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Title Info
- seen: 1-2 of 2
- type: OAV
- grade: worthy
- genre: parody
- people: Yuki
- Other elements of this title:
- This title is a personal favourite.
- form: sub
- source: fansub
- dur: 60
- made: 1989
- Review created: Sat Mar 10 03:13:49 EST 2001
- mod: none
This is just great fun, albeit it's weird, cool sense of humor may not appeal to everybody. Personally every time I watch it I enjoy it more. And that's even without getting all the jokes embedded in this thing, although the Assemble Insert page helped a bit. Thankfully the page still exists and, being the only one, is authoritative.
The scene is a city in Japan held hostage by the powerful demon seed gang. They possess powerful armored suits that have been able to seize any target and brush aside any response from the police. The collateral damage and the seemingly helpless police has led to severe criticism and the desperate search for a plan. At least that's the only reason the head of the anti-demon seed task force can come up with for his plan being accepted. And since he admits to drawing it up while under the influence, and probably only as a joke, it must have been quite a suprise. In any case he's now responsible for finding a 'idol of justice' to stop demon seen. He doesn't expect to find one who can win, but he figures a cute girl won't be hated as much as the police.
And thus they hire a mad scientist to design a suit and hold a 'superhero' audition to find a 'cute' pilot. Unsuprisingly the assembled aspirants are impressive, at least in how weird they are. Until, as they are dismantling the stage, there's only one contestant left. She's been sort of hiding, being shy and uncertain, but since she's fidgeting by bending the mike stand into a pretzel she's quickly declared the winner. Thus begins the heart of the story, as the worlds weirdest police squad becomes the manager for the worlds most shy 'idol of justice'.
Although, in this case, giving the story gives only the slimmest indication of the fun in this video. It's packed with jokes, anime references and humorous characters and dialogues. The one thing I will say is that this is not 'crazy' humor, it's actually quite subdued. The cool part is the rich irony, the way silly concepts are related in a serious story, and the over-riding sense of weird to the whole thing. It's also interesting in that it's tightly scripted and directed, with a clear and uniform vision of what sort of show it's going to be. It's an example of clever comedy which is all too rare in anime.
On the downside it's pretty short. And, since the heroine is fairly shy and subdued, she doesn't get many lines. In fact she fluffs most of the lines she gets in the anime, leading to a battle cry of something like, "nice to meet you". Thus it doesn't score to high on the cute babes scale and leaves lots of character elements only indicated rather than confirmed. And, finally, there's no really deep story behind it. But this is a really novel and interesting anime experience. And for those who like good comedy and drama between mature characters there's some golden moments to be had.
The animation is also fairly strange. It's very uniform and quite good looking, but at the same time it's very minimal. This suggests the possibility of influence from the manga design or perhaps a limited budget. Characters are often depicted quite simply, and the motion animation doesn't even try for complex and smooth action sequences. But it does have a rich sense of character, novelty, and even charm. The voices are great fun, absolutely needed to make much of the dialogue based humor work. The music, both opening and during the anime, is also catchy and fun, with some excellent use of incidental music.
Other Reviews
- Lord Carnage review Well, I did wonder how others would see this title. And lord carnage is both confused and largely unimpressed. He likes the parody concept but finds the animation and humor limited. He also (I think) stuffs up his Japanese. That should be "I don't understand at all". Never the less i'm sure many people will agree with his response to the anime (2.5/5).
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:15 WST 2009