Director: Hiroshi Ogawa and
Yoshitaka Fujimoto
Screenplay: Megumi Hitotsuyanagi
Based on the La Blue Girl manga by Toshio
Maeda
Voice Cast: Kat Vandam as Miko
Mido; Barry Banner as Nin - nin; Lotus as Fubuki; Lynna Dunham as Yaku / Maria;
Tim Brash as King Seikima
Viewed in English Dub
Prologue
"Hentai", which is the
term to describe pornographic work, actually translates from Japanese as
"pervert". For Japanese otaku, placing the term "ero" in
front of manga, anime etc. denotes it as pornographic. We in the West have
nonetheless clung upon "hentai", and inevitably, this subject would
have to be discussed here, though the irony is not lost in term we use having a
loaded meaning when translated.
An initial problem for covering
work like this is that the United Kingdom for all our history of sexual kink
and liberation our laws are still draconian or just antiquated to modern
society, particularly with the issue that especially now with the internet to factor
in, there is not really a market for anything beyond what sells for pure
titillation. Before the internet, and still to this day, porn is only available
to buy legally in licensed sex shops. Not the illicit places of imagination but
ordinary stores, ones however that only exist in certain locations and
inherently prevents the medium of pornography from being seen in any artistic
light, simply because it is not feasible with limited shelf spaces to stock
anything not just designed for masturbation. Even in light of the internet
making an obvious dent on the medium, it entirely depends on the market to
whether animated hentai would be sellable here.
There is also the issue that
there is so much of it, since the start during the OVA and video boom of the
eighties, that trying to sieve through it would be a nightmare. The final
issue, and the elephant in the room, is that even if it was a minority, the
artistic freedom of hentai even in lieu to Japanese censorship laws has a
double edged sword that a lot of it is very fetishishtic. That would not be an
issue aside from the fact that, entirely from even my perspective of only
reading of synopsises and of comments by people willing to sit through titles,
this has also meant unfortunately lot of hentai with premises and content that
sound gross and offensive.
I am not even referring to
cheaply animated work either, but that the image of hentai includes material
which reading descriptions which include transgressive material and sexual
violence. This is not to dismiss the genre in the slightest, as in a case like
the franchise Cream Lemon you can
have someone like Hiroyuki Kitakubo
cut his teeth on his first directorial work for an episode before he goes onto Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), but it
does not help in the slightest that even some of the most well known titles,
like the Bible Black series, are
sold on taboos which suggest not something to watch for a romantic night in but
really transgressive and nasty porn horror whatever its artistic merits. As we
will get into for this review, this poses also an issue for myself as a British
anime fan as this type of material would be significantly more filtered out by
the British Board of Film Classification,
and I would not be stupid enough on that factor and also for my own sake delve
into material I might find disgusting.
One of the most notorious
sub-genres, which became a stereotype of anime itself, would have to be
tentacle monsters schoolgirls, an image of anime which is actually a tiny part
of it in truth. The man responsible for it is La Blue Girl's manga creator Toshio Maeda, who created this trope of
tentacles in a sexual context because he was not allowed to depict ordinary sex
around 19861. Like the issue with depicting pubic hair in Japanese
art, there is an irony that sexual Puritanism is entirely responsible for this,
as the Meiji Restoration led to an influence of Western morality that affected
how Japanese culture perceived eroticism, something which in classical art can
be extremely explicit in shunga art before the censorship. The irony is that
this led to a growth of many fetishes but also probably a few many like me
would feel understandably uncomfortable with. Likewise, as a result of laws
that to this day mean Japanese porn still has blurring, Maeda found a loophole that which was most infamously depicted in
Urotsukidôji, a manga more well known not even for its three part OVA version
for the first arch between 1987-9, but the theatrical version called The Legend of the Overfiend, which got
a Western release and developed a notoriety which adds a huge back story to
this review. You have probably been curious why the review is structured so
differently from usual, and looks to be a long read, but context is important
for myself as much for anyone in terms of trying to figure how to deal with
this review.
Maeda himself? I won't dismiss the creator despite the troublesome
tone of his content. Maeda is someone
who works in a medium where he also does erotic manga for women, and also (to
his own surprise)2 gets fan mail from female fans for his violent
material for men. He only created the use of tentacles due to artistic
censorship and it says a lot of the banality behind a lot of art that, for all
its shock value and controversy, the creator is still an ordinary working man.
This is worth baring in mind for La Blue
Girl Returns as, just looking at the directors, Hiroshi Ogawa has done a lot of key animation including for an
episode of Puella Magi Madoka Magica
(2011) for example, whilst Yoshitaka
Fujimoto has directed a bit of hentai, but has also say storyboards for the
original Pokemon television series. Many
people - directors, animators, voice actors - have to juggle this work alongside
non-pornographic anime for jobs, so an accusations of the problematic nature of
some of this content does have to be considered with the complicated nature of
being stuck having to earn money to feed yourself.
When it comes to The Legend of the Overfiend, its
notoriety and effect on how it made outsiders see anime comes under two lights
for both the United States and Britain. In the States, Central Park Media released it with its owner John O'Donnell managing to even get the theatrical cut version
released in cinemas. In the UK, Manga
Entertainment released the title, and it also has had a lasting legacy
which included a very negative image of Japanese animation that was painted
before my time as a fan. Urotsukidôji
itself is a title to discuss another day, though it ties a little into today's
subject as Maeda as an idea man is a
fascinating person, an interesting fountain of ero-guro creativity whose
adaptations are problematic but could have been transgressive art without any hesitance
if they were tweaked.
All the lengthy prologue above,
and trust me this review is going to be a long dissection to get one's money
worth, is necessary as it all ties in. See, going from the complex Cthulian
tale set over hundreds of years to La
Blue Girl Returns, which is meant to be a more comedic tale of sex ninjas,
you get a complicated epic in itself. The first aspect is that, after The Legend of the Overfiend, there is
not a lot of hentai released in the United Kingdom. Practically, as long as the
United Kingdom has its work classified by the British Board of Film Classification, censorship is inevitable. It
cannot be gotten around a lot of this stuff clearly plays with characters who
are teenagers even when it is very harmless sex, which would be a no-no unless
the dialogue was changed to say they were at community college, and it entirely
depends on the content of each title if it was censored or refused
classification3. Especially if you take the mad action of taking
stuff likely to be censored even in the 2010s and try to release it as a
mainstream release, as for whatever reason, a long defunct company in our
earlier days of DVD releases called ILC
tried a couple of time to release hentai like Alien of Darkness (1996),
all of which was inevitably censored for release. ILC didn't really release a lot of prominence, barring some cultish
horror titles and oddities that Arrow
Films might release on restored blu-ray one day, but they managed to broker
a deal with Central Park Media to
release a couple of their titles in the UK. Most of it was their main
catalogue, like the entire Project A-Ko series, but also inexplicably a sequel
series for a hentai.
This review already has an absurd
nature as the original La Blue Girl (1992-3)
anime OVAs were titles refused classification by the BBFC on the 30th December 19964, Manga Entertainment not even allowed to released a censored cut
like The Legend of the Overfiend,
but having their proposed released flat out rejected. That we got the sequel
series after the fact is perversely comical. And, oh, not surprisingly this
review is going to be about the censored release as frankly, attempting to
review this like one would do the original uncut version would be a waste of
time. See this as an absurd historical assessment.
Episodes 1 and 2
La Blue Girl is effectively Toshio Maeda's take on sex magic as,
once you get past how big the franchise is with sequel anime and even a couple
of live action films, it is a story about a half demon half human young woman
named Miko Mido who is the last descended of a clan who is a ninja able to use
practical sexual magical abilities. Even a cheap production like this four part
OVA touches upon a really interesting concept, that is the idea of sex as a
magical practice, with aspects of Shinto and Japanese folklore iconography
likely to be discerned with knowledge even if in not in their original context.
Honestly, we as a species have always had an obsession with sex having a
magical nature to it, be it fluids like semen and menstrual blood having
mystical properties to the likes of carved phallus to the Sheela Na Gig, a ward
against evil which is a stone carving of a woman spreading her vagina open. The
idea even if for a really kinky porn anime about sexual magic is not absurd to
cover.
One of the immediate things, as
mentioned, is that with the original series never being allowed in the country
even censored, you are dumped into this world with little context unless you
managed to see the original. Two stories, two episodes each less than thirty
minutes. The tone was set when you get a CPM
infomercial explaining "Japanimation" on both discs. Cut to clips of
their other hentai titles, like a Sailor
Moon parody where the sailor suits are noticeably shrunk, they explain why
the female characters have high pitched voices, even and unintentionally admit that
they had to age up the characters who were high school students in the original
versions to college students by saying the later still wore school uniforms. That
is not an actual comment made, instead the serious and thoughtful narrator
explaining that such uniforms are worn by college students, but it is easy to
read between the lines.
The first narrative is a clan in
Japan's feudal past, the insectoid ninja clan of the Mahoroba, who are
connected to butterfly humanoids. They are later revealed to be
inter-dimensional butterfly humanoids, which is ridiculous, but until then they
merely wish to take over the realm Miko Mido's parents have control over. Said realm,
the Shikima, is literally inside a giant being, which may have the
unintentionally hilarious moment of concern about sealing up the
"anus", but is still an exceptionally inspired and grotesque idea in
which you can be inside the colon of the entity said to have created existence
itself, taking the idea of God being all to a literal extreme.
This is where Toshio Maeda, even just going off other
people adapting his work only, fascinates me as Urotsukidoji for all its problematic material is fascinating. If it
had changed its attitude to victimising female characters, even being equal
opportunities offensive in which transgression can happen to male characters
and female characters can turn into horrifying power monsters, it would still
be offensive but arguably more defendable in its take-no-prisoners attitude
especially as it is still a tale of so many centuries of plot, characters and
detail. A sense of scale and ambition beyond something grotty could be found
here too, as even if very weird and kinky, the sex ninjutsu and ero-guro is at
least fascinating. There is some odd stuff that you would be embarrassed to
explain if walk in upon to ordinary people - group masturbation to enter the
demon realm, or the shot that has been burnt into my mind as one of the
weirdest in all anime where magical resistant lotion is applied by two female
heroes to each other by tribbing - but it is at least a transgressive kink with
creativity. None of this material is the real problem with La Blue Girl Returns but, as is the issue when deal even with
non-hentai transgressive anime and manga, where every aspect of shock value always
has to hang upon victimising female characters entirely and no one else, and
that in a work like this it is also meant to be titillating even if completely excised
from this release.
In the perfect world, La Blue Girl would have just been a
comedy, the gender politics balanced out for still lurid but equal
opportunities kink, no violence and entirely played out as a slapstick tale of
a female ninja having to be the figurehead of this clan. The characters here
around her could offer this version - be it her older sister, who is an
ordinary human being whose romantic life is there just to keep his younger
sister wide awake at night, or the diminutive dwarf ninja Ninnin who is
reliable but a pervert, possibly a factor to why the original nineties OVAs
were not allowed by the BBFC to be
released despite being clearly an adult. You even have two former enemies
turned female allies, one who turns into a werewolf and never getting a chance
to use this properly story wise in what we got in real life. Unfortunately, this
cheap and scuzzy production is not that, which warns you of what it is with a
theme credit song so chintzy it is funny in how inappropriate it is for the
material.
You cannot skip over the fact, no
matter how much is cut out to the point the editing is a mess, that the show placates
on monsters molesting and raping the female cast, with the one consensual sex
scene turning into the hunky guy turning into a villain. That these heroines
can bat it off as nothing has happened afterwards is strange in context but
does not help the situation either as a viewer. Even in terms of ero-guro and
someone who can defend parts of Legend
of the Overfiend, La Blue Girl
Returns is not worth dying on the hill for, gross and misogynistic with the
added effect that the censorship the BBFC
demanded really makes a point in subconsciously pointing this out by
accidentally amplifying it rather than trying to obfuscate the material excised.
Even if this was not the case, I will argue you cannot mix action and the
erotic any without it coming off as inappropriately violent unless it is done
with slapstick. La Blue Girl Return
does have light-hearted humour, but it feels so tonally off between the
unpalatable materials it feels worse.
Technically, this is the early
era of digital animation where the OVA was released, so it looks gaudy, be it
the bright colours to everyone having a waxy sculpted nature to them,
especially the female cast who (to be polite) are not the most comically
exaggerated designs but, for a cast for a pornographic work, have a look for
the male gaze and are very shiny. I will admit if there was one interest to this,
alongside the creative ero-guro ideas, is the trashy aesthetic of basic environments
and an aesthetic that could be recreated with action figures, even the monsters
and demons looking like toys you could buy in the nineties in their "toyrific"
nature. Sadly, I cannot really admit a pleasure as with guilt I know it's for
really uncomfortable material. The English dub, the only audio option for the
UK DVDs, is just dreadful, adding a cherry on top of this mangled release in
that, whilst it is going to get worse, it feels more embarrassing than be
caught watching questionable live action porn, because as a result of the
censorship and attempt at a complicated plot. The unnecessary amount of exposition
and terminology makes the experience more terrible as you now have to put up
with lore too. Combined in the English with moaning and a lot of leaden plot
exposition and it adds a further layer of wrongness to all this.
This is worse as the plot is
pretty simple - evil butterfly people who manage to take over the demon realm,
which is depicted with magic resistant elixirs and actual fights between
characters which are literally sex acts between them. The actual work, even
with the censorship, has so much unnecessary padding and a lot of problematic
sexual content whose existent is not really needed except for its own sake that
it does not get around to much with its material. The first two episodes by
themselves are a compelling car wreck, which I have no shame in admitting, but
it feels like the entire production does not know what it is meant to be doing,
even in terms of ILC thinking it was
a wise idea to try to release this in the UK.
Episodes 3 and 4
By the next disc, someone clearly
thought the release got away with too much sex in the first disc, as you even
got drawn genitalia without showing any phalluses, so La Blue Girl Returns goes from butchered to being decimated for the
final story arch.
Plot wise, in the aftermath of
the first story, a plan is set up to gain entry into the brain of the Shikima realm,
which involves clan members who protect it from all intruders even if they and Miko
Mido are reincarnated from former lovers. After this initial set up, good luck,
as from the final part of the third episode, where the scenes are fully ripped
out, you are lead to entire plot points being lost, two characters suddenly waking
up nude in a lab having been in virtual reality and nothing left to explain how
this all transpired. It is ominous that the second disc, containing these two
episodes, are less than forty minutes altogether including a repeat of the CPM infomercial,
which shows a gutting policy to all the content more extreme than before.
Generally, the production manages
to become worse. Harsher editing, a less "interesting" plot, and a
truly dreadful dub performance of Kanako, a character introduced as the last of
another clan who is barely used, a performance whose vocals at time feel
slurred with the addition that she is completely wooden. Semblance of
interesting ideas needed to be rescued are found - a pool of desire in a dreamt
world where, if in for too long, causes one spirit to be lost into the
ineffable eventually - but have mostly dried out when such ideas even in a
transgressive work could be a compelling, surreal one in better hands. That the
whole OVA ends in tragedy, over a death of a character we barely knew but
ending the story as an inconclusive downer, with demons attempting to assault
the brain, adds to the damned experience. It is more an abrupt end as this was
the last anime adaptation from the original nineties release, with no others in
the La Blue Girl world coming in the
rest of the 2000s or in the entire 2010s.
Conclusion
Here I will confess that I have
seen the first two episodes three times now, the last two twice. I owned the
first disc, a compelling mess even if one that many and I may be embarrassed,
the second rented. Then they are included in a boxset ILC released of Central Park
Media titles, these four episodes an outlier. This is not something to be
proud of, yet it says a lot I can argue I have still seen some terrible anime
which does not have the morally questionable content of this. The studio behind this, ARMS, have found that creating franchises like the sequels to Ikki Tousen, the Queen's Blade franchise and Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid (2015), very fetishishtic television programmes which even censored can have uncut physical releases and OVAs sold for, very lucrative without even being hentai. To know they directed the anime series Elfen Lied (2005), divisive and lurid but a programme I would defend, just adds to the strange nature of how the industry works..
Here, I have to include a comment
or two. One, that hentai is not something to just dismiss, that a lot of it is
probably kinky but not like this. Secondly, it is a very obvious thing for a
male viewer like me to dismiss aspects of this title based on content we in
society accept as morally repugnant. Where the real questions are to be had is
if a female viewer, or preferably a few, were willing to tackle subjects like
this as, alongside a feminist opinion, there is also an argument I will make
even in my naive perspective that we oversimplify female sexuality especially
when it comes to transgressive desires, something that should be considered and
why, even if it is this mangled DVD release, a fascinating perspective on
content like this would be a pro-kink female critic or even just a female anime
fan with her own perspectives on titles, her own gender and her own sexuality,
rather than merely for myself as a man, a heterosexual one at that, making the
presumptions.
The question left also is what
the experience of the uncensored version would be like, as so much tonally and
in content being added back would drastically change one's opinion. As
mentioned before, this is less a proper review of this title, but examining a
cultural relic. From there you learn a surprising amount, or at least I did, of
an entire side of this type of anime by way of seeing how BBFC censorship would
come into play. It certainly feels of another era even if hentai still exists
and is in chique - Central Park Media went
into bankruptcy in 2009, whilst ILC
have disappeared off the face of the earth, as CPM's downfall was when the violent and erotic titles it sold were
no longer in fashion, whilst ILC
would be replaced with the slow grow of boutique companies who would eventually
be taken over by those we have with their glossy restorations. If hentai is
available in the United Kingdom, it is never a censored title with an eighteen
certificate, but the occasional title you might find in a sex shop if any.
These discs can occasionally
still be found in our British second hand stores, alongside obscure titles even
from a year or so after from the likes of ADV
Films, MVM and Manga Entertainment etc. All of them are
worthy of examination, and La Blue Girl
Returns even in this state was definitely memorable if in a way to feel embarrassed
about having on your DVD shelf.
=======
1) Yes, before anyone mentions
it, let us not forget the Hokusai
painting The Dream of the Fisherman's
Wife (1814) about a woman's octopus fetish.
2) HERE
3) The story of the Urotsukodoji sequels, number 3 and 4,
for their UK DVD releases is an entirely different example of a doomed
financial license that was ill advised from the get-go. Suffice to say it
involves an entire episode being forced to be removed by the BBFC and requiring
a text explanation on the DVD, let alone butchering in the editing, so the
result experienced would be a baffled historical example few would know about.
4) HERE
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