A short film
compilation
Viewed in Japanese
with English Subtitles
I'm your magnet of love, and I'm here to serve you.
The following is a very idiosyncratic release from the early years of British anime DVDs, and a return to the Virtually Real releases, a group of DVD compilations that I first came across years ago for my anime reviews with Yuki Terai - Secrets (2000), a compilation of music videos and shorts that were both tech demos and also trying to sell a virtually animated female character as a figure of affection and sensuality. Off the bat, whilst this is usually something we are meant to end a review on as the point, these six short films (usually around five minutes each) evokes for me that in so much culture in general people have attempted to capture an idealised form of femininity. This is a problematic idea, rightly challenged over the years by feminism, but it is also inherently a failed cause too. Called "computer-generated femininity" on the British DVD blurb, the six female designs here are meant to be attractive, in the same way in the modern day you have eroticised female drawings and even otaku rejecting the "three dimensional woman" for the 2D one, hug pillows and all.
This compilation, with connection to Pony Canyon, a music/anime/videogame company who I have come across for the notorious failure The Lost Village (2016), is long forgotten. In its obsession, which stems from many, of the idealised woman, an ideal which is ancient and can go as far back as fertility statues, this compilation is fascinating when you step back and take it into consideration from how it is trying to attain this inherently doomed goal as well as a snapshot of old computer animation. A form that is not appreciated, I find looking at obsolete animation strangely pleasurable and unique, even in this case too where there are complications to also bare in mind.
Hikary - A Jellyfish Day begins this with the girl next door, the notion of the idealised version of the woman you as a (male) viewer could meet in the street, here a normal young woman who, in this music video sung in English, is in a Laundromat mopping the floor singing directly to camera. The uncanny valley effect is felt here1, but with the irony knowing this idealised figure was still created by real people for her to even exist. Both by motion capture of an actor, and a real female singer recording the song, as seen in behind the scenes footage in the end credits, the vibrancy of a human being is noticeable over the equivalent of a statue made from 1s and 0s. Created by "Yamag's Garage", Ryoko - In Japan is a vast contrast. A glamorous figure - first with silver hair, silver (very) mini-skirt and top, and silver boots just walking in a corridor of silvery shapes. This music video also includes text, speculating about virtues of beauty from a perspective of a simplistic masculine view which can be brought into question. The animation for all the shorts has aged, but what is fascinating is how, having to worm with new technology, the female character designs have to pull back on aesthetic due to the materials they are working, the complexity established in how the DVD includes making of shorts going into various aspects of digital animation. Unlike the appraisable creativity I have encountered in other anime at this time, even if you cast "Ryoko" in skimpy clothes you have to deal with the fact that she has been created at a time where the animators, in their hard work, had to even attempt to bring a figure to life let alone concern themselves about aesthetic.
Misty is another character who just walks, only she is brash and confident. This if anything is a time capsule to the nineties - nineties techno music on the soundtrack and a sequence of car driving which leads me to not be surprised if any of the animators, creating the scene of a sports car speeding along to camera, worked on a racing videogame. The moon is so ominous and close to the skyscrapers in the city locations I was expecting a horror aesthetic, and that there would be tidal disruptions across the globe as a result. Yukari - Run & Run just go directly for the T&A, a figure who is insanely busty, barely kept in an insanely skimpy sci-fi bikini with giant unnatural eyes and also goggles attached to her head garment. Running in space, the jiggle physics for her bountiful bust are ridiculous though also crude; it evoked whilst I was watching the short, since we are on videogames, the beat em up videogame franchise Dead or Alive which became notorious not only for a jiggle physics for the first game in 1996, but that they kept developing it as the sequels went along. (Sometime into the mid 2000s, with a spin beach volley ball game, it was impossible not to get past the cheesecake fan service even if the main games were well regarded). Naturally this is one of the longer shorts, one where the earlier test footage showed fewer saucer eyed figures and less concerns about how one runs in heeled boots. Objectification like this, the insane exaggeration of the female body, is something you find in anime in general, this case so blatant it is frankly absurd.
Out of all the shorts, the following is the one which actually has anything explicit but also an attempt at something creative, called Super Sonic Jet Girl. It frankly becomes like a Robert Rodriguez fever dream in digital form, a director who has skirted a fine line with his super strong female characters who can yet wear fetishishtic costumes. Set in a dark dungeon that goes to a demonic nightclub, where a giant demon with a snake phallus sits watching and a skeleton band plays, an exotic danger in skimpy underwear and covered in tattoos dances until she has to right off zombies, rather than restage the Michael Jackson Thriller music video. The tattoos are a surprise as even in hand drawn animation from the nineties and eighties, even for theatrical, it would have been a nightmare to draw any character with a vast snake on their back alongside the variety on this female character's body. The joke reference to Rodriguez, and films like From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), is not out of place as this involves her acquiring a samurai sword and well as twin pistols, someone on staff for this production predating the neo-grindhouse films by a considerable time. In fact the one adult detail of this entire compilation, which is likely why it got a fifteen certificate alongside the other content in this segment, is that it ends with this figure topless covered in gore on her chest returning to dancing, which is definitely a distinction in terms of an idealised figure, closer to the alt and goth model movements in the West like SuicideGirls. It is still objectifying but it is at least fun, clearly a production where people were enjoying themselves and thus the best thing here.
Aya - Chat returns to the idea of the girl next door, an even meeker form who wears a long skirt and jumper, beginning with a montage of telephone lines set over real locations. This music video is interesting as it has the CGI character of Aya set over real standard definition shot real footage of streets and environments. It can be awkward, like when she is placed on a swing, but it is a fascinating aesthetic touch. Openly, I enjoyed the experience of Virtual Stars but with mind of how strange and frankly superfluous this entire project is, where the extra shorts, more cruder animation but with more variety, were at times more dynamic. At three of these sets exist planned, CyberVenus Fei Fei (2001) the other I am aware of. They are materials likely to be lost to time, and with good reason as for their problematic gender issues and technical obsoletion, but they would be fascinating to preserve as they raise aloft a case of attempting the idealised female figure, creating her artificially than with even an actress, that is against the reality of the vastness of human personality and individuality but is something that can be argued is an obsession the likes of even high art, painting and literature, became obsessed with for aeons, still representations to prod and scrutinise.
It has not even become aged as an idea as, in June 2020, a sci-fi production was backed with a robot named Erica as a star, an artificially created actress with artificial intelligence. Playing a robot, and a creation of Japanese scientists Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kohei Ogawa, Erica does nonetheless alongside raise the issue of an idealised female image, especially as unintentionally the fact her creators were both men does raise the concern of objectification, rather than if Hiroshi Ishiguro's own android double he has was cast instead2. That is not even including the pop culture figure that is Hatsune Miku, a Vocaloid software voice bank developed by Crypton Future Media and its official anthropomorph, who has become a popular figure or those aforementioned otaku obsessed with drawings over real women. Far from a cultural item doomed to irrelevance, Virtual Stars ironically was a good signpost, though not a trendsetter, to ideas we would be tackling with decades later, those which raise plenty of issues on the notion of representation, alongside gender politics, but still stuck ahead of us to scrutinise.
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1) Robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the term in 1970, as "bukimi no tani genshō", before the term was first translated as "uncanny valley" in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, written by Jasia Reichardt. It does connect back to the notion of the "uncanny", first introduced by Ernst Jentsch and elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud, the idea of the "strangely familiar" which can cause ill-ease, something found in the likes of dolls, waxworks, and with the uncanny valley, robots and even CGI figures.
2) Source HERE.
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