There was a reason I had Bucchigire! on the edge of thee sleeper category going into the season.  It’s one of those series that has a sneaky good staff (that gets better the deeper you look), and you could tell from the promos that it wasn’t going to be a mass-produced model.  The kind of series that isn’t going to be preoccupied with making a prefab anime from a kit that’s as comfortably generic as possible.  Sometimes you get a show like Idaten that scratches that itch – it’s a slot on the the schedule that often goes unfilled but always makes a season better when it exists.

The premiere certainly confirmed the non-generic side of things.  Bucchigire! doesn’t look, sound, or act like anything else on the schedule – or most schedules lately.  It manages to capture an old-school anime vibe but I’m not sure an especially good old-school anime.  Writer-director Hirakawa Tetsuo isn’t a huge name but is well known to animation junkies  – he’s worked on a lot of good stuff with a lot of good people, most prominently as one of Hara Keiichi’s right-hand men.  But he hasn’t done a lot of writing – and as I’ve said till I’m blue in the face, on an original anime the writer is the most important figure.

Bucchigire! is another riff on the Shinsengumi (which also feels very old school).  This time around they’ve just been mostly wiped out by a group of mask-wearing samurai.  Only Toudou Heisuke survives, and with Kyoto increasingly lawless and dangerous, he chooses a group of seven (originally eight) criminals about to be beheaded and recruits them to impersonate the dead Shinsengumi captains.  It’s a fairly representative group of oddballs and lowlifes, most prominent among them Ichibanboshi, a hot-blooded young samurai-hater who’s lost his entire family to the same group that killed the Shinsengumi.

It’s not a bad premise, and the cast is a good one.  Satou Gen seems to be the current it boy in anime – he’s voicing three mains this season (also Hoshi no Samidare and Yofakushi no Uta), and to his credit all of them quite different.  The animation is clean and the art design (some stellar names there, too) stylish and distinctive.  Visually this series is among the best of the season in a modestly-budgeted way – again, very obviously a show with an experienced team of artists with some ambition who aren’t interested in looking like everything else.

So why am I not more enthusiastic?  You guessed it, the writing.  It’s not bad, but lacks any real punch.  The characters seem like archetypes more than people (that can still change), and there’s an awful lot of very mechanical exposition in the first episode.  The jokes aren’t that funny either, and there are quite a few of them.  I’m going to give Bucchigire! a pretty long leash, because I very much appreciate the good things it brings to the table.  Anime needs series that gives creative people a chance to express themselves, and this one clearly does.  It’s just a question of whether Hirakawa’s writing can lift its game to match the rest of it.