Pacific Rim: The Black

 2021, created by Greg Johnson and Craig Kyle - Netflix

I downright loved Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim, I thought it was going to be my thing, my new Star Wars, my new pop culture obsession.  But I knew as soon as I bailed on buying all of the first wave of action figures that I wasn't as all-in as I wanted to be.  I didn't think I wanted more, but I needed more, mainly because I knew there would just be more.  So, I needed to see how the world of Pacific Rim would expand beyond the first film.  There was a couple comic books that really didn't capture what I was looking for out of the franchise, and Uprising, well I was disappointed.  Extremely disappointed.  Disappointed to the degree that I lost most of my enthusaism for the series and the concept.

I wasn't up to the challenge of being an obsessive fanboy, I can only think of how crushed I would have been by Uprising had I been.

I knew Pacific Rim: The Black was coming, and as any of our longtime readers know, I'm not an anime guy.  The Black is promoted as an anime, and the style, at least in the character design (particularly their faces) is certainly of the type, so if I wasn't already wary about that, the fact that the trailer presented it as the story of a couple of siblings who find a Jaeger and go on adventures was grounds for immediate dismissal.

Then I forgot about it.

Until a few days ago when I was scrolling looking for something to watch.  Pacific Rim popped up and my heart ached a little bit.  I want to love you Pacific Rim so bad, but a couple of mediocre comics and a bad sequel just threaten to spoil my good time. 

But wait, did that cartoon ever come out? 
It did? 
What was its deal again? 
Just start watching before whatever you remember ruins it.

So I did, and, well, it's pretty good.

The setup finds young Taylor, a Jaeger cadet, and his little sister Hayley left behind in a secluded location in Australia with other survivors, while their Jaeger-piloting parents go back off to the Rim to battle the seemingly constant wave of Kaiju, though promising to return.  5 years later, Taylor tries to keep Hayley from constantly running off, the the tighter he holds onto her the more she slips away.  She stumbles upon an abandoned base, where a training Jaeger still sits.  Her activation of the Jaeger makes too much noise and summons a Kaiju (an immensely awesome-looking bronzed beast named Copperhead) who destroys their makeshift community and kills everyone.  The guilt hangs on Hayley.

They run in the Jaeger, as they are not armed and not trained and cannot face Copperhead on their own.  In running they enter The Black, a zone of Australia that is basically a black market free-for-all where everything is run by different warlords or bosses or whatever you want to call them.  Their Jaeger runs out of power and in looking for a new power source in abandoned bases,  Hayley and Taylor discover a boy in tank, left behind.  Hayley breaks the boy free and befriends him.  Taylor just calls him "Boy" and the name sticks (an homage to Taika Waititi's Boy?).  He's uneducated, mute, but completely attached to Hayley, and carries a few secrets, like a predelection for killing tiny animals.

Much of the season revolves around their encounter with Shane, one of the gang bosses in The Black, and things don't go great for anyone involved with him. But in the process of engaging and separating and dealing with Shane we learn a lot more about Hayley, Taylor, and the Pacific Rim reality.

Owing a debt to Mad Max, along with all the other mech-suit animes and Japanese giant monster movies, The Black isn't exactly what I wanted from follow-ups to Pacific Rim but it comes close.  I want to see what life is like in a reality where giant monsters keep emerging from the sea, and globally we're putting so much of our resources and efforts in to controlling the flood.  This show sits outside of any "normal" society, but it picks up some of the more intriguing threads that Uprising abandoned after its opening minutes.

The show builds upon its past, taking place an extended period of time after Uprising, but it references events from both films, and namechecks some of the characters without being overly clever or winky about it.  Their use of what comes before is actually quite well integrated.  At the same time, it advances, introducing new concepts (which I won't spoil) which heighten the stakes of the ongoing war.

The animation is very dynamic with some stellar "camera work", approaching things at suprising angles and capturing scale that does inspire some of the awe that Del Toro's original picture did.  The designs of the creatures are incredible, some of the best so far, while the Jaegers seem a little more generic, without as much distinctive flair (or anthropomorphised personality) as they had in the first feature.

I felt like Uprising got the drift wrong in their use of it, but here it's explored very well, and I love the lasting effects being in the drift has on its users.  

There are a few shocks and many surprises in this, and if you thought it was going to be Kaijus-for-kids, it's definitely not.  It's not capital M mature but it takes it all seriously and lives with the weight of things in a way I definitely was not expecting.

At seven 20-minute episodes, it goes down pretty quick, but thankfully there's more coming, and I'm certainly appreciative enough to watch it again.