Thunderbolt Fantasy Is a Glove Puppet Martial Arts Series Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Seen

As the streaming era wears on, it can sometimes feel like we’re going backward. Possibilities are reigned in as promising series are canceled, particularly ones starring queer characters. However, if there’s a silver lining, it’s that even if the streaming era has potentially already peaked, the TV landscape of today is still so much more varied and eclectic than the one from a few decades ago: stories are being told by people from different backgrounds from all over the world. The streaming landscape may be a mess, but if you’re willing to dig, you can find all sorts of hidden gems.

There are plenty of underappreciated series worth fixating on, but one in particular hasn’t gotten its due. It’s both meticulously crafted and delightfully dumb. It features painstakingly choreographed martial arts action deeply inspired by the literary and film traditions of wuxia. It’s singular, outrageous, and unabashedly over-the-top. If you showed it to a Midwestern ‘80s dad, their head would likely explode all over their defrosted TV dinner. And it’s all brought to life with… puppets? The most ornate, beautifully crafted puppets you’ve ever seen, puppets that are equally likely to recite poetry or be slashed to bloody bits (like actually physically destroyed). This is Thunderbolt Fantasy, and there’s not much like it.

Created as a collaboration between the Taiwanese puppet production company Pili International Multimedia and the Japanese companies Nitroplus and Good Smile Company alongside famed anime screenwriter Gen Urobuchi (Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass), the show premiered back in July of 2016, streaming on Crunchyroll in the United States. It follows in the footsteps of Pili’s long-running self-titled series, Pili (this translates to “thunderbolt”), which took a centuries-old Southern Chinese tradition of using cloth glove puppets to orchestrate plays, called bodehi, and utilized this style of puppeteering to create an animated martial art series. After working on this franchise for decades, the studio eventually crossed paths with Urobuchi, who had recently become interested in the art form, and a collaboration was born.

As for what Thunderbolt Fantasy is about, the story follows Shāng Bù Huàn, a wandering swordsman who gets up to all sorts of adventures, including but not limited to: fighting a nihilistic monk in love with a sword, crossing a deadly wasteland that hasn’t been traversed in hundreds of years due to a massive dragon, traveling to other dimensions, battling Elder Demons, and more. The first season mostly centers on him trying to defeat Miè Tiān Hái, a dastardly villain trying to acquire a legendary sword forged to help humanity during the apocalyptic War of Fading Dusk—it can’t be overstated that this bad guy makes his entrance to the series by descending from the heavens, hair flowing, eye-shadow on-point, as a poem details his unrivaled prowess. Then he blows up a guy with his mind.

To best this edge lord, Shāng Bù Huàn has to put a team together, one that includes Lǐn Xuě Yā, a trickster who loves nothing more than tormenting his prey, alongside other guys with nicknames like the “Screaming Phoenix Killer” (the deadliest swordsman in the land), “Sharp-Eyed Impaler” (a peerless archer), and the “Night’s Lament” (a demon necromancer), because everyone in this series needs a metal cover band alias.

While it’s good to have some context for what the series is about, the reality is that seeing is believing, and you will probably know within the first scene whether this one works for you or not: it begins with a cold-open fight sequence involving swordplay and monologues that instantly demonstrates the show’s charms. As Dān Fěi and her brother Dān Héng flee Miè Tiān Hái’s henchmen, it becomes apparent how intricate these puppets are. Each is adorned in precisely embroidered robes and battle armor that conveys their personalities, tying them to this fantastical rendition of an ancient China-adjacent setting. Despite being puppets, their faces are oddly expressive, capable of blinking and moving their lips while remaining stylized enough to avoid any unintentional doll-like creepiness.

And it all becomes even more impressive once you see them move. These figures are choreographed to perform gravity-defying martial arts action defined by a degree of precision that would normally seem impossible for puppets, emulating the look of live-action wuxia films while benefiting from being able to do stunts that humans could never pull off. There is a sense of physicality missing from other forms of animation, as feet kick up dust and overabundances of syrupy blood fly out of every wound, the practical effects, like explosions and debris, melding perfectly with CGI effects. And even outside the action sequences, these characters are puppeteered in deft performances that bring life to these characters. They laugh, gesture, and point, all with the intentional exaggeration of a stageplay. All of this—the puppeteering, the kinetic camera work, the surprisingly smooth compositing around the digital effects—is likely only possible because Pili has been making this hyper-specific kind of show since the ‘80s. In a sense, they’re likely one of the few groups on the planet with the experience to pull this off, best embodied by how the studio co-founder Huang Liang-xun is from a family that has been practicing glove puppetry for four generations.

However, it isn’t just the action and technical craft that makes Thunderbolt Fantasy so charming, even if it is admittedly very fun to watch our gruff protagonist dance through a sea of swords while faceless goons predictably get thwacked. Because another element that helps take the series over the top is Gen Urobuchi’s campy script that blends wuxia, anime, and action tropes before taking hard turns between hilarious and oddly poignant. These characters are barraged with constant tragedies and twists, but at the same time, many of them are given surprising layers of depth or unexpected moments of redemption; get ready to be alarmingly invested in the fates of these puppets.

Without spoiling anything, perhaps the best shorthand for this comes with the protagonist, Shāng Bù Huàn. He initially seems like a cynical, Yojimbo-style wandering swordsman with no real sense of purpose or direction. But then, late in the first season, we discover his guiding ethos and motivations in one clean stroke, a reveal that’s both way over-the-top and genuinely emotionally affecting, so propulsive that it powers the series through the next few seasons of sprawling romps.

In general, Urobuchi treats this world with utter sincerity. These characters never lampshade the fact everyone has the most extra nom de guerres imaginable, or that everyone calls out the titles of their magic powers, or that the first villain is like the final evolution of a mall goth, all skulls and heavy eye-shadow (his alias is the “Bones of Creation” for crying out loud!). While I shouldn’t make this assumption, if nothing else, it feels like Pili had a lot of fun making this one, which comes across in every glove puppet gesticulation and wonderfully groan-inducing one-liner. And perhaps the most shocking element of the series is that it’s fairly accessible, at least in the United States. Crunchyroll has every episode and spin-off film released so far, having added the latest season just a week and a half ago.

But if there’s one big bummer about the series, it’s that it’s coming to an end. While we received a meaty four seasons and several movies, much more than many other shows can say, it was announced that the planned fifth and final season is getting rolled into a film coming out later this month on February 21. Okay, I’ll admit something else too. The show’s encroaching end isn’t its only downside: it peaks in its first season and while the rest is still good, there are a couple of relatively meandering patches afterward. But almost every time there was a lull, this was followed by some absurd or weirdly moving turn, like a former villain finding redemption in an unlikely place or a talking pipa undergoing a Super Sentai transformation. If you’re a fan of Shaw Brothers films, Jim Henson, the vague concept of guys hitting each other with swords, or think you’ve watched it all, you owe it to yourself to check out Thunderbolt Fantasy; I can say without hyperbole that you’ve probably never seen anything like it.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.