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Aka. +Tic Elder Sister
Director: Tsutomu Mizushima
Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima
Based on the manga by Cha Kurii
(Voice) Cast: Mari Kanou as Iroe "Neesan"
Genma, Marina Inoue as Makina "Makimaki" Sakamazaki, Yumi Uchiyama as
Hazuki "Okappa" Okamoto
A 1000 Anime Tie-In*
Synopsis: Neesan, with her friends Makimaki and Okappa, sets up a
model making club at their high school; instead of actually making models, they
spend their time over twelve episodes, two minutes each, exposing their hatreds
for each other, encountering weird students, and learning of the mating dance
of a female gorilla.
Let's delve into some weird
anime, and particularly in the 2010s, anime comedy became a vast untamed jungle
of such material, more so now as the limitations of a very low budget or
restrictions on a certain length per episode no longer applied. Direct to
online material and even tiny minute long projects shown on television have
thrived, and they have a wider audience now anime has streaming services like Crunchyroll that can make them available
in the West too. So instead, I choose a "micro-series", my own
coinage of these tiny series of tiny episode lengths and full duration, which
is an obscurity at the start of the 2010s, before this structure was fully
available and has fallen into the cracks of availability.
Plastic Neesan, as well as not being properly available in the
West, has another factor in that its director/screenwriter is Tsutomu Mizushima, a lesser known but
prolific animation director who has entered the mainstream (at least for the
anime community) for titles like the horror series Another (2012) to his forte in comedy like the Girls und Panzer franchise. However, it makes sense he made Plastic Neesan now as, in his past
alongside this frothier comedy and his dabbling in other genres like horror, he
was notorious for some truly misanthropic black humoured creations. His most
infamous is Bludgeoning Angel
Dokuro-chan (2005), in which a cute female angel with a monstrous spiked
club is assigned to male high school student to prevent him from becoming the
ultimate pervert who creates a way for women never to age after their teens,
infamous for its crudeness and (with that club and resurrection involved)
extreme gore. I myself have seen the obscurer but still twisted Magical Witch Punie-Chan (2006-7),
which envisions the young female heir of a fantasy land dictatorship, as
sadistic as her parents, coming to Earth and still gladly using magic and pro
wrestling moves to put down anyone trying to rebel against her kingdom. Both
were written by Mizushima too, and
considering his horror titles, Blood-C (2011)
for example, are as notorious for their over-the-top violence or being
ridiculous (such as the critically panned The
Lost Village (2016)), he's got some quirks to say the least.
Created as an "ONA"
(original net animation, so made to play over the internet), Plastic Neesan immediately runs off in
a shambolic form, a grab-bag of jokes initially under the pretence of being
about three girls who run a model making club, even to the point they have
replicas of their favourite models permanently on their heads, such as Makimaki
(the "rational" one of the trio) having a tank on her head with a
living little man helming it.
Most of the series instead of
gleefully misanthropic; Neesan (the mascot and the tiny, really hyper blonde
one with a castle on her head), Makimaki (brown hair, a tank on her head), and Okappa
(quiet but secretly a demonic sadist with a train on her black haired head) may
be friends but they will gladly slam each other into a wall enough to make a
decent person sized dent into it. Or, in the case of Okappa, go further like
shove Neesan up in a basketball net, when pissed off with her, to the annoyance
of the basketball team itself. This isn't different from a lot of anime in
structure were it not for that added sense of darkness, Neesan a ball of
weirdness in herself even next to other series' oddball female characters;
she's mad enough to take a friend's bag and twerk with it between her knees
until its night and everything's covered in sweat, entirely exhausted, just to
make a point.
The ironic thing is that, for an
outsider to a lot of anime, Plastic
Neesan is weird, and even in the anime community I learnt of this ONA work
through a "Weird Anime" list among strong competition, but in a
medium where unrestrained anime comedy is commonplace, it's pretty conventional
even in its weirdness, the carte blanche to be weird, such as the internet
favourite show that trolls people Pop
Epic Team (2018), actually a normalising effect that undercuts a work's
strangest unless you really try harder. Really the more interesting thing about
a show like Plastic Neesan is less
it truly being weird but just the inventiveness in such little running time
even in this commonplace style, at least in terms of this type of comedy
providing its voice actors (actresses here) the room for vocal gymnastics and
the staff to be unpredictable.
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From there the series goes for various bizarre whole series gags. One of the most infamous, appearing in memes online, has to be a male class mate of the three protagonists who, "rescuing" two male students from a pair bullies, explodes his clothes off to reveal he's wearing a full set of female underwear, turning in a perpetual crotch thrusting machine moving towards any of the four others involved. It is, in description, deeply homophobic but the execution is stranger, even if it's a case that of a viewer like myself completely pulling the material away from the director/writer for my own interpretation; that something else is at hand in the epilogue, where he's in in the back of a cop car (not arrested but as a witness), draped in a blanket with a look of existential serenity that shows something much weirder in this one-off character's mind. Mizushima in general, from the little I've seen, is strange even when it comes to his characters and their various pathologies when allowed to create them, such as the cute animal mascot in Punie-Chan actually being a member of a race enslaved by her kingdom, planning to murder her constantly and having an entirely war flashback sequence parodying Platoon (1986) and The Deer Hunter (1978).
Among others include two twin
girls with pink hair forced, in a classroom, to feed a giantess, and another
character who could be argued as being deeply offensive too but in execution
can (by accident) be viewed in a different way, that she is in reality that
stereotypical vain pretty girl but here is a plump figured girl who in
incredibly terrible at tennis and with a farcical sense of grace. Again, really
offensive in premise, but the tone of the material (and her voice actor's
actual grace) can easily reinterpret it, especially as with her legitimately
luscious blonde hair and grace when she's paired to three absolutely miscreants
whilst she posits her desire for beauty in an egotistical but energised form.
Hell, you could rewrite one joke as her deliberately missing serves in a tennis
game just to screw with Neesan's head, which would've been hilarious as a
touch.
And this mis- or reinterpretation
of Mizushima's work is not just
myself own weird personal view either as, notoriously, his anime horror work
has always been viewed as being too gory or ridiculous for its own good, even
his most well regarded Another
setting the tone for farce with the first death, falling literally on one's
umbrella, and turning into a mass farce by the finale blown over proportions.
Whilst Plastic Neesan is considered
sane in the delirious waters of anime deep cuts, where true weirdness plays
with the form and expectations of the medium, the more interesting detail is
this obscurer but prolific director's very peculiar career has this twisted
side to him whenever he was ever allowed to get away from it. Aside from this, Plastic Neesan is modestly animated
with the obvious appeal of cute girls being utterly twisted in personality (or
wearing skimpy bikinis in the final episode, when trying to follow the example
of a female gorilla, with a mating dance, to get a boyfriend). Not by a long shot is it truly the weirdest
thing you can encounter in anime - ironically, for all its infamy online, this
is just a regular day at the office for me - but its definitely memorable.
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Mean/Misanthropic/Silly/Weird
Abstract Spectrum (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Personal Opinion:
Plastic Neesan is strange for anyone who would've never seen an
anime or transition from a mainstream success (insert Pokemon/Sailor Moon/Attack on Titan here) without any prior
warning, but in the vast catalogue of anime production, and especially comedy,
this deliberately strange type of story is actually far less weird than you'd
think by not taking itself seriously. Arguably as well the micro length, under
thirty minutes to watch, and it's entirely sketch based style is also a shield
from a greater abstraction. Instead, the dark sense of humour, nasty depending
on your view of some of the jokes, is really the curious thing to experience.
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* Which you can take a look at HERE.
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| From https://ikilote.net/Galeries/News/ Anime/AI/Plastic_Nee-san_-_OVA_189.jpg |
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