Today we deal with an obscure double bill, two erotic OVAs both from 1993 that were released together as a DVD in the United Kingdom in the very era days of the DVD market. These types of titles are fascinating to deal with as, whether good or not, this is an entire history worthy of prodding with morbid curiosity, titles which came, few remember, disappear, but could be found by pure look in a second hand DVD store. In this case, this also means talking about a company Kiseki Films, a long obsolete company whose licences were distributed between the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and ended as a company, to some testimony, when it was bought out by the British company Revolution Films1. Titles they released included Black Magic M-66 (1987), Urotsukidoji III: The Return of the Overfiend (1992)...but also Gunbuster (1988-9), which means this is not the first time I have covered one of their licenses from the early days of the DVD era.
This however, as a double bill, are two very different titles both under sixty minutes each which few may know about, which to my surprise were not what I was expecting for good and for bad in-between them.
Rei Rei (1993)
Director: Yoshisuke Yamaguchi
Screenplay: Mitsuru Mochizuki
Voice Cast: Naoko Matsui as Kaguya; Katsuyo Endou as
Satoshi's mother; Keaton Yamada as the Narrator; Kenichi Ogata as Pipi; Kumiko
Nishihara as Mika; Miho Yoshida as Dr. Manami; Misa Watanabe as Tanaka (female);
Mitsuaki Hoshino as Satoshi's father; Shinichiro Miki as Satoshi; Takehito
Koyasu as Dr. Okabe; Wataru Takagi as Tanaka; Yuri Satou as Ikuko
Viewed in Japanese
with English Subtitles
I've got two cherries for you to chew.
Rei Rei was the one I had the most interest in, and it is a compelling premise, but tragically this proved the most problematic of the duo. There are quite a few titles in anime about supernatural figures, or those who dabble in that realm, becoming involved with the lives of normal people, including for sexual issues, but this is curious as our protagonist is Kaguya, with her diminutive assisting in a fetching purple suit called Pipi, a princess from the Moon who helps mortals who are in crisis with love. She is explicitly, clearly, based on the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a 10th century piece of prose about a princess from the moon found as an infant in a egg, a legendary piece of Japanese folktale which was adapted countless times centuries later in anime and manga, including Isao Takahata's last project The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2014).
That the two thirty minute episodes has issues is more annoying because I love this idea, about a literal magical being, a beauty of unearthly form, who has decided to help mortals whose souls cry out of lovesickness. The first episode initially suggests where tone is going to stay, and how this premise could be sustained as an erotic series but also effectively a form of anthology story formed around a central figure, that of a guy who tries to flirt with a girl he loves called Ikuko, only for her to reveal that she is dating an older female doctor. Unfortunately, we are taken to a deeply problematic tale in which the older woman is a bad person, actually dating a male doctor and purposely injecting raw egg into Ikuko, deceiving her into thinking that it is Vitamin C, to cause anaphylaxis. This is not the aspect of real issue, but that it is compromised by a heteronormative conclusion, that Ikuko has to renounce herself and fall in love with the male lead, a dweeb with a terrible tendency for nearly being hit by vehicles.
It hurts worse for me as I could vibe greatly with the eeriness that this episode had, even having my trope appears where people are whisked off to an alternative dream reality, usually a bridge of symbolic form they have to cross naked in this case. Considering the first episode, by itself, manages to have sensuality and a grace to it, it is sad that this interesting premise, with the art style contrasting urban Japan with a figure of pure fantasy, turns out is more conservative than its own premise is, including some gay panic humour found between episodes. If made a decade later, Rei Rei (also known as Rei Rei: The Sensual Evangelist) could have hopefully embraced a more progressive attitude, particularly as you would not need to change the protagonist in the slightest, a completely supernatural figure who who can be invisible unless she desires to and flies as an ethereal figure leaving behind purple dust. Even her dialogue is completely ethereal too in the first episode - A love lorn soul, a true heart, is calling out in pain - suggesting that even if you could have funded a more sexually explicit television, which do exist either censored or pay per view channels, you could have even made this character actually feminist and ran with a lot of more enlightened (and frankly sexier) content.
And this is stranger as there is a tantalising and subversive streak when Kaguya helps the male protagonist by turning him into a woman. Where it leads to is not exactly progressive, but it definitely touches upon something subversive - that he is going to seduce the male boyfriend of the older female doctor, which really brings about gender fluidity that the show runs the opposite way from immediately when they are in the bedroom down to their underwear. Also, whilst again not necessarily progressive either, the more rewarding ending would have clearly been this boy willing to be a woman for the rest of his life, proudly, for the woman he loves, literally dangled as a premise in front of him in a bag of magical dust. If that ending had transpired, I would have been a drastically different opinion of the OVA even if the second episode had been the same as it was.
This plot point definitely reveals to the weirder side of Rei Rei, which would have been more rewarding if so much of the show had not undercut itself. It also has a weirdness which is also perverse at times to, preparing the viewer for the second episode when about the female doctor has a nightmare about Ikuko entering her body, in a sensitive place which (tastefully but provocatively) is shown in a split second shot. It is a curious mix of a program with a greater aesthetic grace than this type of genre might necessarily have, with clearly a potential for both being bizarre but also having a sensual elegance, only to have the production hit the brakes. One, despite its pleasant comedic tone, which has to cater to heteronormative values and a plot even boring to a heterosexual male like myself in how much of a coward it turned out to be in not taking a risk.
The stranger side grows and runs rampant by episode two, which is again about another male client, another unlikable bland male dweeb, which is something I have witnessed in other genres and continually ask of in terms of who would think such characters are interesting as male representatives in the first place. This one has an inability to be around the opposite sex without his heart racing; it is a condition so bad he can suffer from sudden collapses where he goes unconscious to the point it can look like he is death, with a comically grimace on his face. This turns into a series of vignettes, with Kaguya now becoming much less serious as a character and a lot more cartoonish, such as when his id and soul are trapped in a "Bentendo" video game which she has to get him out of it. It promises something wonderful, with a world of eye craters and tongues in clouds, only to bring out tentacles for a joke that is thankfully skipped over.
This is however also the episode where Kaguya lets him becomes his girlfriend's bathwater, which is exceptionally bizarre...except that sadly gets to Kaguya letting him become invisible like mist in the shower to her, which he with some morals even questions when she recommends feeling her up to become more comfortable with her desires. The OVA never went beyond these two episodes, which was probably for the best as, tragically, this good premise worthy of a remake was already compromised. Even if it manages a plot threat I had never considered seeing - sexual breast feeding to exorcise his emotional pain from his mother abandoning him and his father - it is more as a peculiar oddity from the nineties than a show that I thought could have actually been good. If it had lasted, we would have gotten this as it stands, which would not be fun even if like car crash television at points. All the good virtues are squandered with what clearly was a show running on fumes and unenlightened ideas for good erotic stories, strange aspects otherwise.
*****
The Gigolo (1993)
a.k.a. The Gigolo - Dochinpira
Director: Hiromitsu Ōta
Screenplay: Wataru Amano
Voice Cast: Kōichi Yamadera as
Jin Kaitō; Masako Katsuki as Ai Mizushima; Naoko Matsui as Ranko; Daisuke Gouri
as Hazukura Boss; Hideyuki Umezu as Hazakura Yakuza; Hiromi Yokota as Body
Conscious Girl; Kaoru Shimamura as Okamoto; Kenyuu Horiuchi as Suzuhata
Viewed in English Dub
They're real bullets!
So surprisingly what I considered the trashier of the double bill, which I doubt really was even hentai but just an erotic title, turned out to be a more enjoyable experience. Simply because I expected a censored, junky hentai about a male gigolo, with an insanely deep voiced male voice actor in the English dub2, only to get a c-grade pulp pulp tale which was nonetheless entertaining, a crime narrative where a gigolo finds himself crossing paths between the mafia (yakuza), and a female hit woman out for revenge for her family being killed during an assassination attempt at a restaurant when she was just a child.
Resplendently scored to guitar riffs, this lurid macho storytelling has ebbed away for the most part from anime into the modern day, at least in terms of those found in OVAs we got over in the West sold for their violence and sex, whilst there are likely titles still in existence which tackle this tone in different ways and institutions like the Fist of the North Star franchise still get adaptations but also self referential official parodies. The Giggolo is much more subdued take on, say, the Crying Freeman OVAs, with less of the open absurdities, or an erotic version of the more explicit action melodramas of the OVA era, although this is more tasteful in context and content then I had even considered.
Here a young guy out of his element is only a stereotype of being macho due to all the sex he has, because of his ability to seduce women for work, and having a female roommate happily letting him stay and being proto-friends with benefits. Even then, he gets his head kicked in by thugs until the woman he is with pulls a gun out, and never really is the decisive factor in any for the conflicts, just able to help. He encounters a sado-masochistic client, when it's too late to pull out from the client, who likes her whips and hot wax, and the hit woman even if she feels she has "become a woman" with him is still the one out for revenge, wagering a Cobra sports car for him to win if he can be the first male to actually being good in bed. If it not feminist in the slightest, but is surprisingly more interesting in the gender context because your lead, from his initial introduction as a cool lothario, has this veneer chipped away as the plot continues.
Yes, The Gigolo is still lurid, but considering its double bill title Rei Rei on the same British DVD disc, this tacky and less well made production was actually more defendable as it was also ridiculous. It is sexually explicit, but it deviates fully into its crime drama by the end, much more interested in fully committing to being a melodrama for men, of tears of screaming passion and a sports car full of flowers pushed into the sea like a Viking funeral. The pair does raise the issue of how one tries to write a story with sex as a prominent aspect, espcially as Wataru Amano made their career with titles in hentai like Demon Beast Invasion (1990) and Venus 5 (1994), the later a pornographic parody of the Sailor Moon franchise. Both of the titles I have covered are completely alien to each other in tone and presentation, and both of them offer some curious aspects to consider in terms of how sex is depicted for better and for worse.
Stepping back to these titles by themselves, they are a fascinating pair of oddities. As I am able to dig back and find these titles, I find amusement even in the fact that, as the one person still using a DVD rental service, I am likely the first person in a decade (if anyone at all) who requested this double bill DVD to be posted to me. A title from as far back that you can legitimately fear about laser rot, that sense of investigation in it is entertaining to the point it compensates for the disappointments I did have alongside the unexpected surprises I did have.
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1) We have to rely on Wikipedia for that detail, so take the fact with a pinch of salt.
2) The English is ridiculous, with additional swearing, but especially as the male voice lead (who I thought I recognised but could not tell who) is so deep voiced to a youthful lead it added a level of absurdity to the production.
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