B型H系 / B-Type H-Style / B-Gata H-Kei

B-Gata H-Kei is another entry on the list of anime I’ve watched expecting something utterly dismal but actually finding it quite watchable and even enjoyable. It’s at the nadir of a sliding scale, though: The iDOLM@STER I expected to hate but actually loved and found to be remarkably high-quality, Rosario + Vampire was pretty awful but looked great and was always fun, while B-Gata H-Kei…well, it was a bad premise and there’s really not a whole lot that’s good to say about it…yet it still had moments that made individual episodes quite fun, and a cast that ended up being quite likeable.

It’s really the overall premise that earns the series the hatred I’ve seen for it in other places, sometimes without actually understanding the twist. The story is that Yamada is a pretty, popular, somewhat airheaded highschooler who is privately obsessed with sex and aspires to sleep with 100 men. She is inexperienced, though, and decides she needs to start somewhere easy, so fixes on a plain-looking, unremarkable boy called Takeshita to begin with, in order to then move on to bigger and better conquests. You can see how this would both seem like a plausible premise and rub people up the wrong way, right? On the surface, it seems like it’s a masturbatory fantasy – the audience is meant to feel like they are ordinary, unexceptional Takeshita, and that they ought to long for some hot girl to decide they want to have sex with them. You may think it’s all going to turn out a bit Futari Ecchi. And then you might feel that it’s insulting to the male intelligence and objectifies Yamada. But that is to get the series all wrong.

You see, the twist is that Yamada is actually a pure maiden utterly clueless about sex and rather terrified of it. And what begins as intending to use Takeshita and spit him out rapidly becomes just an eccentric way of getting her to spend time with him – and fall for him. Of course, the sex itself gets delayed and delayed, by mischance and because the two main characters are utterly hopeless at it, and thus we get a light comedy not about a slut and a doormat, but about two people being too sweet-natured, silly and adorable to ever have sex with each other. It’s more cute than depraved, despite there being uncensored versions that more or less turn the last episode into softcore porn. If it were actually about having lots of sex, the whole thing would fall apart, and it’s obvious almost from the start that Yamada’s ideas about sex are totally delusional and completely opposed to anything she could actually do, and she often makes a fool of herself doing stupid things to try to progress her relationship with Takeshita. Oddly enough, that makes the sex angle childlike and sweet, paradoxical as it sounds.

Not many anime driven by a romance can start with characters having sex – the only one I can think of that does is the rather remarkable Shaft production REC – and this series certainly couldn’t support it. Particularly as it’s based on an ongoing Young Jump manga, it has to be put off more and more. Unfortunately, the central relationship can’t quite drive the whole series either, so tension has to be injected with a rival, in this case a girl with a rather overwrought incestuous crush. It almost works in that it does bring some laughs to the series, but it takes everything in a surreal direction that doesn’t help overall.

Basically, B-Gata H-Kei manages to lift itself to something quite watchable and entertaining, which is surprising given its basic premise and the rather sloppy production from Hal, where the art is sometimes gorgeous but often gets downright ugly. It does a good job of twisting a dirty outline into a story about people being very pure, but that leaves it without much direction, and it’s a good thing the series is only 12 episodes, because the gags already got a bit stale by the end.

Essentially, I liked it more than I expected…but it’s telling that I finished it earlier than planned so it wouldn’t be the 400^th post on my blog!

撲殺天使ドクロちゃん/Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan / Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan

Okay, so here’s the set-up. One day, a young boy with the very feminine name of Sakura receives a visit from an angel. The angel, whose name is Dokuro, warns him that God is sending other angels to kill him. Why? Well, in the future, because he is so turned on by little girls, he will find a way to freeze all women’s aging once they turn twelve, thus inadvertently discovering the secret to eternal life. God cannot allow this upstart to encroach on his territory, so is sending his angels to prevent the invention from ever being created by targeting Sakura while he is still a child himself. Dokuro-chan, however, thinks there must be another way, only wanting to help the poor innocent boy.

Except that...every time she loses her temper or gets embarrassed by being seen naked (which happens with alarming frequency), she kills Sakura, along with anyone else in the vicinity, with lethal swings of her massive magical club Excaliborg. This results in lots and lots of blood and gristle, but fortunately Dokuro-chan can use her magical powers to restore any damage she does. This is where the title comes from – Bokusatsu Tenshi translates to ‘Club-to-death Angel’.

This is a very Japanese plotline, it must be said, but most of the series settles into a very typical puppy-love-between-a-mismatched-couple idiom very much in the same mould as Rizelmine. But while Rizel inadvertently causes carnage with her explosive tears, Dokoro-chan just bludgeons people to death. It’s a whole lot less cute.

Plus angels’ magic leads to some very bizarre circumstances. Boys get transformed into animals, their heads just replaced by nature photographs with one or two frames of animation. Angels battle one another with wet towels which can contort their victims into perverted poses. Remove an angel’s halo and they get explosive diarrhoea. Yup, this series stoops to the kind of toilet humour people seem to think Americans have monopolised.

Honestly, it could have been quite cute. The character designs are generic but very sweet and the animation and art are both fairly high-quality. Colours are vibrant, voice actors give it their best (bizarrely, moé-loli Dokuro-chan is voiced by the seiyuu who also plays cool, deep-voiced Natsuki from Mai-HiME) and some people seem to find extremely contorted wrinkled faces (to show the suffering of, say, badly needing the toilet) quite funny, even though I’m not one of them. There were some sweet moments, and the obligatory separation angst in the last episode was handled quite well. But this show is simply not funny. And that makes it very, very bad.

Honestly, I downloaded it because I had it confused with Bakuretsu Tenshi, and watched it because a friend said it was one of the worst things he’d ever seen, which sounded amusing. But he was right, it just is really bad. The poo jokes, the stupid cartoon gore that gets old very quickly, the endless stupid ways to get Dokoro and other female cast members naked, the repetitive jokes and the total lack of plot end up really grating. Rizelmine just about managed to get the right balance, and ended up more fun than annoying, but the violence and the non-cuteness of the title character pushed this title waaaay back over the line, and past further lines no-one even knew were there until this anime discovered them.

I laughed twice in the entire 8 episodes (only 15 minutes each: this was a short OVA, thank goodness), both times unexpected references to other, much funnier shows – once when the main characters were doing a test of courage and Sakura listed things he was scared might really exist, like Nurse Witches, Moving Castles and best of all, reindeer who are actually doctors. These are all references to other anime, the reindeer being Chopper from One Piece, accompanied by a very demonic lookalike lurking in the bushes. A surprising and hilarious little side-reference. The other time I laughed was when Sakura claimed that in order to stop himself creating his pervy invention in the future and thus to get Dokoro to stay with him a little longer, he would even go gay – HAADO GEI. I’d just been watching Razor Ramon Hard Gay himself infiltrating The Television magazine’s cover shoot in some very funny ways, so that one made me laugh too.

But that didn’t make up for the amount of times I cringed, shrugged or rolled my eyes. This anime is tripe, and at that, tripe from a cow that’s been fed on a diet of pants.

(originally written 1.6.06)

プリンセスチュチュ / Princess Tutu

As I wrote when I first saw it, ‘Princess Tutu is a wonderful, weird and wacky anime about ballet with a lovely soundtrack [made up of] new interpretations of the great ballet themes by Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Delibes et al. Where else can you see a duck-girl taught by a crazy Puss-in-Boots teacher who threatens to marry pupils if they misbehave watching an anteater girl perform the male part of a pas de deux with a prince in the place of the girl?’ (Oct 20, 2003).

There’s something about Princess Tutu that makes it very, very special. I quite genuinely call it amongst the best anime of all time, and I’d quite vehemently defend an assertion that it’s the very best anime ever to have a very, very stupid premise, stupid name, stupid way of having characters resolve their problems and stupid overall world. Because what Princess Tutu grows from is very daft, and where it goes is masterful. I pity those that can’t get past the name or premise.

Princess Tutu is, probably unsurprisingly, an anime about ballet, and most of the most popular ones get a reference of one sort or another. Tchaikovsky is at the heart of the plot: in a ballet school in a romantic fantasy kingdom, a young girl is at the bottom of her class. Her secret, barely known to her, is that she is in fact not a girl but a duck with a magical pendant: indeed, her name is Ahiru, which simply means ‘duck’, and if she quacks, then she transforms into a cute duckling until she gets into some water, when she changes back. But the pendant allows for a further transformation, from the brave girl into the beautiful ideal ballerina, Princess Tutu. Ahiru is in love with the mysterious Mytho (pronounced ‘Myuuto’, probably better transliterated as ‘Mute’), a quiet and strange boy in the school. But as the mysterious Drosselmeyer sets a new story into motion, all the central characters find out that they are connected to the characters of an old story, and soon are forced to question whether they are real at all, or just characters in a story with an inevitable fate.

The balance of the story works brilliantly, for any audience prepared to give it the slightest chance. The first episodes are carried along by the sheer eccentricity and humour of the world - the aforementioned cats and anteaters, not to mention puppets and strange prawn-like innkeepers. Where normal magical girl series might feature a fight, Tutu features a dance that reveals the innermost heart. Really nothing very compelling, but fun and idiosyncratic enough to engage. But that is when, more or less with the shift to a second season, Tutu got darker and more sophisticated, although the ideas behind the change were obviously in place from the start. By the end, very little turns out as expected. At the time I finished it, (Dec 5th 2004), I ‘felt the end was so unfair on poor Ahiru, the noblest character in the anime, despite her humble nature…’, but the more I thought about it, the stronger the ending was because it wasn’t fair. Princess Tutu is not a story of magical happy endings and contrivances. It’s about a cruel (but likeable) madman manipulating others, and the struggle to stop him.

It doesn’t matter if the idea of ballet puts you off, or the first episodes seem babyish and trivial. Princess Tutu will impress you by the end. I feel I can say that with complete confidence. Its quality by the end is some of the best anime can offer, if not in aesthetic then in writing. And of course, it has some of the best music in hundreds of years.