#268: Offside Girl (2007)/University Girls (2001)

 

Studio(s): MS Pictures (Offside Girl)/Obtain Future (University Girls)

Offside Girl based on a manga by Ippon Nagare

Voice Cast for Offside Girl: Nene as Miyajima, Kenkou as Akira, Nanami Natsukawa as the Coach, Ryoko Tanigawa as Nanami

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Attempting to cover what most know it as "hentai", alongside any self-consciousness you may feel in whether it presents a negative image of you to strangers or not, is confounded with how like some erotica, they focus on their subject, the act of sex, even if the story is very simple or pushed to the side. In a case like this, you are also confounded by the fact that, combining the two episodes together, Offside Girl makes up less than thirty minutes, and University Girls is only twenty two minutes as one single piece, neither being continued and leaving not a lot to work with. But there is something worth prodding even if you will get into NSFW content with how these works, and erotica in general, say a lot about people, more so as the reason I wanted to cover these was not really to cover hentai just by itself. I wanted to cover them as much because as of November 2023¹, these are the lowest ranked hentai anime on Anime News Network's list of lowest ranked anime, which means as per viewers of the site, this pair is in handshaking distance to notorious works like M.D. Geist (1986), Tekken: The Motion Picture (1998) and EX-ARM (2021) which have gained infamy. The hentai is itself is less likely to be as talked about as titles which could get a wider range of access without the restrictions on selling hardcore materials, which makes it interesting to wonder how they got on that list. Among hentai in terms of premise, when many I would even want to touch with a barge pole let alone ever witness, thankfully these two are tamer in ideas, even if Offside Girl gets into curious kinks, and all their notoriety comes from their production.

Truthfully, we watch action films as much for set pieces as much as the stories, horror films for the vicarious and gruesome moments, and erotica for their sensuality, and with outright pornographic content, in mind to all the issues of their gender politics and attitudes, the ideal is an idealised and in cases exaggerated take on human desire, even if dealing with fetishes and kinks which may come off as weird for some viewers, meant to deal with these ideas in a consenting construct between creator and viewer. That is one of the reasons "hentai" is a term I feel less happy to have to use as its literally the Japanese term for "pervert" and ridiculous to implement, when "eroge" for Japanese erotic video games is one I wish I could steal for this review but have to keep to the parlance we use in the West to avoid confusion. Animation has the advantage, even if it may cause viewers to feel weird to feel desire to figures that do not exist and can be un-human in look, to inherent emphasise a creative fantasy, something to bear in mind as Offside Girl and University Girls are ultra low budget works who struggle with this, and that is why they got the bottom ranks. One of the issues with eroge anime too is that, like live action pornography, the medium is pushed more for content than to try to emphasis artistic content, ostracised in society and with the medium a way for people to access them. This is not to dismiss the potential for this in the medium or manga, let alone live action erotica, as you can envision purely titillation in work made with authorial creativity and a wider scoop like LGBTQ themes, but in mind that it has become a genre, as much as live action where it has been attack and forced to be its own industry selling the sexual content, you have an uphill struggle in making a large budget an acceptable choice in terms of a market. The best example of this in hentai was when the acclaimed illustrator and manga artist Satoshi Urushihara co-directed a high budget hentai Another Lady Innocent (2004), a melodrama set in the period American South, only for one episode to ever to be created in his life time due to how its production, legitimately well made as an animation work, likely cost too much time and money to make when anime in the industry can be made quicker and sell the sex in a faster time. The two being covered today show an extreme which did not gather very well regarded reactions to them, in trying to make erotic anime for audiences in a compact time, but even if the artistic side of the genre should not be dismissed, so much is made and not really talked of that it is like a crap shoot trying to pluck something out, let alone two chosen here for this review as the "worst" for some of their kind.

Offside Girl was the more interesting one because of its premise, and to pull back the curtain was meant to be the single title covered until University Girls turned out to be lower in the rankings, in which its lead, a female student, is smitten with a guy far more interested in being on the men's soccer team at their school. Soccer is as popular in Japan as globally, and imagining a tale of a young woman having to work around his obsession is interested in any genre. You can have a sex comedy premise about this in Britain, where it is called "football", and there is in fact a film called Fever Pitch (1997), a romantic comedy, in which actor Colin Firth played a man obsessed with the sport, based around a memoir by Nick Hornby and set around the team Arsenal's First Division championship-winning season in 1988–89 and its effect on the protagonist's romantic relationship. It is a far more curious premise though to mix porn with sports, just to imagine if you let the soccer nerds get away with references to the sport, and parodies of franchises like Captain Tsubasa, one of the biggest in terms of Japanese manga and anime for the sport, without getting into copyright trouble, against what is effectively a tale of two people who discover they like each other very quickly physically. He tricks her into becoming the manager of the team as part of its comedy tone, effectively the dogsbody who cleans the uniforms and keeps their spaces clean, but when they are forced to hide in a cupboard, soon into the first episode their crush becomes a physical one, and baring in mind aspects of this I would understand being criticised and viewed as sexist, this effectively suggests as a premise two young people, around the sport of soccer, realising they love each other but in a very kinky and polygamous way. The immediate issue is that, if you were expecting the soccer references, be disappointed as you do not even see a soccer ball, barring a musty one in their main team building, nor any sports, as this barely has any content beyond the set-up.

Neither expect more than this. You get barely any context beyond the basic interactions, and most of this is actually depicted in close-ups where you do not see many feet let alone soccer appropriate footwear on people, and it is here the true reason this got so low a rating really comes in on Anime News Network, in that Offside Girl also at times feels like a motion comic or actually a manga if the speech bubbles are replaced by the voice acting. Some of the illustrations of the cast, mostly drawn in minimal close-ups, do look wonky, our female lead finding herself eroticised but also distorted physically in a work which had few resources to work with. The studio behind this, MS Pictures, have made anime beyond this and before, titles with evocative names like Fleshdance (2007) from the same year as this, and yes, that is clearly a pun on Flashdance (1983). They were not going to lose sleep over this production, one where it feels as if the production became less a priority or was allowed to fall down, as this is insanely raggedy for any level of budget.

It actually emphasises the commitment the cast have to put in, even before we get to the absurd dialogue, the voice actresses especially having to go from nought to up to eleven to get this exaggerated form of eroticism over in their bellows. This is where, if I had been worried as a viewer being viewed as a perverse covering this, or anyone was to be put off the subject, you cannot dodge covering the sexual content itself as the driving force of the animation. You have to factor in with both of these works that, with millennia of objectification and oppression of women, this factor will always effect a person's reaction to a work that is geared clearly for a male heterosexual audience, in its eroticisation of the female figures even as mere drawings; like the two female leads in University Girls this follows a fixation on larger bra cup sizes, here with the obvious concern that this is a figure in school despite age being vague this never dares get into, and to how when the second female character is brought in, they can have sexual relations in a fantasy scenario for men, but this would have not teased with male bisexuality too. In mind to all the issues surrounding erotica for their portrayals of the subject, it is clearly exaggerated and unless one is documenting one's own real sexual experiences, the bigger issues alongside confusing this with the reality of sexual relationships is when they forget that people (men and women) are fully formed people, and even if the issue is a bias towards focusing on certain audiences and stereotypes, it is also in mind that many do not play to this to their better in letting the cast even in a fantasy for a heterosexual male audience feel like they are in on the pleasure as the male character/audience. This is more of an issue here as, whilst I would utterly understand someone labelling Offside Girl sexist, it is pretty tame baring touches, and the greater issue alongside the like of time and budget this had is that you do not get characters even as broad stereotypes. Especially with the female lead, who should be the focus on the character dynamics and journey in this tale, where she comes to appreciate soccer and also discovers her own sexual desires, this should be as much where she gets to have fun as the lead, not just go through the motions. Clearly, because this barely establishes the story let alone actually tells one, you cannot tell the direction this went unless you go to the original manga by Ippon Nagare, but even here, you could have had a few more touches to her in what little time you have.

Some would argue, if they saw the second episode where a female coach is introduced with a fetish for managers of all kinds, male or female, that it crosses a line when she could be seen as molesting the lead, and then is "punished" by a male member of the soccer team. In context, the scene is frankly evidence of the production's flaws, vague and confused, and a huge issue with erotica in general where, unless you are dealing with something legitimately misogynistic in tone, you are dealing with fantasies without the appropriate sense of the construction of a consenting world between characters, and between the work and the viewer, where arguably the issue here is also one you need to challenge anime outside of hentai in general for the same issue, as unfortunately that type of scene is one found as the "joke" for many works even into the Millennia. The rest of it comes off more like a really kinky four person fantasy scenario despite nearly edging the line too closely; the "punishment" moment surrounds everyone on the team being aware of their female coach's interests and one of the other players being in a relationship where this is played to, whilst in a scene which did not feel uncomfortable at first, it would be our female lead role-playing being "helpless" to the female coach, rather than play it as what comes as the one really problematic scene in all of this. Whilst not a lot is here, a moment of tone-deaf writing comes in to emphasise that no one was thinking through how to not make a scene nearly become gross.  

There is also the surprise inclusion of a lactation fetish, but with mind that the female coach is not an older woman who has had children, nor there being any other female characters until the last scene of the final episode being introduced. It involves the titular protagonist herself, where her love interest even asks when he discovers this of her whether she is pregnant. It is a curious inclusion, a kink which may put off some, or cause others to roll their eyes as it is a young female student where the fetish comes in, as in reality, it is rarer outside of childbirth including chemically induced methods for this to physically be possible. The fact that it is separated from motherhood, whilst could be accused of a fetish not accepting the reality of human life, also factors in how it is nether for the pleasure of anyone else but the "Offside Girl" herself, where there is a kink about being touched and caresses whether by herself, as in the first scene of the first episode, or by others. These quirks, even if this is porn not thinking hard at all about the accidental symbolisms, can be read into for how you could have gotten something that fully embraced a more bolder, progressively kinky tone even if the reality is alien to this and not helped by its complete lack of budget. A heroine with the discovery of how tactile touch is central in her fantasies is a premise with a lot to write about, seriously and comically, even if you are not going to more here baring a nod to the idea, which is the problem in general with all anime, let alone hentai, where you have one-off or stray episodes to a premise never allowed to ever grow into a full narrative.

University Girls, also known as Joshidai Ecchi Sōdanshitsu, is a more conventionally plotted tale, a one-off erotic story. Madoka, our female lead, is also a student, despondent when she barges in on a male teacher she is attracted to on the university campus mid-coitus with another female student, later to get advice from her friend Yokko to be more confident with him. The set up, with student-teacher relationships, has become more taboo over time even between adults, and this short anime is not going to pass the Bechdel test for how the leads talk mostly about sex and men, but it is a surprise even when this comes to the final scene punch line where it goes, in that this story is about sexually confident women in charge. This is in mind, with most erotica targeting heterosexual man, you are dealing with work that plays this with the female as figures of fantasy, but this still gets into how Yokko, helping her friend, is in a BDSM relationship with the psychology teacher where he is completely the submissive, to literally be walked on, to pleasure her and Madoka when invited to be an additional dominant, and leading to that aforementioned punch line where to Yokko's dismay the hot male teacher wants to be a willing submissive to her after a trip to the love hotel.

Even details like this, whether accidental or not, make something like this which most would not sit through more interesting. In terms of BDSM, with one man being stepped on in shoes, a whip used in multiple ways, even when it comes as an improvised prostate examiner, it is strong if you have never seen a depiction of this, but is also tame when one is aware, with careful rules in place in the BDSM community between the dominant and the submissive, you can get into things like blood play, piercings, confinements etc. in a healthy way, making this look vanilla. Hentai is not a topic I want to cover mostly because of the stuff that would even challenge my belief in the freedom of art, by way of permanent banishment from record with fire, and sadly Obtain Future in their short existence did tap into themes which I am creeped by myself, but it also comes with this sense of them literally throwing anything at the way to see what sticks, leading to University Girls inexplicitly being about strong women in control for their pleasure even if, in context, I suspect no one was necessarily thinking about that as the driving force of the title, just the fantasy of men being dominated by men plus some more conventional sex scenes. Most of their work is also on the bottom list of Anime News Network, and in this case, we cannot ignore the animation elephant in the room as, even if trying to be positive, even I have to admit to thinking Offside Girl looked like a step-up in animation in comparison. Best way to describe it is early Flash animation, homemade, which managed to be released on DVD in the USA by Adult Source Media. Adobe Flash animation was able to let some very talented creators make both animation and web browser games from them, from the likes of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (2004–2009) to the game Frog Fractions (2012), allowing anyone to show incredible talent, but it was also a way to let anyone animate regardless of resources, and undeniably, flash animation on the likes of Newgrounds also includes pornographic work, capable as much artistic quality but also something like University Girls. The voice acting at times even feels like friends or people the creators knew earnestly trying their best next to the performances in other work, especially the actress playing Madoka when she has to cry in one scene. In a work which inexplicably references Sigmund Freud at one point, this feels like with hindsight a work unfairly forced into daylight as an actual DVD release, which unfortunately put in its the crosshairs of anyone gathering the hentai releases from that time.

This review has to factor in how, yes, these titles do come off as crass at points, more than sexist or even misogynistic. Works like this as it stands, even if you could get past their lack of animation budgets, has the issue too with a lot of erotica with how ridiculous the dialogue is, which could be embraced for the exaggerated humour but here feels like it was trying to be serious. The moment in Offside Girls the lead is complimented in having "amazingly indecent breasts" was where this managed to get absurd, only to manage to top itself later on, and in University Girls Madoka is asked about her cup size mid-coitus, which shows as well the obsession with bra sizes in the fantasies of anime in general, let alone these more explicit titles. Ideally, porn if not trying to be serious should embrace a hyper-exaggerated form where, with balance in depicting everyone male and female, it images the idea of everyone being happy with sex so proudly lurid and passionate. Even if merely drawings with voices here, the characters should be symbolic of real people and representing what viewers would be able to have with their own significant other(s) in real life even if it also means screaming the roof off, embracing bodily differences and fetishes/kinks in a consenting environment.

Offside Girl is based on a one shot manga but never gets beyond the prologue to a larger story, where the previous female manager of the team is introduced never to get anywhere further, so it is really impossible to say whether the premise would have gotten to this ideal, instead the anime if you ever watched it being something you cannot pass the animation and production of. University Girl, which is not more than a short erotic tale, an original narrative, is just as stuck with this problem, and between them is the ultimate issue that, even if one was to argue with the noble idea of positive sex wanting to be depicted, these merely help think of the ideal whilst they even struggle with the animation. They do not feel like the "worst" anime ever, if because neither is uncomfortable to watch barring awkwardly rendered sex scenes, University Girls the more likely to break someone for this, and together at an hour as a double bill, barely any life feels wasted away. Neither, thank God, ever got into content I would regret watching, and if it seems strange to have such a long review speculating on what-ifs to what are, frankly, titles most would mock for the animation, it is because sexuality is a topic that is so diverse and expansive in human culture whether we want to be proud of it or not. Between them, University Girls is the one rightly lower in the totem pole, but it feels mean to mock these, when more repugnant hentai unfortunately exists, and there is entertainment here between them even if they get so much wrong.

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1) Anime News Network's Anime Top 100 Worst Rated (bayesian estimate).

#244: Eiken (2003)

Studio: J.C. Staff

Director: Kiyotaka Ohata

Screenplay: Tomoyasu Okubo

Based on the manga by Seiji Matsuyama

Voice Cast: Akeno Watanabe as Densuke Mifune; Miwa Oshiro as Chiharu Shinonome; Emi Yabusaki as Yuriko Shinonome; Mai Kadowaki as Kyoko Morooka; Marina Ono as Komoe Harumachi; Masumi Asano as Kirika Misono; Touko Itou as Lin Grace

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

J.C. Staff are a prolific company who have worked on some acclaimed titles - the TV series Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) and Azumanga Daioh (2002) spring to mind - but they are still a company who worked over the years, leading to an eclectic catalogue which includes legitimately curiosities, ones you may have never heard of and others that you will scratch your head about. The straight to video work is a great example of this.  You can have Cat Soup (2001), a highly regarded and surreal avant-garde animation based on the work of manga author Nekojiru. You can however also have Garzey's Wing (1996-7), a notorious Yoshiyuki Tomino work, and they are a company who have put their hands into a curious number of tangents. Probably one of the most infamous, least in the USA because Media Blasters released this two episode work and the manga, is Seiji Matsuyama's Eiken. Eiken, if you just look at the screenshots, will lead to many running far from it as far as possible. Hell, the still images may even cause problems for those who maintain free blogging sites, unless you have the warning page for sensitive content up. Eiken, with fair warning for someone expecting this to be a review just viewing it as a gross perversion of anime sex comedy tropes may be mortified that this review, dare I say, may even become pretentious. Not to defend the anime at all, but from someone who viewed it only in mind to a morbid fascination, and left finding it a sexual nightmare tale masquerading in cute clothes with a lot to unpick. Even in terms of Matsuyama's accidental contributions as a manga author in real life Japanese politics, Eiken is a perfect example, whether a good anime, a bad anime, or an infamous one, you could write so much about even if entirely personal opinion, and it is all worth having written down.

This all also stems into the past. Let us not kid ourselves, even if the later sentence will sound crass, but anime and manga over the decades has had an obsession with the female bust, and this leads to the term "bakunyu", literally "exploding breasts" and means "enormous breasts", when you take the fixation found in many cultures for heterosexual males to its most extreme level. Eiken is infamous, even when larger busted characters have become commonplace within anime and manga, for being the one title to bring bakunyu to Shonen manga as, yes, this was targeted to adolescent boys in Weekly Shōnen Champion. The story is complicated knowing that its most notorious creative decision, the bust size of a lot of its female cast, was not from the get-go, but a decision made with the editor (with the author's interest) to redraw the characters from volume four in the manga tankōbon onwards, which is also notably where, in the US releases, Media Blasters' publications had to switch from an age rating of 16 plus to 18 plus¹. Even if I advise caution against anyone watching this without warning, I came to this anime fully aware of what I was getting into, and finding rather than feeling dirty, as I will warn most will, the anime adaptation fascinated for what it inadvertedly became. The entire thing by pure accident comes as an adolescent male sexual neurosis onscreen even if that is clearly not the intention of the production at all, all with a perverse air to it that is more interesting to have witnessed for myself than the shock many would have with this title. 

It is not a parody, as it was clearly made as a tale with sex appeal if one with a kink or two few have, and as we will get into later, Seiji Matsuyama created a manga much more controversial, with wide scale effect on Japanese censorship, which is likely to be less defendable and place a more damning eye on this title too with hindsight. Coming to this, Eiken has all the tropes of other anime and manga which can be questionable and clichéd, the high school romance a common story line which can be done well and has questionable aspects to challenge, including the obsession with having so many and the idea one's high school life in a fantastical form is more worthy of anime over the worlds of adults. The difference is that this is anime high school if filtered through an adolescent hormonal nightmare. Our lead Densuke Mifune is so bland, like so many male protagonists in these in terms of his meek inability, that he is immediately set upon by the notorious Eiken club and its leader Kirika Misono on his first day at Zashono Academy, a place which is literally located on a blatant Freudian landmass. It is not redeemable as an anime, but the stereotypical clichés over these two episodes are here and they find themselves being more scrutinised due to how tasteless this show gets, exaggerating them to an extreme whilst still disguising itself as cutesy. The clichés are found in other shows - cute love interest Chiharu Shinonome, who is shy and Densuke crushes on, the school competition that could bring them closer, the former student who studied in the USA who is a threat as another romantic interest, and Densuke's own unfortunate curse to stumble into every clichéd moment of anime sex comedy at the worse moments. The differences beyond its lewdness could almost have been notable changes that the show never actually winked at, in that the most notorious part of the show, the breast sizes of several key female characters, could have just been shown onscreen and everything about the plot could have played out without ever raising the character designs as the anime actually does constantly, forcing one to register it and react with how even a crass choice undercuts everything. This anime is not subtle in the slightest so instead with Chiharu, the bakunyu change forces her to become distorted, the change turning these characters into hyper exaggerations that for a viewer may be a step into the off-putting. And some of the characters are younger and more ridiculously proportion, which makes this even moe perverse let alone more dubious in general before those aesthetic touches. 

If it was not obvious this was a bizarre product beamed from a specific series of circumstances, the alternative world version of this, which was more focused on being a twisted little parody, would have been inspired if off-putting for someone. Even in this dubious form it is in reality, I cannot help but view it like a two episode nightmare from another television show, censored for television censorship, where our lead dreams all of this in a state of delirium, representing all of his sexual anxieties and hang-ups as a teen boy, before he wakes up and encounters these characters with sensible proportions and with less lewdness onscreen. In another context, this would have still be uncomfortable viewing, but could have been a really twisted satire less on these tropes but on teen hormonal anxieties. This is more so considering how many anime sex comedies already have the curious "reward-punishment" trope that I find more and more curious to witness. Far from embarrassment, when I get older as an anime fan, watching work with fan service content, a lot of it is now, if not defendable as good sex comedy, becoming more psychologically compelling to unpick for how they represent sexual hang-ups and relationships. Whether the lead deserves it or by pure accident, any encounter with the opposite sex in terms of something lewd or sexual usually involves a male lead being humiliated and/or beaten up afterwards, something which has come off as more an anxiety of sex in general the more I see it in these stories, whether they are defendable or not.

Even the obsession with breasts, exaggerated here to an incredible extreme and an obsession for many men, filters through this anxious accidental tone; the idea that, whether any psychological or sociological reasons this part of the female anatomy is an obsession for many heterosexual men erotically, a large part of this likely as much due to an integral part of adolescence being how we all go through significant physical change. When one goes through puberty, male or female, your body physically changes and these changes, even if you suddenly become taller or stay short, become the aspect which others take in as they themselves physically and emotionally change, sometime they exaggerate in how they perceive you; this is including those who become attracted to you, and what they may take into consideration, as they themselves suddenly feel attraction to the opposite sex unless they go through the discovery of being gay or bisexual. All of this is amateur observation, so heckling in the comments is acceptable, but it is apt that, if this was a parody, Densuke's nightmare distorts the most prominent features of the girl he has a crush on. These are her shyness, with the Japanese vocal performance from Miwa Oshiro, a model whose only voice acting role is this show, exaggerates through the timidness in her high voice, and her figure, which if this was a sensible show, and not a fetish work, would be through the mind's eye of how one teen boy views her through this over-the-top physicality as the other female characters with similar proportions. Considering the hair styles of the female cast, regardless of figures, is just as exaggerated with how large they are, it befits this distortion. Someone like the leader of the Eiken club Kirika Misono and others are even more exaggerated in their proportions, and even with those which are not, their seemingly sexual openness, whilst not subtle and well done, could have been in a satire his fears of girls he is attracted to but are absolutely more aware of themselves physically and in desires then he and most of the males in the school ever can. The crass phallic food jokes do not help among many moments in this show, particularly with Kirika's obsession with things like bananas and not eating them conventionally, sight gags that you the viewer will hope no one comes into the room (with the whole work) when you are watching this; even those though would make sense if this was an actual satire if still crass. That being Densuke a case of someone with a sudden desire for the opposite sex but is terrified of them as confident, hypersexual figures in his view of them.

This is all death of the author logic, but I am coming to this title with its legacy being hyped, that I had heard for years this was to be approached with caution, a title you would scratch your eyes out in immediate contact of. Instead I watched Eiken only to find myself admitting I was not affected by it at all, even with some of the worse jokes that appear between the two twenty plus minute episodes, even finding a sick sense of humour to this with distance for how unintentionally un-erotic it is. My tastes for readers is also one that, appreciating the best of art, is also being someone with the taste for the weird, even a cinematic trash panda who can try to wonder what formed work that is never going to win many people. Again, let sanity come and point out this is all a viewpoint to a work proudly, and brazenly, perverse on purpose, but still I find one of the stranger moments in this anime was not sexual at all, that among the duo of female commentators on the sports events, both classmates, one of them decides to hold her finger to her top lip like a moustache and talk in a faux deep male voice to sound like an expert, which is stranger than anything else that is lewd and sexually symbolic. Far more disturbing for me is that the male student returning from the States is a predator, someone claiming to be Chiharu's knight in shining armour but emotionally twisting her, and forcing her to be intimate with him in the sports games in a non-consensual way as a team. That content is more problematic over the years in anime, making his punishment (even with the cheap joke at bald people) actually justifiable. 

This is all in mind that, even if you manage to get through episode one, episode two is going to be more off-putting for some. The first has a yoghurt water slide as a challenge, which is sexual innuendo giving up subtlety, but the later has a chocolate waterslide, which is unfortunate in what it looks like instead, and one off jokes, including involving eels, which will cause even those who got through that first episode to give up the anime broken. Yet it still feels like the sexual nightmare of Densuke, causing me to wonder why Seiji Matsuyama for his manga made most of the humour, if accurate to the manga in the adaptation, a male lead who is the butt of these jokes. There are moments when Densuke has some very kinky fantasies of his own about Chiharu, but they truly feel adolescent and are constantly undercut by how at a disadvantage he is in every situation, like a guy whose learnt of these in a dirty mag but would be in the deep end in an actual relationship with another human being. This is probably the one thing in this entire anime arguably close to real life even if I do not want to give Eiken credit for being smart. Even jokes that it has which are eyebrow raising, such as Chiharu's younger sister being openly flirtatious with him, are a) jokes we need to critique in other anime for having too, and b) itself another of the moments this show accidentally feels like one poor boy's hormones being his own enemy. The entire "gag" (with air quotes) of Densuke  being forced to wear a woman's swimming one piece (with ponytails) for the chocolate water slide challenge is loaded in itself, and would be still the same even if Seiji Matsuyama was to have admitted, if from the manga, he never considered anything more to it beyond thinking it a "gag" to casually include for one chapter.

A weird amount of sexual anxiety comes into anime even when it is playing to questionable tropes of girls being seen undressed or nude in changing rooms for a joke and titillation, not forgetting hot springs episodes or when by pure accident a slip of clothing in a pratfall transpires. There is likely afterwards to be the scene of the guy being physically injured in the transgression, or in this case Densuke constantly at the end of humiliation and belief from others he is a pervert. The Japanese voice performance, unlike the one from Bryce Papenbrook in the English dub, is a female voice actress Akeno Watanabe who plays him uncomfortable young in how high pitch he is, like a middle scholar including in his short height, but it adds to the sick joke of the poor lad trying to wrap his head around this world of hyper-figured women even taller than him let alone with a few wrapping him around their fingers. Suffering at the cruel hands of the writers (and manga author Seiji Matsuyama) falling back on the dated tropes of sex comedy, that this still feels like a conventional comedy barring its lewd details adds to this adds to this twisted nature. With its early 2000s look of bright colours, its nineties mah-jong videogame music score, and how cute it is all meant to be, the idea this is all meant to be like a regular anime comedy is weirder than any of the perversity onscreen. There is even a bear creature no one raises questions about being in the Eiken club with everyone else just to toy with any viewer who can tolerate how extreme it is, finding a new way to baffle.

Considering the stuff I have sat through where I have found more disturbing content in more inappropriate places, I find Eiken just perverse. Anime with uncomfortable levels of non-consensual eroticism like VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fresh (1997), a straight to video work which presents itself as a sexy action show only to be nasty in misogynistic ways in tonal whiplashes, make Eiken a lesser of two evils, more curious to prod as an oddity. It is tasteless and one I understand the reactions to, that it is gross and deserves the most negative reviews; the only things are that I have suffered through worse, and that this is a weird artefact too loaded with psychosexual aspects and unintentional weirdness that are compelling. It is not pleasant to watch the anime, but it was compelling in its own way. If someone like Guy Maddin made a story like this in live action, imagining now the perversity and surrealism of the Canadian filmmaker of Careful (1992) adapting this story, Eiken would be a film that would put people off, but it would one damn curious trip, considering that a film like Cowards Bend the Knees (2003), one of Guy Maddin's more transgressive films dealing with sexual kink, was a film about male sexual neurosis if by way of ice hockey. The fact this has no actual nudity either adds to its tone too. It is tame in what you do not see, but has content kinkier here than in actual animated porn, which will make people feel very filthy for watching this but adds to this perverse feverish idea even if entirely from this viewer's perspective. There is a lot of anime and manga which is entirely with this tone, meant to titillate with having sexy schoolgirls with ridiculous proportions and near undress, which has its own moral and gender issues rightly to unpack, but also usually come with a need to punish its male characters as if to punish the male viewers.  It is fascinating to watch what is held as one of the most notorious straight to video anime for many people and, rather than take it as it is, imagine what Sigmund Freud would have thought of it. Even if Freud's ideas on sex and women were always dubious, just to see him trying to figure it all would have been something I wished happened.

The one sobering point though, and this is something I have been wary to reach, is that the history after this for Seiji Matsuyama would let to him get into legitimate controversy with another of his works, a title called Oku-sama wa Shōgakusei (My Wife Is an Elementary Student), which, yes, does raise alarm bells as a premise even if a gag comedy. This controversy over this manga and others in 2011 was connected to a revised bill to amend the Youth Healthy Development Ordinance², one that not only restricted those manga³ but was marked with concerns, under its new revised guideline, to restrict the sales of materials that were considered "to be excessively disrupting of social order"³. Bill 156 as the final revision became, through failures and revisions beforehand, was controversial, and whilst the material it targeted includes work which for many is difficult to defend, including manga that involve sexual relationships with minors, unfortunately one of the men who helped this revision finally get passed in 2010 was then-Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara. Ishihara, until the end of his tenure in office in 2012, is an incredibly problematic figure, a former novelist whose beliefs have been slammed as racist^4a, misogynistic^4b, and pertinent to Bill 156, included openly homophobic comments from 2000 that homosexuality was abnormal^4c. The problem with Bill 156 at the time was a conundrum; that the materials it targeted would be incredibly difficult for many to defend, such as work in the lolicon and shotacon genre, minority genres of manga yet ones that challenge what freedom in manga as art is, but that it could have been abused for censoring LGBTQ voices under the auspices of protecting children, alongside those promoting views on controversial subjects done with intelligence and grace. Especially as difficult work for many, even those who believed in the freedom of art, could be pointed to as evidence to justify the censorship, the bill could have had great lasting damage, and considering it was Seiji Matsuyama's Oku-sama wa Shōgakusei that was shown on television by Tokyo Vice Governor Naoki Inose as corrupting and needing to be restricted⁵, part of a campaign leading to the birth of this bill, Matsuyama got his fingers burnt by this and it does reflect back on Eiken. Whilst it is its own perverse little thing, least in this short anime adaptation, the tone of Eiken if accurate to the manga does show a lewdness, including that it was sold for teenage boys, could have gotten more confrontational if he was allowed to push the envelope. It was a different title of Matsuyama's which got him in hot water, but he could have raised controversy from certain groups even from Eiken if remotely like the anime. 

Eiken itself managed to return, least the anime adaptation, when Media Blasters came back from a long hibernation in 2020. Media Blasters, who were founded in 1997, are fascinating as the little independent distributor in the United States who has never refused to give up the ghost, and despite a long period of absence, founder John Sirabella has kept the company afloat, coming back with a vengeance in 2020. The manga arm of the company is gone, but Eiken got a Blu Ray re-release that year^6a and would be made available to watch on Crunchyroll for streaming by the end of 2020^6b. I would not be surprised , whilst Media Blasters sells actual porn anime and lewd ecchi anime, that Eiken's re-release comes with the knowledge of its notoriety after the passing time. Eiken is the title which, after its first release and its manga being published in English in the US, could be seen as the ultimate infamous title to dare to watch for some, the one too weird or perverse for others to see, and in my case the notorious title I spied with the aforementioned morbid curiosity. It is to be approached with caution, and if this had been a full television series of just thirteen episodes, my comments from these two episodes may have lead instead to me becoming a husk of a demoralised anime viewer after my initial cockiness. Considering the manga had eighteen volumes, even my perverse interest in the title may not want to know where it went with this premise beyond these sixty minutes, and knowing full well this is loaded with innuendo, sometimes something shorter is less painful over something significantly longer in terms of watching anime. As I have found, short anime, even those considered the worst, do not have that much power for me because they do not take too longer to sit through. At sixty minutes, Eiken is the kind of show John Sirabella's Media Blasters could re-release and take advantage of even negative legacy, and honestly, I admire them for taking advantage of this even if other people may not, probably regretting watching this even if they ignored warnings like mine in this review. 

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1) Who Was Responsible For This Anime?, an insanely (and applaudably) detailed and intelligent YouTube documentary on Eiken from Hazel ("@hhhazel"). The video here and the channel here.

2) Full Tokyo Assembly Passes Youth Ordinance Bill, written by Egan Loo and published by Anime News Network on 15th December 2010.

3) Akamatsu's J-Comi Site Posts Adult Manga Restricted by Tokyo Law, written by Egan Loo and published by Anime News Network on 3rd October 2011.

4a) Alternative Report to the First and Second Periodic Report of JAPA on the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. Section "3. Control of expression, incitement and violence related to racial discrimination", under "(2) Absence of provisions regulating and punishing discriminatory expression by public officials", under "C. Position of the JFBA". Written by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations  (JFBA) in January 19, 2001 and published online by Nichibenren.

4b) Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, The Third Consideration of Japanese Governmental Report: Proposal of List of Issues for Pre-sessional Working Group, written by the Japan Civil Liberties Union and published on 27th January 2003, archived on 23 November 2012.

4c) FEATURE: Ishihara's homophobic remarks raise ire of gays, written for Japan Policy & Politics and published April 3rd 2000. Archived on the Free Library.com

5) 4,000 Protest Takashi Murakami's Versailles Exhibit, written by Egan Loo and published on Anime News Network on 30th August 2010.

6a) Media Blasters to Release Eiken, Jungle de Ikou!, Jubei-Chan 2 Anime on Blu-ray Disc, written by Crystalyn Hodgkins, and published by Anime News Network on 21st February 2020.

6b) Crunchyroll Adds Eiken Anime to Catalog, written by Rafael Antonio Pineda and published by Anime News Network on 25th September 2020.

#234: Sakura Diaries (1997)

 

Studio: Shaft

Director: Kunitoshi Okajima

Screenplay: Kenji Terada

Based on the manga by U-Jin

Voice Cast:

Japanese:

Kyoko Hikami as Urara Kasuga; Mitsuaki Madono as Touma Inaba; Mako Hyoudou as Koumi Natsuki; Rumi Kasahara as Meiko Yotsuba; Kunihiko Yasui as Tatsuhiko Mashu; Masa Saito as Touma's Mother; Masamichi Ota as Keisuke

English:

Lauren Worsham as Urara Kasuga; Mariela Ortiz as Urara Kasuga (2005 dub); Martin Burke as Touma Inaba; Robert Martinez as Touma Inaba (2005 dub); Monica Rial as Mieko Yotsuba (2005 dub); Rebecca Davis as Meiko Yotsuba

Viewed in English Dub

 

This sadly was a review, an act of revisiting an anime I saw when I was younger, where I found myself having completely forgotten most of the content, including how one dramatic choice can entirely capsize your production, a reminder of how something can go grossly wrong as an artistic choice, and ruin what sadly also had, even as an average sex comedy, moments of virtues. Sakura Diaries is a twelve episode series, yet it was released straight-to-video, all in spite of the fact that, even as an explicit sex comedy, it only once or twice ever uses the creative freedoms of the medium choice to be more sexually provocative, or even have actual nudity. The rest feels like a quieter comedy with dramatic moments and a lot of innuendo. Trying to get into college, a young guy from the country Touma Inaba fails the entrance exams to get into a university. When he falls for a red headed woman named Mieko Yotsuba, he claims he has passed into that prestigious university in a moment of panic and attraction to her. Wishing not to just damn Sakura Diaries, and instead present the sad minefield where a show can make one wrongheaded choice but still be interesting, it is that this aspect of the story becomes the most fascinating and having had the potential to grow into something inspired.

Namely that Touma, whilst a cliché of a young man protagonist who can be a pervert, also presents all the neurosis of someone in his position, that whilst the show has tone deaf and misogynistic choices, he is a fascinating character of a virginal young guy who is trying to get away from working in the family hot spring. Having fallen in love with Mieko, even if lying that he enter the most prestigious college in Tokyo, he has the desire to enter cram school so he can get into the college for real. His sex fantasies are lewd, sometimes inappropriate, but when the tone works, his flights of fantasy, about romance and losing his virginity, become comedic in how he has his heads in the clouds as much as in his pants, who is stuck masturbating to porn and admits he is neurotic of his inexperience that he would unsatisfying women like Mieko even in bed. Feeling Mieko is entirely out of his league, even his dreams about trying to succeed in cram school are interesting, in a tragically humoured way, in how his subconscious can cruelly make him dream he has failed the exam, even more cruelly making him believe he is awake and has passed to exams, or involve his sexual hang-ups, which are some of the most rewarding moments. Even the crass jokes about Touma realising his libido is preventing his studying, in this anxiety, is thoughtful for being blunt about this.

The facade of being in college is complicated as he is living with his young female cousin Urara Kasuga, who has clearly lied about her father being constantly away on business but managing to keep the lie one. This is something some will find icky, and Urara is viewed as the show's central icon of sexuality, but again with mind that this could have gotten to be a more thoughtful story, Sakura Diaries does have the set up to have been more dramatically complex than it does briefly have. Urara is already eccentric, if questionable, in her relationship with Touma, meeting him by pretending to be a sex worker upon the first time he has seen her grown up, soon into him living at her uncle's wearing only an apron when preparing a meal, all in what is her blatant attempts to attract him to her. In a show if it focused on this drama more than the moments it does, it would have been compelling as a tale of a cousin whose love for Touma comes from a tragic moment in her life, the passing of a close relative, which is complicated by the fact that the emotional dependency involved years on is not healthy for either of them. [Major Spoiler Warning] The ending, where she has to learn to have a broken heart as Touma moves out of the house, realising the relationship is not healthy for either, is a good ending in context for this. [Spoilers End] Mieko realises she herself is in an existential position, where the debonair guy in the college, obsessed with her and trying to undermine Touma, is someone with his own psychological baggage, but also when confronted by her is rightly damned for wanting to own her like a won prize. The drama here is compelling for that reason.

The problem is in the tone. Specifically, and this is why the review now has to come with a trigger warning, entirely for Episode Five where, after a drunken game of strip paper rock scissors, Touma suddenly becoming a violent figure who attempts to rape Urara before realising what he is doing. That, in mind to a show whose tone is soft, lightly coloured and gentle even as a lewd sex comedy, is the most abrupt and inappropriate tonal shift possible. It is ugly, it is unacceptable, and it makes it impossible to like Touma as a protagonist for good reason, especially as the show references this moment a few times over the last episodes rather than pretend it did not happen. It is an absolute disaster in terms of a dramatic choice. The surprising thing is that, if you look into what the source manga is, this one segment is just one moment in a show which entirely jettisoned what the tone was for the manga, which makes this creative choice even more cursed. Even though I do not what to criticise the manga or its author without having seen the source material, there was a lot of content which, if done wrong, would have been far worse than here.  

The Sakura Diaries manga is hentai, which is not a thing to criticise. What is more shocking is that, looking into synopsis on what content is within it, it has a lot of content which sounds absolutely tasteless and crass if it had been presented with the tone of Episode 5's misguided change into serious drama. That it includes Urara becoming pregnant, entering sex work with a friend, and an incident trying to swindle money from a client involving one of them being gang raped. Yes, that in itself does feel, especially for a hentai manga, legitimately uncomfortable to consider as working as good let alone acceptable storytelling. U-Jin, the source manga author, is unapologetically someone, looking at their career, which wrote transgressive content - some, depending on the tone, to kink shame, such as Vixens (1994), which involves BDSM and Omorashi (the arousal from wetting oneself), but other material as plot threads in Sakura Diaries, would dangerously skirt the line between offending people or if they managed to get the tone right. The tragedy is that, for one moment, Sakura Diaries the show makes one mistake with one storytelling choice, and thus ruins itself when it is, for the most part, a gentle comedy drama which, despite some dated sexual politics, had the right trajectory with its production.

It is a shame as, even with the crass sex comedy, of Touma lusting over women, the show is a mostly fluffy story whose drama in the end, accepting a romance that will not happen and growing up, is absolutely alien to its one tasteless shock moment. The opening and ending credits are light coloured and sweet, contrasted by two choices of songs which actually are good for this tone, the first an acoustic song which a gentle earworm. It is however with realisation, a perfect example here, of how one decision is able to capsize a story fully. It does evoke Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987), a legendary science fiction theatrical anime which made as equally as misguided choice in sexual violence involving the main male protagonist. Honnêamise though, whilst not defendable and a decision which should have been excised in its production, was attempting a moment of great existentialism, a horrible mistake nearly done in a moment of exceptional world bearing crisis, leading to an existential enlightenment learning from this idiocy, even if again a scene which is rightly challenged as nearly capsizing Honnêamise's incredible achievements fully. Honnêamise is however also a film of such magnitude that, in its complexity, this problematic scene is still there and undermines it, but is a work dealing with such complexity on a psychological level, which can be grasped even if that artistic mistake is to be challenged. Sakura Diaries is a light hearted sex comedy, even for its emotional complexity, suddenly shows a horrible misogynistic side in how Touma acts to Urara before the sexual violence is even considered, never meant for real complexity even if misguided. It completely deflates Sakura Diaries fully even if the drama afterwards is interesting and of reward.

The odd thing is that no one on the production is really someone who should have known better. Kunitoshi Okajima, the director, was prolific in the animation side of anime productions the decade before, and screenwriter Kenji Terada, with this one of the last works of their career, had a long filmography beforehand, having penned for franchises including the original series of Kimagure Orange Road (1987-1988) as its key screenwriter. This is a very early production from Shaft as a studio, one which would grow and be prolific over the decades after, including being the home of Akiyuki Shinbo, who started helming productions there in the mid-2000s, and to the current day is his home, meaning they were the ones who brought his big hitters of the 2010s to life. If anything, this feels like an awkward stumble for the studio that, in this time, also brought about Arcade Gamer Fubuki (2002-3), a work with too many tasteless aspects to defend, even if there are grains of gold within it too.

Sakura Diaries, were it not for Episode 5's conclusion, would be an all right, if not perfect drama, one which could have been significantly better but has virtues. As it stands, including Episode 5, that is enough to put people off decades on, and it really emphasises how one mistake in tone, even over anime which is more openly lurid and tasteless, has a far worse influence when, here, there were virtues. The only thing I had remembered from this series originally when I had watched it, which is a tasteless moment, is that there is a scene where exchanging pubic hair is considered a good luck charm. It is something which comes from actual Japan belief¹, and is not a bad thing inherently in itself to include, but considering Touma emotionally bullies Urara into it to help him pass his exams, there is a streak of toxicity to the drama which does undermine its tone too. The English dub, one of two ADV Films recorded, and in the UK was the only language track they included in their DVD release for us, neither helps, not good and actually emphasising how, for every moment Touma does come off (if lecherous) as a sympathetic figure, there are so many scenes which do not work because they paint him as a detestable figure we are meant to sympathise with. Sakura Diaries' problems are more than one horrible drama choice, but that one choice does emphasis how this series failed to reach the virtues it occasionally clings to, which is heartbreaking to experience. This should have been a melodrama where the knife stabs into the viewer - like Touma going to karaoke with Meiko, only for Urara to have gone to the same one, with the pain where she lies about being his sister - not stab the viewer in a way that this has aged badly and destroys its own virtues at the same time.

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1) Japanese Lucky Charm: Pubic hair, written by Timothy Takemoto for Burogu on April 6th 2012

#231: Ghost Talker's Daydream (2004)

 

Studio: Hal Film Maker

Director: Osamu Sekita

Screenplay: Katsumasa Kanazawa and Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on the manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro

Voice Cast: Masumi Asano as Misaki Saiki; Tomokazu Sugita as Souichiro Kadotake; Yukari Tamura as Ai Kunugi; Daisuke Kishio as Mitsuru Fujiwara

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

This anime adaptation had always been one of interest for me because I was a fan of the source manga. Found discounted in a British bookstore, the source manga by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro, whose work was adapted into Twilight of the Dark Master (1997), an obscure Akiyuki Shinbo helmed horror OVA. It is also lurid, about an albino dominatrix named Saiki Misaki who, in-between her sex worker career which also includes writing for a porno magazine, is using her ability to see and communicate with ghosts to help a branch of the local government exorcise buildings and environments. The source manga is violent, sexually explicit and sleazy, and tackles subjects like sexual violence. It was also however a work which looked exceptional, with the illustrations by Meguro, and had managed to be the right side of lurid by being smarter, building a world whose images could be ghoulish as much as it played to sex comedy. Sadly, published by Dark Horse, they only got to volume six before the series was cancelled for English language release, never continued up past through the remaining four volumes, and managing to end on the worse cliff-hanger as well to emphasis this fact involving a haunted apartment complex.

It will not defend its lurid content and neither makes a good case for the manga to people, as ten minutes in it depicts a near rape, involving a younger sister of a murdered woman and her male murderer, only for the lead Saiki, in S&G gear which she uses in her exorcism work for ease, to barge in and deal with this. Neither will some appreciate the blending of light comedy (including sex comedy) against the grim subject matter, as the first episode, introducing that high school girl character Kunugi Ai, a main character for the source, also deals with the murder of her older sister and the death of her infant daughter in the same incident, their ghosts haunting the world as much due to a plush bear with audio recording technology within it has compromising material recorded onto it. The premise, in spite of its lurid content and seen in glimpses here through all four episodes, is a good one in terms of how, whilst her career choice was a salacious one, Saiki Misaki's career choice is a day job which is frustrating and a chore. Some of the best moments here in the adaptation deal with how all her jobs, never touching on her writing career, are a grind, with exorcists like her quietly hired by the Japanese government, or a local government branch in the city, to deal with hauntings of public buildings and apartments as contract work, which is a fascinating premise to have just in envisioning this like a public service sector role. Even that the third and fourth episodes include a female sceptic, a cop in a certain case Saiki accidentally gets involved with, is contrasted in that this a job which is not spectacular even if the risks are dangerous.

The only unnatural aspect, never really elaborated on in the anime, is that she has a demonic rope, living, which co-exists around her body if pushed, but it feels neglected in this adaptation. Everything else in contrast is the banal struggles of being a working dominatrix or having to put up with annoying promotional work for her company like giving used underwear as a prize. It is lurid, but this banality is playfully absurd. This anime adaption, despite coming midway into the manga's run, feels like a slither of it which is also a handicap, especially as the four episodes are usual television episode lengths of under thirty minutes, which means none of the wider plot the manga was building up between episodic tales is seen, only two episodic tales and a final one taking two episodes. The anime is an adult work as its source, with explicit nudity and lot of sex comedy in-between the more macabre content, which was as much the reason this was released. Aspects from the source material are dumb and weird if anyone was to view this, like the running joke about pubic hair which is a source (or source lack of) of embarrassment for Saiki, and in the source manga there was the fact, though one which could be a compelling piece of drama, in that she is a virgin yet managed in this career alongside exorcisms. 

Like the source material never being fully released, it is a shame as inherently the show has an advantage for an episodic horror work of having a strong set of leads. Saiki herself, in spite of all mentioned, and that the manga and the anime are thirsty for her physically, is a great lead character to work with as, gimmicks aside, it is a young working woman who complains and is frank about this, stuck in a regular job which she is good at but sucks at times, or that she technically has a stalker, high school student Fujiwara Mitsuru, whose gag as a stalker may be far more tasteless nowadays, but comes off as a mere annoyance to her, one who is actually helpful in many times just in this adaptation, as well as coming off more as a frenemy for her especially in the manga. Kadotake Souichirou, the person connected to the exorcism business, is a great male lead - a scaredy-cat when it comes to ghosts, a meek and clumsy bespectacled employee and driver, but a killer in martial arts - and Kunugi Ai, when she comes in, is an idiosyncratic side character, developing her own ability to see ghosts and an eccentricity, as she carries a giant plush teddy bear with her everywhere called Popo. In the manga you had time to built this motley bunch and, one of the huge virtues of the manga was that, alongside these characters, it managed to avoid becoming offensive with some of its more lurid content and, when it wanted to be macabre and transgressive, it had the huge advantage of its illustrator Sankichi Meguro pulling the sequences off on paper perfectly.

The obvious issue is that, alongside being merely a slither of the premise, more a work to sell the source material, this is also an OVA in the post hand drawn era when the format was losing favour, so one of the hugest virtues for Saki Okuse's source manga, Sankichi Meguro, is lost as this has a very flat look.  Hal Film Maker, the studio behind this, managed some good work at this time in spite of this transitionary period - Princess Tutu (2002-3), so different to this as a sweet ballet fantasy TV series, had a distinct art style even if working around its budget, and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005), despite its stereotypical "anime" style, is not known for this, both for how gleefully perverse its premise is but also how visually the jokes, including an angel girl whose bludgeoning club does obliterate the male lead's cranium to mush as much as resurrects him, took advantage of its bright cute colours and style. Ghost Talker's Daydream does not have a memorable style, and a distinct thing for Sankichi Meguro's artwork in the manga was that black, not only in terms of a lot of night time scenes but even black outlines and detail regardless of the time a moment takes place in, is one of the first things I think of for the manga, whilst this has a brighter washed out look. Alongside that, tonal changes between the serious and humorous, and all the kinkiness, within the manga has a more concise tonal balance even if it is that manga, as pages to read, can pace itself differently and nothing else.

This is definitely the case that, for episodes three and four, this is dealing with a series of child disappearances which were clearly eventual murders, with the added complication that the person behind the crimes was a woman who was raped by her uncle, the anime carefully dancing around this even though it could be argued as purely exploitative. This is where I still hold the manga, again, having managed a daft hand, or the right tonal mood in its rich aesthetic and tone, around this, even if this is entirely of a personal opinion and can alter as I return to the source over and over This shows, like a lot of anime, that the blurring between comedy and extreme content is more common than you think, but this has the additional issue that, looking very light in colour and style, not heavy in aesthetic stylisation, the anime adaptation loses an advantage to its arsenal in being able to stand out and even get this balance between these two drastically different sides right.

It had virtues, and if biases from the admiration of the manga's virtues are here also, I will not deny that this is more a curiosity. As someone who wished as many titles were preserved, I would always be biased to have even an obscure title like this still be available, even if contrary to my initial beliefs, this did manage to get a Western release as there is an English language soundtrack. It unfortunately was a Geneon release, Geneon USA a side division of the Japanese Geneon group which, starting in 1993, closed in 2007, a DVD distributor that was entirely in the United States and, for many titles which were licensed rescued later also saw others, like Ghost Talker's Daydream, trapped in the afterlife never being recovered from it. The manga especially, whilst with content that might be difficult to defend, feels a greater tragedy just from never getting finished, falling into obscurity, to be found in cheap discounted copies on sale in bookstores and online as I stumbled onto the work. Manga especially has so many titles which never get finished for their English publications over the decades, which is miserable for anyone who was following them and collecting the volumes, a painful remainder of the business side of this art form.

#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.