Part 1
Another fifty reviews have passed on this blog, from reboots of legendary franchises to despised Christmas comedies, and it feels best to recap through them all. Rather than attempt a protracted monologue, beyond being glad this probably took less time than in previous cases to get to two hundred reviews, it is best just to let the choices (between Lupin the Third - The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012) (#151) to New Cutey Honey (#200)) speak for themselves...
The Most Disappointing (and Dubious):
Admittedly, we should probably begin with the failures and the misbegotten, as unfortunately not everything in this medium of Japanese animation succeeds. In this case, weirdly, I have titles on here which are yet compelling and with get nods later on in these imaginary awards, but this season of reviews was a case of the more banal and bland titles dominating most of the list. Unlike some of these, or other years, where argubly the titles which never get mentioned at all even for negative reasons should be viewed as the worst in their blandness, this year had more of these examples instead.
Not able to qualify, as the version covered was the censored UK DVD release which had the first two episodes banned by the British Board of Film Classification, Urotsukidôji IV: Inferno Road (1993-5) just for its final episode would been a strong contender for most misguided direction to go for a lengthy franchise by that point. Ending having hastily covered a lengthy lore prepared in Urotsukidôji III beforehand, and even the franchise from the infamous beginning, it felt like this OVA sequel had planned to be longer but had to hastily finish, thus ruining even the first in the series let alone its predecessor. I have not yet gotten to the unfinished attempt to fix this mistake, Urotsukidôji V: The Final Chapter (1996), so this tale attempted to steer everything back on course; it is not a spoiler, even without covering that entry, that considering it is an unfinished one episode pilot effectively, this franchise which is legendary even if problematic ended as miserably as you could get.
A lot of this list, as mentioned, is forgettable, which can be argued for being worse in that they do not contribute an argument even against their existences in terms of work, let alone positives. Mangirl! (2013), is as flimsy as you can get in terms of a micro-series, less than fifteen minute episode works. A narrative about an amateur all female team wanting to create a manga publishing house, it has an interesting idea but is more a bland show to be cute. Always My Santa! (2005), an adaptation of Ken Akamatsu property, the creator of Love Hina, was just a really bland Christmas comedy, one of the only few, which was just a lot of clichés. Disappointingly, to be found on this list, is Amagami SS Plus (2012), a sequel series to something I liked. The original Amagami SS (2010) can be accused of its questionable premise - based on a visual novel, it has parallel dimension storytelling based on various separate narratives following a different girlfriend, which could be seen as just a more hypocritical take on the harem fetish of multiple girlfriends - but it was actually a fun show whose unique structure actually proved unique. I may return to the Plus sequel series and find more worth in it, but it felt like bonus padding to a show which was fine as it was.
The top two are special, arguably, twisted, works so bad in many ways, and neither defendable in their varying sleaze, which are fascinating for even existing. Well, for one, it is technically two porn anime for the price of one, Gonad the Barbarian & Search for Uranus (1986), in their dubbed English forms as done by an adult film company. Gonad the Barbarian is arguably the only one of the pair compelling enough to go out to watch, just for the English dub and line changes from porn producers turning it into a sex comedy farce, but it is still bottom of the barrel scuzz. Paired with Search for Uranus, which was a stroll into the tentacle related waters of pornographic anime which was just not pleasing to sit through, even if with a curious atmosphere, and both arenot defendable anime at all even as guilty pleasures.
And then there is Akikan (2009), which for Number One (Bottom One?) would have gotten here if I was just writing about the bonus OVA episode. That episode was just a barrage of the worst and the most questionable clichés hitting with all the worst impact, worse as, merely a bonus set at a hot springs which, even without any actual nudity, is just about characters blushing being seen naked, managed to hit a level of wrongheadedness that was depressing to sit through. Akikan the series proper is going to be one of the oddest things to talk of this season of review because it is going to return, as a show which does have moments I actually like, but has to be declared the worst of the season for how misguided and a mess it was.
That is a paradox, and I openly admit that. This is such a mess that emotionally it is a nightmare to figure out my stance even though, by gut instinct, it has to be here. This is a show sold on a very surreal premise, soda cans who turn into women, that never actually gets around to this nor the bizarrely existential nature it suggests with said premise, more of a thing stuck with whilst the show hastily improvised. From the get-go, you have bizarrely a show getting the worst prize here that had a great episode, of three of the soda can girls just on their off-day in a vignette episode, yet claims this prize with so many justifiable reasons. Deeply inappropriate sex comedy, one of the worst male leads possible, a predatory gay male side character as a comedic foil, never getting around to a premise of soda can women fighting in matches to determine if aluminium or steel cans or superior, never gets around to the existential issue of their original disposability, nor that they are owned by their masters, and an abrupt turn for a light hearted show where one soda can girl nearly impales the lead in the stomach outside a baseball stadium for jilting her master.
Even the paradox that I can find good moments in this show, like the female witch side character who is openly gay for the female lead and does dress as a witch on Halloween, does not defend the mess this was, nor the tasteless material that would not be defendable even in a late 2000s anime. It has to be placed here, and it is not even a guilty pleasure. It is just a compelling mess.
The Weirdest
Deciding to go for paragraphs than a list, unlike previous years, does help in this part especially, always the longest section because I openly admit a taste for the weird, this time especially appropriate to split this up into multiple paragraphs as there are multiple categories.
The first are the bad which are strangely compelling. Akikan, as mentioned, is so bizarre in spite of it never getting into full swing with its already bizarre premise, anthropomorphized cute can girls, because it decides to jettison its plot of can girl fights, become effectively a sex comedy instead which delved into moments of sudden darkness, including a soda can girl antagonist who robs the souls of opponents, and goes about it with really tasteless and undefendable moments. Genma Wars (2002) is also in this camp - a second attempt to adapt a collaboration between sci-fi author Kazumasa Hirai and manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori, after the really divisively held 1983 Rintaro feature film Harmagedon. Even without the animation for this early show clearly struggling with a tiny budget, you have a mess. Some of it is also undefendable, with a trigger warning now to mention that rape does appear in the show a great deal, including from a male protagonist you are meant to root for, but also you have sentient monkeys on a satellite orbiting the Earth, the discovery in a world where monsters rule an apocalyptic Earth that children's brains are a delicacy, boys more spicier than girls, and too much to even get written down in the original review. Mad as a box of frogs was apt as a description for this viewing experience.
You can argue Birth (1984) is also bad, a peculiar experiment from the eighties, when money was available in the anime industry, but I would argue it is more a fascinating curiosity which just has huge technical flaws. A feature length action sci-fi narrative, it is beautiful to look at, but also possesses a very peculiar pace which is the biggest issue for many. It is also a cartoonish work with a lot of comedy yet has a very bleak ending. It is a really odd title, a true one-off. Likewise, Government Crime Investigation Agent Zaizen Jotaro (2006) is not a good series, an ultra low-budget animated series where your main protagonist's super power is a credit card with unlimited credit, and his enemies are corrupt businessmen and an occasional yakuza backing them. This is weirder in terms of premise because of taking such a banal scenario and trying to make it dramatic, business corruption as a dynamic show where your hero is still a bad ass who is slick, quotes Shakespeare, has every women fall head over heels for him, and says "Da Bomb!" randomly. It is equivalent to Salaryman Kintaro (2001), a better show where a former biker gang leader ends up trying to work in the construction industry, in that anime as an industry has been able to have much more idiosyncratic and obscurer premises be adapted, this among them as a weird curiosity.
More obviously weirder is Sekkō Boys (2016). It is a gag as a micro-series, where a young woman who was made sick of art decides to become a manager of a boy band, only for the boy band to be statue busts of real figures - Mars, the Roman God of War; Hermes, a Greek God; Saint George, as Saint Giorgio here, a real life saint in Christianity and Islam; and Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, an Italian nobleman and ruler of Florence, who is the young heartthrob. They can talk, sing and interact with the world, but have to follow real world logic of having to be carried around and be heavy. It is still a weird premise even if openly absurd, including Roman general Marcus Junius Brutus and French playwright/poet Molière being a veteran musical duo the main leads idolise, or Saint Giorgio having a bad habit of Dad an jokes.
The list proper, of five titles, may not begin to sound as strange as the likes of Akikan or others, but sandwiched between them and two of the strangest I have ever encountered in the top two, the other three are as much context based. Some viewers may find it odd, for number five, She: The Ultimate Weapon (2002) is here. If you are old enough, like me, to remember this show was a heavily promoted title in the United Kingdom for Manga Entertainment, in their early 2000s period of trying to expand out beyond their nineties heyday with television series. She, or Saikano, if you stop and think about it however, was a bizarre premise even if its plot and ideas have been seen before and since in other narratives. A teen girl is turned into a living war machine, a David Cronenberg approved one, yet the show is a bleak romance. The war is a never ending one, with unknown enemies, with the show not pulling away from the fact this is frankly the end-of-the-world scenario. Even in mind back in the day I was turned off as a young anime fan by how abrupt and apocalyptic the ending was, all in hindsight is a deeply strange work just for tone and how it goes about this, as a bitter sweet tragic romance against an almost Kafka-like war scenario, where nothing makes sense barring to still fight, to the entire sense of this being an actual romantic drama, as at times naive and overbearingly bleak as it gets for a teen cast. It is only less strange knowing your female protagonist Chise turned into a spaceship in the manga. That by itself could have been even weirder in hindsight to consider.
As for Numbers Four and Three? Two mere snippets of ideas, abruptly never getting anywhere, and that is in itself as strange for varying reasons. Cat Shit One (2010) has a pedigree, that its source material is the work of manga author Motofumi Kobayashi, who throughout his career is an author of realistic narrative dealing with the likes of the Vietnam War and other conflicts, yet in his most famous work abroad decided to make realistic war stories, including set in Vietnam and a sequel in the first Gulf War, with anthropomorphic animal soldiers. Cat Shit One the anime is stranger, set in the post second Gulf War of the 2000s, by being entirely like war actions films like Black Hawk Down (2001), but with anthropomorphic cute rabbits as American soldiers. Never mind the politically incorrect Arabic camel soldiers, but rabbits with sniper rifles, told seriously without a sense of humour, is weird and more so as this one-shot was meant to be a pilot for a television show, one based around motion capture where actors had to act out these characters first, and that it never led to anything.
And yet Wonder Momo (2014), whilst a conventional premise in comparison, is weirder for what its production history was. Bandai Namco Holdings decided to create a subsidiary called ShiftyLook, a Western side, to revitalize old videogame franchises from Namco, starting with web comics for the likes of the 1987 game Wonder Momo, a female sentai hero parody. Dusting off the Wonder Momo game, the micro-series and the web comic were set in a world ultimately revealed to have the daughter of the original heroine become the new hero and fight aliens. It is pretty obvious material, but alongside now having the hardback copy of the web comics, one of the few published of the original project, proudly on my bookshelves, this does have a tantalising premise - not a lead who wants to be a musical idol but is also a heroine, but the idea her mother was the original lead, and that both mother and daughter can be heroines, alongside a rival, and have the post-fight talks afterwards of a family relationship for potential comedy and dramatic gold.
Where I will argue the work for me is truly weird is entirely its production history, one of the strangest and tragically abrupt you can get. In February 2014 the animated adaptation is premiered. There is hype, even a Q&A added onto the Crunchyroll streaming service alongside the show, but only two years after its founding in March 2014, just a month later, ShiftyLook themselves would be closed down by Namco. The show does not even have a true ending, and is far too short as a micro-series to get anywhere, negatively held if you look up ratings of viewers, with only one volume of the web comics published in hardback form, and never heard of again. That for me is just as strange as any premise for an anime.
Undeniably, the final two in this list are weird, not for background detail, just truly bizarre. Number two is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005-7), specifically the 2005 OVAs, the first season, as tragically in 2007 four pretty generic episodes were created which felt like bonus fan service than continuing with the impact the first had. Tsutomu Mizushima is a director known for comedy in the current day, and his really divisive dabbling in horror, but he has a background in some really misanthropic and perverse comedies from his earlier directing days. Dokuro-Chan is the most notorious, it's really twisted initial plot, a teen male who is deemed to create something to prevent women from aging from their young teens, and a female angel called Dokuro sent to kill him who decides instead to hang around and hopefully change him, becoming a springboard for something more bizarre. The gore, as she has the ability to resurrect the male protagonist every time she explodes him with her giant spiked club, is notorious, as he dies many times just in a single episode, but this is comedy at its most over-the-top. The mis-reference to Franz Kafka earlier on is apt as, for the hell of it, the protagonist from The Metamorphosis, Kafka's most famous written work, makes a cameo, but not in concern of him waking up as a giant insect but more concerned about his erection. It is really juvenile humour, the tropes of anime sex comedy rife, and jokes like stealing an angel's halo forcing them to be burdened with unending diarrhoea, but with this, it is always funny because of how mean and twisted it is. Even the opening theme song, a cute ditty, is about the many ways Dokuro-chan can mangle the protagonist in their sado-masochistic crush.
Yet, preventing Tsutomu Mizushima from getting the award again, as his later (unintentionally weird) horror series The Lost Village (2016) was bizarre in another way, a very obscure OVA exists called Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman (1994) and, if you can find the masters and re-release this, a company like Discotek Media could market this as the zenith of weird. Similar to Go Nagai's Kekko Kamen in structure - a school terrorised by an evil group, the heroine keeping a secret identify of a sexually provocative hero form, in this case one involving a sumo belt with a ridiculous costume and a posterior fixation - Gautaman is nonetheless Number One for how strange it gets. You need part two, of this two part OVA, to really get the impact and it is something to be dumbfounded by when you reach it.
A sumo with a Darth Vader helmet is nothing next to a Ninja Turtles parody, which leads to possible student on student cannibalism, or the Terminator parody so accurate it may make the show difficult to release unless the parody law is evoked. The perversity grows in context in the second OVA, alongside the strangest aspect, how this takes itself seriously. You have what, at first, is just pandering in a romantic relationship with the heroine and her female Hindu friend, which leads to a fan service sequence of sharing a bathtub, but that is taken serious in the conclusion. The war, on a campus of religious study, with the Black Buddha group has a potential romance with the male protagonist, which is also taken serious as they are on opposite sides of good and evil, but with the added factor that he also happens to have a tree trunk between his legs just for a random visual revelation. And that, for all the perverted, tasteless and just weird content you have here, this ends as bitter sweetly as it does, which will be gotten into later, just took me by surprise even knowing of this series for a long time. Finally able to see the whole thing, this is as weird as you can get.
To Be Continued in Part 2....
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