The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Blue Miburo

Nio is an orphan who can't help dreaming of a better world. He meets two men who show him how much a few swords can change history.

Blue Miburo is based on the The Blue Wolves of Mibu manga by Tsuyoshi Yasuda. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

GoHands may be known for their distinctively butt-ugly productions, blazing a trail in terrible compositing, muddy color gradients, and Medusa-esque hair, but there's another studio that has come to specialize in the truly hideous. Maho Films' anime may be less ostentatiously ghastly than GoHands', but two years ago they rendered a show I was looking forward to, I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss, into an unwatchable mess, and I'll never forget the big, ugly chins that marred My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 and the startlingly flat colors of A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life. But Blue Miburo is based on a manga, not a light novel; it already has a set art style. How bad could they mess that up?

LOL. LMAO, even.

If I were the artist of Blue Miburo, I'd be furious at seeing my art rendered this way for anime. I've seen manga panels, and while they didn't blow my socks off, there was some finely-wrought linework and carefully-composed swordfights. The Maho Films version has gone with the approach to color where they aim for an old film sort of sepia tone, but instead end up with something that looks like every frame was rubbed in dirt. The animation is horribly stiff and awkward, the characters' facial features shifting between shots. The relatively realistic historical animation makes it so that every exaggerated expression has an uncanny quality to it, especially when their faces split into big, toothy grins.

The plot is a standard enough historical drama, which doesn't excite me nearly enough to make it feel worth it to slog through the ugly, ugly animation. The script is as clunky as animation, a total waste of some excellent voice actors. The episode's climax consists of the protagonist, a white-haired child named Nio, delivering a rant about how children are taken advantage of in society. And he's right, but also includes some lines about how “they” take land and brawl in the streets, which doesn't seem… pertinent? It's strange and rambling but not delivered in such a way where it feels like it's supposed to be, especially as the music swells and everyone looks on, deeply affected by this eloquent, observant child.

It's just not good, and I'm not sure if better animation would have salvaged it… but maybe it would have been a 2.5-star show instead of a paltry 1.5 stars. Maho Films is a scourge on the industry.

Blue Miburo is exactly the kind of show you'd expect to sneak in at the tail-end of the season, like that kid who always shows up twenty minutes late to class with a Starbucks in his hand, acting like you aren't going to notice if he just shuffles on in and starts sipping on his coffee and pretending like he has a damned clue what's going on. It's a bad premiere, there's no two ways about it, but it's bad in the kind of aggressively nondescript way that makes you think that it wants to be ignored. Sorry, champ. It's my job to take stock of every new show of the fall season, and Blue Miburo doesn't earn a “Get Out of Preview Guide Free!” just because it is content to fade into the fog of forgettable mediocrity.

The signs are all there from the moment Blue Miburo's premiere begins. The artwork is flat and washed-out, lending absolutely no charm to the show's Edo Era period setting. The character designs are as basic as can possibly be, giving every member of the cast — even our silver-haired protagonist — the look of background extras who would normally only exist to fill up crowd reaction shots and the like. While I'm happy that Nio, Iroha, and the ronin “Wolves” we meet got the chance to get their closeups and earn their SAG cards, it doesn't make for a very compelling experience on our end of the screen. Blue Miburo isn't terribly ugly, but it is a total void of discernible style or personality, and the generally limited animation only accentuates how little the anime is giving us to work with.

Granted, even in this visual medium, you can get away with a lot when you've got a good story to work with…and I'm sure that you can look at that star rating up there and guess how Blue Miburo shakes out in that department. It is, again, a case of the show not failing in any exceptionally noticeable way; rather, it steadfastly refuses to write a single story beat or line of dialogue that will stick in its viewers' memory banks. I have seen many samurai- and ninja- adjacent TV shows and movies in my lifetime, and I've hit every point of the quality spectrum. The point is, I've seen the scene where the innocent perspective characters get saved from an ambush by their mysterious new swordsman friends at least a hundred times, and Blue Miburo doesn't do a single thing that could help it stand out compared to either the good or the crappy examples I've already got living in my brain. When the Miburo save Nio and Iroha, there's no tension to be found, no spark of chemistry or cool screen presence on the part of Hijikata or Okita, and nothing else for the audience to emotionally invest in.

Watching Blue Miburo is an experience that is about as entertaining as waiting in line for the grocery checkout when there's only a couple of poor, underworked kids to man the busy lanes. In other words, this is not a series you need to worry about including as a last-minute addition into your seasonal viewing rotation. If you are desperate for more old-school samurai swordplay, then by all means, check out Thunderbolt Fantasy instead.

If I'm going to pick up a new iteration of the Shinsengumi story, it had better bring something to the table that makes it as good as or better than my two favorites, the Kaze Hikaru manga and the Hakuōki otome games, or at least be entertainingly trashy like a couple of other Shinsengumi-themed otome games I've played. Blue Miburo is neither of these things – it's a very standard piece of historical fiction doing what many another similar work has done: put in a new character not recorded in the history books and attempt to tell the storied tale of the Shinsengumi through their eyes. I'm sure there are works that don't do this, but at this moment, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single one.

It's not a bad approach, and this isn't without its appeal. Nio, our new recruit, is a plucky orphan with an investment in social justice, particularly as relates to the kids left behind by the adults – adults who do things like “use small girls as bait for creepy kidnappers and then act like that was fine.” The girl in question is Nio's sister Iroha, so he's got a leg to stand on, even though Iroha seems remarkably calm with the whole situation. And Nio looks, from the opening theme, to be one of three boys recruited by Shinsengumi standbys Hijikata and Okita, none of whom are going to go down in history according to the frame narrative by one of the few survivors of the group. It's a plot that's worked before, and it may work again here.

But the thing is that those other works that have used this plot all have something else going for them. This one seems to be playing it straight, putting all of its eggs in the basket of “orphans join legendary group” without setting up anything else. Hijikata and Okita are basically the same characters they are every time, the art is flat and dull, and the sword “fight” is over without us seeing any actual swordplay. Nio's whole deal, apart from his pale hair and eyes, is that he's really observant, which isn't all that interesting.

I have read the first volume of the manga this is based on, so I may be a little more hopeful about the show's chances based on that, although the issue with the over-drawn, cartoonishly expressive faces against otherwise stoic art is present in both story forms. But this just isn't doing enough to hook me, putting it in the realm of one of those franchises where I may pick up the books if I see them at the library, but otherwise am likely to forget about while I go reread Kaze Hikaru instead.