#133: Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt (2010)

Director: Hiroyuki Imaishi

Screenplay: Atsushi Nishigori, Hiromi Wakabayashi, Hiroshi Seko, Hiroyuki Imaishi, Masahiko Otsuka, Shigeto Koyama, Shin Itagaki

Voice Cast: Arisa Ogasawara as Panty, Mariya Ise as Stocking, Ayumi Fujimura as Kneesocks, Hiroyuki Yoshino as Briefs, Kōji Ishii as Garterbelt, Miki Makiguchi as Fastner, Shigeru Chiba as Corset, Takashi Nakamura as Chuck, Yuka Komatsu as Scanty

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Note to the viewer, alongside some possible spoilers this reviewer has decided to fit a tone appropriate for this series of having more than usual amounts of swearing in the review text. Be assured this isn't going to end in a childish joke where every sentence is full of unnecessary cussing, as I get tired of that in other peoples' work, but considering how much voice actresses Arisa Ogasawara and Mariya Ise swear, it felt the perfect tribute whilst still writing a constructive review. For any new readers, this isn't common in other reviews, just for the joke here. Also as a result this isn't a review suitable for children to read, but anyone who lets their children see this show are bad parents anyway.  

After frankly a few major duds, let's get back track with oodles of profanity, shit and other bodily functions, all whilst having flashbacks to watching Cartoon Network shows like Johnny Bravo in my childhood. It's an unpredictable series, but fucking hell, with swearing the only expectable language for a review of this late era Gainax production, profane and potty mouthed, Hiroshi Imaishi was a much needed kick up the arse for the company wasn't he?

Starting with Dead Leaves (2004), a divisive production, Imaishi however scored a big hit with Gurren Lagann (2007), a tribute to older giant robot shows, but Imaishi really planted his flag in the business in the 2010s onwards, even though Gainax after this series wouldn't be the recipient to this. Imaishi jumped ship, and founded his own studio called Trigger, getting another blockbuster under his belt in Kill La Kill (2013) and wowing everyone still. Starting the 2010s though, he created thus divisive but well remembered tribute to American cartoons, one that is still something to admire if you accept its cuss mouth and attitude.

The plot's simple - two angel sisters are our protagonists, Panty Anarchy who is a proud nymphomaniac who loves fucking, and her sister Stocking Anarchy who is a Goth Lolita who is a sugar junky, and under the orders of a priest named Garterbelt they have to defeat ghosts terrorising a city, the coins left destroying them to save up to get back into Heaven.  Throw in Chuck, a dog-like creature with the capacity to survive being maimed (chopped up, crushed under car wheels, obliterated etc.), and a male geek named Brief who the sisters pick on, and this thirteen episode series is notably not plot driven until the final two episodes. That vignette structure it is instead is clearly influenced by Western animated shows from the late nineties from the likes of Cartoon Network, right down to episodes being split into two smaller stories (or even more in one) baring the finale. It's also crude and lewd, not a show that was successful with otaku but did get a surprising popularity with female viewers and people wanting something different.

Also, when I mean lewd, also include proudly gross. It doesn't show a lot, and for all the English language swearing from voice actresses as the leads, it actually censors language spoken in Japanese. No, the thing is that Panty & Stockings.... goes for stuff that's crude and shocking even for a TV show that has to follow certain rules still. The first story, for the first episode is upfront with this by having a shit monster as the first ghost, and they go through all the bodily fluids quite early on to the point running out of matter to get to. And yes, they even get to semen when, challenging the opening of Ozamu Tezuka's 1970 manga Apollo Song when sperm where depicted as humanoids in a race to the death, all here by having them part of a Saving Private Ryan D-Day landing parody, with spunk soldiers on mass to the doomed mission ahead. There's isn't bodily humour as I remember, but that's because it's literally expended with in the first quarter.

Beyond that is that it's a show about anti-heroines who you eventually love, Panty proudly sleeping with many men, Stockings more elegant but easier to piss off and a visibly masochistic streak, the duo in the centre of numerous deliberately tasteless jokes. One running joke has not aged well, that Garterbelt really likes young boys, an uncomfortable tinge nowadays to revisit, but it cannot be denied that, even in the restrictions of television anime, this went for broke in profaneness. Rarely does one encounter a show which has motherfucker proudly spoken unless Manga Entertainment dubbed it in the nineties with additional swearing in the English dub.

The energy is felt in that, in tribute to Western animation, the unique look is much simpler in design but means the animation can be incredibly kinetic and has movement. It was a huge, amazing surprise to realise how taking a very different direction to most Japanese animation, more detailed designs usually used with limited movement, leads to incredible set pieces for what is meant to be a comedy. Action based, Panty's namesake clothing able to be turned into guns, Stocking's into twin swords, when the series ramps these scenes up they have a level of artistic spectacle even I, someone who finds most live action films dull, admire as the style used even allows the animators to use camera movements that would be insanely difficult to try in a more detailed art style. The best examples of this are in Episode 1, already showing its hand how well made it is by having a prolonged vehicle chase/action scene for one story with a speed demon ghost (even involving a train and police car crashes to top The Blues Brothers (1980)), and Episode 6, which introduces their arch nemesis, two demon sisters Scanty and Kneesocks, who eventually go to cartoon show evil schemes but have a drag out fight/shootout in a high school for the finale.

The music is also fucking incredible. The production hired Taku Takahashi, a hip-hop recording artist/DJ/record producer as the musical director, who career started in the late 90s and can draw from his experience with all the artists he collaborated with for this soundtrack, their synth and electropop tracks created as a result a unique collect, a spectacular and poppy energy that's better than a lot of pop used in anime. Alongside producing earworms - not just the opening and ending credits music, but the song D City Rock which gets introduced later - it's as dynamic as the show itself, always going for broke and varied to a great extent without a sense of it being repetitive unless its key motifs.

So much of why I admire the series is that, even if ideas failed or weren't as funny as expected, the show was individuals allowed to be experimental and bold even in the name of absurd humour and toilet jokes, even in the fact that when ghosts are defeated they cut to live action, filming a model of them that was built just be blown up with explosives on a model set. The production team was visibly having a whale of a time on the production, but all with a sense of creativity that even the tasteless jokes have more whit to them, like the deadpan nature of semen soldiers going forth to their death that is played tonally seriously. Even for the puke ghost, it lead to the hiring of Osamu Kobayashi for that segment, director of BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad (2004-5), a very idiosyncratic figure who made a very divisive early episode of Gurren Lagann; his segment here is actually one of the best, if you want a fucking bleak tale drawn, with realistic character designs, of a downtrodden old salary man living a depressing useless life, all with the lead heroines (drawn in their normal style) only appearing near the end.

Helping the series as much is the Japanese voice cast. Listening to the English dub a little, it's too broad and exaggerated, missing the point entirely. Arisa Ogasawara and Mariya Ise, cussing like sailors as Panty and Stocking respectfully, are incredibly and arguably two of the only people who have managed to make English curse words like fuck being used in between Japanese dialogue work without feeling tonally wooden, mainly because they make these crass characters credible with nusicane even as broad stereotypes. (Tragically Ogasawara's CV isn't large in the slightest, in contrast to Ise who has done a lot and even a big of theme song vocals). Too many individuals stand out here, even with the guest actors standing out, such as the voice of the underwear eating ghost who's magnificently fabulous in his vocal delivery. Personally returning to this series after so long, I also adore Takashi Nakamura as Chuck, just for the absurdity of having to play an animal mascot who can only say his name over and over again, managing to make this work. When a lovely little twist is revealed in the final episode, of him being actually a badass, it's fucking hilarious and pays off as Nakamura has had to spend the series, even in his segments as the star, just saying "Chuck" over and over as a figure usually kicked around and maimed.

The bravery of the show means it takes risks that, even if they don't necessary succeed, you have to admire the big fucking brass balls when many anime series play it safe, something a testament to Hiroshi Imaishi as an auteur anime director as this is reoccurring throughout his career. An entire story that is a parody of the original 1980s American cartoon series of Transformers springs to mind, the "Generation 1" series one that Japanese viewers would know of as it got popular enough in Japan to have Japanese exclusive series being produced afterwards. It clearly throws in constant references to the old work, but still manages to be funny as a story of the lead sisters' arguments getting into being giant robot on robot skirmishes, whilst managing to get away with explicit Transformer on Transformer sex with mechanical genitals.

Probably the most ambitious are the two episodes just before the two part finale, Episode ten multiple mini-stories, from ones entirely about Chuck to a music video that parodies everything from The Beatles to the Gorillaz, a nice throwback as I've always suspected Imaishi's debut Dead Leaves was aesthetically influenced by Jamie Hewlett, the character designer of the Gorillaz and co-creator of the comic series Tank Girl. Episode Twelve meanwhile has on exceptional segment entirely shot in a lounge with only a couple of edits, animated long takes of just characters getting hungry.

To be honest, after this the weakest episodes are the last two of the series because trying to write serious plotted stories for this material and wrap everything up is fucking ridiculous. Plot threads like Panty suddenly becoming a virgin again doesn't make sense even for the show's absurd logic, and being structurally like a Cartoon Network animation for most of its length, but only thirteen episodes long, does make the shift utterly out of place. What succeeds is nonetheless inspired in spite of this obvious problem - it includes the only justifiable compilation of old episode clips I have seen so far in an anime, as its used to push a plot point, and the ending escalates to the best of insane scales, even having effectively a Monty Python moment if significantly more sensual.

Then the series fucks with the viewer with the infamous Gainax ending, and even if I had not gone for the joke of adding more swearing into this review, this would be the one time I could justify this verbal choice, all because this is the first Gainax ending I have had to talk about, and they are infamous for a good reason. Gainax at some point developed a reputation for shows which abruptly curveball in tone, usually at the ending rather than what, say, Gurren Lagann does with juggling tones throughout, to the point this infamous trope became a trademark. Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), their most famous work, is the most well known example of this concept too, as this morally and psychologically complex giant robot show suddenly ended in its final two episodes with a vague and avant-garde journey into its lead character Shinji finding his self confidence, by way of being represented by a school hall with chairs than apocalyptic robot fights. It ended up pissing audiences off so much that director Hideaki Anno got death threats^1. The Gainax ending here in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, with the most abrupt heel turn taking place in the last minutes, is clearly meant to be ridiculous and funny, made even more a trolling of the fans as the show ends on "To Be Continued..." actually being on the screen.

Sadly over the 2010s, no sequel was made even if it was hinted at. Imaishi as mentioned would leave Gainax in 2011, this last directorial effort for them. Gainax themselves hasn't done particularly well. They were kings in the nineties, a studio created by anime fans in the early eighties who once had to reuse animation cels just to make amateur work, only to have titles like Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987) to Neon Genesis Evangelion under their belt. A lot of the problem is that three-quarters of their titles after the 2000s, baring this or FLCL (2000-1) or something that is divisive like Diebuster (2004-6), are unknown or tainted with feeling as if they were catering with fetishes of a fan base, not a lot of their series from a certain period with exceptions ones you might have heard of. Monetary problems have not helped, as it's been sadly chronicled that even in 1999 in their height Gainax president Takeshi Sawamura and tax accountant Yoshikatsu Iwasaki were arrested and jailed for fraud. Evangelion exists more as the project of Anno's own studio Khara nowadays as he started the Rebuild of Evangelion films in the late 2000s, with Anno even suing his old company for unpaid royalties, and to make things worse representative director Tomohiro Maki was arrested on allegations of sexual indecency on an aspiring voice actress in December 2019, the later an awful black mark to a company  that over the Millennium would eventually be battered, crushed and dragged through into public for scandals like this last one. Only a threat of a sequel of The Wings of Honnêamise seems to catch my interest and I don't know if that's even going to happen or if I want to witness it.

And Imaishi himself? Well, Kill La Kill was huge and Promade (2019) had struck a chord with viewers in its theatrical release, so in contrast he had a fucking good decade which he deserved, as alongside Masaki Yuasa never was there a man who earned got a great decade of success in ten solid years, and all with the sense he's a talented one-off we are glad to have and who earned it. And yes, returning to Panty & Stockings with Garterbelt in this long and profanely written review, when its good its fucking glorious.

=========

1) Probably the best for me to represent the Gainax Ending however is This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (2004), a pretty generic sci-fi show of a guy protecting an alien girl for the most part whose most striking feature was that the fan service got to the point of actually drawn nudity from the get-go. Suddenly in the final episodes, everything changes and with no fucking hesitance in spoiling it, as the swearing will be found here in these notes as much as the main review, it the princess was revealed to be the destroyer of the Earth with everything going apocalyptic. It was even back then a show in my early young adult years I found average, only for that ending to be so surprising that the show's still stayed in memory.

#132: Arcade Gamer Fubuki (2002)

Director: Yūji Mutō

Screenplay: Ryota Yamaguchi

Based on the manga by Mine Yoshizaki

Voice Cast: Sakura Nogawa as Fubuki Sakuragasaki; Hiroshi Fujioka as Leader; Kaori Shimizu as Hanako Kokubunji; Masaki Yamamoto as Sanpeita; Megumi Toyoguchi as Honey; Satsuki Yukino as Alka; Shinnosuke Furumoto as Arashi; Toru Furuya as Mr. Mystery; Yuu Asakawa as Chizuru Jyumonji

Veronica Taylor as Fubuki Sakuragasaki; Bob Orlikoff as Masao; Brad Bradford as Arashi/Mr. Mystery; Dan Green as Leader/Narrator; Jamie McGonnigal as Sanpeita; John Paul George Jones as Groepie; Lisa Ortiz as Chizuru Jyumonji; Rebecca Honig as Ruriko Sakuragasaki; Sharon Becker as Alka

Viewed in English Dub

This, viewed by itself without context, would be an embarrassment for someone to see as his or her first anime. It's a title to point to so anyone could dismiss anime as a bad thing. There's no way around this sense of shame with Arcade Gamer Fubuki, and yet it's entirely blameable (no matter how wrong it sounds to write this) because the production was more fixated on teenage panties than a potentially fun fever dream, envisioning an evil cabal wanting to take over the world who can only be defeated by playing video games.

Technically, I viewed Fubuki as a notoriously bad anime, though it's never brought up with the infamy of a Garzy's Wing (1996) and that ilk. It only got to my attention because of Justin Sevakis. Among his many hats over his career, he was the in-house video and subtitle editor for the DVDs of Central Park Media, writer and co-podcaster in the Anime News Network, alongside Blu-Ray/DVD Authoring and Restoration of titles currently for Discotek Media. Authoring is an unsung position, as restoration in cinema let alone anime has always been a task with arduous struggles before the successes, testament to the poor guy with the restoration of Discotek's release of Cyborg 009 The Cyborg Soldier, the 2001-2 TV anime of Shotaro Ishinomori's manga which never got a full run or DVD release in the United States, and was a horror story in when Sevakis got the master materials to restore. Suffice to say, it took a year to complete, just for the uncut dub alone, because the master tapes were in a frightful state, aspects of restoration we don't consider even in terms of non-anime cinema let alone for one man who worked on the project with these issues in front of him.

Sevakis wrote of the subject of this review as part of his Buried Treasures articles on Anime News Network, which I openly admit to still tracing through the archives of to locate titles to see and review, many thankfully getting re-releases but also quite a lot talked of from a man who authored titles like them or from different eras of anime over the decades as obscurities. Fubuki comes from the occasional "Buried Garbage" sections which talk about the worst of anime, the idea like a carnival freak show but with the knowledge of his career so you learn something from them. Arcade Gamer Fubuki is for him the worst anime he ever saw, which wasn't helped when he had to work on the title in his time in Central Park Media; bear in mind, for all the good titles that company released, like part of Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), but also had the schlock fest MD Geist (1986) as one of its successful titles to sell as well as a lot of hentai (porn) anime that would horrify some, a lot Sevakis has talked about working on in his time there too.

Whether Arcade Gamer Fubuki is the worst is a debate, without wanting him to hear of this review and come punch me in the face. There has been worse made anime, as this is a nicely animated OVA with a handful of redeemable aspects, but good grief besides the toe curling plot point of the "Passion Panties", which I will be forced to get to, this is a premise of some fun squandered in the end. Probably the worst thing that can happen to an anime is when it deflates good will from the first episode onwards. The calibre surprises as it's based on a manga by Mine Yoshizaki, whose Sgt. Frog manga is one of his most popular work, the TV series infamously a property ADV Films got the license to but sat on for a few years in the 2000s despite the company being known for being prolific in their releases and the amount of time they worked on releasing it.

The title as mentioned also has an amusing premise in imagining a standard anime tale, a plucky young heroine versus a world dominated evil group, by way of arcade cabinet tournaments. It's ludicrous, but if anime should teach outsiders anything, along the cerebral and intelligent work it creates, it can have a multi-series work like Yakitate!! Japan (2004-6) which is about competitive bread making, so we can have a plucky young heroine named Fubuki fight a group wanting to take over the world with videogames. We can have a groupthat includes an evil villainess who manages a bunch of despondent masked goons, acting more like the disgruntled staff of an ICT company, and even a velociraptor that is brought back by gene manipulation and can somehow operate an arcade cabinet, let alone perceive with intelligence what to do with it.

It is also bright and slickly made, a handsome four episode production that went as far as even getting license to use Sega videogames of old, such as Fighting Vipers 2 (1998) to Fantasy Zone (1986). The irony is not lost, whilst never a video gamer but just a curious outsider who knows a bit, that this was the time of the Dreamcast, their last games console before giving up on them as, like an ominous sick joke at how Arcade Gamer Fubuki tanks the good will in the license, that console didn't do well in the damndest.  The show itself with all its good ideas - as the heroine wishes to win the world arcade game tournament, fight the villains and find out what happened to her absentee father from her childhood - doesn't even try as that company did with the console.

The immediate issue, and where you roll your eyes in embarrassment, is that to power up, as to be the best arcade player you have to jump high into the air and play the arcade cabinets upside down in gravity defying gymnastics, is that she has the "Passion Panties", which means having her female friend expose them with a fan and means exposed panty shots. It's bad enough to have the leering nature of anime, especially as the medium has all the potential to deal with sex with better fun and grace than this, but you then have to realise female characters within them are meant to be underage teenagers a lot of the time, regardless if their character designs and proportions suggest otherwise. Fubuki is, what, meant to be only between ten to twelve, which makes this worse, also with mind her nemesis is another girl, who travels on rollerblades and is an expert on shooter games, is reduced to this as well. It's really low, creepy, idiotic hanging fruit particularly when you know this OVA title is targeted to grown men.

The other issue though is my biggest takeaway, that Arcade Gamer Fubuki is lazy. Its fan service is as much part of the problem, alongside how it squanders its premise. I can thankfully say that its director Yūji Mutō went to better work, as he made Tonari no Seki-kun: The Master of Killing Time (2014), a hilarious micro-series about a guy in a class mucking about with bizarre activities with none of the issues here and perfect comic timing, which makes Fubuki's existence in his early career a shame*. Its say a lot to a four episode OVA that it fails so blandly in spite of having all the weird and potentially fun details you could want, from the velociraptor playing videogames to that the minions, led by a stereotypical female villain who uses the famous noblewoman's "ho ho ho" laugh used in a lot of anime, being a bunch of regular employees who get drunk with her in a bar and put up with their lot clearly just to get paid.

A lot of the premise never is dealt with as a result, like the tournament where a cavalcade stereotypes appear to duel, and most of the cast is underutilised. One character that could've been done without, or shot into space by the cast when he appeared, is a young boy whose obsession with just taking exposed panty shot photos of Fubuki is stalking in all but name. Many however are underutilised, even the stereotypical busty American cowgirl who is the best at dancing games as, in a better work, that she's actually on the villains' payroll but a) is lovely and b) immediately adores Fubuki as a friendly older sister figure is at least fun in premise. Probably the only character who gets fully fleshed out, even though he sadly still has to go on about those damned Passion Panties and a creepiness to his shadow over Fubuki in characterisation, is Mr Mystery. Mr Mystery is the noble masked guide to help Fubuki, a buff guy in just a wrestler's pair of pants and mask whose virtues and strength don't negate that, when he jumps through a plate glass window for example, it still hurts and black humour comes from him being liable to injury even if he does good in the end. As much as this is due to his voice actor Brad Bradford, watching the OVA in English, being the only stand out as he clearly go the memo to boom his lines to the back row of the theatre and in gravitas. The sense that he's of interest is found as much in when he's finally revealed beneath the mask - he looks identical to the protagonist of a 1978-1984 manga called Game Center Arashi about a videogame player, which clearly is meant as a nod and had its own anime in the early eighties.

Beyond this, well, it would still be possible to make four twenty plus minute episodes succeed, just accepting the gross fanservice as the sad aspect most productions are stuck with to sell, but the time is wasted on a lot of dumb jokes like the female rival wearing a dog costume or content which is ignorant of its creepiness, like the villains in Episode 2 stealing Fubuki's Passion Panties. In a perfect world, this would've been a tournament fighting story with tokusatsu villains, absurdity embraced like contests taking on top of a skyscraper or the promise suggested in one of the best and earliest moments, in which the villains try to rid of Fubuki by setting a literal trap on her walk to school, an invisible barrier which forces her and her friend to dodge giant barrels trying to crush them like an actual videogame of yore. The lack of actual videogame logic barring occasionally just adds to the grievances. As much as it pays lip service to the passion of the gamer, with all that lucrative Sega merchandise on display, it barely plays on the aesthetic or style. In a better world, for an example, we could've have Fubuki trying to avoid being crushed by Tetris blocks or a parody of Street Fighter with a world arcade gamer tournament. Maybe it could have even flipped the bird at Nintendo, say by having an evil Italian plumber as a villain. I wonder how much of the many problems are due to sticking to the source manga, but I know animated adaptations can take liberties with only occasionally some fan complaints.

The OVA also suddenly tried to become serious in the fourth and final episode, introducing a main villain who is a cross between Akuma from the Street Fighter series and Go Nagai's Violence Jack. Connected to Fubuki, the villain drags this silly farce into the most abrupt tonal change possible as he's a videogame developer who was horrified when his technology was used for ballistic missiles in warzones. Even if there's an absurd moment where, super strong and buff with his shirt off, he stops a missile with his strength just as it is about to hit him, only for it to explode, this is suddenly Arcade Gamer Fubuki getting into territory that looks ludicrous and misguided to fall into. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, but utterly ill advised in a production that hasn't succeeded at all.

The result was forgotten. I only know of Arcade Gamer Fubuki through someone else's vitriol. Whilst I can find some joys here, I feel exasperation at so much squandered potential that is on display. "Bad" is subjective in use, but "bad" in failing is really the crime here and stinks miserably to witness.

=====
*Studio Shaft, who created the OVA, also thankfully went onto better things. Mainly collecting all that Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Monogatari money. 

#131: Parasite Dolls (2003)

Director: Kazuto Nakazawa, Naoyuki Yoshinaga and Yasuhiro Geshi

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka and Kazuto Nakazawa

Voice Cast: Akemi Okamura as Michaelson; Kazuhiko Inoue as Buzz; Soumei Uchida as Kimbell; Kikuko Inoue as Angel; Masaru Ikeda as Takahashi; Toshio Furukawa as Myer

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

I like Chiaki J. Konaka, the divisive screenwriter of a lot of anime, and it is of immediate interest that he worked on the following project. The other figure of note, whilst there are three directors, is Kazuto Nakazawa. Nakazawa is the director who worked on Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) no less, the man responsible for the animated back story of the character O-Ren when Quentin Tarantino literally knocked on Production I.G,'s door, probably one of the biggest hit points in anime's mainstream popularity, alongside animating the video for Breaking the Habit, the Linkin Park song whose video was a mainstray of my childhood watching Kerrang television in the early 2000s. Parasite Dolls is also another interpretation of Bubblegum Crisis (1987-1991), a big popular OVA series (in spite of the fact its planned run was cancelled) that got quite a few follow ons At this point with Parasite Dolls, there was the very badly regarded sequel Bubblegum Crash (1991-2), A.D. Police Files (1990) which we will get to in a moment, and two parts of a reboot, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 (1998-9) which Konaka wrote, and A.D. Police: To Protect and Serve (1999), another TV series.

A.D. Police Files, the 1990 OVA, is appropriate to talk about here. That title had none of the main cast, a group of women armed with power suits, and was a prequel entirely about the AD Police, set up to deal with malfunctioning robots named Boomers in a world of futuristic Neo-Tokyo where they are mass produced for everything from manual work to even paid sex. It was a dark, violent and seedy OVA, one I have grown to admire in spite of its problematic gender politics because of its style, the three stories told as the dark cyberpunk side of the world where cybernetic implants and robots are commonplace in a rundown metropolis, and an eighties J-pop soundtrack which is endlessly listenable because of how moody it is. For two thirds of Parasite Dolls, you get something trying for this again. Something lurid but still attempting a very thoughtful piece, arguably more so then A.D. Police Files which came from the tail end of lurid eighties OVAs.

It does have the stereotype of the grizzled old veteran in just his late thirties, who never carries a gun and even plays a saxophone, which presents something a bit absurd to begin with, but for the first thirty minute episode, we get a fascinating snapshot of this world. This is a rundown city, drastically contrasted by the rich being behind dubious behaviour, be it the company behind the Boomers secretly covering up malfunctioned creations, to a dark pleasure to connect to Boomers on a rampage directly through the brain as part of a nude orgy. Building from this, side characters of interest are there, the naive but tough female or the lead's partner, a Boomer on the force whose attempts to gain semblance of human freewill make him a pretty good cop and an immediately rewarding figure to follow.

The style of the OVA is interesting, a very distinct one, matched by an incredibly rewarding soundtrack which immediately caught my attention. The depiction of Neo-Tokyo is not as sordid as A.D. Police Files, Parasite Dolls instead coming from a curious period where the OVA would diminish completely baring as tie-ins to other productions or porn. It's a handsome creation nonetheless, which is definitely felt in episode two when there are more unconventional aspects to consider, about a being killing female sex boomers. Ironically A.D. Police Files had a similar storyline about someone targeting human female sex workers, whilst this take is the episode where the virtues of Parasite Dolls appear, following the female lead and getting into both grotesque horror (the boomer sex worker killer) and weirdness as [Huge Spoiler] I keep coming across titles which teach viewers to distrust cats completely.

Episode Three, the finale one, takes a sudden and surprising direction where all hell breaks loose. This is not glib either, as it immediately gets darker than the other episodes just from the opening where an anti-Boomer fanatic is having sex with one in front of his cult and a corrupt police officer, monologuing only to then blow the poor robot's head off mid coitus and then talk of how they are just machines next to humans, proving this by shooting a young minion in the knee. This episode will eventually lead to most of Neo-Tokyo blown up, with most of the cast dead and a cultural shockwave to permanently scar the world. It would, in a full length Bubblegum Crisis film or series, be jaw dropping and an incredible conclusion.

Here however I have to confess, hiding this until now when I pull the rug under Parasite Doll's legs, I went from having an energy rush from just sitting through the three OVA episodes, thinking it was a forgotten gem, only for it to dissipate in my mind only a few days after. I entirely blame the finale, not its existence but that there's barely any build up to it and that the production shot itself in the legs by only having three episodes and not enough time to make this work. Characters we barely see die and little is witnessed, squandering a lot. That the episodes are only less than thirty minutes each, like a TV series, doesn't help as, more common later on, older OVAs like A.D. Police Files had over forty minutes per its three episodes alongside just being vignettes of separate stories in the same world, having a better effect as a result.  

Whilst I appreciate the technical quality of this anime, I don't feel the enthusiasm. The other thing is that, whilst I applaud the chutzpah with the ending episode destroying the world of a beloved franchise, I find this surprisingly normal for Chiaki J. Konaka. Disappointingly so as one of the few people who love his abstract leaps, which is also why Episode 2 is the best episode of Parasite Dolls, closer to his trademarks whilst taking from this franchise in its bizarreness (a bio-robot death machine), cerebralness (can a female robot have a personality?) in very little time to work with, and abstracting as said Boomer is haunted by a female ghost child.

It sucks how Parasite Dolls is affected by its own slightness as, if it had been longer, every episode here would work and the ending would be perfect. But as it stands, this does become an example of style over substance in a bad way, as there would've been a lot more to appreciate if we had actually gotten enough time for this material, where even the lead not carrying a gun is a reference to a tragic back-story which is abruptly included in at the end, rather than naturally introduced. The lack of balance between what wants to be a serious cyberpunk story and the presentation, which would've been more successful if it had just been an action work, is felt immensely. That this is the last Bubblegum Crisis animated production also adds a sadness in that, whilst I have somehow only seen the spin-offs, that original OVA series was popular. Of the time, as eighties as you could get, but one you'd think would get reboots. A work like Parasite Dolls might've been frankly too controversial, as there's nothing in the original premise here, but it was an attempt at brining the material to the new decade even if it has big problems structurally. Only an anniversary celebration or a drastic reboot coming to be might be the only way we get anything new.