#218: Kimera (1996)

 

a.k.a. Ki*Me*Ra

Studio: Animate Films

Director: Kazu Yokota

Screenplay: Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on a manga by Kazuma Kodaka

Voice Cast: Yasunori Matsumoto / Brett Weaver as Osamu; Nobuo Tobita / Kim Sevier as Kimera; Ryotaro Okiayu / Tristan MacAvery as Jay Gibson; Juurouta Kosugi / Bryan Bounds as Kianu; Mugihito / Guil Lunde as Ginzu; Kinryuu Arimoto / Robert Peeples as Dr. Gibson

 

He's even worse than my haemorrhoids!

Sultry electro on the soundtrack introduces the viewer to an entity in a space pod landing on Earth. A tentacle monstrosity, to the horror of the hunter watching on in the woods, tragically kills and drains the life-force from his dog to emphasis in dangerous nature, before he is targeted off-screen. This prologue intertwines with two cornflake cereal salesmen, (yes, that is what they are), one a married American man named Jay, the other a Japanese bachelor named Osama, who together cross into the aftermath site only to get involved with an obvious cover-up.

This is where I should nod to the author of the source manga, Kazuma Kodaka, and that Kimera, despite what the ADV Films English dub tries to cover up, is explicitly an LGBTQ horror story. Kodaka, born in 1969, is known mainly for her work in the "yaoh" genre of "boy's love" manga. Different from "bara", work written about gay men by gay men in manga, yaoh is a huge genre in itself, in genre and popularity, crossing into anime with Kimera interesting as a violent horror story which is yet connected to this genre. It is a tale of Osama meeting the titular Kimera, a sensual androgynous space vampire, nude in a containment pod, one he falls head over heels with the moment he finds them. Osama, in his banter with his friend and colleague, even gets into denial about not having a girlfriend when teased about, befitting a tale which is not going to beat around the bush about its central romance. With incredible progressiveness too, it is not going to think about the two central figures' having any conflict with their desires or sexuality either, even if one is a sexually fluid space vampire, next to an apocalyptic scenario with a former lover and a group of evil space vampires are involved too, and are a significantly bigger issue.

The ADV Film English dub tried to hide this, with "Kimera" dubbed with the pronoun "she" but being an unnatural otherworldly beauty, an intersex  entity who can reproduce with women if men are not available, a figure who is unfortunately destined to destroy (feed off) the Earth which their children when birthed. In the original Japanese dub, as the manga, Kimera is explicitly male, if physically intersex, with only one minor female character in the anime at all, and the drama entirely about this physical beautiful figure. This is complicated by ADV in that the English dub has Kim Sevier play them, a voice actress who voiced Yui Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), protagonist Shinji's deceased mother, whilst in the original Japanese dub, they are played by Nobuo Tobita, a prolific male voice actor. In hindsight, it comes off as dubious on ADV Film's part, particularly as Sevier does use a voice that is gender neutral in tone. Beyond the idea that yaoi stories were not commonly available at the time in the West, it is a strange creative decision which barely hides what is actually happening in the anime.

And Kimera beyond this fact is fascinating. In tone, this sits nicely among the ultra-violent horror anime works from the eighties and nineties fully, with only the sense of it looking of the late nineties present for myself, with a very distinct look in simple colour tones used. It has no qualms with being grotesque even when gore is not onscreen, as one of the humans Dr. Fender, a contrast to the handsomeness in the leads, as a dated trope, of being an figure depicted ugly physically as well as his behaviour, has sided with the evil space vampires, but through one of the sloppiest methods possible of ordering fresh cadavers and organs (of the freshest quality) which can be easily tracked by his fellow scientists. When it is physically violent onscreen, it has in less than fifty minutes mutilation, death, tentacles pushing peoples' eyes out and gore, but with gender subverted, coming off as a sibling among all the violent anime that parents warned us about that came to the West on video, but with this distinct aspect to subvert things. The trope of space vampires is one I have inexplicably come across in anime a lot, as baring the Hellsing franchise there is usually a habit of them being tangibly placed near outer space if not from it, but this packs a lot that, if remade, is pretty striking and would be fascinating to see expanded out, both in subverting that trope but also what the narrative is too.

It has its quirks already, in which the vampire planet is a beautiful fantasy land of lizard birds, but even that slides next to what is an insane melodrama with potential, even those idyllic scenes, with Kimera depicted closer to the kind of elegant female leads of other work, particularly Belldandy from the famous Oh My Goddess franchise, being contrasted by the horror and tragedy of their narrative. That Kimera, having witnessed their own mother become a figure, in a tube, only to breed on their planet, biologically existed in their home world to just breed for their species, even their former lover now having come to Earth too to kill Kimera and spare them this fate. Yaoi in anime and manga, even as someone with barely any knowledge when I came to this anime, was something I still knew in mind of not being a genre, but a theme which crosses into a variety of genres (even American buddy cop tropes with Fake (1994-2000) for an example), which the authors of could take in any direction they could. With yaoi's prime audience a female one, not excluding the potential interest for a gay or bisexual male fan of this work or the manga, the idea that this is proudly a gory horror anime which is yet based on a source, also a horror story, for women with this central romance is really spectacular and something to appreciate decades on.

This manga was also published in Super Jump, which is a "seinen" work targeting young adult men  and adds an additional layer to viewing this title. In the same biweekly manga anthology with Bartender (2004-2011), adapted into an anime series and a drama about a bartender soothing customers' sorrows with the power of alcohol, and the magazine where Buichi Terasawa's legendary Space Adventure Cobra manga was partially published through, Kimera being this explicit as an anime in its gender relationship is even more fascinating, especially as playing to the trope of sex intermingling with death, there is a very explicit threesome with Kimera and two men which is long, and eroticised only until those two mortals get eaten. Considering as well those involved in the production, the legendary Toho among those involved, this is just among the many anime of a variety of types they worked with. For the central studio behind the anime Animate Films, who cut their teeth in this time on horror OVAs like Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (1987), but could also do the erotic OVA Kama Sutra (1991), making their day job putting Kimera together as it becomes progressive in the sense that, for them, it was as worthy for a potential audience as any of the others.

It is still a cheesy sci-fi horror narrative at its heart, even with some classier choices like In the Hall of the Mountain King on violin on the score in terms of style. It is still very conventional in terms of this type of ridiculous horror anime, in terms of the gore, the character archetypes, the aforementioned obsession with space vampires, and a lot of exposition to cover the lore in little narrative length it possesses. In the latter case, emphasising a troupe of human beings as unreliable and destructive figures which appears in a lot of anime in general, you even get the choice dialogue, alongside side this narrative being based around the real myths of vampires stemming from this alien planet, that dissecting a vampire who came for peace talks with us, and keeping their brain alive in a jar, was a bad move of ours. Even in mind to Japan's relationship to vampires, i.e. a concept alien to their mythology that, when embraced, their pulp stories have had to explain and interpret in their own ways, Kazuma Kodaka as an author herself still kept the idea of their morbid sexuality as a prime part, which shows how they have a universal quality regardless of country. Even here, the final fight takes place in a Christian church, western iconography, with someone impaled on a giant cross, so I credit even Kimera the anime nodding to the lore it is reinterpreting for its original audience.

This even has a happy ending...if John Carpenter, with one of his famous doomsday endings from his horror films, made a horror romance story with either hope or the end of the world potentially happening. Kimera is still not the greatest horror anime. It is sadly one that might be difficult to re-release too, simply because so much straight-to-video anime exists, and ones which are less than an hour long with no further episodes like this are a struggle to re-release even today. It is however fascinating, it is entertaining, and even decades later, it still stands out as being one of the gory OVA anime from this older era which was also an early LGBTQ title that we did get in the West if just in North America.