It’s nice that there is an ever-increasing market in anime for writers to combine their massive love and knowledge of niche topics with the accessibility of cute girls, but of course the end result has to be a delicate balance between the two as well as presenting it all in an engaging and enjoyable way. Bakuon!! actually manages the first two fairly well; if someone were to tell me that these girls ride motorcycles as a hobby I’d believe them. Yet there’s something that the show lacks, perhaps in the comedy or the writing or the variety of scenarios, and it’s something that makes the show lack impact, and lack memorability. The girls are obsessed with bikes, yes, and the creator’s depth of knowledge on the subject comes through as they talk, but most of what they do is…talk. The setting is perhaps too mundane, such that everything comes across more like a lecture in disguise than a comedy with some motorcycle lessons attached.
To be sure the school setting actually does work in this instance, as the almost jarring matchup of teenagers and motorcycles does add a certain spice to the humor. Singling out one character, the newest member of the school’s Bike Club, Hane, speaks excitedly in a breathy and incredulous voice all the time, making her feel completely out of sync with the image of the big growling engine at her control. Also for all four of the core Bike Club members to favor a particular brand and argue incessantly about the quality of their favorite company sells them as the kind of obsessive fans you would actually see in a hobbyist circle, and the debates reminded me of the banter in Genshiken. Along with brands we also see all facets of the hobbyist community captured, from the hardcore racer to the mechanic to the “hardcore” sidecar driver, and seeing these aspects of their personalities come up only as often as they are truly relevant—for instance when a breakdown occurs or testing out a virtual reality motorcycle arcade game—makes these archetypes feel secondary to the people rather than the other way around.
And there are plenty of genuinely funny gags. As Hane continues to get lost on her journey of discovery about motorcycles, both figuratively and literally, she occasionally runs into a nameless rider with white robes, his face obscured by the helmet, and a halo hanging above his head. She finds him exactly where we would least expect to find the second coming: pushing his bike on the highway looking for gas, or pulling out the pinups from the motorcycle magazines at the bookstore; and yet he inevitably leaves a miracle in his wake, only for Hane to not notice and keep going about her daily life. Another is the voiceless head of the bike club, who stays completely faceless and expressionless behind her helmet and is at least a twentieth-year student, as well as an unbeatable racer and quite possibly easily embarrassed, although nothing can be said for sure.
In fact at the end of Bakuon!! something inside me wants to have better things to say about it, and desperately wants to recommend it more than I actually can. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, none of the gags fall particularly flat, and the characters were plenty of fun to spend twelve episodes with. It feels like there is love behind the work, mostly for the motorcycles but also for the cast who rides them. But alas, perhaps all I can say is that nothing went wrong, not that anything went spectacularly right. For all the emotion behind the characters and the bikes and everything else, very little of the actual excitement behind the writing came across in the telling. Everything is stated more than shown, and for as down to earth as the presentation of motorcycles is there barely ends up being any excitement, anything to grab onto to feel like motorcycles really are as fun and worthwhile as the show says they are.
In the last episode they even make a scene out of poking fun at all the issues with motorcycles and how the world really wouldn’t be much different without them, and the only real resolution is that they would be somehow less happy, which makes sense considering it’s already an established part of their lives but doesn’t serve as the most convincing argument itself. If I had half the love the girls have for bikes I would probably be tearing up alongside them, but the show never quite brought me there. It was telling for me that at the end of every episode I felt satisfied, but at the beginning I felt the small creeping sense that something else would be more worth my time.