#193: Akikan! (2009)

 

Director: Yuji Himaki

Screenplay: Hideaki Koyasu

Based on a light novel by Riku Ranjō and Hiro Suzuhira

Voice Cast: Jun Fukuyama as Kakeru Daichi; Sayaka Narita as Melon; Aiko Ōkubo as Yurika Kochikaze; Aki Toyosaki as Najimi Tenkūji; Aoi Yūki as Budoko; Mamiko Noto as Yell; Megumi Nakajima as Miku; Megumi Toyoguchi as Airin Kizaki; Nobuhiko Okamoto as Gorō Amaji; Ryotaro Okiayu as Hidehiko Otoyo; Ryou Hirohashi as Misaki Miyashita

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

If you want to drink me, tell me beforehand, idiot.

When I initially came to Akikan, it was under the auspices of it being one of the weirdest anime premises in existence, that of anthropomorphic cans turning into women. This is not the only time then or before of objects being humanised, and whilst in an occasional while it can be gender reversed, like Miracle Train - Ōedo-sen e Yōkoso (2009) that can even include train stations as depicted as cute guys, usually this is done with cute girls and women. Be they firearms, planes, even Sega games consoles. Akikan is definitely weird, though the initial concerns were both sexualising women as literal objects, here owned by those who first bring them to life (of any gender) by finding the right can and drinking from it, and the idea of anyone wanting to have sex with a Pepsi can in the first place.

The bigger issue, and not what I was expecting, was how bad Akikan turned out to be. Still a show, in spite of content that did actually offend me, and content which was just dumb, that I could get some pleasures from, but certainly a deeply misguided production which also felt rushed and had no idea what it wanted to do. That pleasure is honed from years, including within the time I even started writing amateur reviews, of willingly suffering through the strangest of titles as I can appreciate the truly great, which is a significantly different mindset to come to the actual show with than for most readers. The part never brought up in all the weirdest anime lists Akikan gets onto is just how bad some of the ideas turned out.

Here, the protagonist is Kakeru Daichi, who finds an Akikan he will dub Melon, a melon soda that inexplicably turns into a young woman his age when he drinks from it. In this world, what the set-up is presumed to be is a secret group, part of the Department of Economy, who are staging battles between Akikan across the city, those originally aluminium and those of steel, for a very violent form of product research as these magical women have powers. None of the Akikan in the anime are any other gender than women, though the owners can vary, as Kakeru's childhood best friend Najimi accidentally gains one, during a night where her ability to get drunk just on carbonated drinks leads to a sports drink becoming the severe and tough Yell, whilst a junior high school girl named Misaki acquired Budoko, a bratty grape juice based Akikan whose inability to beat Melon is not going to stop her sling shooting exploding grapes at her. None of this, premise wise, is actually bad. It is deeply silly, with the added factor of a lot of cultural idiosyncrasies which would make this a more curious take, that Japanese vending machines and their contents can be very different from other countries, meaning that, if this went any direction, Akikan based on canned coffee could exist and the original light novels has one based on a can of sweet red bean soup. No idea is stupid if the execution is done well.  Akikan tragically does not try.

I am trying to avoid everything, from episode one, that immediately made me realise this show was going to get painful at times, though in truth after the initial few episodes it does settle down or a tolerance came to be that helped me adapt to this production. Dramatically, this review will work better if all the awful content is left to hit the viewer as a warning by the ending, whilst instead I will start here with how, in spite of itself, Akikan is definitely weird. At first, you did not expect this to suddenly have very bleakly existential angst, from the first episode, from a young woman formally a melon soda can. Having to sustain her life-force from drinking other melon soda, which is a potential nightmare if the brand was discontinued, and even having to take cold baths than hot ones, the first days with Kakeru, when he is not one of the worst and scummiest male protagonists to put with as a true sex pest, are filled with the angst of a life of a metal drinks can usually thrown out into recycling or left to rust in waste, uncared for beyond a product. This is really twisted existentialism the premise probably did not realise, all when a lot of it is really the magical girl genre if everyone owned a magical girl, able to be turned back into a can if a tab eye ring is pulled, and with a lot of fetish in its apparently wholesome veneer blatantly there, such as the transformation back into human shape drinking from the can, effectively kissing.

Like an exploding can shaken up, it is not possible to hide from Akikan's many issues, which I probably had a higher tolerance to, but Akikan itself also meanders so much. It has very conventional characters and also a lot of additional weirdness. Something truly weird is felt when you realise the back-story between Kakeru and Najimi, who has her own crush on him, involves Kakeru having protected her in their youth from a kidnapping where he got the gun and killed the criminals dead in the classroom this transpired within, something brushed over in the show's bright tone without realising how tonally out of place that is. Some of the weird in contrast is admittedly funny, the male friend who literally becomes invisible to everyone when no one talks to him, or Yurika, who until the OVA bonus did her a disservice was arguably the best character here. Openly with a huge crush on Najimi, willingly to protect her from the sex pest protagonist by throwing razor sharp tarot cards from him and, born on Halloween, literally a witch who, gets something good in the show which her riding on an actual broom on her birthday.

Even she though, in her introduction, has a weird joke for one scene of trying to sustain herself on vitamin supplements out of curiosity rather than food, or literally distracting someone with her large bust during a baseball game. Then there are moments like how Goro the invisible friend, in the witch sequence previously mentioned, is inexplicably woken up from the bed shared with his sisters in dog hat bed clothes that even baffled me. Akikan, if it was not for all the many sins it commits, would be deliciously erratic and bizarre to experience at times. Eventually even the concept of aluminium and steel Akikan fighting each other is jettisoned, as everyone merely accepts each other existing, and no other Akikan barring one in the two final episodes are introduced.

You have a lot of melodrama and sex comedy, with the added and additionally jarring tonal shift for a major plot that, when Kakeru skips out on a date with Najimi, Yell takes it onto herself to nearly disembowel him, which is the kind of sequence I would have expected from the notorious School Days (2007) or a bad ending of a Japanese visual novel instead. This entire incident is skipped over - which is not surprising, what between Najimi herself having a fixation on a "waste monster" that will get her for not hording, and hair that is literally an antenna, even Yell behaving like a cat if a shiny thing is dangled in front of her, these characters do not act conventionally in the slightest even as caricatures. It is actually a surprise, barring a joke or two, the swimsuit episode, set in an indoor swimming pool, is actually tamer than what comes before. Well, barring the moment a certain character, whose joke is to be a perverted male character in a small sparkly thong, tries to get intimate with Goro, but that character is to still be introduced later here, instead here evidence that if this had been a more sedate and weird show, I would have been a lot kinder to it.

There is even a good episode, or at least for me a breath of fresh air. Episode 10 is actually a good episode, entirely about nothing. Melon with the perils of getting the laundry done with the weather being erratic, between bathing in an ice bath with melon soda drinks; Budoko with cats attacking her hair in her sleep; and finally Yell being distracted by a dragonfly during house cleaning. Many people would not like this episode, but it was such a surprise to have an episode, contrary to others, where there were no dumb jokes, no tasteless sex humour, none of the problematic side characters eventually to introduce in the review, and at the third to last episode not making much of an issue about how little has actually transpired throughout the show. So much so the introduction of an actual antagonist is absolutely rushed. The final two are about a figure created for the anime, a mixed juice Akikan who is absorbing others as a super villainess, replicating her victims as shadow clones in two episodes that are just average. Living with the show as much as I did meant, even Akikan for all it does wrong left some emotional investment, so these two episodes did have something even if the show goes to the obvious conclusion, the power of wishing invoked and inexplicably tying in the cats you find throughout the show into a back-story.

That goes without saying Akikan was also a brutal viewing experience, in that for a late 2000s show, it was amazing how much inappropriate content and bad ideas it had to. After three-quarters of the review biting my tongue, this is where I also confess the countless times, an incredibly amount, I was also cringing throughout. Kakeru, our lead, is immediately a problem as, whilst he tones down at times, he is both one of the worst of the generic male leads of an anime I could have encountered, entirely because he is just an id who says the most inappropriate things. When your lead, meeting Budoko, a young girl Akikan, for the first time asks whether she wants to date him, saying that he will wait until she is grown up to take her virginity, it is, yes, legitimately gross even as a gag and not expected. That is not even taking into consideration a figure more inappropriate, the head of the shady Department of Economy with his female assistant called Hidehiko. Hidehiko is, to be blunt, a walking gag of a predatory gay man who lusts after young men, first introduced with a young man fleeing his office with his clothes in his arms, which would have not aged even in 2009, and upon immediately meeting was an alarm bell of how bad Akikan could get. Much of the worst of Akikan comes in knowing, with no nudity within it, it is a sex comedy when the writers thought jokes about a man trying to molest teenage boys was good, offensive in multiple ways at once. And this is neither just being politically correct or social justice warrioring, but that this is also done with complete tone deafness, nor even getting to the point of the entire premise, which is barely used. Most of this would have been average harem fantasy comedy, with a very weird premise, for the moments which are truly strange is a lot of the premise never being used because the writer was focused on jokes really off-colour and wasting time.

Particularly as, released as a separate bonus, the straight-to-video hot springs episode is a cursed item. Nothing happens - it is a hot springs episode post-series which is an excuse for a sex comedy - but how it is done, in mind there is no nudity or sex, it is a twenty plus minute barrage to suffer through. Immediately you have the two youngest girls among the group, sexualised, which is gross and would edge the border to New Zealand banning this OVA, as they have done so for other anime in this area¹. Nothing within this, even in terms of the sex humour, is inherently problematic either barring that example, but again you witness how execution can be misjudged. That a strategically placed Tengu mask, with a long nose, is phallic; that there is body sushi for no reason, or that Kakeru is a perv. What happens is a barrage of bad and tasteless jokes, a lot of material which is just thrown out without though, like a joke on murder mysteries at hot spars, which, condensed into this bonus where there are not restrictions, is arguably even worse than the whole series. There is more problematic humour with Hidehiko, as a predatory gay male character, at the end, making up the foul cherry on the top, and even predatory lesbianism as a joke, for the unfortunate covering of all bases and ruining Yurika, throwing a fun over-the-top character under the bus. By the point the body sushi scene involves cats happens, that was the point, whilst you do not see anything, the OVA did slip into a rare tier for me, that of something we could have lived without the existence of from a viewer known for being able to find virtue even in the main series. When only one scene, of seeing Najimi herding cats on mass in a one scene joke, the only thing within this of interest, the OVA might be one of the worst things I have actually sat through.

Akikan was a mess to experience. Completely undefendable, and frankly not recommended unless you are willing to sit through something which is not going to be good a lot of the time. The inability to exploit the premise, the concept of soda cans as human beings and all the unintentionally dark existentialism involved, is the scathing thing above all else for me in this show never working, all its un-PC humour worse, not just out of a moral trigger, but that it wastes ideas that could have worked for jokes. You could easily remove all the jokes without ruining anything which says a lot about the work, such as another character (barely seen) that is drag queen, that runs a cafe but is also sadly painted as a broad caricature even if treated more kindly. Even little details - such as Goro not understanding that women can be gay and thinking it's wrong in his oblivious idiocy - comes off as more overtly dumb and really out of place, especially when one of the aspects of anime, in truth, was always its gleeful sense of sexiness even for the sake of titillation, be it embracing the lewdness, the playful fun, or proudly waving homoeroticism around, be it male characters or appreciating the busty gay female friend who is a hell of a lot more appreciated, especially as a witch, as a character in this strange premise than an obnoxious bland male sex pest lead.

Accidentally opening a Pandora's Box, the show is just dumb, and unfocused. To have salvaged this show, regardless of whether faithful to the source material, you would have to drastically rewrite it entirely, especially when knowing the end credits song, a silly attempt to have soda drinking as erotic analogy set to multiple vocalists and musical genres per episode, was one of the only inventive aspects² to a show which also looks visually bland. This is worse in knowledge this is on Weirdest Anime lists online, because for all its weirdest moments the show does not live up to that reputation like it should do.

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1) See Puni Puni Poemy (2004), which was banned in the country for sexual exploitation of children, one of a couple of anime that have been caught in the crosshairs in that country for this. And that was an OVA being tasteless to shock on purpose in the broadest and over-the-top forms, and released uncut in the United Kingdom in the day, so that attitude to the government's censorship is unwavering.

2) Every episode has a different spin on the end theme, including a guest star from artificial vocalist Hatsune Miku, which is surprising considering how generic the show is in look, and obviously how haphazard the work is in narrative and presentation.