#161: Ben-To (2011)

 

Director: Shin Itagaki

Screenplay: Kazuyuki Fudeyasu

Based on the Light Novels by Asaura and Kaito Shibano

Voice Cast: Emiri Katō as Ayame Shaga; Hiro Shimono as Yō Satō; Mariya Ise as Sen Yarizui; Ai Kayano as Ume Shiraume; Aoi Yūki as Hana Oshiroi; Ayana Taketatsu as Asebi Inoue; Eriko Nakamura as Chapatsu; Kazuyuki Okitsu as Ren Nikaidō; Ryoukichi Takahashi as Bōzu; Tomoyuki Higuchi as Agohige; Yui Horie as Kyō Sawagi; Yūichi Iguchi as Hiroaki Uchimoto; Yukari Tamura as Kyō Sawagi

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Proving anime can have the oddest premises, Ben-To presents a ridiculous yet enticing one which managed to last for fifteen volumes of a light novel series. The title refers to bento, boxed lunches which are a trope even in anime and manga of homemade meals in boxes, but can also be bought at stores, of a higher quality in fact then you would presume for store made food depending on the bento in question. Unlike say a TV dinner or a ready meal as well, bento boxes can be historically traced back to the Kamakura period (1185 to 1333), so they have developed a historical and cultural relevance in Japan which, just from how many anime I grew up with referenced them, makes them worthy of even a very silly premise about. Here, this imagines if, when the unsold higher end ones are labelled half price later in a day, a world of high scholars and young adults who have set up ritualistic brawls over them. People, gender equality involved as women fight men and each other, defeat all the competitors who wait in which store this happens in at night, known as "wolves", until the winner claims the top prize, which is usually the best bento marked with a laurel leaf sticker, the runners up get the remaining bento, and everyone else has to do with cup ramen.

Enter into this Yō Satō, a new high school student who is the stereotype of the male anime lead, very horny around the female populous, who is a plucky and clumsy figure. Give Ben-To its due, with the first episode told in reverse until the middle which him trying to remember what happened, it opens with him having had his head kicked in at a store and, upon his short term memory coming back, realising he had wandered into a culture of bento brawlers without realising it and got decimated. This does however lead him to the stern female figure of Sen Yarizui, nicknamed the Ice-Cold Witch, who decides since she is the only person in her own Half-Price Club, for bento brawlers where the discount stickers she claim are kept in a book and put on the wall, to welcome him and Hana Oshiroi in, the later a girl who merely dodges through the brawls and, in a running gag, is using Satō and others in this world as inspiration for her man-on-man fan erotica called Muscle Cop.

Any premise can work in anime, particularly as Ben-To has a huge advantage in a bigger budget than most shows. This is likely because, frankly, of the entire real product placement. We will get into all the fan service and sexual humour, but this again is history of the video game company Sega's weird marketing decisions in terms of anime, doing this a decade earlier in Arcade Gamer Kabuki (2002), alongside there being licenses products from others as well, in the stores and a pharmaceutical company a co-producer. Ben-To as a result is able to indulge in more polish and style, able to indulge even in three elaborate opening animations, one just used once. It also takes advantage in having fight scenes which are elaborate and of a good quality, even if they are pointedly not martial arts fights, but brawls. This in itself is unique, with characters able to flip in the air, mass fight fights among a horde of competitors, one enemy early on nicknamed the Boar, a woman who uses a loaded trolley a battering ram, and the ultimate opponents having perfected hand baskets as defensive/trap weapons for limbs.

The world as it is promises a deeply silly but potentially inspired one - where there are fights like this in every store in Japan, here with West and East groups established, and a code of ethics among the wolves, such as only fighting when the person who puts the half price labels on finishes, and that once someone gets a bento they cannot be touched or have it stolen off it. Everyone has nicknames and, as I presumed the show would be, the tropes of an anime fighting tale of increasingly stronger enemies and elaborate scenarios would play out.

Arguably there are too many characters for only twelve episodes, but you have enough even as clichés for good material. Satō and Sen are regulars, as is Ayame, Satō's cousin who is the stereotypical big busted character who is also a wolf; inexplicably half-Italian, which is not even used for character detail but this being one of the only anime who needs to explain a female character with blonde hair, and is very intimate with Satō in a borderline way. Her friend Asebi, a criminally underused figure, is a holy fool who is so cursed with bad luck that, for all the disasters and chaos she causes herself but especially to everything near her, is blissfully happy. Thankfully more used is Hana, the Muscle Cop writer, and Ume, the school council president who is explicitly attracted to other girls, and beats up Satō up for presumed mistreatment of Hana, who she is very more attached to, only with the issue that Hana (even if not sexual) has a fascination with muscled men and gay erotica. Ume has an additional aspect to her in that one of their classmates, secretly a masochist, has found since she will not beat him up, he will instead take delight in watching her beat Satō up instead. Then there are other wolves, side characters, initial rivals, a group known as the "Dog" who gang up to scavenge the bento away from fights, or a character like Hair Dye, her most prominent aspect that she is another female fighter, also another with a big bust, but you never see the face of at all under her long brunette hair in one of the funnier jokes.

I will note that twice I have in one paragraph mentioned the figures of some of the female characters. That sounds crass, but Ben-To is also explicitly an ecchi fan service show too, clearly to be able to sell the show to a larger audience of male otaku, which says something that a fun fighting premise and even Sega merchandise was not enough already. The problem with it here is more, as we will get to, a premise being too distracted by padding than the material I wanted. Sex comedy and humour is in a lot of anime, and there is a side of this I think would have worked without everything else. Hana's gay erotica jokes are worth having, even the fact Ume is explicitly attracted to her.

Even that closeted masochist who thinks Satō is into being beaten up, and later tries to bond with him over material, like an "instructional" self defence video where a busty woman beats up men, or that Satō is a lewd person, which can be toe curling at times but can be put up with if just for the fact, to his horror, people start calling him "Hentai" ("Pervert") as his Wolf nickname, which makes his inherent horniness actually a character trait he will have to deal with, especially as with some of it, he is definately a high school student who has no bloody idea what to do if he actually had a girl propose any intimate with. Much of the series is just titillation for the sake of titillation, with all the female bathing scenes or the pool resort episode, all with no actual nudity mind, that sense of not actually being erotic and wasting time. Again, it amazes me Sega thought this was a great way to sell their history, where Satō has a Sonic the Hedgehog wallpaper on his phone and the characters play Virtual Fighter 2 (1994), planting their flag on something again where the fan service dominates.

That a real pharmaceutical companies were involves shows the blunt truth that anime is also a product, and that it needs to promote itself somehow, even if it means cute girls packed into bento boxes for eye catches in the middle of episodes. Truthfully, the bigger problem is that I had hoped Ben-To would be everything that premise had been, all the fighting story clichés in a world of stores and supermarkets, but does not follow it and is distracted by the likes of the fan services. You do have a boss attempt to control the West and East, angered over a fight in the past, and the pool resort episode gets away with existing as they have a bento brawl where the prizes are floated in the middle of the water, adding an entirely different series of physics to deal with. But you could have had secret supermarket fight techniques, events in other regions, even have plot points from other stories like something trying to destroy the bento brawling society for them harming them or a loved one in the past.

No, what we get is okay, but is beholden to all that fan service, and squandering its budget and time, it feels slight. Even the Sega product placement makes no sense - the only moment of note is when, where Sen decides to throw his Sega Saturn games console out a window because she kept losing, Satō nearly loses his life falling down with it to protect it, a joke which is funnier, even as a non-gamer, as I actually had a Sega Saturn as a kid, a console which failed completely but secretly loved by people especially if they could import the Japanese games.  The sense of the show spinning its wheels, clearly not going to take a risk when it has been okay, is felt when two episodes, eight and nine, are a waste of time. One is when Satō went out a window to protect that Saturn, ending up in hospital very injured and recuperation; it is meant to introduce the Sawagi sisters, the ultimate adversaries, but the episode feels padded with them pretending to be nurses, in cute pink uniforms, to scrutinise him for a punch line that takes too long. The one after is so oddly paced with nothing actually happening; it does have more about Ume in her romance with Hana, and that unfortunately her love is more interesting in muscular guys with other guys, but it feels so non-existent as an episode.

This show does improve a bit more for the final three episodes, but never was there a show like Ben-To where it felt disposable like this. Again, this premise, no matter how absurd, could have been amazing if it had been even more over-the-top or dramatic. What I get with Ben-To is a show which did not embrace this fact.