When the announcement came that there would be a new Trigun anime with the involvement of original creator Yasuhiro Nightow, it was some of the biggest anime news of last summer. Now, over half a year later, the highly-anticipated new series Trigun: Stampede is finally arriving on Crunchyroll. Having been sent the first episode by Crunchyroll for advanced screening, there’s no shortage of takeaways from what this new iteration of the classic series is setting out to do.
While it’s always a challenge to gauge the vibe of an entire series off its first episode, the opener of Trigun: Stampede tries its hardest to feel large in scope and fast in pace. The opening minutes of the anime establish its sci-fi setting that show off the polish of the animation, functioning as a sort of flashback establishing the origins of legendary outlaw Vash the Stampede as a sort of focal point of this new adaptation.
First Impressions
This new version stops short of warranting the label of “prequel,” although it plays around with time and perspective to highlight new dimensions on Vash’s character. Avoiding spoilers, it’s important to stress that characters and dynamics from previous incarnations of the property make an appearance in the first episode, with the art and trailers of the series still promising others that don’t show up right away.
The biggest question that a lot of people have about this new series, for better or worse, is undoubtedly the interest in the new CGI aesthetic. This new CGI feel will prove an inevitable hurdle for the more purist 2D anime fans, and it wouldn’t be right to deny that it’s got its own vibe. However, this CGI is definitely made knowing that it’s CGI, using the medium in a more full-on commitment than, say, the hybrid CGI used in portions of Trigun: Badlands Rumble to really highlight the expressiveness of the motion.
Studio Orange uses the medium of CGI to emulate the feel of 2D anime, and the extra dimension retains the feeling of traditional anime both in how models are staged on-screen and given posed-based animation. When characters are engaging in heavy dialogue, it can run the risk of feeling a bit like a video game cutscene. When the action starts up, though, it always has a strong clarity of movement and an anime feel as much as anything in the original anime.
Like so many aspects of Stampede, the art direction and music also have a respectable ambitiousness to them. Saturated color pallets play a very large role in giving different locations a sense of identity, and the soundtrack switches between ethereal sci-fi ambiance, to the rough western melodies fans would expect from Trigun, to some surprisingly fresh horn melodies. Nightow is on record for wanting Stampede to have a cinematic, Hollywood feel. The end result is nothing if not action-packed and epic in scope.
A prescient image to describe this new series appears in the latter half of the first episode. There is a pronounced duel that Vash the Stampede finds himself challenged to in the heat of the space desert. With the sun hanging high and the entire town watching, a bet is placed on if Vash will be able to defeat his opponent with some betting for the famous outlaw-pacifist, many betting against him.
The uncertainty of the Human Typhoon being able to prove himself here is, in a way, like Stampede trying to measure up against the reputation of its predecessor. Would it be right to say what becomes of the outlaw in a spoiler-free episode, and is it possible to gauge everything Stampede has in store for fans from its first episode? Maybe we can’t say.
But it definitively is Vash the Stampede we’re looking at. Perhaps that’s all that needs to be said.
Trigun: Stampede comes Saturday, January 7 to Crunchyroll.