Thunderbolt Fantasy S1E1: “Code of Umbrellas”

This review was commissioned by Phil Pestinger.


This one looks like an interesting mix of elements. It's a puppet-based fantasy series in traditional Chinese puppetry style, produced through the cooperation of a pair of Japanese and Taiwanese studios. The brains behind the operation is Gen Urobochi, a creator who I've had mixed (but more positive than not) experiences with. It started airing in Japan in 2016 and Taiwan shortly thereafter, and is still ongoing.

So, puppet wuxia! Let's do this!


We open on a stormy sky, with a bodiless narrator rambling something about thunder and lightning that I wasn't quite able to follow, but I guess the lightning motif is going to be front and center from the beginning of the story. Then we descend to ground level, where an overdressed brother and sister are fleeing through the forest from a party of soldiers armed with swords and muskets. The visuals here are...well, the camera angles and basic cinematography are all really good. The environment is lovely. The thunderstorm looks great. But, there were two other things I noticed in quick succession.

The first of these is that the characters are all moving really, really fast. To the point where I can't tell who's saying what, or who I'm looking at from moment to moment. I actually thought I had accidentally sped the video up or something. It doesn't look like a fast, frenzied escape sequence. It looks like a video that's been sped up.

Then I managed to catch a glimpse of the characters' faces and OH GOD THAT'S WHY THEY DIDN'T WANT US TO SEE THEM TOO CLEARLY.

I hoped she was supposed to be wearing a mask at first, but no, that's her actual face. She looks like one of the witch sisters from Kubo and The Two Strings. You know, the ones who the creators are on record saying they designed them to look as uncanny valley as possible. It doesn't help that this is her "expression" while she's screaming in panic. In fact, I don't believe that any of these puppets' faces move at all, even when they're speaking. JelloApocalypse as uncredited co-creator? Maybe.

I've seen some other Chinese puppet show clips online. They didn't weird me out like this. I don't know if its the faces of these specific puppets that are bothering me, or just the more dramatic storyline making greater demands of their nonexistent facial expressions than more traditional fare.

The bad guys catch up to them, and fighting happens. I can't tell who's killing who most of the time. I *think* that the nightmare beast in the screenshot above is a good swordfighter, but again, I can't be sure if that was actually her making most of those kills, or her brother. The fight has lots of anime lighting and particle effects that look totally out of place among the puppets, and also make the lake of facial animation stick out that much more. The brother has a magic sword that can shoot glowy seeker-bolts out of it, which the bad guy leader makes the mistake of underestimating.

Just as the siblings are starting to turn the tables though, the thunderclouds overhead get all funky and the Dark Lord appears and starts babbling about the inevitability of death.

The Silence, but with troll doll hair and bling. He doesn't have a mouth to not move while speaking, which ironically makes him the least unsettling character to see in motion.

Species 8472 over here lands, creating a shockwave that knocks over a bunch of trees, and tells the brother and sister to serve him or die. Brother asks him what brought him to this sacred place (I guess "to make you serve me or else kill you" isn't a sufficient explanation), and Lord Trollhair reaches out his hand and says "you already know what I want, hand it over." Okay, it's a One Ring type deal I guess. When they refuse, he emphasizes his threat by taking off his Silence mask, revealing himself to be...an extremely generic long-haired animu bishie boy villain.

I really would have preferred it if the alien mask thing was his actual face. At least, if this was going to be the alternative.

He did have one pretty cool line when he advanced on them though. "You will serve me until you are corpses, or you will be turned into corpses. Either way, you meet your end at my sword." Generic in substance, but its evocative wording that I don't think I've seen anything quite like, so serious points for style.

Lord Trollhair and Brother have a duel, and once again everything is sped up in an attempt to hide how poorly suited for this style of performance these lifeless-looking mannequins really are. You see swords and energy beams and stuff shooting and flying around like a video game or a particularly bombastic shonen anime series, and those look fluid enough, but the puppets themselves don't come anywhere near to measuring up. Just stiffly waving their swords up and down while shaking in place while the lightshow happens. The sped-up camera doesn't succeed at hiding how terrible it looks, but does succeed at making things go by too fast to tell exactly what's happening or who's using which abilities. It's just perfectly calibrated to give us the worst of both worlds. Anyway, they fight. Brother does a big named attack that hits Trollhair with a bunch of conjured CGI sword missiles. It has no effect on him, and he does a big named attack back that hits Brother and makes him fall over with blood splashed across his unmoving plastic mannequin face. Sister picks him up and he monologues about how she needs to take her half of the magic sword that Trollhair is after and run. Trollhair and his men just politely stand back and give them the time for this.

Anime time dilation is one thing, but here she's holding him up while he tells her, out loud, that she needs to run and hide the thing that Trollhair wants, while Trollhair is standing right there. They could have had her hold him close to her ear, to give the appearance of this being something he's whispering, but no. And then, after she starts running and Brother tanks a couple more spells from Trollhair before disintegrating to buy her a few more seconds, Trollhair seems surprised that Brother had only the handle of the sword on his person and not the blade.

There's no indication that he or any of his men were chasing Sister while she ran. Because her being the one with the sword or even just part of it on her didn't occur to any of them I guess.

Sister, meanwhile, has swan-dived off a nearby cliff. Trollhair instructs his men to go catch her, and then flies away.

She escaped by jumping off a cliff.

Trollhair is the one who can fly and spam ranged attacks with his magic.

And...he sends his mundane, landbound minions to chase her while he flies away.

-_-

Questionable tactics aside, he summons this big undead bird/dragon thing to catch him out of the air and fly him home faster, so that's kinda cool I guess.

Episode title appears. Sister makes her way across the rain-soaked forest under the cliff. Elsewhere in the forest, a lone...monk? wizard? something weirder? I'll just call him a monk for now...sits under a tree to shelter from the rain, smoking a pipe. Near him is a little Buddhist shrine whose roof has rotted away, but someone (either the monk or someone else) has planted an umbrella there to protect the Buddha statue from the rain. A soldier (one of Lord Trollhair's minions from earlier, I think?) comes wandering through the woods. As it's raining, he goes over to take the umbrella from the rotting shrine, but the monk berates him for this. It's not his own umbrella, and he doesn't know whose it was, but someone left it there because they wanted to keep the Buddha dry, which makes it a religious offering, which means taking it would be stealing from Siddy G himself.

The swordsman counters that an umbrella was a really dumb thing for someone to have offered, considering that this particular statue is made of waterproof materials. He needs the umbrella much more than the statue does, so it's not wrong for him to take it. The monk counters that even if he doesn't think the statue needs the protection, the umbrella's owner clearly did, and by taking it he's robbing that unknown person of the ability to do what they saw fit with their own property.

I like how neither of them are wrong, necessarily. It's a conflict between two perfectly valid moral philosophies.

The monk tells him that if he's going to take the umbrella, then he should at least pay for it by committing a charitable act to replace the one he's undoing. The next person who he meets on his travels, he must show compassion and generosity to. The swordsman agrees, mostly just to get the monk to shut up. Okay, I see where this is going. Regardless of whether or not the swordsman is one of Trollhair's men, he's going to take this promise seriously enough to give Sister a hand.

Sure enough, he runs into her just a few minutes later. She's limping, and seems to be suffering from internal injuries. It looked like she did some sort of magic thing when she jumped off that cliff, but maybe it wasn't enough to protect her completely. He doesn't know who she is or where she came here from, which I guess confirms that he has nothing to do with Trollhair's manhunt. He asks her if she needs help, but she just staggers on past him. He starts to shrug and move on, when the soldiers chasing her rush by all around him. He watches in startled confusion until they catch up to her and, when she refuses to surrender, beat her to the ground.

This prompts him to get their attention. Either because of his promise to the monk, or (more likely, given how he didn't seem to take that whole thing very seriously) he's just not the type to let this sort of crime take place in front of his face. A more metal sounding fight theme begins, contrasting sharply with the previous action sequence's more typical fantasy scoring, as he challenges the soldiers.

The soldiers tell him to mind his own business. They're the Xuan Gui Zong, and nobody wants to get on their bad side. The guy seems to be wholly unfamiliar with their organization though, so the threat means nothing to him. I guess he's from pretty far away, or else just really oblivious. He also makes a half-serious little crack about him having to stop them in order to earn his umbrella, and their understandably puzzled reactions to this are...you know, I feel like Urobochi's comedy bits might be the most distinctive thing about his writing. Whether you share that sense of humor or not, his flavor of dry (but slightly "off") snark is a different flavor than most Japanese creators I'm familiar with.

The soldiers attack him, and he fends them off with his new umbrella for a while, but when they prove persistent enough he draws his sword and starts lopping off limbs. He goes through quite a few of them before the rest retreat, leaving him with an unconscious princess and an umbrella that was, tragically, broken in the fight. This fight scene looked quite a bit less bad than the previous. I think it's mostly just the lack of confusing high speed, along with the characters performing only relatively simple sword motions that the puppets are actually capable of somewhat pulling of.

Anyway, grumbling to himself, Umbrellaman picks up sister and casts some sort of healing spell before carrying her with him as he searches for somewhere dry. For want of a better option, he doubles back to the shrine, where Monk is still sitting under his tree smoking his pipe as the sun starts to rise. Monk expresses surprise that Umbrellaman actually did all that just for his namesake, and seems to play this off as if he was just fucking with him this whole time. When Umbrellaman tells him what the men called themselves and asks if Monk is familiar with an organization by that name, Monk gets freaked out.

Like I said, I'm not sure if "monk" is accurate. He doesn't look like one, but he's been acting like a fairy tale Buddhist monk pretty consistently.​

Umbrellaman confirms that he's a foreigner, and thus not familiar with most of the local politics, but he also doesn't really care that much so when Monk is reluctant to say anything about the Xuan Gui Zong he just brushes it off. Anyway, he tells Monk that the girl will be waking up soon once his spell has finished its work, and since he has no idea where she's from or where she would want to go, he's just going to leave her here under the tree next to him. When Monk asks who he should tell her to thank for saving her life, Umbrellaman just sardonically tells him to tell her it was a miracle of the Wet Buddha.

Before he can go on his way though, Monk tells him that he might want to investigate this matter a little more first. Based on Sister's clothing, Monk believes that she is one of the Hu Yin Shi. Is that something I would understand if I spoke Chinese? I tried google, and got nothing. Whoever and whatever that is, Umbrella does seem to have heard of them, and he seems to be taking this situation more seriously now.

Fortunately, Monk and Umbrellaman clarify this for us pretty soon afterward, and it's well done pretty organic exposition as they wonder aloud why a woman of such high standing and strict responsibilities would be outside of the sacred ground entrusted to her. From the sound of things, the Hu Yin Shi are a highly esteemed priestly caste who inhabit the temples where "the wisdom of the gods and the tools of the demons" are kept safe. That sword she and her brother had to hide is probably one of these demonic tools, then. Both are mystified at the notion of armed men daring to lay a hand on a Hu Yin Shi, let alone succeeding in chasing one so far from her temple complex. I guess even the Xuan Gui Zong are typically more restrained than this.

Still, Umbrellaman insists that while this might be an important matter, it's not his important matter, and tells Monk that since he knows more about the situation, he should take Sister back to civilization from here. They bicker about it for a while, and then the officer who Trollhair left in charge of the search shows up. He tells Umbrellaman that he's going to be uncharacteristically merciful and overlook his killing of Xuan Gui Zong troops a little while ago, but only if he lets him take Sister right now. Umbrellaman just grasps his head, clearly wishing he had managed to distance himself from this situation before it got urgent again. As he tries to decide what the hell he should be doing, Monk takes matters into his own hands and blows a mouthful of pipe smoke into the bad guy's face. He breathes it in, and it causes him to start hallucinating that Umbrellaman is actually Sister.

Wow, Monk is a prick.

Umbrellaman tries to deescalate the situation and help the officer snap out of it, but it's no use. By the time Monk's ganga jedi trick wears off, Umbrellaman has left a small cut on the baddy's face in the process of fending him off. There's an exchange here that I quite like, where the baddy tells Umbrellaman that now, even though he's no longer hallucinating, now he has to kill him to make up for the shame of having his face scarred and Umbrellaman's reply is, essentially, "u w0t m8?" He gives this extremely well-reasoned and articulate argument for why honor isn't worth risking your life for, especially when the only people who saw the event are ones who don't care about this particular type of honor themselves. Furthermore, even if the officer wasn't fighting at full effectiveness due to possible side effects of the smoke, the fact that Umbrellaman managed to cut him suggests that he might be able to injure him much worse if the fight continues. Why do this when he can just walk away and pretend none of this ever happened? Or even just keep harassing the girl and Monk (ie, the actual guilty party in causing his face to get cut).

This line of argumentation doesn't work. And even if it had, I'm not sure if Umbrellaman would have actually had it in him to stand aside and let the bad guy take the girl he just rescued and healed (though I doubt he'd stop him from attacking Monk). But still, just the fact that a major character even attempted this line of argumentation is a refreshing breath of sanity in a show in a typical shonen-y plot like this one.

So, they fight. Attack names are called out. CGI lightshows are superimposed. It's worse than the last fight scene, but still much better than the one before that. Unsurprisingly, it ends with Umbrellaman victorious. He sadly tells the officer that he tried to talk sense into him. The officer, as he sinks to his knees, mortally wounded, asks if he can at least have the name of the man who slew him, in a dark reprise of Monk's earlier request. This time, Umbrellaman decides to grant the man his dying request.

As soon as Shang says his name, the officer starts laughing maniacally and throws a little metal doohickey up into the air, which flies away on its own power. He cackles that now that the Xuan Gui Zong have the name of a man who killed a high ranking officer of theirs, he'll never escape retribution. Ah, that magic thingy he sent flying off was a communication device, I see.

Then, he stabs himself in the neck and...

Oh my god.

He cuts off his own head. And, somehow, does it with sufficient force to send it launching straight up into the sky like a cork from an overpressurized bottle.

This IS supposed to be funny, right? I'm actually laughing. Like, no shit, actually laughing out loud. I thought he was just going to make good on the Japanese side of this story's cultural influences and do the standard sepukku, but I guess there's no room for half measures in the Xuan Gui Zong.

That was legit gold though. I'm still chuckling even as I type this.

It turns out that the metal thingy he launched first wasn't actually a messenger drone, though, but rather a skeleton bird-dragon thing summoner. One of those big flying mounts like Trollhair used before swoops by and grabs the severed head out of the air before it can fall back down again.

I'm guessing Lord Trollhair has a way of resurrecting or at least speaking with the remains of his minions, then. He's mailing his own head back to HQ for revivification or at least consultation. More likely just the latter, thinking about it more. If these guys could resurrect their fallen, then they probably wouldn't take the killing of their men as seriously as they seem to. So yeah, Trollhair just needs the head to cast speak with dead or whatever, I'm guessing.

Shang starts to turn his attention to the monkwizardprick, who's earned himself an asskicking with interest, when the lady wakes up. Asshole wizard gloats that now Shang and Sister have a common enemy, and he HAS to stick with her to defeat the people after both of them.

...

Obviously the wizard set all this up because he knew Shang had what it takes to help him beat the dark lord and save the world. He's still a prick for going about it in this way.

...

Meanwhile, the skeleton bird monster to the Seven Sins Tower, hidden deep in the Demon Spine Mountains. I wonder...it's starting to seem like the Xuan Gui Zong might be the bad guys. The tower has a bunch more of those undead birdragon monsters flying around it, which this one flies past to deliver the severed head to Lord Trollhair's balcony.

He picks up the head, and snarks a little about the unexpectedly poor performance from a seemingly promising officer to some cronies he's hanging out with. He casts a spell that lets him read the last few minutes worth of memories out of the severed head's brain, which is fairly close to what I was expecting. The twist, however, is that he doesn't seem to give two shits about the man who dealt the killing blow. Rather, he succeeds at determining the more important role of the wizard in events.

Oh, actually he recognizes the wizard. Old enemy by the name of Lue, apparently. We end with Trollhair cackling as he prepares his retaliation against this resurfaced opponent. End episode.


There were some great dialogue bits, especially between Lue and Shang, and the forest environments were all beautifully filmed. I also liked a few of the details that seemed smarter than average for this type of fantasy, like Shang's attempt at reasoning with the honorable evil guy, and the bad guys having an established (if really, really silly in execution) protocol for getting intel back to their necromancer boss in the event of their defeat.

Unfortunately, these puppets' sheer lack of charisma hangs over the whole production like a wet blanket. Nevermind Jim Henson's work, the puppets in Team America: World Police were more expressive than these ones. The voice actors are really giving it their all to compensate for this, but it felt like the visuals were just letting them down. The puppets also not being up to performing the nimble, anime-style swordfights the show calls for didn't help either.

And, style issues aside, this was such a paint-by-numbers heroic fantasy story that even Shang's well-written reluctant heroism wasn't quite enough to make it feel fresh. Opening scene where the bad guys chase the small team of escapees with the thing they need. Dark Lord with a spooky mask who lives in a spooky castle and monologues about death and futility all the time. Etc. There's nothing wrong with using the classics, but I feel like this pilot, at least, didn't put quite enough of a new paint job on them.

Speaking of recognizably Urobochi details, I'm starting to notice this pattern where he introduces female warrior types who are as skilled and competent as their male colleagues, but then events always conspire to have them get knocked out of the fight early and need a man to save them. It's always well justified enough in the story that you don't question it at the time, but looking at this and F:Z side by side the number of times where it happens starts to seem a little weird. It's worlds better than most writers in this genre, sure, but I feel like...

...

Wait a minute.

Distinctively clever dialogue and snark that you can always identify in his works. Progressive-on-the-surface gender politics that show their seams when you think about the broader trends. Bounces around between studios a lot, usually to fan excitement.

I just now realized that Gen Urobochi is Japanese Joss Whedon.

...

So, Thunderbolt Fantasy is...okay? A couple of clever details and a cool and interesting hero character, but they're balanced out by an extremely generic plot and inadequate practical effects. It's not something I'd mind watching more of, but it also isn't something I'd go out of my way to continue.

There's another episode of it up next though, so I'll be seeing at least that much more. The puppets are almost certainly not going to get any better this quickly, but the plot might start coming into its own now that the generic intro beats are over with.