ドラゴンボール 最強への道 / Dragonball: Path to Greatest Strength / Dragonball Movie 4: The Path to Power

This is something a little different from the other Dragonball movies I’ve seen: it was made in 1996 and was actually the seventeenth theatrical film in the Dragonball series as a whole – so strictly speaking comes after thirteen other films I haven’t seen yet. I thought it would be good to watch it now, because after all there won’t be any spoilers any more, and with it I can move on to DBZ. But I kinda wish I’d waited until after I’d finished and seen some of GT, because…yup, once again this was a retelling of the start of Dragonball. Probably at the time it was a great rush of nostalgia, but y’know, for me, it’s not that long since I saw those first episodes, and then they were all rehashed for the first Dragonball movie, though here the plot speeds along to the Red Ribbon Army arc, condensing it all into the Muscle Tower.

The most notable thing, really, is that the art is in the style Dragonball evolved to, with its distinctive eyes and more rounded faces. I have to say, I prefer the original aesthetic, which had more variety. Yamucha and General Blue in particular look very odd with Trunks’ face and proportions, and though it’s nice having Bulma with hair colour closer to Toriyama’s intentions, and the animation is obviously much more ambitious – in the climactic fight scenes in particular – generally I just feel it’s better to watch the original and this is a nostalgia trip that no longer boasts cutting-edge visuals. It makes me wonder if I’ll consider the first of the Eva remake like this when its visuals, too, are dated.

There’s also the fact that Muten Roshi’s voice actor, so instantly recognisable, had recently passed away when this was produced, and the replacement just doesn’t compare, especially when the scenes here are from when he was about the most powerful character yet introduced.

The story essentially covers once again the introduction of Goku, Bulma, Oolong, Yamucha, Pu-erh, Muten Roshi and his Umigame, and the Dragonballs. Skipping Pilaf, we more or less go to the Muscle Tower, where Metallic is given a makeover and Android 8 is given an inflated role. General Blue is given an ignominious end, no longer the formidable fighter of the original, and General Red is no threat at all, with only Staff Officer Black managing to be formidable. The ending is something a bit different, but let’s face it, no wish to Shen Long is ever going to match up to Oolong’s.

The long and short of it is that there was a time and place for this, and it’s probably more in line with what Dragonball Kai represents now. This doesn’t have the advantages of nostalgia nor up-to-the-minute visuals, so it serves only as a slightly-updated curio.

ドッグデイズダッシュ/ Dog Days’/Dog Days Dash

Last year’s Dog Days was a funny, pretty little series that, perhaps because it followed Madoka so closely, everyone expected to take a darker turn. This didn’t happen, despite hints at darker elements, so that in the end it felt almost incongruous, how simple a moé series it was. A cute boy went to a cute kemonomimi world where there was no danger of dying in battle, became the hero of the country and won the hearts of all the girls, then had to go home amidst tears and promises of a swift return.

Well, that return came here. But while at the end of the first season I was surprised by the lightness of the tone throughout, here I ended up more disappointed. Rather than explore any of the hints from the original series about areas where the spell preventing death in battle doesn’t hold, or the origins of the world, Dog Days Dash is determined to have very little happen in a very cute way. It is inconsequential, superficial and adorable. But I wanted more.

Shinku returns to the world of Biscotti and Pastilage to again act as the hero of the dog-eared cuties against the cat-eared cuteys. But this time, he’s brought the girl who used to beat him in the Sasuke-esque challenges to serve as hero for the cats. And his best friend – a girl named Becky – is along for the ride. Of course, a third country – squirrels – gets involved and have Becky as their own underdog hero. And so the games resume.

That’s about it, really. They end up doing a variety of the usual things that fill moé series – bathe together, have awkward romantic moments where they fall on each other and accidentally kiss, magically swap bodies and go to visit each other for tea. About the most interesting thing they do is free an ancient evil – who of course turns out to be pretty harmless, does perverted things and then along with the ancient good who counters him, becomes something of a mentor.

The cast becomes rather too large – there are a lot of random knights and guardians who barely get any screentime, or who become interchangeable – and with only thirteen episodes some characters get rather more attention than they really ought to. The worst part, I thought, was the way poor Éclair was treated, especially since while Shinku would be cute in a couple with just about any of the girls interested in him, she was my favourite – she gets about the most dramatic relationship moment in the series, a bit of the fall-out from it, but then it never really gets fully addressed and she doesn’t even get a goodbye scene in the final episode of the series.

I get the feeling Dog Days is a hit in Japan. It got a second season, after all! But there was a real chance to be ambitious here, only for the fanservice option seemingly to be more appealing. I can only hope Dog Days gets a third chance, and this time takes a few risks instead of treading water. If not, though…well, I have to say I’ll keep watching, enjoying and feeling the brainless pleasure that comes from looking at irresistibly cute character designs in cute contexts.

And perhaps if there’s a third season, I’ll see more of London. I have to admit, I got a kick out of seeing Soho Square. 

ロザリオとバンパイア CAPU2 / Rosario+Vampire Capu2

Well then – Rosario+Vampire, by all accounts a throwaway piece of moé frivolity, managed to be a it of a smash hit and justify a second season, ‘Capu2’ – a bit of a pun, the Japanese pronunciation of ‘two’ sounding like ‘chuu’, the onomatopoeia for a kiss.

As I said in my Macademi Wasshoi! review, this second season of a fanservice-based series somewhat crippled itself with censorship on the TV broadcast, here the stupid bat mascot censoring the panty shots – and sad to say, this follow-up series took the usual tendency for a moé show to become much more perverted for its follow-up (looking at you, Dog Days Dash) and went to the absolute extreme. There are panty shots every few seconds. The episode preview is girls’ backsides shaking away until finally their panties are revealed, different every episode. The girls’ skirts are so short they reveal panties when they are simply standing, which actually becomes a plot point. And of course, the girls have decided that they will grope each others’ boobs at every opportunity.

But if any show couldn’t really get worse because of added crass fanservice, it’s Rosario+Vampire. It was about pervy fanservice from the beginning, and pushing it way past High School Girls level doesn’t detract much from an already stupid harem comedy. And what strengths the series has, it still has – a girl for every taste, some of Gonzo’s nicer and more consistent artwork, and a compulsively watchable quality derived from the light, simple tone and likeable stereotypes.

The set-up is much the same – Tsukune-kun the human attends a school for monsters, and has a disproportionate number of the female students lusting after him. Added to the mix is Moka’s little sister, a tsundere who only wants to see Moka’s dark side – and fleshes out the bat mascot into an actual character. She acts forceful and bratty enough that when she gets humiliated it’s both cute and satisfying (though spanking was a bit far). We also see the main girls’ parents, who are like exaggerated versions of them, and we get an answer to the first series’ mystery of whether the two Mokas are aspects of the same person or ought to be considered two distinct individuals – in fact, that becomes the centre of the dramatic part of the series…as in, the parts that aren’t about the Loli magically becoming an adult with big boobies, or the gang going to a bathhouse – which in the DVDs meant unappealing nipples everywhere. Even the loli looked absurd with small, stiff anime boobs.

Given that it was stupid, meant to be stupid, and happy being stupid, I didn’t mind Capu2 at all. It was dumb, unambitious fun, and while I’d never buy any merchandise based on it, it was a fun light distraction. The one problem I had was how they dealt with the typical irritating part of any harem series – the fact that the male protagonist sees the girls fighting over him, professing their love, indirectly imploring him to choose, make a decision, get them past their indecision – but he just says nothing. Laughs awkwardly and changes the subject, or gets interrupted. And the last episode has the true Moka making clear she fully understands what is going on – she beats Tsukune up for just wanting to string all the girls along and have them all, which is after all the fantasy. It’s not a fantasy I like – I’m all for the romance of one love. Tsukune clearly likes Moka the best – and he should make that clear, no matter what the audience likes. That said, that didn’t exactly work out so well for Midorino Hibi or Da Capo, so maybe I’m in the minority. And when each very different girl has rabid fans, it’s gonna be tricky to please everyone.

There probably won’t be any more Rosario+Vampire, and that suits me fine. But if there is, I’d watch it. It’s one of those shows – pleasant enough to watch without having to think at all…but not good enough that I’m sad it’s over. 

まかでみWAっしょい！Macademi Wasshoi!

At first I really did not know what to make of Macademi Wasshoi! – a pretty, fast-paced and pervy comedy series from Zexcs, the studio responsible for the rather ugly first season of Da Capo and the anime of boys-love game Sukisyo, one of very few series I have on long-term hiatus and only vaguely intend to one day finish. For a somewhat minor studio, they made Macademi Wasshoi! – based on light novel and manga series Magician’s Academy – look great, there’s no doubt about that. But watching the first episode, the uninitiated viewer is bombarded by crazy images and there’s a feeling of having everything the writer can think of thrown at you all at once. We see a magical school full of elves and witches and robots, we see the summoning of a mysterious naked cat-girl, we see a crazy teacher who looks like a young boy but whose head is detachable, we see a whole range of mecha filling skies with rockets, we see packs of dwarfs and we see one girl with a split personality who has a sharp tongue and drains others’ magic when her hairband is off, but is so shy when it is on that she has to write her thoughts down like Shion in Shion no Ou rather than speak them. And that is only about half of the most memorable characters from Macademi Wasshoi!

Being thrown into the deep end sometimes works brilliantly, though – I had that same impression when I started to watch Azumanga Daioh, after all – and looking back, the set-up isn’t so complicated. It’s essentially like MahouSensei Negima (young magic-using boy gathers a harem of moé clichés and they compete for his attention while magical crises are averted) with a touch of Baka to Test, plus the anarchic humour, style changes and direct parodies of Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei and heaps of fanservice. Still, after a few episodes I was thinking there just wasn’t much to Wasshoi! – I’d seen it all before. I didn’t like the intro song – an attempt at the rapid-fire style of Damekko Doubutsu or Lucky Star with a festival dance feel that just meanders and sounds half-finished – and it felt like Tanarotte was painfully underdeveloped for a central character, like she was just Mikoto from the first episodes of Mai-HiME, never to develop beyond that.

Episode five changed everything with the introduction of Hapsiel, the masochistic, bisexual beefcake of an angel with a mission to spread love and peace by kissing everyone into submission – which was one of the most disturbingly hilarious episodes of an anime I’ve ever seen. He is so completely foul and the humour so gross that it’s brilliant – not even mentioning the Evangelion parody it builds from. There’s something homophobic about the humour of Hapsiel, how repulsive it is to have a big, muscled man acting so suggestively, but main character Takuto is just about as sexualised as the girls in his harem, and as the moé-loving teacher points out, he and his kind have no problems with cute love stories between younger boys (and the tragic one-sided love story of two minor male characters is more affectionate mocking than contemptuous), but Hapsiel’s sweaty, forceful, ultra-masculine love has long been a source of gross-out humour in Japan (Chou Aniki being a well-known example), with Hapsiel probably its brilliantly horrific apogee.

Moé sensibilities turn out to dominate the whole series, and it soon becomes the wider cast who steal the show – one brilliant episode plays straight the love story between a personified computer and a rocket about to be sent to space. The older male characters tend to be very into their moé and it’s very obvious that the otaku crowd is being pandered to, teased and complimented – which makes for some feel-good viewing and big laughs. Of course, the series tries to end on a serious note, with tragedy coming very close and the ending being uplifting, with a final Christmas episode doing such a good job of making the central three girls endearing that it really should have been episode 4 or 5, because their being underdeveloped and not actually very interesting was probably the show’s biggest problem.

It was also remarkable in being one of two shows from late 2008 that were purposefully highly censored to boost DVD sales – the other being Rosario+VampireCapu2, which went too far in every way and ended up with a ruined TV show and a vastly overdone DVD. Here, all the risqué scenes and nude scenes were replaced with clay figures. This showed a lot more effort and ingenuity than Rosario+Vampire managed, and other than shots of faces, I have to say that I rather preferred the clay versions, not because they looked good but because the uncensored version was just really awkward to watch. Tanarotte looks like a preteen but with oddly large boobs, and seeing them bare just…seems incongruous and isn’t at all a pleasant sight. It just looks tacked on and doesn’t suit her as a loli type. Macademi Wasshoi! is a fun, zany comedy with lots of explosions and random Kaiji parodies – it shouldn’t need nipples to shift DVDs, and feels cheapened by them. But perhaps that is just where I’m out-of-sync with the moé ideal…

もえたん/ Moetan

First impressions, 14.7.2007: And now something that’s extremely cute and very silly indeed. Step forward, Moetan, with yet another adorable Tamura Yukari performance!

Final thoughts: Several times now, I’ve brought up Moetan as an example of a terrible, terrible anime. But it’s not quite so clear-cut – Moetan is terrible, but it’s kinda meant to be. It’s a parody of magical girl anime – and most of the parody becomes simply doing the same unsavoury things, but very much exaggerated. While this creates some very silly humour, it also means that ultimately, Moetan is getting its audience from the same tropes it mocks, while making them much, much worse.

Based on comedy study aids for Japanese students learning English, the title is a backronym – ‘Methodology Of English, The Academic Necessity’, which of course is a clumsy excuse to be able to use a word that combines ‘moé’ and the oft-used moé version of ‘-chan’, ‘-tan’. The book is full of magical girl parodies and direct references to other series, and the anime follows suit – with a whole lot of ecchi lolicon fanservice.

Our story revolves around Nijihara Ink, a 17-year-old who looks and acts like a preteen. She has a crush on her classmate Nao-kun but is not very good at studying. When she meets Ah-kun (short for Arcs), the magician banished from the magical world and trapped in the form of a little duck for perving on little girls, she is granted the ability to transform (in very pervy transformation sequences that make Ah-kun drool) into Pastel Ink, magical girl and English teacher extraordinaire. Of course, she has a rival, the similarly loli-ish Sumi-chan, given her powers by the little cat-mage Ka-kun, and Alice, the young idol who has a history with Arcs in the magical kingdom.

Though only 12 episodes aired, one of them a recap (seemingly because episode 6 was too explicit even for late-night anime, arguably having more overt imagery than episode 8, which is boldly stated as pure fanservice), Moetan struggled to get past its initial premise. Early episodes set up the exposition and the rivalries, and then Moetan doesn’t really have anywhere to go until the one episode where a dark force threatens the magical world and the girls must battle it – which could have been strung out but was thin enough as it was. Thus, you have episodes of cute girls doing cute things (Ink gets ill and the others care for her), silly romance (Ink’s perfect date with Nao-kun goes awry) and even one episode that opens with the anime staff discussing how stuck they are and that everyone just wants fanservice, so they basically go ahead and get everyone naked over and over again, in bathrooms, bathhouses, anywhere – with the flimsiest of excuses.

After their mini-epic battle, the girls are depowered but continue trying to do their jobs as magical girls in cosplay, which is quite sweet. The series ends with a daft throwaway side character becoming the new mage sidekick and turning Nao’s little sister into the next mahou shoujo.

None of it really works well, and it’s all a long way from original. The potential gimmick – learning English – was relegated to gags centred on poking fun at the anime industry at the end of each episode. Thus Moetan carves out its niche by just going to greater extremes than anything else. I wrote that after the ruling on late-night anime corrupting the youth made the extremes of perversion had to be toned down would probably lead to Kanokon being the most perverted thing ever to appear on late-night TV anime, but that was before I saw Moetan’s greatest extremes – and I think this pushes more boundaries, getting very, very close to the line where it would have to be classed as porn, falling short only in that it doesn’t draw details but opts for Barbie-doll anatomy. It really succeeds when it is directly parodying – there’s a parody of Jigoku Shoujo that works perfectly – but too often it’s just a general mishmash of Nanoha and Saint October-type fanservice that nudges and winks and says ‘Look how stupid these shows are’ – while doing it all far worse in the name of comedy.

The series would probably have benefited from (a) not exaggerating Ink’s design quite so much – if she was more Madoka and less Bincho-Tan, if she didn’t always look like a parody image with no nose and no real features, probably it would have been easier to identify with her (though that comes with the source material) and (b) wholeheartedly going into parodying the epic storyline by taking it seriously but subverting it at key moments. A big joke where a whole episode, even two or three, had to be taken seriously only for a big payoff of bathos at the end would have worked, and while the DVD-only episode 13 comes close by having a non-dramatic death and recasting Nao as a megalomanic with ambitions that echo those of the main character once he grows up in Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokoro-chan, but it needed to sustain and break its serious mood rather than keeping undercutting it with gags – especially if they have to be fart jokes – as out-of-place and unfunny here as they are in something serious like Korra.

I’ll always remember Moetan as an extreme. But not one that worked. It was a silly parody, one that occasionally raised smiles, but definitely not one to recommend, or that I would ever rewatch. Would I be tempted by a season two? Well, perhaps – but after all those jokes about how clueless the anime production committee were and how few people it pleased, I very much doubt that’s going to happen.

俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない/Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawai Wake ga Nai! / My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute!

OreImo manages, just by the skin of its teeth, to be more than the sum of its parts.

Because, honestly, it really shouldn’t be very good. It’s actually in the same line of succession as Rosario + Vampire and B-gata H-Kei, the latter of which has a character with a notable amount of similarities to Kirino, the girl at the centre of this anime. But while each of those I expected to be dreadful, only to find myself entertained and liking them whilst knowing that, actually, they were pretty crap, this one I expected to be mediocre, and found that it was mediocre…yet really, really enjoyed it.

At a basic level, this is harem anime with all the usual harem contrivances and awkward need to have the male protagonist not actually commit to any of the girls pursuing him, as that’s when the tension goes out of the story. There’s a veneer of cleverness overlaid in that eroge (the story-based erotic games that form the basis for many harem anime) are the subject of the plot, as referenced in things like choices for key decisions popping up on the screen and the alternate ending given in the OVAs being referred to as the ‘true route’, but that if anything counts against the show: at times it comes close to the smug ‘we’re above these clichés but we’ll use them anyway just to point out how silly they are and because we can’t actually think of anything else’ writing I dislike in shows like Buffy (see my Cabin in the Woods rant). But it’s the self-examining otaku-centric writing that also gives this title its charm.

Kirino is quite the perfect teenaged girl – she excels in academia and sports, has plenty of friends and is pretty enough to be a model. But her big brother Kyousuke knows her as the stroppy, arrogant girl who snubs him and constantly criticises him at home – until one day he discovers her secret. She likes anime and hentai games. A lot. And not the ones you might expect, but the ones known as the domain of the creepiest otaku – she likes moé-moé anime about little sister types, especially ones who get romantically involved with their big brothers. But not because she projects herself onto the little girl – no, no, she wants to be the big brother in the situation. Kirino is a pretty, clever, sporty, fashionable lolicon.

Upon discovering this, Kyousuke realises how lonely she has been and does his best to help her. He arranges for her to meet up with some other female otaku, and despite some difficulties she makes two entertaining friends – the hilarious clumsy, awkward old-fashioned otaku Saori, who gives her name as Saori Bajeena (both an absurd, funny-sounding name and a Gundam reference) and is secretly a refined ojou-sama type, and the acid-tongued, standoffish Kuroneko (a nickname meaning ‘black cat’) who is a loli in the other Japanese pop culture sense, ie a follower of Lolita fashion. She’s also a bit of a loli in the former sense – ie, looks like a little girl and is sexually appealing – though keeps everyone at arm’s length. So Kirino and Kuroneko are both tsundere in different ways: Kirino’s tsun side is all aggression, contempt and shouting, while her dere side is blushes and sharing, while Kuroneko is tsun with haughtiness and cruelty, then dere with softness, goofiness and…well, more blushes. And both soon show an interest in Kyousuke while trying to hide it from him, as do just about every other girl he comes in contact with – his spacey childhood friend, Kirino’s two model friends (a brat and a normal but very pretty girl who presses close to yandere) and even comic relief Saori.

Where the series succeeds is the otaku comedy. It’s nothing very new – most of it has been seen in Genshiken and Welcome to the NHK, even Otaku noVideo – but it’s very well-balanced over just a few episodes. Be it the reactions of disgust of the uninitiated seeing nudey transformation scenes a la Nanoha or Kuroneko revealing herself to be gaming goddess by easily beating a pro gamer (like I did today, kekeke…), be it pastiches of the kind of anime Kuroneko likes – the mesh of Code Geass and DNAngel that is Masquera (with a superb outro song made for it) or the obviously-named Rosen Jungfrau – or subtle inclusions of other incest-based anime like the DVDs of Da Capo on Kirino’s pile. More than most ecchi romances, it manages to actually be funny.

But it stumbles in its second half. A big part of this is the anime-only story that Kirino’s terrible fanfiction (which includes the emoticons she uses in online and phone chats) becomes published as a novel and enough of a smash hit that there was an anime adaptation, which leads to some scenes where Kyousuke is given the chance to stand up for his sister and look cool. The trouble is, it all seems like some wish-fulfilment fantasy that someone is going to wake from, or some bizarre Haruhi-like bit of supernatural reality-bending. It seems really jarring that Kirino could make this story, and inconsistent in the way it’s presented as simultaneously hilariously amateur and wildly popular. It all happens too quickly and with too little input from Kirino, and is all over and near-forgotten too soon – quite surprising given that they got premier anime writer Kurata Hideyuki (Uchuu Show-e Youkuso, Read or Die) for the script. It all basically felt tacked on so AIC could pat themselves on the back about fan-pleasing things like changing their intro every episode. And then soon after, it becomes apparent that her attitude isn’t changing. There’s a sweet ironic moment where Kirino finds a little sister character annoying because she’s too prickly and doesn’t show her cute side until much later (when Kirino of course does a U-turn), which she doesn’t see is a direct mirror of her own behaviour. But the trouble is that she’s just hard to like, it’s hard to swallow that her brother really doesn’t understand her actual feelings (which honestly seem unlikely for me for someone who likes little girls), and while I do like her, and enjoy watching her, she’s just not all that likeable and her character progression feels much too slow.

This is if anything highlighted by the OVAs, in which (following the original light novels’ plot) she leaves the country and Kuroneko goes to Kyousuke’s school. The two of them join the video games club and it all gets far more Genshiken as she clashes with a fujoshi and then the two of them work together on a game. The mini-arc is just far more enjoyable than the main anime, and Kuroneko is a rather more interesting central character, especially in a modern school setting rather than, say, as a loli detective in the 20s, Gosick-style. The fujoshi character is hilarious, and the Makabe-kun character I found utterly adorable, especially blushing wildly as he hears the horrible things Akagi the fujoshi has imagined him doing. I wonder what that hint about her brother despising him in the DVD extras was…

Indeed, the DVD extras deserve a mention – I thought ‘animated commentary’ would just be a waste of time, and the horrible basic animation of the SD chibis in the first episode almost bore that out, but ultimately it was less a dull commentary than a very interesting way to get characters discussing the anime from outside it – as well as having some really fun ideas like letting the characters from the anime-within-the-anime do some commentary and having the characters see things that happened in private. AIC Build at the very least know how to please fans with the trimmings.

My head says that I shouldn’t really like OreImo. Under all the self-referential humour, it’s still dumb harem, and its main character may be sweet but even with just twelve episodes it stretched credulity a little that she could be so blatant and yet Kyousuke remain oblivious. And yet I looked forward to every episode, I laughed at the jokes and the awkward situations, and though I preferred Kuroneko I was pleased when Kirino returned to the series. And I will definitely tune in for season 2. 

今日の5の2 / Kyou no Go no Ni / Today in Class 5-2 (Xebec)

You may notice that the pic is familiar – that’s because I wanted it to directly echo the one for the original Kyou no Go no Ni OVA series (right-click and open the pic in a new tab/window to see it full-sized). When I mentioned this Xebec adaptation there, I expected it to be quite different – much cuter and less full of erotic situations featuring its 11-year-old cast. After all, that series was made by an anime studio that makes hentai – and I described it back in 2006 as ‘ultimate pedo-bait anime’. Xebec mostly make cute stuff like The Third and DNAngel, right? So they’re not going to make it that pervy. Even if they did also make Kanokon…? 

In fact, it was much the same, only without all the gratuitous panty-shots. Sure, not having panty-shots makes for a bit less squirming and eyebrow-raising, but to my surprise, the scripts were still centred on sex jokes, especially for the first half of the episodes. Ryouta is still forever walking in on the girls topless, accidentally falling on top of them and being caught in compromising positions that, for example, make it look like he’s receiving oral sex.

And again, it’s when the series moves away from this that it is at its best. With a full 13 episodes and its own season-based OVA, this version of Kyou no Go no Ni at least gets to develop its characters more. In particular, the boys are given more of a focus – in the old version, they were almost ignored, while here Kouji’s quick-wittedness and Tsubasa’s amusing innocent wisdom get fleshed out properly, and the girls similarly have more time onscreen and get more character development beyond being the archetypes of the tomboy, the childhood friend, the funny spacey one etc.

To my surprise, though, I actually preferred the art style of the original. I’d hoped it was going to look like Minami-Ke, which as I said in my review of the OVA is from the same mangaka, but in trying to move it towards the fad for cute moéblobs it actually ended up looking mostly cheap and clumsy. A lot of the art just looks ugly and off-model and the kids’ body shapes are often weird and malformed in motion. Ryouta looks much better than in the OVA, but other than that it definitely suffers for the comparison, and a more defined and slicker art style would make the characters more distinctive – I more than once mixed up the two short-haired girls Yuuki and Natsumi.

Overall, the series did show the improvements I had hoped for – but only when it had already repeated all the parts of the OVA that were a bit too far. Moéblob art only accentuates that these are 11-year-old kids who don’t suit the sexual-themed humour here – I would have much preferred they were aged up and drawn in a slightly more sophisticated way. I’m not usually one to preach against the sexualization of minors in anime, but this is one of the rare cases in which it seriously detracts from the piece overall, which only gains its charm once the steam goes out of the ecchi humour and more quirky character-based jokes or funny situations –like one with a duck – can come in. 

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!

ロザリオとバンパイア/ Rosario + Vampire (series 1)

Like Claymore and Tegami Bachi, Rosario + Vampire was one of the series that crossed over when Monthly Shonen Jump ceased publication and then reappeared a few months later as Jump SQ, short for Jump Square. Like the others, it’s a supernatural-themed story with lots of action scenes. Unlike them, though, it is not an adventure narrative but a pretty brainless harem story chock-full of pantie shots but severely lacking in charm.

On the other hand, it is also one of the more successful manga out there, its tankobon volumes selling tens of thousands of copies each and no doubt there being a healthy trade in figurines and body pillows, too. And terrible though it is, I have to admit this anime adaptation by Gonzo both looked very fine and was compulsively watchable – though it would not leave me desperate for the next episode, if I had time for an episode and wanted something light, it was always a good choice.

The concept is simple: the ordinary, rather passive but good-hearted young man Aono Tsukune failed to get into a good high school when he did poorly in his exams. However, his parents came upon a random acceptance slip for a private school called ‘Yokai Academy’, so he enrolled. Unbeknownst to him, the school is actually for mythological monsters, so that they may learn to integrate with human society – but of course, a human discovered in their midst may or may not make it through the rest of the day alive. Luckily, Tsukune quickly makes a friend of Moka – a vampire whose true powers are sealed away by a rosary around her neck.

If it sounds cute, along the lines of PetoPeto-san, it’s much more like Mahou Sensei Negima or even Shuffle! – the everyman boy at the centre of it ends up the object of desire of a series of cute girls to suit every taste – not only sweet-natured Moka but the huge-breasted succubus Kurumu, the eleven-year-old loli witch Yukari and the quirky yuki-onna ice demon Shirayuki (which is Snow White’s name in Japan). The structure of the 13-episode series more or less introduces all of these, gives one or two episodes of them working together to overcome adversity and joining a newspaper club together, then everything comes to a head as the school’s disciplinary committee finds out Tsukune’s secret.

I really ought to sniffily dismiss such an awful show. Constant panty shots happen at the slightest provocation. The girls are totally objectified, mere shells of characters forever getting into scanty outfits or grabbing each other’s boobs in jealousy. The plots are paper-thin and usually have no tension because Moka’s inner powers get unleashed – along with a different personality that may or may not be an entirely distinct character – and all problems get solved with a bit of violence. Tsukune himself is duller than even the average ignorable male in harem anime, doing almost nothing but calling out the names of all the girls when they’re in trouble and stringing them all along because he supposedly doesn’t know how to handle the attention he gets. And yet…

…and yet I have a soft spot for it, and will be watching series two. Partly it’s just because the production values are nice: it all looks good, the characters’ faces are very cute and I love the silly theme used for lovey-dovey moments. And it’s entertaining and funny despite all its shortcomings. It’s not a show I’m proud to like, or would recommend – but despite myself, I find that I do like it, and it does make me smile and care about its paper-thin characters.

お金がないっ/ Okane ga Nai / No Money

Here it is, then. The worst piece of animation I have ever seen. Stephen Fry writes in his autobiography about the guilt he felt giving a book a bad review, but I feel no compunction calling this the worst anime I’ve ever seen: it’s not anyone’s personal baby but the mangaka’s, and after all, it’s the lowest sort of trashy porn so I seriously doubt she has any great attachment to it.

Yes, this is another review of a hentai – although I suppose it may be trying for shounen-ai rather than yaoi, featuring as it does ridiculous arty angles and shining lights rather than pixellated genitals. And yes, it’s another homoerotic one, although it’s actually been a while since I last watched anything like this, unless you count the tedious Junjou Romantica – which I suppose it has more in common with than, say, Words Worth.

You may point out that I always seem to give homoerotic anime a hard time. I didn’t like Papa to Kiss in the Dark, I stressed how much better Enzai would be without the porn and Boku no Pico remains more funny than anything else. Loveless and especially Gravitation really tried my patience, and Sensitive Pornograph was dire. So why keep watching them?

Well, the fact is that there are good stories along these lines out there. This show covers similar themes to many a CJ Michalski or Yamakami Riyu publication, only with everything that makes it unique also being everything that makes it utterly horrible. Why animation companies should choose to animate a manga like this and not something decent I don’t know. So I am not naturally predisposed to hate these shows – they are just very bad examples of their kind.

Okane ga Nai – and I sigh as I write this – is about a girly-boy university student who looks like a mutant little girl stretched out and given ten thousand eyelids around his terrifying eyes. He is voiced by the seiyuu who did characters I really like, like Riku in Onmyou Taisenki, Gauche in Tegami Bachi and Albert in Gankutsuou, which makes me strangely sad (and he was also Grell in Kuroshitsuji, which makes me mostly confused). Through no fault of his own (a reckless family member), he is in debt by millions of yen to a huge scary (but handsome) 'businessman' (One Piece’s Arlong and Naruto’s Asuma…). Unbeknownst to the boy, he once showed kindness to the man at his most vulnerable, so the man is actually in love with him. The man thus decides to express his love by saying that the boy can pay off his debt by moving in with him and becoming his whore.

Romantic as this may sound, it gets worse. Not only does the man keep his feelings hidden for some reason, making the boy feel he is being mercilessly raped, he has powerful enemies. Thus, the main crisis of the OVAs comes when the boy gets kidnapped, drugged and the bad guys strip him with intent to rape him on camera. The man comes sweeping in to save the day – too late to stop the boy being violated by a suppository and exposed to the camera, and with the great plan of bringing in one of the rapists’ daughter and threatening to slit her throat. And then just using brute force instead. To celebrate the boy being saved from almost being raped on camera, arrangements are made to make a nice sex tape of him, now that he’s found out the man actually genuinely has feelings for him. This is, of course, supposed to be hilarious.

I hate everything about this, except that it was only four episodes long. I hate the art, with the absurd giant seme and ridiculous stick-limbed uke. I hate their faces, one some sort of golem and the other with creepy eyes that look like an unkind anime parody – though the original manga seems to look less terrible. I hate the rape fantasies even more than I hate them in just about all erotic anime (as it’s sadly prevalent) – this time it’s even more of a nonsense because a few words would totally change the issue. I hate that the boy is supposed to shrug off the fact a whole room of men saw him abused and violated. I hate that he’s supposed to fall for his abuser. I hate that the characters are such distorted ideas of lovers.

This is really like banging my head against the wall. I’m aware that it’s like watching a live-action porno and complaining about how unbelievable the plumber’s character was and how the naughty nun’s lines didn’t ring true. But dammit, this sort of thing is a huge industry in Japan, and straight hentai is getting surprisingly good. Yaoi has its big names, and some of them are big because their art, story and characterisation is good. So why is rubbish like this still made?

今日の5の2 / Kyou no Go no Ni / Today in Class 5-2: 2006 OVA series

First Impressions, 22.4.06: New anime: Kyou no go no ni (‘Today in [Class] 5-2’)

Heheheh! Ultimate pedo-bait anime! Perverted humour mostly involving a boy getting inadvertently put into seemingly sexual situations with various girls, then being found in compromising positions, is an old staple of anime humour, especially in the harem genre. But they’re not normally 11!

Funny little show. Could be quite entertaining, could be eye-roll-inducing fanservice for undiscerning lolicons. We’ll see. But I was amused enough to want to watch more. I feel somewhat dirty afterwards, though.

In all honesty, though, they could’ve made exactly the same anime and just SAID they were 18, so I don’t see why anyone should be too disturbed.

Final thoughts: 22.01.12

It was only in the last couple of weeks, when I decided to finally watch the five-minute special that capped off this OVA series, that I found out that Kyou no Go no Ni – or ‘Today in Class 5-2’ – was by Sakuraba Koharu, the mangaka behind Minami-ke. It was something of a surprise, much like when I read the manga of Ichigo Mashimaro and found that rather than a comedy about childish silliness, it was actually quite pervy. For though I had watched the Kyou no Go no Ni episodes more or less as they came out, they struck me as both not very memorable and pretty embarrassing.

You see, Kyou no Go no Ni is about a class of 5^th Graders – mostly 11 years old. They have all sorts of mishaps, almost all of them involving one poor hapless boy innocently blundering into what look like sexual encounters and getting smacked for it. The truth is that it’s quite possible to tell this is from the same source as Minami-ke, really – there, too, a lot of the humour comes from people leaping to the wrong conclusions, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or misinterpreting what someone else is talking about, and indeed, most of my favourite characters there are the same age (and mostly in their own Class 5-2) and have similar – often rather androgynous – designs. Albeit with those strange mouths.

The trouble is that these OVAs were made by Shinkuukan, who are a porn animation production studio. And they produce this little mini-series about 11-year-olds more or less as porn. I don’t know how much of the manga is sexual-themed fanservice, in which the poor protagonist Ryouta is constantly seeing girls near-naked, falling and landing on top of them or even getting a kiss or two, but just about every joke in these OVAs is along these lines or leads in that direction. And the fact is that it’s much better when they’re not. Humour about Valentine’s chocolates or thinking your childhood friend is talking about an old memory of wanting to marry you when actually she’s talking about bedwetting are worth a thousand cheap skirt-flipping gags – and to be honest, those would be far funnier if they were played for the laughs you get from reactions (ie, the shot is arranged behind the girls having their skirts flipped up, showing nothing of what the boys see but their shocked expressions instead) rather than the uncomfortably blatant child erotica of close-ups of crotches.

After this, Xebec made a series of Kyou no Go no Ni in its own right – with its own OVA afterwards – and apparently they are much less squirm-inducing, and honestly the character designs look rather nicer. I expect the animation is less smooth and the colouring much simpler, but it doesn’t matter if it turns out this version looks far nicer: the fact is that so obviously eroticising the children makes them immeasurably less cute rather than making them more desirable, and takes the viewer’s thoughts not to the character but to the animators and their motives. Either make a cute comedy or make loli porn; don’t spoil a comedy about cute 11-year-olds with more awkward erotica than High School Girls and Rosario + Vampire combined. At least Moetan doesn’t feel like it could be something much better.

On the other hand, Kyou no Go no Ni does indeed have another chance – the Xebec series, which I shall watch. I don’t really remember much about the characters beyond the main boy, his childhood friend and the spacey blonde girl, there’s no plot to sink my teeth into and, well, I’ll always be wondering how much fanservice is in the manga (and perhaps I’ll find out at some point), but I’ll give it a chance. After all, I didn’t particularly care for Minami-ke after a few episodes but it grew on me and I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming fourth season.

劇場版 天元突破グレンラガン 紅蓮篇 & 螺巌篇 / Gekijouban Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (movies)

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Gurren-Hen
Kanji: Crimson Lotus Chapter
English: Childhood's End
Impressions written: 19.5.09

Watched the first Gurren Lagann movie, which honestly I found very redundant. I enjoyed it very much, because it was manly manly Gurren Lagann, and the altered climax, now having the attacks from divine generals happening simultaneously, made for at least some new experience, but generally it was a rehash of the first half of the series with next to nothing added…and the best gag (wonky first combination) done much less amusingly. Non-fans would’ve been bewildered by major characters getting introduced in a brief montage, so I really don’t see much use in this film version other than (a) big-screen experience in Japan, (b) recap and (c) money.

Fun for me as a fan, especially since it’s been a while now since I watched the series, but really kinda pointless.

Gekijouban Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Lagann-Hen
Kanji: Spiral Stone Chapter
English: The Lights in the Sky are Stars
Impressions written 11.12.11

Having been a bit underwhelmed by the first Gurren Lagann movie adaptation, I left it two and a half years before finally getting around to watching the second one. If the second film was, like its predecessor, to be more or less a recap of what I had already seen, it was better to give it some time so that I would have half-forgotten the things I was seeing. Besides, Gurren Lagann didn’t quite change the anime landscape like I had expected it to. Imaishi Hiroyuki’s successor to Gurren Lagann turned out to be Panty and Stocking, which despite its exuberance I didn’t like at all…and now he’s off to form his own studio, Trigger – so we will have to wait and see if that is a success. To see more in the Gurren Lagann vein, one has to go back to the lacklustre Dead Leaves, or possibly be content with that one episode of The Idolm@ster.

So it was with slightly odd expectations I watched Lagann-Hen. Neither the first film nor the Parallel Works had scratched an itch for more from the excellent series, and I actually expected a tiresome rehash. Luckily, I had rather a similar experience to when I saw You Can (Not) Advance after the expectations established by You Are (Not) Alone, and there was really rather more new and awesome stuff to see in this version than anticipated – though not a whole new storyline. While the second half of Gurren Lagann – after its timeskip – is certainly the weaker part, it’s also where proceedings get truly ridiculous, with universes and big bangs being thrown about and characters slipping into fantasy worlds in their own minds. It means a slow start soon gives way to the most absurdly grandiose setpieces in any anime, with lots of shouting about the strength of manly feelings and ‘Who the Hell do you think we are?!’-ing, which is always a good thing.

While the framework is the same, obviously much-truncated, there are little changes – mostly added details to please fans, from the Spiral King getting a funny little CG sequence for when he hacks a system to individual Gurren made for characters like Nia and Yoko – as well as a fun combined Tengen Toppa for Gimmy and Darry, appropriately split left and right. For this fanservice, the early world-building for the timeskip and the interesting internal worlds of the fantasy sequences are skipped over – and, sad to say, we get no adorable humanoid Boota – but that was no loss. This is after all not a film capable of replacing the half-series it retells whatsoever, and thus is only a companion piece – so the more original content we get, and the less reuse of animation from the TV series, the better.

Essentially, this isn’t a film for people who haven’t seen the Gurren Lagann series. It’s no good just watching the two films either. But this one succeeds where the first one stumbled – it offers enough new material to work well as fanservice, and I don’t mean the Gainax Bounce kind, though there’s plenty of that too. It worked especially well for a fan watching it after a few years away from the property, and I don’t regret getting around to watching it at last one bit.

美鳥の日々/ Midori no Hibi / Midori’s Days / Midori Days

I was still fairly new to weekly anime and the fansubbing scene when I watched Midori no Hibi, back in 2004. Fresh from Azumanga Daioh and Excel Saga, I thought that in the grand scheme of things, the concept of Midori no Hibi wasn’t all that weird. But it is. I was in a little bubble of surreal anime, and I’m not sure anything has had such a weird basis since. Even OreTama has a more coherent thought pattern behind it. Midori no Hibi is truly weird, and only weirder because once it slaps you across the face with its premise, tries to be a very normal odd-couple drama.

But the lead girl has magically replaced the lead guy’s hand, and lives there, attached to the stump of his arm.

Yes, Midori no Hibi is a zany romantic comedy about what happens when you wake up with a cute girl instead of a right hand. Sweet-hearted little Kasugano Midori has long admired delinquent Sawamura Seiji from afar – he has a reputation as a mean fighter and bad company, but she knows most of his fights are to protect the weak, and generally he’s very much like Ichigo from Bleach, down to the hairstyle. After a mix-up with wishes coming true and Seiji thinking that his reputation will mean he will only ever have his right hand for a girlfriend, the two are brought together indelibly.

Midori no Hibi has some of the most bizarre fanservice you could imagine, and is a truly surreal romance, but somehow it powers though with such self-belief and conviction hat it manages to cohere. The result is something certainly unique but also familiar and very funny.

I remember the series being popular at the time mostly through the highly influential Snoopycool scanslation group, and though the manga had several new characters and a slightly more adult tone to it, the only things that the anime missed out on by leaving out the crazy American girl or the strange yankee girl who obsesses over the adorable shy boy who Seiji always ends up rescuing was a few laughs, and those are easily accessible through the manga anyway. Ultimately, the anime feels more like a tool for getting people to pick up the manga, but in and of itself it’s a fun, silly, satisfying story with a surprisingly good romance story and the ability to take its absurd premise to serious places beyond wacky comedy.

And somehow, there’s something hilarious and adorable about how poor little Kouta has to suffer so much.

臀撃おしおき娘 ゴータマン ゴータマン誕生編 / Dengeki Oshioki Musume Gōtaman: Gōtaman Tanjō-hen / Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman

With a title like that, it’s going to be a comedy, right? And so it is, a very strange piece of ecchi irreverence from 1994. I got this out to amuse people at a con, and it didn’t fail – Buddhaaaa became one of the in-jokes of the weekend.

A surreal comedy, it centres on a girl who in order to protect her best friend is granted the powers of the Buddha (Gautaman being ‘Gautama’ rendered in superhero style), which for whatever reason entails getting sumo powers, complete with the traditional loincloth. The joke, then, is that there’s a cute girl wearing very little with some absurd powers.

While religious irreverence in cartoons is pretty commonplace, and after all the precedent goes all the way back to Journey to the West, it’s actually quite rare to see Buddhism treated in such a silly way.

It’s 45 minutes long, and very slightly overstays its welcome, the joke wearing thin by then. But for something absurd and funny – with the added veneer of respectability being over ten years old for whatever reason anime is granted – you can’t go wrong with this.

りぜるまいん / Rizelmine

Rizelmine is one of the sillier animes I’ve ever seen, typical moé, but very cute and funny and compulsive watching. It’s an undeniably odd series about a teenaged boy who spends all day fantasising about his teacher, who comes home one day to find that three government agents have brought him a young girl who they announce is legally his wife.

Rizel is very cute, very innocent, looks about 8 and…well, despite the probable intention is a long way from sexy. Rizel adores her ‘danna-sama’ (respectful term for husband) and spends all day trying to make him love her as much as she loves him, until he calls her an idiot and she cries – and for some reason, her tears are made of nitro-glycerine, so everything blows up. Told you it was silly.

Aimed squarely at the lolicon fanbase, I don’t think it even hits that mark. Rizel is about as desirable a lover as a baby rabbit. But that doesn’t make it any less fun to watch – Rizelmine was always a safe go-to if I felt I needed cheering up, or wanted to relax. It was simplistic, daft and cutesy, but that was precisely its appeal.

In many ways, Rizelmine was deeply influential, or at least part of a general movement that defined anime in the years since it aired, back in 2002. Cutesy, silly moé anime was a guaranteed hit for years after this, and I feel sure that its success was a part of the decision to make that movement happen. Nothing clever, innovative or deep, but fun, memorable and very, very sweet.

(Expanded from impressions, 19.4.05)

シャッフル! / Shuffle!

I suppose one could call it ‘the nipple factor’. With the exception of R.O.D. the TV, every show that has female nudity and actually includes nipples, rather than trying to be artistic and tasteful with the Barbie-doll factor or concealing crucial areas, has been catering to the lowest common denominator, ended up being trashy rubbish and actually removed rather than enhanced most of the attractiveness of the characters. Let’s face it: a drawing is a drawing, and dots for nipples aren't going to do it for most.

Anyway, Shuffle! got a fairly bad rep in the anime community. And a lot of it really is very bad. However, it actually manages to be better than expected, but only because the first and second halves of the series seem like completely different shows.

The first half is pretty awful. Rin, an ordinary sort of a boy, is surrounded by cute girls, including one who lives with him and acts virtually as a servant of her own free will. Not only this, but the world he lives in is populated not solely by humans but also by demons and gods, distinguished mostly by their kawaii~ pointy ears. Rin’s daily life is disturbed when two new girls transfer to his school and announce that not only are they both princesses (one of the gods, the other of the demons), but both want to take Rin as husband and make him ruler of an entire dimension.

The absurdity only increases. We have the normal harem nonsense of beach episodes and comedic mix-ups. We then get utterly trite angst with the channelling of dead twins and split personalities, and an overlong subplot about little engineered lolis who can only be saved by the power of love.

The second half, however, mostly ignores this sort of rubbish as Rin seems to be leaning towards another girl altogether, a long-time friend who is the least cliché of all the girls. This part actually begins to work, even when jealousy is taken a very long way, but then it all tumbles down again because of lazy writers falling back on magic.

In the end, Shuffle! isn’t dire, and at times it actually leans towards Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien in a rather appealing way, but ultimately it’s laden with too much crap to be considered anything like a good series.

However, it brings to anime the rather excellent term ミスターロリペドフィン!

(originally written 11.12.08)

ぼくのぴこ + ぴことちこ / Boku no Pico & Pico to Chico

Warning: this show is paedophilic gay animated porn. Read on only if you can get past this rather disturbing premise.

I’ve written nearly one hundred of these little reviews, but this is the first time I’m reviewing any hentai. In fact, this is actually the first hentai I’ve seen right through; other than this, I’ve only ever watched clips of Eva porn in an AMV, clips and bits and pieces shown to me for comedy value. People may be sceptical when I say this, but it’s true – hentai really doesn’t do it for me, doesn’t turn me on, and doesn’t stimulate me as a piece of storytelling…but then anyone who’s seen hentai will know that the last assertion is just stating the obvious.

Even well-known hentai like Bible Black, or ones that spark a lot of discussion like Kite, just don’t interest me. Because if hentai isn’t utterly stupid, then it’s really disgusting. And it’s usually both.

Along comes Boku no Pico. A laughably ropey plot allows for lots of gay sex scenes – an adult male meets an adolescent boy who acts like a little girl. They have sex, then have more sex, then have an argument, then have make-up sex. That really is it. To my surprise, unlike most yaoi, especially with this sort of age dynamic and seme/uke pattern, and in spite of its fanbase in the West, Boku no Pico was not made for women to enjoy. It was made by and for men. Although Pico is a horribly blatant caricature, the pretty, extremely submissive teenaged boy as a sexual ideal is intriguing, being such a taboo, and though ‘Mokkun’ treats the kid in a pretty dubious, objectifying way, it’s mostly only so that Pico’s soft personality can come through.

Let’s face it, Pico is an idealised girl with boys’ pixellated genitalia, in the typical moé mould of absolute submissiveness with just a touch of headstrong selfishness than can be resisted later for maximum sweetness.

But oh good lord, the sex scenes are not appealing. Leaving aside the bizarre errors concerning how the male body works (no, you can’t do that with a foreskin, my dears. I can see what he’s doing behind that pixellation, and it’s not possible!) and the effectiveness of spit as lubrication, why on earth is it supposed to be sexy to see an ephebe ejaculating about a litre of spunk that’s stickier than wallpaper paste? They’re good for just one thing, laughter; Boku no Pico can be sexy only until it becomes porn, and even then not very much so.

Then comes the sequel, Pico to Chico. Pico goes on holiday and finds an even younger boy, who looks about seven, and they have sex! Pico, the most submissive character ever conceived, gets an uke of his own! Well, some of the time – he’s so feeble that the seven-year-old can be the dominant partner at times. Pico and Chico have lots of sex, dress up as girls, and Chico’s sister masturbates while she secretly watches. Charming. The animators don’t seem to know that prepubescents don’t ejaculate, because Chico, too, is bursting with yucky wallpaper paste.

This kind of thing is legal in the UK at the moment, though will quite probably cease to enjoy that status within the year, as our beloved politicians know what it’s acceptable for the nation to see, of course, and John Reid has announced that underage cartoon porn will soon be criminalised. (Hundreds of teenaged girls around the country, take note.) No-one’s ever going to believe that Pico is 18, let alone Chico, but I need not fear breaking the law, because there’s nothing that makes Boku no Pico worth re-watching, and it won’t be on my hard drive.

Hentai featuring huge boobs, exaggerated cocks or tentacle rape: delete at once.

Hentai featuring a cute teenaged boy: watch it all the way through, shake head and delete.

Hentai featuring a the boy having sex with a pre-teen: watch shaking head, sneering or laughing, then delete.

On the other hand, it does give me a desire to see other shounen-ai, if not yaoi. It was, after all, the yaoi that ruined the shounen-ai. As long as it’s not crap like Loveless or Gravitation, anyway.

(Originally written 22.8.07. A third in the series has since been released. I have in fact found more uses for the show as it has since become more infamous: it's occasionally very funny to show it to the wrong people at the wrong times)