#215: Debutante Detective Corps (1996)

 

Director: Akiyuki Simbo

Screenplay: Juzo Mutsuki

Voice Cast: Natsumi Yanase as Yoko Ryuuzaki; Rumi Kasahara as Nina Kirov; Sakura Tange as Reika Shuu; Shiho Niiyama as Kimiko Ayanokouji; Yuko Nagashima as Miyuki Ayanokouji; Toru Furuya as Nomura Keiji

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

[Some Major Spoilers Throughout]

Among the many obscure straight-to-video titles I have encountered in anime, many I stumble on feel like pilots for programmes that never came to be, here digging into the obscure VHS era of ADV Films too, who would start releasing titles in the United Kingdom on tape in the nineties as much as the USA. This has the added touch that it also had a video game, for the PC-FX, a 32-bit home video game console developed by NEC and Hudson Soft. It was released in 1994 and discontinued in February 1998, the game for this anime a maze puzzle game where, with this anime's leads those you need to avoid, you play a thief trying to steal valuable objects¹.

This OVA however has a bigger twist to it, that this marks an early title of Akiyuki Simbo in the director's seat. Long before he cemented himself, he worked on titles like this or Twilight of the Dark Master (1997). By the time he gains greater recognition for his distinct auteur touches, he hit it out of the part with Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), the bleaker subversion of the magical girl genre which many after have tried to replicate afterwards, and the long and prolific Monogatari series (2009–2018), one between one-offs to series which feels like a dimension and a fandom in itself.

By itself, Debutante would have been a fascinating slapstick work by itself, starting with the introduction of the leads, almost all crashing through the doors (and walls) of their school campus on the introduction day. Miyuki Ayanokouji, a mechanical expert, on a motorbike; Yoko Ryuuzaki, a master of disguise; Nina Kirov, a Russian born figure, dropping in by her own attack helicopter, and letting it crash when she ejects in the air; Reika Shuu, a Chinese martial arts expert; and Kimiko Ayanokouji, more gracefully but frivolous in hiring the entire police force to take her to school, the sister of Miyuki who claims to be a powerful psychic. They all come from rich and powerful families - one dubious touch, merely a minor detail which did not need to be included, is that Yoko Ryuuzaki has Adolf Hitler as an ancestor - all of which is documented in text which the ADV Film's video release subtitled.  

It is ultimately revealed, as an oblivious goofball, that Kimiko has hired men to help bond them as a detective squad in a "fake" threat on their lives, but these women can handle themselves. Debutante.... is a goofy action comedy, where logic can be thrown out of the window for a gag, one where you have a simple premise for one episode which could have been a whole series. The archetypes, following a trend of all female groups who became central to anime titles, is that everyone expresses a stereotype, and in mind that some of the best can flesh these characters out fully over a length, this even as a silly comedy had enough to work with.

Miyuki as the most grounded, dumbfounded by her sister's oblivious hubris, someone with real psychic power but, with a promo shot of her bending spoons, is a prat. Yuko is literally chameleonic, a meek bespectacled young woman able to change her voice and, with equipment, can even become a middle aged and larger male policeman. Add to this the stoic Nina and Reika, as the clumsy fighter who yet becomes super powered when she takes the arm weights she has on off, and the work is pretty standard but a worthy beginning. Almost any story can be stretched into something special, and this sets up what type of premise this could have taken, with three mercenaries sent after them. Helping this as well in tone is that there is also the loose reality at play, as one of those mercenaries is able to grow into a towering fighting monolith the size of a building. The slippery logic of physicality, deliberate, does work well.

You cannot really say this shows Akiyuki Simbo's directorial style for the future, except for the future knowledge that, known for his idiosyncratic compositions of scenes and art styles, OVAs like this would have let him hone this visual side in a variety of different genres. With character designs by Miyabi Kizaki and Shinji Ochi, this looks of a different time, with really big eyes and exaggerated colour choices which feel exaggerated as well to a virtue. Beyond this, there is not a lot else to add, as at thirty minutes, this is just longer than a traditional first episode. Nothing is particularly adult - a shower scene comes with nothing but a very weird cut, for a weird moment, of a faked murder scene with gore as a warning to the leads. Considering Kimiko is the one behind this, it makes sense, but alongside Yoko's ability to literally change gender and shape with her disguises, able to "break" her vocal cords to the right tone, and you have with Debutante Detective Corps a premise with its surreal tone you could work with. That it did not adds to the curiosity, a forgotten piece where, ironically, it is less the director who stands out but the general production altogether.

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1) This is referred to from One Controller Port, with Ojousama Sousamou – PC-FX English Guide, an introduction from September 15th 2021 to help anyone who cannot speak Japanese if they fancied playing that video game adaptation.

#214: Azumanga Daioh (2002)

 

Director: Hiroshi Nishikiori

Screenplay: Ichiro Okouchi

Based on the manga by Kiyohiko Azuma

Voice Actors: Chieko Higuchi as Tomo Takino; Houko Kuwashima as Kagura; Rie Tanaka as Koyomi "Yomi" Mizuhara; Tomoko Kaneda as Chiyo Mihama; Yuki Matsuoka as Ayumu "Osaka" Kasuga; Yuu Asakawa as Sakaki; Akiko Hiramatsu as Yukari Tanizaki; Aya Hisakawa as Minamo "Nyamo" Kurosawa; Kōji Ishii as Kimura; Norio Wakamoto as Chiyochichi; Sakura Nogawa as Kaorin

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Azumanga Daioh has been a long time to return to for me, fond of this series originally, but returning to this now as an adult. Azumanga's source material, a manga by Kiyohiko Azuma, has been published in the West, and was originally for Dengeki Daioh, a manga for teen males, thus undercutting any preconceptions of a target audience. Some sex jokes aside, and the idea the all-female leads are "cute" for the target audience, this is incongruous to the "moe" genre which would emphasise cute school girls doing things. In contrast, this series is a much more whimsical work for the better. The best way to start with Azumanga Daioh is actually to look at the adaptations before. Azumanga was gauged with a tiny little short, an ONA very early in that medium, called Azumanga Web Daioh (2000), clearly a taster to see if there was an audience for this. Baring some very dated school corridors made in early polygons for the medium, Web Daioh is fascinating both in how it is far less common than the other tiny short work. Alongside all three having different looks, it is just a snapshot of what would be entailed, but with a plotline which is not referred to in a form in any of the full television series. Namely, that the main have been given a film camera to record what will be a time capsule, in a short which, if anything, does not have as much of the humour as would come later.

Far more striking is Azumanga Daioh: The Very Short Movie (2001), a short originally made for theatrical screenings¹, which ADV Film's included in the last of their DVD releases when anime, in the early to mid 2000s used to be split up per episodes in sets over multiple DVDs. It is a strange work to experience in how, whilst the series for me has a memorable, this is J.C. Staff as a studio (before they worked on the series) flexed in a huge level of quality animation for what was a taster. Characters look thinner than they would be in the series, with more dark highlights on their designs, and whilst a strange choice of words to use, this feels even atmospheric for what is a high school comedy about a troupe of female students which, whilst capable of being very surreal, is also matter-of-fact and gentle in its pace. It is fascinating to see this short, as with any television series of note, in terms of seeing its theatrical reinterpretation even if this came beforehand (see Escaflowne from its 1996 television series to the 2000 theatrical reinterpretation). It is also good the short was made available, as whilst this replicates jokes that would be expanded with the series, this has one imaginative reinterpretation of one later used, exclusive to this and flexing the animation budget, where Ayumu "Osaka" Kasuga imagines her classmate Chiyo Mihama, a child prodigy who is a ten year old moved up into high school, searching for her pigtails which ran off on a journey where carrots grow as giant tress in mysterious lands.

The animated series proper, produced by J.C. Staff and aired from the April 8, 2002 until the week of September 30, 2002 - on TV Tokyo, TV Aichi, TV Osaka, and AT-X - was also different from how most in the West would have experienced it, as it was originally five minutes segments shown every weekday, than repeated as a 25 minute compilation that week, leading to a 26 episode collection most of us know this as now. Azumanga Daioh in whatever form is a series of vignettes tied by its cast, spending the three years in a high school for the five (and quickly six) main female students in one class with a few side characters. Chiyo, as mentioned, starts as a ten year old girl so smart who was moved into high school past a few grades. She is the closest character to the "moe" archetype, that jokes include her being adorable as a child in this adult environment, a later episode running with how sticking her in a penguin costume even causes the hardest of hearts in their school (even their boorish homeroom teacher Yukari) to melt seeing her. This is also a show, able to get away with this in animation, which finds humour in her being knocked about in violent slapstick. Sakaki is the quiet and thoughtful one, the most adult of the group in how, to her classmates, she is the elegant and cool figure, beauty and great at sports, taller than everyone else, but is obsessed with animals and cute things with a lot of eccentricities, including imagining back stories to plush toys she owns. This includes the repeated issue, with her mother having allergies, she cannot have pets of her own and, with the repeated joke about this, cats or at least one particular grey one on her way to school have a tendency to bite her.

Tomo is the hyperactive tomboy with very impulsive behaviour and lack of whit, including learning that reindeer do exist, whilst Koyomi "Yomi" Mizuhara, who comes off as the most generic of the initial five until later on, is there as the despondent straight man putting up with Tomo, clearly loving each other in their love-hate relationship even if they do bicker a lot. Introduced properly in episode ten, when she is transferred to their class, Kagura is the athletic sports figure, stuck with the "bone heads" group with Tomo due to struggling with her grades, but is more sensible and just enthusiastic with what she does. The other member of the boneheads' trio is Osaka, who is the one more likely to be a meme from this entire franchise. She as well emphasises that, whilst this became a show which translates to the West well, was very much a work meant for a Japanese audience. Osaka, nicknamed as such for coming from that city, is the ultimate extreme of someone on an entirely different wavelength or picking up signals from a different dimensions, baring one running joke that works more for those who understand Japanese, even if they translated, of her being God-like with puns and jokes about kanji in the Japanese language which can look like other words.

There are only a couple of additional characters. Kaori deserves to be mentioned as the classmate whose crush on Sakaki. Baring some mania in her love for, Kaori is blatantly with a gay crush for her female classmate which, barring the joke being her bad luck trying to enjoy the experiences, has actually grown in weight as a sweet side character. Hers is also a character who really emphasises the cultural distinctions of this comedy; her type of character comes from a perspective as far back as the 1910s, connected to the cultural phenomena of girls having crushes on other girls in schools in Japan known as "Class S"^2/3. A 1919 novel Yaneura no Nishojo by Yoshiya Nobuko connected to this is a romantic work about a lesbian romance between women in an all-girls school which, alongside a happy ending, has been argued to be the cultural spring from which the yuri genre of all-female romance in anime and manga took inspiration from⁴, Kaori even if a caricature finding herself part of this rich heritage in her own way. 

There are the two female teachers, who are important inclusions, their homeroom teacher Yukari, a good English teacher (in the original Japanese dub) when she is focused, but a tempestuous and impulsive figure of rowdiness, laziness and hangovers, contrasted by her high school friend and straight laced fellow teacher Minamo "Nyamo" Kurosawa, the P.E. teacher who contrasts her as another straight-man. There are very few male characters, barring Chiyo's dog Mr. Tadakichi and Chiyo-Father, the personification of Chiyo's father as imagined by Sakaki and Osaki who is a omnipresent orange cat humanoid which, in the Japanese is voiced Norio Wakamoto, a voice actor who through that I grew up with the Anime World Order podcast became a cult figure for a certain audience for his recognisable voice, especially as Chiyo-Father is as strange as he is funny to witness even for this show. Sadly, this also includes Kimura, who is sadly going to be the one aspect which undermines this entire series and may be off-putting for him, because his entire joke is that Kimura is a classical Japanese language teacher who lusts after schoolgirls. I half suspect he is meant to be a parody of this idea of a perverted male teacher, as the female cast (and the female teachers) are skeeved out by him, but he has not aged at all because, rightly, the idea of a male teacher creeping on high school/secondary school students is unacceptable in real life.

Daioh has some adult jokes, but barring those about breasts between the female students, usually for Sakaki to end up blushing, as the most "adult" of the troupe in figure, most of the jokes are cleverer and rarely sex related, one of the few explicit actually one of the best because you do not hear the conversation at all, when at the summer home Nyamo, drunk, accidentally teaches the teenagers the birds and the bees when commenting on her own sex life with a montage of flowers and other quant items cut too, and a lot of stern proud nods from everyone (barring a confused Chiyo) to her horror. Kimura himself is not subtle. I admit a guilty laugh or too finding a few jokes funny, including when his wife is introduced and, seen as a sweet (if clumsy) woman that raises questions from the cast of how on Earth she is married to him, but he unfortunately is the albatross that you have to get over for this series, especially when everything else is perfect as it is.

Because beyond this, I think Azumanga Daioh has aged like fine wine. Structured around the three years of starting in their first year to graduation, with the repetition of sports day, the cultural festival and summer, where everyone goes to Chiyo's summer home, Daioh has a lot of creativity surrounding its simple structure of five minute vignettes. The source material was a "4-koma" manga which used four panels per page, so the adaptation had the ability to improvise around the source in creative ways. It is incredibly whimsical, eventually fleshing every character out from archetypes and even devoting episodes to certain figures, like Chiyo or Sakaki. It even does so unofficially, Yomi even technically getting an episode, starting off as seemingly the weakest character only to emphasise her as the most ordinary of the group as a positive, a person who loves food but is conscious of her weight, clearly likes Tomo (as vice-versa) despite their antagonism, and unfortunately getting ill the day before she is meant to go with the group to a theme park.

The archetypes everyone begins as are funny enough, but everyone grows in titbits of them we learn, even Chiyo despite being the broadest character of the lot you can gleefully knock flying in the air as a slapstick gag. Contrast this with a later show, I watched back in the day as an ADV Films release, like Pani Poni Dash! (2005), which was a far more over-the-top and absurd, contrasting even Daioh's strangest moments, including its own cat that exists in a vending machine who claims is God, with a far more broader and frankly weirder cast of characters who were not deliberately fleshed out as people. Azumanga Daioh when it wants to be weird gets very weird, but contrasts with what is called the "slice of life" genre, of ordinary life depicted in animation, as equally. There is an entire episode, with too many good ones to choose from in their compiled version, about weird New Year's Day dreams, where Chiyo-Father is introduced, which stands out, as does Osaka's belief Chiyo's pigtails are sentient. There is also however one set in spring, where there is cherry blossom on the trees, which is entirely a calm character building piece, where Nyamo (being at the stage of wondering if she should marry) and Yukari bond, meeting a well-off friend from their school days, contrasted by clearly seeing Tomo and Yomi like each other when Tomo climbs through Yomi's bedroom window to hang out and tease each other.

Knowledge of the show's original five minute form makes its structure more admirable, in how running jokes are allowed to grow and cultivate perfectly throughout even for an episodic level. One of the best is the Yukari-mobile, that Yukari is not only a terrible drive but one, when originally hinted at early in the series, causes Chiyo to suffer permanent PTSD after the first summer house, and if eventually being paid off onscreen after so much build up off-screen. Sakaki's journey with cats, in contrast, provides a sweet conclusion after, during a school trip to Okinawa, they encounter a wild iriomote kitten.

The presentation is Daioh's biggest virtue. The show will pace jokes and even extend them to the point they become funnier in a proto-anti-humour. For parts, this even feels like a proto-version of decades-later series like gdgd Fairies (2011-13) which were entirely based around female voice actresses, usually with low budgets, in character having conversations and sometimes breaking out of them. The opening credits alone are magical - a prelude to events through the series whilst being visually dynamic, with a lovely and surreal song by Oranges & Lemons about magical cake to set the tone perfectly. The music by Masaki Kurihara throughout is as vibrant and playful for a show that can juggle sweetness with silliness. Sadly, their career is significantly short, which is sad barring the delightful strangeness that, among their tiny CV for anime music, it includes California Crisis: Gun Salvo (1986), a truly idiosyncratic OVA title from when money was plentiful for one-offs.

Azumanga Daioh is a series worth discover, even if nostalgia exists for the series. Barring the one unfortunate character in Kimura, I think the series is a success. It was released again after ADV Film's first DVD run with the 2016 Sentai Filmworks compilation in the United States, but sadly not in Britain, a shame as it is a delight to experience.

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1) The short, according to the Anime News Network entry for the short film, was intended to play in theatres alongside Slayers Premium (2001) and Di Gi Charat: A Trip to the Planet (2001) as a opener for Sakura Wars: The Movie (2001), as distinct a marathon of animated work as you could get.

2) Don’t Throw Class S Out Entirely by Zeria, published on November 20th 2017 for Floating Bliss.

3) Women-Loving Women in Modern Japan by Erin Subramian, taken from Yuricon.com among its older essays.

4) Yuri Novel: Yaneura no Nishojo, written conversation between Erica Friedman and Hafl published May 9th 2010 for Okazu.yuricon.com