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Dir. Maezono Fumio
Within Japanese manga and anime, Nagai Go is one of the most important
individuals within both mediums. Starting in manga in the late sixties, his
success would continue on, increasing with his contributions to television
anime in the seventies and becoming one of the most successful individuals in
terms of volume. Volume of output, volume of successful creations, volume of
live action and animated adaptations, and volume of praise he has both in Japan
and internationally. He is as vital in building both anime and manga as it is
today as Studio Ghibli and Tezuka Osamu, having juggled anything in
his career from innovating the super robot genre to bringing more adult content
to manga. He is also something, like the acclaimed manga writer Koike Kazuo, who is unapologetically
dark and lurid in some of the creations of his. He has gained immense critical
praise but not only has his more controversial works, that many would find
shocking, not been ignored, but no attempt has been made to sweep them under
the carpet. This is someone who has created work for children and popular
franchises like Mazinger Z (1972-74) but was also someone who in
one of his first manga series, Harenchi
Gakuen (Shameless School) (1968-72), got attacked by Japanese parent groups
and moral campaigners for creating a degenerate piece of filth. Just watching a
few of the anime adaptations alone show Nagai's
more adult side, whether they are accurate to his original manga or not. His
most infamous creation is Kekko Kamen
(1974-1978), a parody of the pop culture character Gekko Kamen, a female superhero who wears as mask, boots, a scarf
and nothing else, completely naked in her battles with villains. Ironically
with that example, Nagai created it
as a joke for his editor, only for them to like the idea, and for this joke to lead
to a 1991-92 anime and ten live action
adaptations. One that wasn't a joke was Violence Jack (1973-73), which lead to an 1986-1990 anime that is
only going to get an uncut version on DVD available in the US next year, which
may lead to some very traumatised viewers knowing of the things that were
removed and have traumatised myself with without having seen the content itself.
Again, as someone who has a lot of his work to explore for the first time, it's
obvious how diverse Nagai is. And he
is important regardless. But once you know of works like Kekko Kamen and the such you cannot ignore such lurid works, proof
if any of how diverse and fluid the mediums of anime and manga are. For better
or worse, this mentality, from creating children's work to Violence Jack in Nagai, allows
flexibility to take place in creating new stories, unpredictability happening
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On her eighteenth birthday, the
titular Jun flees a forced marriage proposal against her mother's wishes, her servant
and friend Kurata pulled along with her. As Jun is a super strong Amazon who
can break men's necks, even if she is as girly as you could be for a young
woman, her mother sends anyone she can to force her to come back, anything from
ninjas, a reward for members of the public to find her, even deviants for more
twisted methods. Its forty six minutes long, which is both a very short amount
of time and yet needs a lot to fill it out. Short because it'll suddenly end
meaning you cannot choose a normal length narrative, but you need to find a
narrative more appropriate for the length. If I describe the plot for this
anime, it would be summed by this - Jun escapes, Jun eludes escape, gets
captured, fights her mother for the finale - which is a minuscule plot for a
short work with little flesh to its bones. The straight-to-video anime, unless
feature length, was usually between thirty to fifty minutes long in their
heyday, be it per episode or the one-off, and even a ramshackle one could still
be a vigorous shot of content to sit through and watch. The worst kind in this
type of anime would likely be the ones that feel like many hours to sit through
in such a small space of time. Like many nineties anime, its candy coloured and
gaudy. Average animation. The character designs for Jun and her mother are the
only distinct aspect. Jun is drawn as a very feminine character, but the many
times when she is in a fight she is drawn with a body builder level of muscles, hulking out all the sudden. (You'll notice the discrepancy between Jun in the screenshots shown - all I can say that she finds normal clothes that hide a lot of pounds of muscle). Her mother, to be honest, is drawn as a male villain design from something like
Fist of the North Star - giant black
eyebrows, a scowl, a monolithic bulk and height - only with breasts and wearing
make-up.
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The real worth, if you can find
it, in this anime is if you can appreciate the absurdity of pulp that is
churned as continuously like sausage meat, looking for the kinks within each
one. The faults, the odd ideas, the good ideas, the inexplicable things. Even
the nature of this type of material is interesting to me, admittedly because
being twenty or so years old now this type of anime is now very different from
what it is now. Even average animation with Iron Virgin Jun is better than average computer aided animation. The
anime is interesting for me more in the churned out nature of this kind of
storytelling, the same story as many other similar tales but with new weird
additions and faults, rather than as a "good" work, which I'm not
going to suggest. It's strange attempts at humour, its peculiar plot, the many
things that make it a "bad" anime also the rewarding things in its
slight form. There is one contentious issue with Iron Virgin Jun that will put many off, a reminder that its
original creator Nagai Go is also
someone who has created some perverse ideas, although whether the follow is
from the manga I cannot confirm. Affectively her main henchmen, Jun's mother
calls forth a group called the Golden Cherry Boys to help her force Jun back. With
cartoonish, mechanical animal heads where their crotches are, including a swan
and a turtle, their main task, to put it politely, is to deflower Jun under the
apparent belief her mother has that losing her virginity will snap her out of
her "deluded" concept of escaping marring to continue their family's
power and economic gain. Never mind that there is no nudity, no sex of any
sort, and likely chops out most of the original manga's content, an erotic
work. That it little blood let alone gore. That Jun, while some of the male
characters help her when her back is in the corner, normally destroys everyone
in her way including most of the Golden Cherry Boys. This aspect, particularly
the jokey tone to it at points, is immediately going to offend someone for
understandable reasons. I didn't know this was going to be in the anime upon
seeing it for the first time, only knowing the title and Nagai was involved. It is still unsettling in places for me
personally as well. But...it becomes more of a tasteless inclusion that is
incredibly absurd. When it consists of animal heads and the desecration of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at one point, I'm reminded
that, in reality, something like the Golden Cherry Boys shouldn't be something
to waste time on to criticise. That time should be spent on creating something
that doesn't include that sort of thing to the objecting individual who'll hope
their own creation is more popular. Far more offensive for me are the moments
of stereotypical brattishness of Jun because no sane person who watches this,
like myself, is going to take the tastelessness of the Golden Cherry Boys
seriously, but stereotypes are more common problem.
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What this is instead, and is the
thing that makes Iron Virgin Jun
interesting to me knowing its junky anime, is a mere slither of a peculiar area
of pulp storytelling most of us know of but is rarely defined. Works which are
not intentionally being politically incorrect or offensive but, forced into a
tight, impossibly short deadline, delirious, maybe feted by alcohol or lack of
sleep, where the creator(s) has to create something to keep the viewer/reader
continuing to take interest in their work, having to do so through the most
shocking content or weirdest idea they have in their mind. Perversely, evidence
this anime qualifies for this term, is that it's trying to be a metaphor of how
Jun has to grow from being a teenager to an adult woman. Her decision to go
against her mother and be independent is effectively depicted with the two battering
each other in a comic book finale scene rather than as a drama. Even the Golden
Cherry Boys have a symbolic meaning in this way even if its a creepy way to
depict it. (And the manga might've been more weird for this from just reading
the Wikipedia summery). It even goes
as far as having actual symbolism in how in one moment Jun sees an island out
in the sea upside down, told she will only be able to reach it when she sees it
the right way up. This is something of interest in pre-2000s anime, moments that
don't work which are yet are fascinating in how they were even considered to be
done and were put in the final work. You wonder watching anime like this what
the maker(s) were thinking, but as a trashy work the result of these sorts of
decisions are strangely watchable.
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Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None): None
It is notorious how punishing
deadlines for manga can be, as well as how much material for each release is
required, punishing as a career from what is documented. In this position it
wouldn't be surprising a work like Iron
Virgin Jun was created, something as a result of a certain type of
imagination and trying to write something that would grab a reader. And it is
well known how underpaid animators are, anime a profession for those willing to
sacrifice a lot of basic things to consider taking on as a job. A work like Iron Virgin Jun feels like the result
of a manga pushed through by whatever peculiar ideas its creator had recreated
for a straight-to-video anime as much a product to sell as it was an
adaptation. You could find despair in the fact that something like this is made
as much as a commodity only, but instead I find it more interesting to find
entertainment in the inherent idea this was made in the first place, regardless
of the flaws and things that cannot be defended at all. I can imagine this
anime being created by people fed on long nights awake working on frames and
ingesting a lot of Cup Noodle as
basic nutrition, the back-story of how it was being made, as I try to imagine
it, as much part of its story as the actual narrative. Iron Virgin Jun is too conventional to get on the list, but it's
perfect to show this manic aspect of certain forms of entertainment, a frenzy
of getting a work created along with the fevered ideas that were from the
original manga, the result a strange mix altogether. I can just marvel at the
fact it exists, decades later on, how it's come out of meat grinder as it is,
the things that stick out amongst the merely watchable.
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Personal Rating:
Only for the incredibly curious.
A work like this is obscure for clear reasons, even if it still managed an
American DVD release. For those who want to explore how perplexing straight-to-video
anime in the nineties could be, even if the work is not that good, this is
worth digging into for those who intentionally find the most obscure works
intentionally. If you will find it tedious to sit through, or find aspects
offensive, aesthetically or in content, I don't recommend it. It's not the
strangest you could find but nonetheless a good example of how a certain medium
like anime can produce oddities that inexplicably exist.
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