I watched 30 episodes of Donbrothers in two weeks because Donbrothers is The Only One

I am an occassional Japanese superhero-watcher. My favorite Kamen Riders are Fourze and Kuuga, I’m fond of Garo and Keita Amemiya’s works in general, and I especially love the wild 90s era of Toei sentai and Metal Hero series.1

But it’s an inherently repetitive genre with, typically, a 30-to-50-episode time commitment per series. You’re either in the mood for it or you’re not, so it’s easy to burn out. So I don’t keep up with *every* airing Sunday morning hero series; unlike TV anime, I’ll be away from the stuff for years at a time.

The thing that pulled me towards tokusatsu again was Kamen Rider Geats’ cool suit. He’s a fox! Do you see it? Anyway, Geats has been a bore thus far— see my sub-only post on that subject to find out how, exactly— but I do have it to thank for one thing. It is because Geats put me in the mood to watch Japanese superheroes again that I finally laid eyes upon the revelation that is Avataro Sentai Donbrothers.

Super Sentai series— the long-lived progenitor to the US Power Rangers— pick themes for their fighting teams that their kid audiences already know and love: Animals, cars, ninja, you get the idea. Donbrothers’ themes are virtual reality and the Japanese folktale of Momotaro (guaranteeing it will never show up stateside as a Power Rangers series).

But Donbrothers is much weirder than that sounds. Written by veteran tokusatsu storyteller Toshiki Inoue, Donbrothers is extremely elusive about the most basic details of its setting, while also dead set on subverting every genre trope it sees… in a genre aimed primarily at six-year-olds.

The result is a twenty-minute weekly slice of chaos, an unpredictable superhero rollercoaster that does absolutely whatever the hell it wants.

For one thing, the red ranger isn’t really the protagonist; the yellow ranger is. Taro Momoi/Don Momotaro (use the Japanese name order and, right, Momotaro) is a distant and inscrutable hero, flawless and superior to the point where he exasperates everyone around him. The series mostly keeps us out of his head, inviting us instead to to sympathize with the other rangers— who he refers to only as “my companions”— while he forcibly drags them along with his endless bullshit.

The closest thing to a viewpoint character Donbrothers has, particularly early on, is the yellow ranger, Haruka Kito/Oni Sister. A disgraced teen manga pro framed for plagiarism, Haruka is full of herself, quick to anger, and totally lovable.

The other guys on the team are different degrees of deeply flawed cartoon character. Blue (Monkey Brother) is an itinerant dirtbag sage obsessed with Japanese “wabisabi” aesthetic and composing haiku, so committed to a freeloader lifestyle that he orders invisible ramen that he eats with his imagination; his fingers burn when he touches money.

Kijino (Pheasant Brother), who I imagine must be the Super Sentai series’ first male pink ranger, is a sad office schlub whose sole and greatest joy in life is his wife Miho, who he never shuts up about. Finally, the black ranger (Tsubasa Inuzuka, Dog Brother) is a pretty classical “bad boy with a heart of gold”: a fugitive on the run for a crime he didn’t commit, in search of his lost girlfriend.

The pink and black rangers form something of a dyad of Wife Guys: you might think of pink as “Light Wife Guy” and black as “Dark Wife Guy.” Or is it the other way around…?

In any case, these characters are all pulled together against their will, as strangers, at completely random times to battle monsters. The Donbros noticeably lack the kind of cohesion typically seen in a Super Sentai team; their battles are manic and slapdash, with each member just kind of doing whatever. They can’t even get their group pose right from week to week.

(The black and pink rangers, a small dog and massive pheasant respectively, are completely CG, and it looks strange!)

Speaking of, their job is to beat up folks who’ve succumbed to desire and turned into monsters (Hitotsuki), all the while dealing with the warriors of the Cerebrans, a race of computer-brained humanoids from a parallel universe. The Cerebrans want to destroy Hitotsuki outright, while the Donbrothers seek to return them to their human forms by inflicting a great deal of flashy, kid-friendly, toy-selling violence upon them.

That’s the core of the show, but really you don’t know what you’re going to get when you watch an episode of Donbrothers. It is equally likely to drop a massive twist as it is to swerve into an absurd sitcom interlude or deliver a genuinely amazing superhero duel: sometimes it will give you all three in one episode. There was an ep about the ramen mafia; two full episodes concern themselves with the running joke that Taro will not appear at fated battles of destiny until he is finished with his day job delivering packages.

The only thing that’s predictable about Donbrothers is that damn it, you will be entertained. I was on the edge of my seat for the next tidbit of the story, and thanks to the genuinely funny and endearing cast, I enjoyed the sitcom stuff just as much. I couldn’t stop watching; in just a couple of weeks I was caught up with the weekly broadcast.

As is standard in modern sentai series, fun hand-to-hand fight scenes quickly give way to endless processions of characters pulling out one toy weapon after the next (now on sale, kids!) to power up, culminating with a big, cool-looking robot for the finisher. Hey, I’m the grown man watching a toy commercial series for children, here. I signed up for this.

Donbrothers knows what it is. If the CG has to be cheap, then it will lean in, throw it all over the screen, and thumb its nose at the very idea of looking “real”. It is directed like a live-action cartoon, shamelessly over-acted, and drenched in cheap, unconvincing CG that at times revels in its own artifice.

And if you’re not in after all that, I want you to know that the red ranger and his Cerebran rival have a star-crossed romance, a reading strongly backed by this completely official music video.2

You may or may not be ready for Donbrothers. Like Don Momotaro himself, it doesn’t care at all if you don’t get it. It knows it is the only one.