#106: Burn-Up W (1996)

From https://strawberryscentedburnout.files.wordpress.com/
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Director: Hiroshi Negishi

Screenplay: Katsuhiko Chiba, Katsuhiko Kochiba, Sumio Uetake

Voice Cast: Yuka Imai as Rio, Maya Okamoto as Maya, Ryotaro Okiayu as Yuji, Sakura Tange as Lilica, Yuri Amano as Nanvel, Akemi Okamura as Chisato

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

If you were curious, or merely fancied a dive into the morbid, imagine a franchise whose existence has entirely vanished in befuddled thoughts despite having had enough popularity or interest for multiple sequels, to which many exist in anime and you can look no further to the Burn-Up anime. Predicated on super sexy, voluptuous police women in a sci-fi Tokyo, the original 1991 OVA (merely Burn Up) sold well when ADV Films released it, ever the company to sell their wares on lurid promos. After that came the sequels - Burn-Up W, a four part OVA, Burn-Up Excess (1997-8), a thirteen episode series¹, and Burn-Up Scramble (2004), another series.

Burn-Up W and Burn Up Excess were sat within the same version of this world, even with a few differences. From what I was remember, between them you have Rio Kinezono, our shopping obsessed (and broke) main heroine, who is the same with her over the top blonde hair and curvaceous figure; Maya Jingu, a gun obsessed officer with an unhealthy fixation on shooting things, with green hair, got a deeper voice and became much more of a tomboy for Excess rather than being as high pitched as a schoolgirl here; Lilica Ebett the hacker, pink hair, is the same and I forgot Nanvel Candlestick, the raven haired tech head, was eventually introduced in episode two. We shouldn't forget Maki Kawasaki, their female leader, or the sole male on the team Yuji Naruo, technically Rio's boyfriend, utterly lascivious but baring being a pilot useless, something which is a reminder that, for all the gender issues and objectifications, there is a surprising habit that, for all the skimpy costumes and busts, a lot of anime and manga makes all their female characters stand out even in just their designs whilst most male characters are emasculated constantly and idiots.

Burn-Up W is cheesecake, tonally jarring cheesecake as I'll get into, but for the first two of four episodes this is still ridiculous material, adequately animated and of the nineties in bold brash colours. A hotel is taken captive by a group who, whilst the real ringleader gets on with her business, demand absurd requests like a baseball coach to apologise for his team failing and a female idol singer to bungee jump completely naked. The franchise is sexy sci-fi cop action, denoted just from how form fitting and short the female cop costumes can be, or where members like wear frilly white and Chun-Li approved hair accessories; even a tank top is made comically small for these characters' figure. It's an issue of the "gaze" whether this is all merely innocuous or not, but not the "male gaze", the complicated reality that a viewer whether heterosexual or gay or bisexual brings their own individual reactions to this material, set again the obvious sexualisation here, which could easily lead to multiple reactions rather than the presumed ones. For me personally, it causes me to roll my eyes at times, but it's much more an issue as, like a lot of anime, this includes a world where the men are mere letches and pathetic (trust Yuji to film his girlfriend taking the nude bungee jump to get the other jump on the criminals), and everything being sorted as by women both as heroes and villains. It is an odd dynamic, the more you think about it, how work like this (even getting former porn manga author and Tenjho Tenge creator Oh! Great to work on a tie-in comic) for all its lasciviousness still leads to this strong female dynamic as a polarising duality, something which is common in a lot of media beyond just animation.

It's also done with humour, an absurd action romp which is knowingly silly, the style predicated on exaggeration with bold multicoloured and pigtailed hair on many, elaborate futuristic buildings, giant guns and broad voice performances for broad characters. It's strange as mentioned, where male characters are interchangeable in anime, no matter how crass and rightly to question depictions of female characters are in anime and manga, hell a lot of creative media, over the years even in some objectionable examples there's this fascinating discrepancy, no matter objectifying, where the obsession with style and personally given to these characters right down to their choice of coloured hair is more distinct and cared for than a random blank male protagonist or side character we "meant" to also root for, a curious paradoxical strength. And again, this is a show which is lead by its female cast; they may be dressed in skimpy clothes, and fully envision the problematic ideal of the strong female character who is just fetishized, but that these characters are still the ones who have the events to overcome, barring the one where Nanvel's beloved giant robot creation literally falls in like a Monty Python foot to resolve the story hastily, which adds layers to this conundrum worth dissecting.

From http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/8/86/Burn_Up_W_
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The same applies to Episode 2, where a virtual idol (with a helium voice) is "kidnapped" in an ongoing plot over the episodes; twenty two minutes per episode, it feels closer to TV and was aptly a dry run for Burn-Up Excess where this exact world, even the villainess in some form, returned barring some slight character changes. It doesn't allow for much complexity, so the show is frantic. It plays to silly jokes, such as Rio's lack of cash even leading to her considering selling her used underwear posing as a schoolgirl in the opening scenes of Episode 3, or Nanvel's aforementioned giant robot she treats like a living pet and is crestfallen hasn't been brought out to help in an assignment yet. It's a broad and juvenile world, so much so a female cyborg with Wolverine claws also has the revealing portions of a Barbie; it's not defendable, but thankfully it's not the egregious and repulsive fan service of other shows, where it's inappropriate and constant, and thankfully these characters are at least grown women, still undefendable still but without another moral quandary for drawn characters to deal with.

A detail I haven't mentioned is how surprisingly bloody the show is from the start, extras being killed off, which leads to that aforementioned tonal jump, not surprisingly probably the result of having one screenwriter writes the first two episodes, another the last two. From the opening credits, building up to an elaborate one between comic panels and a hot speed pursuit of underwear thieves, to the beginning of Episode 3 where Rio does indeed try to sell her used underwear does suggest the same as before. Than a character close to her is introduced and killed off within the same episode with completely brutalness, even if off-screen, for an emotional shock. Add to this a crackdown on a police station where two deviants carve officers down and everything is on lockdown, I was caught off by how suddenly serious this OVA suddenly tried to be, which I completely forgot took place. Cheap emotional shock, brainwashed cop going on a shooting spree, Rio wandering despondently back to her apartment for a huge emotional meltdown, over a character only introduced that episode, all of which swirls together into insanely bad screenwriting which is yet amazing abrupt. Jokes still take place even in Episode 4, in the midst of the police station under siege when everything is meant to now be a serious action story, which adds to this madness.

It also has no real ending, the villainess returning for Burn-Up Excess adding to the sense these two, with tweaks, would be part of each other in design. Is Burn-Up W, however, worthwhile though by itself? It's not good but it was compelling nonetheless, and considering how long out of print Burn-Up Excel is, ADV Film's liquidation (even when they became Sentai Filmworks) removing their type of releases for the most part from the British anime industry, I'm stuck now with the morbid desire to follow up how this went into Excess as a result. Like a gaudy, entertaining but beguiling mess, I find myself still remembering details in Burn-Up W for the review despite so much I know is amiss. It's not surprising, until Burn-Up Scramble likely crashed and burned in sells, ADV Films were constantly being involved with this franchise in the first place, as even some of the details I have criticised were what sold it.

From http://solrpg.22web.org/admin/rpic/
Burn-Up!%20W%20&%20Excess/Burn_Up_09.jpg

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1) Burn-Up W and Excess were the only entries, to my knowledge, that ever got a UK DVD. Infamously, in one of ADV Film's aforementioned lurid promotional works, they had as a DVD extra for Excess called a "Jiggle Counter", a DVD extras option where you could have onscreen a tally of the entire collected breast jiggles the four main leads had for the whole series. It's sexist, dumb as a brick, actually useless as a extra...and yet I openly admit, as a younger guy, I watched the series with this function on for baffled curiosity. I am able to say, from experience, the extra was a waste of time, as it'd never change unless your DVD was cursed.