BNA: Brand New Animal, The Pre-furred Choice

After SSSS: Gridman, the studio Trigger did their next original work directed by Little Witch Academia creator Yoh Yoshimari. BNA: Brand New Animal is a new take on the “animals living in the same city” that Zootopia made a bundle on. The downside to this is most anime fans initially saw this as a rip-off of Beastars, so it didn’t receive the attention it needed. This was written by Kazaki Nakashima that also wrote for Getter Robo, and the Batman: Ninja movies. BNA was a limited series, only 12 episodes long, but it got in, told an entire story, and got out in record time. The anime premiered on Netflix in 2020 along with a light novel and a one-shot manga. The show initially prospered when it premiered, although its fandom has settled down over the years, even among furries.

Set on an alternate Earth where certain humans are called beastmen because they can take on the form of an anthropomorphic animal. Humans and beastmen have been living together for thousands of years, but beastmen are trying to have their own town in Japan named Anima City in Japan, because that’s the only country that takes in this kind of messed up metropolis. This was established because beastmen receive discrimination and need a haven to thrive. The Japanese government agreed to this to keep beastmen away from human population.

The story stars young basketball fan Michiru who has somehow become a beastman, specifically a tanuki also referred to as a raccoon dog which according to Japanese mythology are trickster creatures with the ability to shapeshift. She darts to Anima City to seek refuge and a cure for her case which is called beastmanitis. Upon getting there, she comes across the stoic wolfman Shirou who is a special agent for the mayor that helps Michiru gain her citizenship. While getting used to her new home, Michiru discovers that she can morph parts of her body into different animal parts, such as wings, gorilla arms, and her tail can be used as a cushion for rough landings. These new abilities help her locate her missing friend Nazuna who also got beastmanitis and is currently acting as the idol for a religious factor called the Silver Wolf cult who worship a mystical giant wolf that has appeared throughout history to help beastmen. The true antagonist is Slyvasta whose pharmaceutical company is secretly working on an anti-beastman formula to permanently turn all the beastmen into regular humans.

Trigger brought their A-game when they were making BNA. There is fast-paced action and sparkling animation with literal sparkles, plus explosive colors. The characters in both humans and beastmen stand out and are particularly sharp and angular. The designs vary between sharp and lean but can change to being either musclebound hulks or cute fuzzy children. You can see a lot of the effort that was used to make productions like Promare and Gurren Lagann so iconic.

Comparisons of BNA to Beastars were inevitable as both shows feature life in a city full of anthropomorphic animals, although Beastars was set within its all-furry world, whereas BNA shares its world with the rest of humanity. Beastars social division stems from carnivores and herbivores trusting one not to eat the other, of which Zootopia also shares some aspects. BNA represents a more relatable discrepancy as the human prejudice for beastmen is clearly meant to replicate discrimination between races, sexes, and gender. Anyone who has any idea of the X-Men can see the similarities between the plight of mutants and how the beastmen are treated by humans. The animosity humans have is partially out of fear, but mostly due to them seeing beastmen as not even human but lower lifeforms.

When BNA first aired, Netflix premiered the first 6 episodes, with the remaining finishing out the series a few weeks later, and there is a tone shift with the second half where it gets deeper into political intrigue and government conspiracies. Instead of exploring Michiru’s transformation into a tanuki girl, the concluding episodes get bogged down in the doctrine of the Silver Wolf and how religion can be a double-edged sword giving people faith but also making them too reliant on what they believe and how they have trouble dealing with the reality of a critical situation. It’s possible that an extra episode would’ve given BNA enough room to lay out all its racial and religious allegories while showing the everyday life of an actual community of furry people.

BNA is an anomaly among Trigger’s productions like Kill La Kill as it steers away from a few anime tropes like gratuitous fan service or Dragonball-level fights, even though there is a big battle between two kaiju-sized wolves, one of which even has three heads like Ghidorah. There’s plenty to enjoy in this and the plot does move along swimmingly, although it has much more backstory and world building than a 12-episode series could handle. If this anime was given another season, it would have been able to accomplish what it set out to do. Michiru’s childhood friendship with Nazuna was borderline sapphic in the beginning, but we see that there was a bigger chasm between the two characters thus making any lesbian fangirls disappointed. Over the course of the series, you are given a satisfying watch with a fun anime with dynamic animation, but you’ll also feel a little left out as there was clearly more to this brand-new world than what we got.