a.k.a. Striking Daughter
Director: Takashi Kimura
Viewed in English Dub
Another work in the "worst
of" anime list, but unlike a Mars
of Destruction (2005), which is terrible in creation but too innocuous to
really hate, Utsu-musume sayuri was
built up as gross and terrible. In reality, whilst a weirdo one man CGI short, Striking Daughter (as its English title
is) isn't deserving of such a list accolade. It comes off instead as if a
segment from a weird midnight show meant to baffle drunken viewers coming in
from a night in the town, even when it comes to the incredibly broken and
wooden English dialogue.
It is the initiation of a
daughter of a strange family, a group of varying shaped mutants who are like the
denizens of a shunting ritual from Brian
Yuzna's Society (1989) if they even
allowed talking cows in at the door. That reference is appropriate as, whilst
sexual, the short isn't as gross as I had built it up in my mind. The ritual
instead is spanking on very pronouncedly drawn buttock on a wanting, which is
far from the worst thing I have heard (thankfully rather than seen) in anime.
Three years earlier, the OVA/film Malice@Doll
(2001) would tackle creepier, icky imagery of sexuality by way of a
fascinating early CGI anime I wish was better known.
It's a maligned subgenre, usually
held as terrible but for me a fascinating little corner in anime's forgotten
history killed off by Final Fantasy: The
Spirit Within (2001). Into the 2010s, very bad CGI animation still exists,
where as I view this early period purely experimental, which leaves the likes
of Striking Daughter instead equivalent
to early experimentation. Certainly, this short also belongs in general to the
type of experimental animation that comes from Japan.
In knowledge one man, Takashi
Kimura, animated and directed this, I cannot hold it as terrible baring being a
strange oddity, merely what resources he had and a clear sense of being
deliberately "weird" at that. Certainly, its grotesque looking, but
I'm fascinated by grotesque/obsolete aesthetics anyway, to which that is
aplenty here in the bold colours and style, particularly as in context to its
history, its better animated by one man in lieu to its apparent awfulness. The
bigger concern is that, at less than three minutes, it's just a slight snapshot
where I would always posit that something significantly longer is more likely
to be dreadful.
The thing which is likely to be
the bigger issue, and definitely is ridiculous, is the voice acting. One male
voice, who for all I know is the director, speaking in incredibly fragmented pronunciation
of English dialogue which is roughly recorded. It's bad, but God knows in this
era people would deliberately create work which had details like this on
purpose; in this decade, it'd be considered ironic.
The length prevents Striking
Daughter from being the worst. Three minutes is bearable if you have courage -
we will wait when the equivalent of this plays over a thirteen episode anime, alongside
the fact that whenever I encounter anything boring and/or offensive is when the
reader will likely find me write something vicious and very negative. Nothing
here is that, Striking Daughter
practically a mole hill over built when you could not only see it online but YouTube
reaction videos of others watching it.
As for the director? He directed an episode Koi Koi Seven (2005), about the only boy in an all-girl's school whose wars are literal and silly, and that's it. Unless we've got a case of two Takashi Kimuras in existence, that's pretty small as careers go.
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