Kekko Kamen (1991-2)

 

Directors: Kinji Yoshimoto, Koji Morimoto, Nobuhiro Kondo and Shunichi Tokunaga

Screenplay: Masashi Sogo

Based on a manga by Go Nagai

(Voice) Cast: Emi Shinohara as Kekko Kamen; Arisa Andou as Takahashi Mayumi; Jouji Yanami as Principal Toenail of Satan; Kazue Komiya as Gestapoko; Kikuko Inoue as Yuka Chigusa; Kiyoyuki Yanada as Mizutamari Tsuyokarou; Mika Kanai as Tanaka Hanako; Mitsuaki Hoshino as Teacher Ben Kyoshi; Tesshō Genda as Shuwarutsu Negataro

 

My designer is a pervert.

At Sparta Academy, a strict system of punishment is carried out by the head master, a masked jester known as Principal Toenail of Satan. Openly uninterested in any of the male students succeeding in life, and a pervert alongside his sidekick and teacher Ben, he employs bizarre punishment teachers to sexually humiliate female students who fall behind in their studies. One by the name of Mayumi Takahashi is a specific target for them, taking the constant brunt of the staff's interest. However, there is always a mysterious female figure there to protect Mayumi named Kekko Kamen, who wears a mask, a scarf, gloves and boots... and completely nothing else. As the synopsis describes, and images of either the anime, the manga or the live action films show, this is one of those franchises which could be embarrassing to talk about, and has not aged well. Go Nagai himself from the 2010s has had a renaissance around him in the West, especially since an adaptation of one of his manga Devilman Crybaby (2018), distributed by Netflix, took the world by storm. His work has gained admiration even before then, whether his giant robot anime, or characters like Cutey Honey who, even if she has had version playing into her transformations in a sexual way, is a magical girl character many love and even had adaptations made for different audiences. Here though we are reminder that, even if his work has been celebrated as subversive he has his whims and some of them are like Kekko Kamen.

It also needs to be stressed to how Kekko Kamen was actually a joke Go Nagai created to send to his manga editor at the time thinking it was be immediately be rejected¹. A parody of Gekkō Kamen, a legendary superhero figure and one of the first of Japanese superhero characters, it was meant to only get a reaction out of said editor only for that person to actually want to publish it as a continuing series. Nagai is not one to have shied away from the perverse in his work too. Between becoming a legendary figure in manga and anime, including his significance in giant robot stories, his first successful manga, Shameless School (1968-1972), was a sex comedy which made him a pariah of moral standards groups. However the fact that Kekko Kamen, this joke he created, managed to last for five volumes, had a 1991-2 anime for the video market, and eleven live action films, is probably something he is baffled about to this day as some viewers might too.

The premise, even if crass, makes sense for a sexy anime if with the notable concern in how this surrounds "punishment" and sexual humiliation, which is a contentious thing to deal with for this anime when experiencing it. There is an obsession in anime with the shame of public nudity, which is played for a joke in many cases and is still argued to be problematic, but is fascinating to scrutinise in terms of imaging anime high school being a melting pot of neurosis, hormones and these types of fears; here it is taken further than this. It is also an anime, whilst only four episodes long, under two hours altogether, which is a chore to sit through and is the worst thing to introduce as anime to someone who has never seen any, even if you were to choose one with sexually explicit content as the first. The fatal combination of how icky the premise is and how utterly lame it all becomes its downfall, as it tries to parody itself with four wall breaking gags and comedy that cannot overcome its icky subject. All four episodes follow the same template exactly. A new punishment teacher is introduced, they always torment the main female character Mayumi, and Kekko Kamen eventually steps in to save the day, usually with her nunchucks and with a finishing attack that cannot be described any more politely as nude spread legged suffocation.

Even with the Barbie Doll nudity, it is a fetish anime full of ripped underwear and titillation that is off putting because it is all at the expense of the female characters without their consent. This show was once cut for release by the British Board of Film Classification in fact because of this, only to be finally be released uncut on my shores in 2007 by ADV Films², a company that no longer exists which, even with their less edgy anime releases, definitely feel of the era with stuff that has not aged well or is cheesy to consider just in their promo trailers. The Kekko Kamen anime in its original form is not a work, even if trying for cheek and a sense of humour, you can defend, particularly as the first punishment teacher would immediately put people off the show. She is Miss Gestapoko, a BDSM queen from (sic) Auschwitz Academy and ranked by fully uniformed Nazis, as offensive as you can get but quietly buried afterwards, something which comes from the point of deliberately going for the most tasteless idea but in the modern day making the worse introduction to the premise as people will find this material even more problematic than before. After that, a bodybuilder whose muscles are the heroine's kryptonite, a female android and a stereotypical ronin samurai seem normal, but you still have to work around its modus operandi being non-consensual. There are moments which can be fished out of virtue, but this will be a huge struggling point for many, especially as the humorous tone can make this more an issue than if the show took itself seriously. Considering the lightness of the end credit songs, with lyrics penned by Go Nagai himself and sung in earnestness by the female singer, it feels disingenuous to what from the song's tone should have been a more light hearted and cheekier sex comedy about a female heroine.

Production wise, it is a cheap show. As much as I reveal in this type of crackerjack, cheap anime from this period, with Kekko Kamen it has also the villain of the week structure which presents a huge issue to for anything to progress. The tone, in another production, would work but is at odds with the subject matter, be it the composer Keiju Ishikawa's score, of its time and low budgeted but still more interesting and diverse, or that the only progressive aspect is how Mayumi crushes over the girls around her, including Kekko Kamen herself. Jokes about Kekko Kamen's nudity and voluptuousness aside, this part of Mayumi's character, crushing over multiple female characters and the whole gimmick of the show could be subversive in another tale. That in itself becomes a thing to consider for this show, how even if with a gaze over young women, this sex comedy could have actually succeeded if one of its key aspects, the sexual humiliation, was removed, a trait that is clearly something more acceptable from a different time period which we look even more damningly on nowadays. A more light hearted and openly erotic tale, still about an evil school full of punishment, but where one girl's relief from it all is an older girl who is a literal superhero, who kindles your romantic longings even when she is brazenly nude all the time, would have worked. Arguably one of the punishment teachers without the content, the robot, would have worked in this tone too; the beautiful girl, the best in class, willing to help you study, only to suddenly start insulting you one night because your grades are still struggling can be one of the few serious and nightmarish aspects which could have been retained. Even the really crass joke that an off-switch is one of her breasts, because her creators were perverts, could stay, but it is when the show has to linger on a female character being restrained against her will and tormented, even if no way near as extreme as a Urotsukidôji title, where the work loses credibility. Controversially, even Urotsukidôji was meant to depict the horrors of demonic entities, and its problems were an undefendable bias to titillation than being proper ero-guro transgression, whilst Kekko Kamen should have been fluffy and silly, causes one to feel gross, and is arguably less defendable because of this attitude.

The origin of this premise does explain this adaptation's lack of legs, already burnt out by its halfway point, even though there is enough here which could have been salvaged. It is telling how Go Nagai views school for example, even with mind how he specifically named it Sparta Academy; even if you only known of the ancient city-state of Sparta through Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 1998 graphic novel 300, or the 2006 film adaptation, it is damning even as a joke premise how the Japanese school system is viewed by Nagai as like a militaristic civilisation, where the weak perish and only warriors of education may survive. Aspects like this which make the work a little bearable and could have been good can be found, be it the parody of Gekko Kamen itself, that Toenail of Satan has nightmares of Kamen entering his bedroom while he is sleeping to give him permanent testicular pain, despite also having masochistic tendencies wishing for Kekko to be his dom, or the fourth wall breaking jokes which work, like the villains complain how Kekko is not using her theme music (which can be heard in this world), or how Mayumi's friend Chigusa Yuka can break the fourth wall, aware of the viewer and able to talk to the screen away from the rest of the cast.

The show even without its problematic centre can also be viewed as very sexist, such as the premise of Kekko being weak against a bodybuilder's physic, and that it takes her the whole episode to realise she can close her eyes to fight him, which would need to be factored in for this premise to ever work. It is juvenile, even if it was not a premise meant as a joke, and there is a sense that a lot of this comes off far more problematic nowadays than it already was as we have rightly reassessed how problematic content like this is. Coming from someone who believes that almost any idea, no matter how bad or tasteless it is, can work if the tone or point of the premise is exactly right, Kekko Kamen is completely misguided in presentation and point. It should be, even if an embarrassing anime to show others, a light hearted comedy. One without the Nazis, without the uncomfortable harassment fetish, without the awful jokey nature and something which, even if the idea of a super heroine who parades herself completely naked barring a mask and accessories is still juvenile, was fluffy and silly. A sex comedy with a farcical edge to it, even one which bordered into the pornographic area of anime, could have worked, everything that this anime never was sadly. Considering its origins as a gag, the chance of sustaining it was virtually slim from the beginning and the anime proves it, even in how that the final episode teases how, if the tapes sold well in Japan, more than what was released would be produced, something which never came to be. It is a bad work to consider Go Nagai from, but sadly for a time, this might have been one of the few adaptations, least in the United Kingdom, that existed from someone like him who is a huge name in the manga and anime mediums. Whilst examples like this in his career show his flaws, his well regarded reputation for when he created characters that could be emotionally attached to and be reinterpreted in so many ways is a far more interesting side to look at than something which is just tasteless and off-putting.

 

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1) Conférence public de Gô Nagai à Japan Expo 2008 ! (in French). Written by Gemini and published by Review Channel on July 8th 2008. Archived from the original on August 22, 2008.

2) The Melon Famers page of Kekko Kamen for BBFC Cuts K: Kb-Km