birth name "Nai" instead. To its credit, Trigun Stampede eventually gets its shit together and finally came into its own for the second half. With the caveat of it being so long since I last saw the original that I've have forgotten a lot of the finer details, I felt that Stampede aimed for and succeeded in fleshing out Vash and Knives' origin story a lot more. Most notably, Knives was simply a coldly logical and blood thirsty killer in the original, and here he becomes a much more sympathetic character, with his contrast against Vash feeling rather like that between Magneto and Profession X. One particularly harrowing scene of plants in their "last run" is one of many that makes Knives' case against humanity quite damning, and they provide especially poignant food for thought in this current era when climate change and living off the planet sustainably are such hot topics. I kinda wished we got to see more of Rem though, especially when the prolific Maaya Sakamoto lent such an experienced, star quality to her voice that she stole almost every scene in which she played a significant part. The final part of Trigun Stampede wasn't without issues, the most glaring one being the technical aspect of the plot descending into incomprehensible, gobbledigook jargon jungle. That said, the ending provides an intriguing twist (one that I might have guessed had I re-familiarised myself with the original adaptation before embarking on this one), but you'd have to have seen the original to appreciate it. Yet again, this was an instance of the series throwing a bone to a familiar crowd that the newbies to the franchise would miss. Before I finish up, I want to give a nod to the music production of Trigun Stampede. While the series abandoned the snarling electric guitar solos and the twanging sound of the blues of the original, what they replaced it with is at least as good. The opening is a modern, stylish chiller of a song with the auto-tune effect serving as a fitting parallel to the CG laden visuals; the ending is a melodic soother, gentle like a summer drizzle. Combined, they represent one of the best OP/ED combinations I can think of in recent anime. The background music is also good, serving up an array of distinctive styles to suit distinctive sceneries. This is one anime for which I want to check out the sound track! So, how do I feel about this new adaptation of Trigun? Try as I might, I can't extricate myself from my impressions of the original to give an independent assessment of Trigun Stampede, different though it may be in both style and substance. My best guess though, is that newcomers to the series will find it underwhelming. But for existing customers, it's not bad, with a strong second half salvaging the mediocrity of the first. The more in depth origin story makes it a worthy supplement to the 1998 adaptation. At the very least, it has sold me on the next season, and I'm feeling just a little a spark of excitement about how they'll continue the story. Personal rating: +0.5 (decent)

A complete bastardization of a cult classic. While the original Trigun had its issues, mostly with Vash's sense of morality having double standards in the second half of the show, Trigun Stampede abandons everything that was good about the series in order to make an edgy adaptation for a younger audience... but it just fucking sucks ass and feels like a cash grab. The choice to remake this show in 3D was one of the worst mistakes possible and should have been a very huge red flag to anyone keeping track of releases over the past decade or so. But even then I gave it thebenefit of the doubt. Not every 3D show is bad. Shows like beastars or land of the lustrous are able to utilize a 3D style consistently while maintaining stylistic integrity. However in this case the 3D art present is on a similar quality to anime adaptation of God Eater or... indie animations such as RWBY. This is also a level of artistic bastardization similar to the awfulness of the modern GITS 3D remakes. It completely misses the point of the original anime and manga's style. It portrays more of a techno-dystopian sci-fi society instead of a run-down western with archaic tech no longer understood. I think one of the most awful things they decided to do artistically is change Vash's signature hairstyle into an absolutely generic modern cut. It makes his character design just have no soul at all. The animation is not the worst that I've seen come out of the 3D space in Japan, however it just does not stand up to any studio that is more competent at 3D animation in the country such as Sony. The writing is absolutely horrific. It abandons most of the meat and potatoes of the manga and series, and just about the only thing it keeps is the protagonist/antagonist relationship between Vash and his brother. Comic relief characters such as millie are just... almost entirely absent. In fact there really is no humor present throughout the show even though the original series was heavily comedy focused. Did the director of this even watch the original? Did they even read the manga? It feels to me that they may have had someone read them a paragraph summary and just did their own thing. And this is complimented by one of the most generic and lazy copy/pasted soundtracks I've seen in an anime for a long time. But what do I expect when they hired the composer of fucking food wars and kampfer for this. One of the key aspects of the music in the original was how the music harmonically was very much inspired from Jazz, funk, a tiny amount of ragtime, and a bit of rock thrown in. That is why it was so often compared to Cowboy Bebop... the music *accentuated* the western feel of the series alongside the visuals of the desert. The soundtrack for stampede only attempts to recreate the style of things you would be more familiar with seeing in anime such as Angel Beats, Evangelion, Darling in the Franxx, etc. where the music matches a lighter color pallet. This style however, just does not fit with a western. If you want to get into Trigun. Do not watch this, The Original 90s show more than holds up by today's standards, and even the movie is decent. But this is just awful.