Akemi’s Anime Blog AAW Blog

• Author: Marc
• Date: July 23, 2009 - 12:14am
• Filed Under: Anime Notes • Post-viewing Notes

Just finished the short 2-episode Dokuro-chan 2 OAV series (or 4 half-episodes, if you prefer).  Dokuro-chan the TV series (was that actually shown on TV?) was incredibly dirty in addition to being absolutely horrifying in many other ways.  Which left me wondering what the OAV series, ostensibly without the restrictions (what restrictions?!) of the TV series, would do to top it.

Turns out I didn’t have enough imagination, because Holy Kim Jong Il in a Chicken Basket, Batman! is that series dirty.  Oh, still violent too, but man did that toss out some nasty, cringeworthy, wholly inappropriate, and just plain wrong things.  Some of the throw-away jokes (along the lines of what we briefly saw Zansu doing with a bunch of SM gear and a video camera) are so wrong that I was laughing and wanting to gouge my eyes out at the same time.  Even more than before, that is.  I must admit, it does feature what is the single most horrifying gift wrapping I have ever seen by a huge margin.  Some of the stuff is so dirty you might not even get the joke, and if you do, well, you should be ashamed of yourself.

The upshot, though, is that while it’s even more horrifying than before it’s also considerably more funny.  A slight reduction in the extreme cartoon-style character animation was another plus, since I really don’t go for that sort of thing.  Oh, and it hit the one bodily secretion that I didn’t even realize the first series missed (snot).  I actually ended up laughing pretty hard several times, albeit between cringing, groaning, and wishing for blindness.

It’s a specific kind of masochistic humor (sometimes literally), but at least it’s done well.

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, my comments on the self-fanpon in Genshiken 2 came before watching episode 5, in which Ogiue starts writing raging BL doujinshi in her head about the male members of Genshiken… which we see acted out in graphic detail by hardbodied, bishounen-enhanced versions of the thoroughly unattractive cast.  No, seriously, Genshiken offhandedly tossed out some pretty blunt comments of a sexual nature, but this episode goes there, big time.  As in “Why haven’t we faded to black or cut away yet?  Still no?  Still?!”  I think that’s the most explicit (albeit tastefully shadowy) content I’ve ever seen in a TV series.

So Genshiken has now officially not only done its own fanporn, but it’s run through almost every wholly inappropriate slash pairing and lust-crazed fangirl fantasy scenario possible (Madarame apparently bottoms in Ogiue’s head).

And it gets bonus points for having the entire concept go completely over Saki’s head (she naively assumes that Ogiue just has a crush on one or two of the guys, missing the subtext of what she’s fantasizing about entirely).

Basically good, good stuff, even if it does hurt in multiple different (TMI!) ways.

• Author: Marc
• Date: March 9, 2009 - 3:11am
• Filed Under: Anime Notes • First Impressions

On a recommendation and fortuitous gap in schedule, I checked out the first couple episodes of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan.

Yikes.

It’s essentially the endgame in the regular-guy-with-crazy,-clingy-girl-attached genre arms race. Violent and pervy doesn’t even begin to describe it.

It’s about a relatively normal junior high school kid who in the future will apparently accidentally create eternal youth when he attempts to create a loli-heaven—all women stop aging at 12. At least, that’s what a couple of angels sent to stop him from doing this (it infringes on God’s territory) claim, though there’s no particular indication that he’s got either the talent or desire to do this.

The concept is sort of genius, I have to admit. It’s the execution that is… well, extreme. The “bad” angel is trying to kill him. The “good” one, the titular Dokuro-chan, does kill him. Repeatedly. She immediately brings him back to life with a standard nonsense incantation, but still, main character death on the order of Excel Saga. She does this with a huge, spiked club, resulting in volumes of blood that seriously make Fist of the North Star look family-friendly.

Again, conceptually, I love it—it’s what happens when baka-hammers actually do as much damage as it looks like they should. The extreme gore is so far over the top (less showers, more geysers from what’s left of the protagonist’s head) it’s actually not quite as bad as it seems, but it’s still stupefyingly violent. Also so pervy—when she’s not decapitating him, Dokuro is using her feminine “wiles” about as bluntly and extremely as her club to distract him from doing anything productive, and the opening credits and a few tossed-off SD images along the way basically lay out every SM fetish you can think of, with very little left to the imagination. There are several other background jokes that are equally in “I did not need to see that” territory.  And that’s not even hitting the more standard dirty humor, which is kicked up at least a couple notches past average nosebleed, and made all the worse by an underaged cast.

On the appealing side, the kid actually isn’t so bad—he’s got a healthy fear of her, seems like a relatively decent guy, but also isn’t completely neutered as the usual nice kid is—he’s certainly not above leering and enjoying the undue attention on occasion, though he’s fighting against decency and fear. Also, the universe hates him, but he’s not complaining much.  Also, the brutality is occasionally abrupt and realistic enough to actually be funny (ironically, the less cartoony the violence is, the funnier it comes across as).

On the negative, it’s incredibly cartoony in the character art, to the point it ruined some of the jokes compared to if they’d reined it in a little, even if it did soften the violence.  Some of the exaggerated cartoony faces are just plain hideous, too—more “avert your eyes!” than laugh.  It out-does even Onizuka’s freak-outs.  Also, when a classmate gets turned into a monkey they just slap a photo of a monkey head on the animated body, which while weird, I don’t particularly like—it sorta breaks the flow, if this show has any. Worse than the creator head in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, since it’s part of the scene here.

Anyway, the show certainly caught my attention for the ultimate twist on tsundere masochism (actually, come to think of it, it’s sort of a vicious masochistic fantasy made as anime comedy), being more or less as violent as any comedy possibly could be, and being close to as dirty as you can get away with without slapping an H label on it. And it did get some laughs out of me, though some were half shock factor. That said, it’s also annoying and stupid enough that I’m not sure I’ll be able to sit through enough to be able to do up a proper review.

Still, now I know where the end of the cute-girl-on-meek-guy violence meter lies. Wow. And ew.