Note: This post is considered an episode review and it dives into spoilers for the movie.
BanG Dream! FILM LIVE is an anime concert film released between Seasons 2 and 3 of the original series. The movie has Poppin’Party, Afterglow, Pastel✽Palettes, Hello, Happy World!, and Roselia perform for a large outdoor concert they’ve been invited to. PoPiPa bookend the event and they as well as Roselia perform for the encore. The set list is comprised of music from Season 2 though there are some new songs added in and the movie uses full versions of select returning tracks, as opposed to the abridged versions used in the show.
This movie is sort of canon to the TV anime. It at the very least acknowledges the events of the show up to Season 2. To play it safe and because I’m a stickler when it comes to completion, I decided to include this in my coverage for the original series. But as you might’ve assumed, there is almost no story to talk about here. It literally is just song after song with some emceeing in between. The only time the movie steps out of that pattern is between the last official song and the encore and even then, that’s just Rokka providing the audience with backstage footage of everyone.
I quite like the insert songs for Season 2 so I had plenty of fun watching the characters perform most of those songs again. It’s especially cool to actually see Roselia and PoPiPa perform their opening themes for Season 2. That only happens briefly in the band’s respective OP sequences and in PoPiPa’s case, a series of stills for the season finale. It’s nice that it finally happens here in the movie and with the full versions of those songs no less. Not having Raise A Suillen perform is a little odd but then again, they only had one song in Season 2. Them being shoved to the wayside works anyway since it leads to a funny cameo appearance by a very salty Chiyu. I did notice with the returning songs, a lot of character and camera animations are reused from the show, just with different backgrounds and maybe different outfits worn by the characters. To be fair, it’s a smart budgeting decision to reuse animations that already syncs up to the music. Plus, there’s still plenty of new animation when the characters perform new songs or full versions of select tracks.
With how long the original Bandori is, I can understand skipping this movie to save on time. It’s pretty inconsequential to the show’s narrative so it’s not that big of a deal anyway. That said, if you’ve enjoyed the insert songs in Season 2, this is a fun follow-up to watch after you finish that season.
Xenodude Scribbles 