Games of the Abstract: Oyaji Hunter Mahjong (1995)

Developer: Warp Inc.

Publisher: Warp Inc.

One Player

Originally for: 3DO Interactive Multiplayer

Warp and its founder Kenji Eno are unsung indie heroes of nineties video games, but tragically their legacy is marked by little of it being available officially. We can only be thankful D (1995), their most well known game, got ports on everything to the point Night Dive Studios, a retro game preservation developer, re-released the PC port, but Warp are a cult studio in a medium where preservation is still an issue with video game distribution. It neither helps Warp's legacy was backing the cult machines, not the winners, of the fifth and sixth generations of video game consoles. D, a really inspired attempt at an interactive movie that yet had an attitude to puzzles that I feel was more accessible, was a big hit but it was ironically Sony, the winner of the fifth and sixth generation with the Playstation One and Two, which under published copies and annoyed Eno so much he deliberately revealed he would jump to the Sega Saturn at a Sony press even with Enemy Zero (1996)¹, a full motion video sci-fi horror game. There is D2 (1999), sadly on the Sega Dreamcast, Sega's last hardware, and an unsung machine for arcade ports and experimental works. It would also be the last project under the Warp name even if Eno worked afterwards. More obscure is most of the work which helped Warp come to be. Those would be the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console games, which is a very unpreserved console for any game which was not ported from or to the PC.

With hindsight, this console doomed by how expensive it was among other factors, such as a lack fof a mainstream killer app, was innovative and its figurehead Trip Hawkins deserves lionisation for. The founder of Electronic Arts in 1982, he spearheaded an idiosyncratic and bold console, taking a really un-mainstream attitude to a machine at the time where the hardware was not unique, and could have a variety of different versions created by outsourcing to electronics companies, had no censorship which allowed for adult games to be made for it officially, and had no region locking. The cost to develop for the CD based software was a lot less expensive too, which leads into how even next to Microsoft, a huge company who struggled to get the Xbox over twice in Japan, the 3DO managed to have an easier time, just from the exclusives, in that country, and even in South Korea which had exclusive games too. Kenji Eno was an admirer of Hawkins because of these aspects², and it was clear the model, whilst not a successful console, allowed Warp to exist. Knowing one of the variety of games they made for the 3DO, the block puzzle game Trip'd (1995), was clearly named after Trip Hawkins shows the company were grateful for the machine.

Among the obscurest is Oyaji Hutner Mahjong, which comes from Kenji Eno seeing all the erotic mahjong games including for the arcade, where beating female players leads to them taking their clothes off, and being sick of them, thus imagining a game where a male superhero exists to protect women from perverts³. It is a fun premise, and you have to respect someone even if not a serious satire playing with gender stereotypes in this genre. Innately, I do not see anything inherently amiss with the idea of strip mahjong games, but if they are all clearly designed for a heterosexual male audience, with the female players always the ones meant to lose, then you see an accidental issue of objectification this game rightly parodies. It is not perfect itself, and it would have been cool to see a female heroine fight the sex pests, but our lead the Oyaji Hunter does stand out in a funny way. With women even having a way to turn on his own equivalent of the Bat Signal in the sky to call him, be it by Hunter Yo-Yo to the face or the Hunter Beam, the Oyaji Hunter is there to beat up and force wrong-uns to apologise for acting like pigs. Like the man in just women's underwear and a trench coat terrorising a schoolgirl for an underskirt shot with a camera for the first opponent, he will beat these men up and then humiliate them in a game of mahjong.

It is a mahjong game, with it explicit these villains or the Oyaji Hunter himself the first to challenge the other to the game, even the later having to bring out a game board for a last ditch attempt against the big bad of the game, in a giant tall building sized robot, which is funny for a broad slapstick comedy. You still have to play mahjong, specifically Japanese (riichi) mahjong rules, to which this was my first encounter with mahjong in a competitive form than mahjong solitaire. As a result, I cannot attempt an expert opinion, but I will call Oyaji Hunter Mahjong a good example of experimentation in what I would call "ephemeral" video game genres, those which exist throughout video game history but are always doomed to be replaced by new version for new consoles and machines. Mahjong games have always been made for video game consoles, and even the strip adult ones are replaced by new versions, making this a case of one where the personality is its advantage of being remembered. Sadly despite the desire for electronic versions of such games, as is the case for soccer or golf, they can be replaced with ease, making those which are really idiosyncratic or openly distort the rules some of the more memorable even if in bad ways as well as good.

The game itself here is not that radically altered in mind to this. Attempting to explain rules as a new player, the goal is to match tiles in threes (and fours if lucky) by matching images or orders from a variety of different sets like the Sō bamboo tiles.  You can only do this if the tile an opponent discards is the one you need, and you can also win if you have a full hand (or what remains from those you still have) when the next tile you pick up for your round, especially the last one, can complete a set of tiles which all match or connect in a certain way. This raises the innate issue here of random choice, but you can win either by making full sets clearing as many as possible, or if you can manage to have a "fully concealed" hand, a full set of matching/ordered titles only revealed to the opponent when you have won the round instantly.

There is more to this game's rules though, as you both have life bars, the numbered states which are the equivalent of betting with money, yours always at "5000" and jumping into higher numbers over the five opponents for theirs, which have to be knocked down. If you are lucky, each time the opponent sacrifices their life points for a bet, believing they have a perfect hand, and you screw them over, you can still chip at this number, but you are advised to win hands so they cannot, especially as this leads to the one new factor for this game for whoever wins. If they win, you hope to choose the randomly shuffled card that leads to them miss a blow, or the one which only causes the least damage, as they can use a special attack like in a comedy anime story, such as saying a pun so bad it hurts, which can be destructive to your chances of winning. This is more an issue as the score they get for how they win is used for the initial attack damage, something you thankfully have as an advantage if you win. The Oyaji Hunter, if he wins that round, can through a roulette wheel kick, punch or use one of his attacks which have bigger multipliers, 5x for the hunter boomerang, or the Hunter Beam itself, which is a 10x and can decimate enemies in one shot if you won by a big point hand. Or you can miss entirely too and feel like a tool.

This presents an obvious issue with the game whenever you bring random choice. Mahjong has a strategy, but random choice is as much a factor here even with strategy involved, rather than the full ability to win by master planning, or puzzle games where you are previewed what the next item you will receive will look like. This reminds of another curiosity, the type Kenji Eno was satirising, Sega Saturn's Haunted Casino (1996), a bizarre erotic gambling game for that console which however envisioned a full video ghostly mansion to explore. It felt like it was a game in the mould of Myst (1993), if instead of puzzles you played Western style games like poker against cat girl card dealers. It also had the issue that you could be grinding through rounds in games, or that if the A.I. got good hands over and over, you are doomed. Random choice is innately difficult with games, as it is not due to you having made a mistake, and Oyaji Mahjong Hunter is affected by this.

Which is a shame, as it is a compellingly odd project. For a low budget production too, it is still ambitious, as Warp brought in Ichirō Itano as the director of the animated cut scenes, a huge name in Japanese animation. In fact, as an animator, he is legendary, a huge figure for his art form especially for the likes of the Macross series. This is even seen here with his trademark "Itano Circus" where at one point, with the final opponent's giant robot, the individual missiles they fire at the Oyaji Hunter, as they were in the Macross series from robot/fighter plane hybrids, take different (individually drawn) trajectories whilst in the air. As a director, this is probably the most abrupt yet wholesome work for a notorious animation director, Ichirō Itano's work some of the most controversial and nihilistic you can find. His entry in the three Violence Jack  episodes, made between 1986 and 1990, was not readily found uncut and would make some edge lords green; Angel Cop (1989-1994) is notoriously an ultra-violent jingoistic sci-fi action work which, infamously if the English subtitles for the Japanese dub were not censored, sadly fell into actual anti-Semitism for its final plot twists; even a television series Gantz (2004) had befittingly a director suitable for its nihilistic and very violent premise, of resurrected people who died forced to kill aliens in death match-like scenarios, which had to be censored for the gore and sexual content for its television broadcasts. It is quite perverse, in a sick humoured way, he fully committed to this comedic project and created some playful cut scenes in spite of this record of accomplishment for controversial, problematic and not necessarily well regarded anime as a director which violently contrasts his justifiable legacy as a talented animator.

As a story, this game has one which is far from perfect, but I was not expecting a profound tale of gender politics here considering the type of game this is set up as, a silly parody. After the first opponent, the dirty mac photographer, you get a man in BDSM gear trying to tie up and drip hot wax on a female biker, one who eventually gets revenge by revealing he accidentally targeted a Queen Dominatrix. The third is a man trying to grope a geisha, forgiven by her when you win, especially when revealed from then on the men are being brainwashed and cannot remember their actions. The fourth is an odd duck, using his bald head as a forfeit attack in its shininess, trying to force cooked meat products down a poor air stewardess' throat while saying bad food puns, getting his comeuppance when she turns out to be a talented chef who decides to however use ultra hot wasabi, part of the goofy cartoon tone. The big bad, the fifth and final opponent, is human Gollum getting revenge for being mocked for his short stature by wrecking havoc with a giant robot. His conclusion may disappoint, as he is forgiven by the women involved despite using a beam himself to briefly remove all their clothes and his comments on their gender's laziness. However, literally looking like a wizened Benjamin Button baby when defeated and humiliated, I again think the project was always a knockabout farce parodying erotic mahjong games, a proper video game satire tackling gender politics left to be created and worth trying one day.

The sense of where this came in Warp production is found in how, by accident, this has a compelling historical footnote for the company. There is little in the way of extra options, but the one you get, set up as an elevator with multiple floors for the options, allows players to try demos of other games from the company and has previews, one being an original tease for D2. D became their most successful game in terms of sales, but sadly, their company found themselves always on the wrong side of history afterwards. This version of D2 sets up what did happen in the Dreamcast game, only with the fact our lead Laura rather than just being the "virtual actor", Kenji Eno pioneering the idea with "Laura", a blonde Western female lead, playing different characters per game, is still playing the same one from the original D in that game's aftermath.

She is on an airplane, and whilst she is not pregnant as this trailer has her, the airplane crash that sets up D2 as it became is established here. D2's trajectory shows the unfortunate history for Warp, with Eno's untimely passing in 2013 happening long after that name did not exist as a developer. D2 was to follow Laura's son, warped into a medieval dungeon setting after the set up on the airplane leading to Laura's death⁴. It was being created for the M2, what was supposed to be the follow up console to the 3DO which never came, despite games being created for it. D2 as we got, which is effectively a re-telling of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) that kept Laura alive and surviving an airplane crash in the Canadian wilderness, tragically found itself on a console which only lasted for three years and led to Sega stepping down from being a hardware powerhouse to just being a software publisher. Oyaji Hunter Mahjong by pure accident presents a tantalising piece of their legacy, and whilst not a perfect game, this game itself is unique as a production, so odd and full of charm you can forgive its game play mechanics, a real testament to the studio even as a lesser title for trying to make interesting work.

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1) Kenji Eno, Japan's Maverick Game Creator, Dead at 42, written by Chris Kohler for WIRED and published January 14th 2015. Archived on March 8th 2017.

2) CoreGamers Interview and Profile of Kenji Eno (Part 2), written for CoreGamers and published August 21st 2008. Archived from the original November 20th 2015.

3) Saving Women by Crushing Perverted Old Men at Mahjong – Oyaji Hunter (3DO), written by Snowyaria and published on their Kusoge Coffeehouse blog on April 15th 2021.

4) D2 [M2 – Cancelled ], written and published for Unseen 64 on April 7th 2008.

À l'aventure (2008)

 

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Cast: Carole Brana as Sandrine, Arnaud Binard as Greg, Étienne Chicot as the Taxi Driver, Jocelyn Quivrin as Fred, Lise Bellynck as Sophie, Nadia Chibani as Mina, Estelle Galarme as Françoise, Frédéric Aspisi as Jérôme

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sadrine (Carole Brana) begins with a friend on a bench where an older man sat near them on the same public furniture starts talking about their complacency as a species to act like sheep, starting her journey in self doubt which in context to how the film goes, could easily become a pretentious smut film. If my choice of words seem scathing, this will be a kinder review of À l'aventure, though viewing it as a flawed production which still is worthy of examining over and over. It is not a condemnation of erotica as a potential for art, or smut as inherently a bad thing, but in mind that this is a film by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The late French filmmaker presents a film which is doomed in nature, a film by an older cis male director making an erotic film with a female lead, which is common in the history of cinema, and made more complicated due to Brisseau's controversial real life history. A filmmaker since the seventies, I watched a film like Noce Blanche (1989) which still has erotic elements, but is a drama which focused on its characters complexities. Many will probably know him from Secret Things (2002), which was promoted in the early 2000s as a sexually explicit thriller and also begins the contentious aspect of his career. In 2005, he was found guilty in French courts for sexually harassing actresses in the auditions for that film, two actresses asked to perform explicit sexual acts during the audition process which included them being filmed, leading to him being fined and a one-year suspended jail sentence¹. This does not help scrutinise his career afterwards, especially when with The Exterminating Angels (2006), Brisseau had the gall if you condemn the man to depict his own criminal event in a speculative dissection of the incident which is sexually explicit as well. À l'aventure presents, however, something which feels drenched in ennui, presented as an erotic film where sensuality is still there, but the initial premise of Sadrine looking for the perfect orgasm, a premise from any softcore erotica, given way as a Trojan horse to existential dread. This review will not defend the man at all, but it fascinates as if the results of that criminal charge bled into this production completely.

It feels too obvious, before even watching the film and digesting it after, to just damn the production, more as even if its director presents a concern, now he marked himself for sins away from the film camera, films still present complicated psychological readings. The challenge for a man to write a woman's voice, and the perils of them doing it in a way which is potentially embarrassing, does however not ignore how intentionally (or unintentionally) write their own psychological state into any character they touch. With Jean-Claude Brisseau, this is even more of an issue, but Sadrine's lack of satisfaction with her boyfriend and routine starts as a set up for so many erotic works, sleeping with the stereotypically handsome male psychoanalysis, but feels like the work of a man drained in what he made. Even if going through the motions of erotic, it feels instead like Sadrine's sense of dissatisfaction is more than arousal, and this is also Brisseau's own, more poignant when his fascination of female sexual desire rightly got him criminated.

Whether the film itself actually succeeds is subjective, but in this case for this viewer, it is a failure from trying to be a profound about the meaning of life, as it falls into clichés, but becomes far more interesting and more rewarding as the struggle for meaning, and that pervading sense of distance a director-writer who pigeonholed himself into the stereotype of erotic cinema ended up in here. Brisseau has a type, let us be honest, of the slim intellectually beautiful woman who is bisexual in the ideal of certain cis male views, but even the male lead is an erotic ideal for him as a cis male, the ideal erotic man in Greg (Arnaud Binard), handsome and intelligent, embodying the desirable figure for this ideal woman. It is to the point he is named after actor Gregory Peck for a cineaste reference, a figure who believes in confronting conventional morality. The irony is knowing he will be skewered as a false love interest for Sadrine, and that feels on purpose, whilst Brisseau's own stand in is the older male taxi driver, who has no interest in Sadrine physically but like each other as figures wanting to talk about their place in the world. It is an erotic film which however falls back onto Brisseau's static camera takes, from cinematographer Wilfrid Sempé, of talking and Sadrine finding more insight with the aforementioned taxi driver, played by Étienne Chicot, who began her self doubts and shows more interest for her as a fully thinking figure.

It would almost be self parody in some of the scenarios here, as she encounters a submissive mistress to an open minded heterosexual couple, that indulge in cinematic light BDSM, but the idea of a restless middle class who need to escape routine is felt too, following sexual fantasies whether they can help or not. This comes with the issue of gender bias, beautiful women in the conventional idea who are intelligent on a surface level and open to all sexual scenarios as here. It becomes an issue with the figure who made this film who fell into the trap of thinking this ideal would be forced onto women, rather than how much more complex people are, and rightly got a criminal prosecution for this and thus marking all his art work with a stain we need to always point at even if we stay open minded to watching the films still. I would even accept being called a hypocrite for even watching this film or even taking some surface pleasure from it, but it comes with many details that dissect itself, becoming more than the stereotypical film of a bad filmmaker, bad in the true sense for badness as a man and not for something arbitrary as whether the dialogue makes sense, or if the film is well made. Figures, all women, are figuring themselves out existentially, be it from trauma of losing a child, or boredom and stifled sense of their purpose in life, and the mess of this take on the subject is still compelling even from a deeply failed production.

Even if objectifying a figure of desire, if figures speak at all of concerns or pains, even for humour, that can be a writer revealing more of themselves then they may realise. À l'aventure, set in the urban France of so many French films about anxiety and relationship tensions, where tellingly enlightenment comes from fleeing to the countryside, is filtered through divorces, the issue of the ideal marriage of heterosexual couples being hollow, and of how many of these characters here talk of themselves as wives or female figures being bored. The friend meant to say Sadrine's decision to ditch her job and work, drifting along in her sexual journey, is deluding herself ends up running off with an arms dealer in a romance and disappears from the film entirely, an absurd touch in the context but apt for the film. Even if the film ultimately feels like it is grasping at straws sexually and philosophically, that touches on a feeling of conventional reality being unstable from aimlessness that is one of the film's better aspects.

The fantasy the film is set up in is an issue unless you accept the inherent flaw of this particular piece of erotic trying to be serious, instead revealing itself as softcore punching above its weight but with the failed boxing blows still revealing so much more. You cannot work unless you are on the dole, or a true outsider, and there is more to even a naive writer like myself about the notion of a polyamorous relationship that, even for unrepentant and proud smut, you could work with beyond this, whilst this feels tame and falls into the problems of really hollow sexual fantasies shot for cinema that have women as the eroticised figures. But the fantasy still starts as a perfect template because of the fact it collapses, and the fantasy instead exaggerates the fixations that are uncomfortably real. Even when it looks like it is getting into a fantasy scenario that would be considered problematic and requires a lot more concern, even if transgressive to consider, about the place the willing submissive enjoys and controls the scenario as much as the dominant, the film throws the least expected curveball.

That scenario is when Greg is convinced to hypnotise the three female leads by the women themselves, which can make a viewer uncomfortable especially as erotica has the fantasy of mind control and hypnosis, frankly with the issues right to consider about whether it is a healthy scenario to imagine depending on the context. À l'aventure however completely undercuts this. Even if these turns in this type of world cinema I got into from DVD can be the moments which lose viewers as ridiculous, I am always happy when I get what I was not expecting from such films. It is set up that one figure Mina (Nadia Chibani) is susceptible to hypnosis, to the point a coin on her arm when told is hot does leave a real burn, leading into the supernatural crushing this fantasy as she starts to bring up past memories and past lives into what was meant to just be softcore. What was a set up to the sexual fantasy involving all three women turns into a work of figures trying to figure themselves out, accidentally prodding a hole in reality, and Greg making an ill advised attempt to explore this hole that just causes damage. All because he was not prepared to not go into the experiment and went in cluelessly, especially when people start to levitate off the floor in a real miracle.

The philosophical ideas of our repetition and sense of infinite are not original and of depth here, which would become an albatross if a viewer took this film to be a take on existentialism in a really detailed form, but even this abrupt turn in a plot is a surprise, including the one nod to a very contentious subject in French culture when Mima remembers an incident from Algeria in the past, talking of a horrible tragedy she caught the results of when too young to process it. Even the idea, if caught in the issues of Brisseau himself as a compromised artist, of the sexual ecstasy being linked fully to the spiritual is a compelling theory to think of, even if it ends here instead in disaster, those not prepared for the real force beyond their process, and Sadrine realising her ideal erotic man in Greg is not the person she can ever feel fullness as a person from. Ultimately the sex becomes unrewarding, more of a choreographed scenario by the end of this, which is pretty damning for a film that would have been sold on sex, leaving on a beautiful countryside field and discussing how people live in such little time of reality for what has been a millennia plus of the Earth's existence. Eroticism still plays a part in Brisseau's work, but it feels as if it is slowly ebbing away here, burnt by his own controversies of his career but also feeling like it confined him, none of which is a defence of the man in the damndest, but with the sense here the struggle came to the screen in a compelling way.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) French Director Found Guilty Of Sexual Harassment, written for Movie Mail and published December 20th 2005. Archived for the Web Archive on April 26th 2014.

Careful (1992)

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Kyle McCulloch as Grigorss, Gosia Dobrowolska as Zenaida, Sarah Neville as Klara, Brent Neale as Johann, Paul Cox as Count Knotkers, Victor Cowie as Herr Trotta, Michael O'Sullivan as The Swan Feeder (Dead Husband of Zenaida), Vince Rimmer as Franz

An Abstract Candidate

 

Guy Maddin with Careful makes a film about a mountain community, a very bleakly humoured take on this setting and context, the Germanic society of Tolzbad a community forced to stay in silence to avoid setting off avalanches. It is a precarious place where it is truly a godsend there are rare valleys nearby whose acoustics silence noises, but one where the problem is significant to the point that flocks of geese are so dangerous they need to be shot out of the sky in the perimeters. The film was also a project whose co-writer George Toles explicitly wanted to tackle incest in Careful¹; the setting allows for a really psychologically twisted work of pent up emotions, contrasted by the lush aesthetic and playfully strange whimsy of this timeless world of the non-existent past. The setting, everyone trapped in this isolated high altitude, has lead to these figures having unlocked memories and desires pent up, including for their own parents or ties to them too tight to the point, suffocating, they will duel their widow mother's suitor to the death.

The tale surrounds the sons of the late Swan Feeder (Michael O'Sullivan), a man who will return as a ghost but stuck with his eyes still blinded, losing one as a babe when his mother pressed him too tightly against a brooch with the pin sticking out, the second warning to any viewer of why you do not stand too close to a cuckoo clock when it hits the hour mark. He will have to watch on, and try to warn anyone he can communicate with, at the two act structure of his lineage's perils, the first following Johann the eldest son (Brent Neale), who wishes to marry Klara (Sarah Neville), but has incestuous dreams about his widowed mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska). Johann begins the first of the two acts as he succumbs to "mountain illness, meant to be the curse to climb the mountains, which is warned as very dangerous and having claimed many, but is blatant symbolism of the isolation of this extremely closed and emotionally rigid community which wrought neurosis and suppressed desires, especially in a world where the danger of raised voices causing avalanches is a constant. Johann's introductory story shows how edgy Careful has remained, spying on his mother bathing upside down in the chimney, and his downfall where he concocts a sleeping draught before he cracks in guilt violently, in the moment he was to commit a true transgression, leading to the younger third son Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) to take over the film.

Whilst played with a sick sense of humour, Careful is entirely about the pull of family, one of the most prominent themes of Guy Maddin's filmography, among the many aspects juxtaposing his really eccentric humour against really uncomfortable themes. A lot in his career have had to do with sexuality of all forms and many taboos, which causes his characters over the years to be thrown in melodramatic maelstroms. Grigorss falls for Klara, and inherits Johann's role as the new butler at Count Knotkers' castle, the head of Tolzbad played by Paul Cox, only to learn the truth of Knotkers and his mother's love for each other which was still burning even when she married the Swan Feeder, explaining as well why the oldest brother Franz (Vince Rimmer), who cannot talk and was forced to live in the attic, was stuck ostracised. The connection to family is a theme Guy Maddin has death with even interpreting his own life, or even in a positive way with actress Isabella Rossellini and her legendary filmmaking father Roberto in My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005); in Careful, be it Count Knotkers having his own deceased mother preserved in a sanitised bedroom, or that Klara has a fixation on her own father, jealous of the closer relationship between him and her sister Glenda as the favourite. Her story even leads to the one scene which may be far more problematic, if unintentionally nowadays, in her going as far as deceive Grigorss with a possible false accusation to kill her father, even if there is a whimsical touch involving using the avalanches to do the job. The irony is that barring the tragic passing of his father at a young age, the short The Dead Father (1985) which began the director's career influenced by this, Maddin's upbringing is sweet and eccentric, even recreating his childhood which showed examples of this in a fantastical form for My Winnipeg (2007), so it might surprise he has twisted tales on family like in Careful.

He definitely likes to probe at neurosis, sexual anxiety and the perverse, which will dabble into anything from the band Sparks providing a musical number in The Forbidden Room (2015) about a man mentally crippled by his interesting in the female posterior, to the purely glorious and fun, making a short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1994) entirely about men wearing very little clothing spanking each other. Guy Maddin's work is not overtly messaged, but the themes are there filtered through obsolete cinematic tropes, least in that his work was seen as throwbacks at this stage or when The Heart of the World (2000), a short inspired by Soviet montage editing, brought more influence in editing and production techniques forward in his work. The fantastical and lyrical is contrasted by the incredibly dark or the purely ridiculous, eccentric behaviour portrayed by characters in these films as much part of their mental tapestries. There is even a whole aspect here in Careful of Johann and Grigorss studying in a butler school, which I cannot help but think of in context to Jakob von Gunten, a 1909 novel written by Swiss novelist Robert Walser which is a very unconventional work, and one we had to wait for animators Stephen and Timothy Quay, in their first theatrical film and with actors, to get an official theatrical adaptation in 1995 with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. The connection, even if accidental, is perfect for two works dealing with the unconscious wells of desire.

You could not write a review of a Guy Maddin film without talking of the aesthetic, with the additional fact that with Careful, he was starting to move away from playing tribute to silent cinema aesthetics to others, the look here of old photography hand painted in colour after development, contrasted to the tinted scenes in one colour evoking how silent films used this technique with the colours used depending on the context. Maddin's films are very artificial, even when using old film and TV footage to retell Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as The Green Fog (2017), Careful having a rustic artificiality with ornate homemade set design, feeling of the 18th century in fact but with details like phonographs existing which effect the sense of time and setting being clearly placed. There is even a deliberate crackle in the soundtrack like an old vinyl which emphasis the sense of this entire being a relic, ironic knowing that the themes I have mentioned of Guy Maddin's, whilst over-the-top, are very real in subject, the hyper exaggerated filmic nature of Careful as if influenced by the plots. The safeguard this artificially created world of Tolzbad becomes allows for Maddin to deal with themes in a way to soften their blow, when he does include some incredibly dark content as talked of in this narrative.

This would be followed by a road bump in his career, with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) becoming a maligned work, marking Careful and that film as the last of the first era of his career where the editing and production design were not as explicitly part of the texture of his work as later, more staged dramas in their tone in his first act as a director. I view Twilight... as an underrated film, but one which lead to a period of short films, but nothing in terms of theatrical length work until Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002). The Heart of the World was a jump start to his career, but also emphasised that, to tell these tales about neurosis, their tactile natures as films included using silent film techniques like intertitles more explicitly, using the editing more, and into the 2010s, Maddin embraced another turn into explicit digital post-production. Careful however marks a point, more overt than his previous films, Archangel (1990) and his first film Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), where one of his most distinct features, melodramas about the traps psychologically and sexually which ensnare usually male leads, became really prominent, and alongside being a great film in its own right in a strong filmography, Careful becomes as important for this reason too for the context.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric/Melodramatic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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1) Interviewed for Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), a Maddin retrospective documentary from this first era of the Canadian filmmaker's career.

Reality (2014)

 

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Alain Chabat as Jason Tantra, Jonathan Lambert as Bob Marshall, Élodie Bouchez as Alice Tantra, Kyla Kenedy as Reality, Eric Wareheim as Henri, John Glover as Zog, Jon Heder as Dennis, Matt Battaglia as Mike, Susan Diol as Gaby, Bambadjan Bamba as Tony, Patrick Bristow as Klaus, Sandra Nelson as Isabella, Carol Locatell as Lucienne

An Abstract Candidate

 

What are the sticky things in the tummy Daddy?

After films like Rubber (2010) and Wrong (2012), Quentin Dupieux made a more sedately strange film with Reality. This follows a series of figures wandering through scenarios set up by the film, dream logic integral to the premise that everything is interlinking between worlds, between the waking one to films and dreams. Time is non-existent, and logic is less concerning as the rationalisation all weaves into each other, a collective unconsciousness in dreams. When taken with her father to the woods, as he hunts boar, a young girl name Reality (Kyla Kenedy) sees as he guts the animal back home a blue videotape fell out of the corpse’s stomach, wanting to see what is on the tape. The host of a cooking show, where he wears an animal costume and asks guests if they believe in God as much as their chosen desert to make, is having an eczema attack which is not helping the production of the show and no one else can see. One of the cameramen, an older man named Jason (Alain Chabat), has a once in a lifetime deal to make a film with a producer, about televisions trying to conquer the Earth, and only needs to get the perfect groan of agony, good enough to win an Oscar, for the producer to bankroll the project.

Layers of reality are broken, without it leading to a conventional climax to rationalise it all, where an audience is watching the girl’s tale. They are dealing with producing her tale as a film, following an ex-documentary filmmaker named Zog (John Glover) who may be able to record dreams. There is a superintendent at her school, who goes to his psychiatrist, Jason’s wife, about a dream of driving a military car in a woman’s dress, only for Reality herself to be in the dream and later blackmail him over this. Reality herself will watch the cooking show and the videotape bends reality itself further as the film becomes more threaded between each other. There is no explanation of this, and it would be patronising to try to rationalise this either. What you get instead is dream logic of various states of mind and anxieties, a classical surrealistic style, but one you can see influenced by relevant ideas to the director-writer Dupieux. The inherent curiosity of an unmarked videotape, whether a boar can swallow one whole unscathed or not, is a surreal but would fascinate any of us if we encountered it, a little strange moment with curiosity in this phantom object as for the young girl. I can also see Dupieux himself as a filmmaker having had the anxiety Jason has, where he finds himself in a cinema where his premise for a film he worked so hard on is already a produced theatrical release. There are more overtly wacky moments – the producer is a figure who wants non-smokers who visit to try his cigar collection despite hating the smell, and picks off surfers from the nearby beach from his mansion with a sniper rifle – but this is not different from the gags surrealist artists used to pepper into their work on purpose with the subversion to catch viewers off guard, the predecessors to surreal comedy.

Reality is the logical conclusion to Rubber’s thesis of content in films happening for “no reason”, not with a nihilistic suggestion of meaninglessness, but with logic here beyond trivial structure of time, and characters like Jason and the host finding themselves lost in a world spiralling out of their grasp. Reality does not have as much of the wackier touches of the Dupieux beforehand, and feels a more sober production even if entirely a comedy at heart. The one moment which feels less indebted to figures like Luis Buñuel in tone is when we thankfully see Jason’s premise for his film Waves, which could have been a “Rubber 2” (as seen on a cinema marquee as a joke) with TV sets microwaving people until they start bleeding from every orifice to death. In fact scenes like this emphasises that Dupieux, part of this wave of “cult” filmmakers who came into cinema in the late 2000s onwards through film festivals and greater emphasis on the DVD releases being more readily available than theatrical screenings, had an advantage that surrealism found its footing in genre films and independent productions to bend such tropes. He was able to get to the point with Reality where it could touch on premises on psychotronic horror movies about homicidal electronic appliances, and yet also being deliberately more unconventional, basking in mood within it’s playful tone.

Dupieux’s style is clear, another US co-production whose style rejects elaborate camera set ups but allows him to use his locations and style for the intended goal, especially for this premise where realities will bleed into each other to the point bedrooms are to be found in woodlands. A prominent audible choice comes from using the same fragment of Philip Glass’ 1971 minimalist piece Music with Changing Parts, released as a full length album piece which Dupieux deliberately only used a fragment of to cause a sense of being in a loop¹. It is also befitting, knowing Glass’ precise style, or how his opera Einstein on the Beach (1979) consisted of repetitions of stream of consciousness for its lead, Dupieux choose a composer whose trademarks included layering multiple parts and repetition, something befitting for Reality’s examples of repetition and layering of sequences from earlier in the film onto others, before you even get to Jason finding there are multiple Jasons in existence.

There is some post irony here, where characters blatantly state that none of this is making sense, a sign less of compromise but a tongue in cheek humour. That in itself is arguably a mark of how culture has changed, how we have likely had to include this for modern films, but also with an awareness that this type of humour reflects a sense of malaise with life in general as reflected in sarcasm and ironic nods to this makes sense in context to this ennui. The idea of a collective unconsciousness this gets into is admittedly a positive concept, and the character of Zog comes off as an enlightened genius, dismissed for wasting film footage only for his skills and patience as a “fucking genius” to be revealed as he has figured out a way to record dreams and these through lines. The only character left who may still suffer is the host with his eczema, also finding out the eczema doctor he went to, covered entirely on the face with eczema, may be a gatekeeper aware of these realities too, and that this is never resolved may put some viewers off. The lack of conclusion or explanation in itself feels refreshing, ultimately a film deliberately designed as like a dream. All makes sense in the dream, and it is only after waking up, or leaving the film in this case, that one feels pause for thought trying to rationalise the material. For me, that was not a bad thing to experience at all.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

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1) Quentin Dupieux Explains Why He Doesn’t Like Being Compared to David Lynch, written by Greg Cwik and published for Indiewire on May 4th 2015.

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005/2007)

Director: Tsutomu Mizushima

Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima

Based on a light novel by Masaki Okayu

(Voice) Cast: Reiko Takagi as Sakura Kusakabe; Saeko Chiba as Dokuro-chan; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Rie Kugimiya as Sabato-chan; Akeno Watanabe as Zakuro-chan; Atsushi Imaruoka as Umezawa; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Daisuke Kirii as Seargent/Zamuza; Fumitoshi Miyajima as Nishida; Reiko Takagi as Minami-san

 

"It can't be helped that the class representative has been turned into a monkey, so Dokuro-chan may sit next to Sakura-kun."

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, to use its full name, could be seen as a true stereotype of anime. A young teen male has a guiding angel, a cute girl, protecting over him, with wacky sex comedy hijinks ensuring. Even if a parody of these tropes, it might prove an eyebrow rising take on them for an outsider to the medium, so this title does come with a caveat that it is an acquired taste. However, considering immediately into the first episode she kills her charge with her giant spiked club the first moment she is introduced, caught getting changed in his room, only to resurrect him as she will do at least two more times that same episode, we are dealing with something more openly twisted in its humour than other anime parodies or sex comedies. It really works as a parody for people who have actually seen anime tropes it is parodying, but as much of my interest in this straight-to-video production, whilst slight in length is seeing it take the stereotypical love-hate romantic relationship found in many stories, not just animated, and take it seriously whilst with its macabre sense of humour, as if there could have been a version of this with a regular of romantic comedies, Jennifer Aniston, could constantly bash her love interest's brains out everywhere only to oops, resurrect and apologise for this over and over. 

The story of this production, and this theme of love even if the female lead will kill the lead, is also as much to do with its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, who I fully believe has always approached his career as an animation director with a macabre sense of humour, which is more implicit as he is the screenwriter for this two series straight-to-video production too rather than just their director, adding a greater connection potentially to the material. Mizushima has fascinated me for a while. Arguably, as much of this may be for the wrong reasons, as his stints in horror after Dokuro-Chan have been divisive to say the least. This is where the question of what is intentional or not gets confusing, but also compelling, as there is a title like Another (2010), a supernatural mystery series, which violently contrasts its serious tone with over-the-top deaths that you could call comedic, such as the first being an unfortunate encounter with an umbrella and a staircase. The Lost Village (2016) really comes in as the production which raises this concern. With its main composition by the acclaimed screenwriter Mari Okada, a huge figure in anime, let alone a significant and prolific female screenwriter in the industry, who has even directed a theatrical work named Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018), it was a very divisive television series, one which many would argue was terrible, but has been argued to have been a satire of the genre which took people by surprise. Between a character who has forever stayed with me and could have been a character here in Dokuro-Chan, Lovepon, a young woman even a tragic back story whose obsession with execution becomes delightfully absurd, and material that even for horror would be balked at, like a giant monstrous silicon breast implant, it emphasised the really unpredictable nature of the director Mizushima.

Because of how many tangents there are in his career, I have always been wary of dismissive some of these projects even if they were failures. Even for the work of his that is more wholesome, like the Girls und Panzer franchise¹, Tsutomu Mizushima has also had a streak of misanthropy found in his career, especially in the comedies from his earlier productions in the straight-to-video format. These are the points, including how gory he could get with his horror work to a hyper-exaggerated form, which raised this question of deliberateness for me as an anime fan. An obscure set of shorts less than thirty minutes long for online viewing, Plastic Neesan (2011), is an absurdist comedy about a group of model making schoolgirls which never got to model making, and was instead about characters who could be really spiteful or just weird. There was also Magical Witch Punie-chan (2006-7), which envisioned a magical girl if she was the evil despot heir of a magical kingdom, an inspired and dark premise which went as far as a comedy as having her cute animal mascot as an indentured slave constantly trying to murder her. The infamous one of this trio is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan itself, as whilst the USA also got Magical Witch Punie-chan, Dokuro-Chan was the one which gained a wider attention when it was released in the United States by Media Blasters back in the day, a straight-to-video work which is brazen with its tone despite juxtaposing it against its fluffy presentation.

This, including its source material, a light novel series, is clearly a parody of a couple of works. Ah My Goddess, originally started as a 1988-2014 manga by Kōsuke Fujishima, was about a young man who accidentally summons a titular goddess to his world as a new roommate; famously, as nodded to in a joke here, is Rumiko Takahashi‘s Urusei Yatsura, a legendary manga (including its animated adaptations) where a young teen male finds himself with a female alien named Lum living with him on Earth. Dokuro-Chan herself is an angel from the future with a halo and a giant spiked kanabō club called Excalibolg,  which she can use to both resurrect the dead unscathed as well as splatter a torso into chunks with one swing. The tone of the straight-to-video series, and why it may raise an eyebrow from anime fans as much as non-anime viewers, is that the initial set-up is legitimately twisted despite most of the story in these episodic episodes being more a sex comedy in the traditional sense from anime. In context to the fan base, even some of the lewder jokes are normal, but the cutesy tone occasionally gives way to jokes which with hindsight are quite transgressive, softened yet paradoxically heightened by the tone.

Dokuro-Chan was originally assigned to the past to bump off the male lead, the young teenager Sakura Kusakabe, as he was foretold to accidentally defy God by giving people immortality despite being the typical horny male lead, one whose hormones make it impossible to get past a girl he takes interest in without embarrassment. Where the joke might be more shocking nowadays, casually used as part of the humour, is that for the price of immortality, it meant finding immortality by accident by permanently stunting women from growing biologically from twelve years old. With very casual jokes of people calling Sakura a paedophile much to his horror, it never gets any further in terms of transgression, but is causally brought up to torment him quite a few times and emphasises that, whilst portrayed as a light hearted comedy, this is for the first "season", not conventional in episode number or length, it taps occasionally on bleaker humour whether it has all aged well or not multiple times. This is the kind of joke that occasionally appears within this, which means I would not recommend this series for most. It also falls back into a type of sex comedy which is common in Japanese animation, including a potential issue for anyone outside anime fandom that many sex comedies involve teen leads in general, as here, that will also not be for everyone either. A lot of this in this case, as per the genre's tropes, is usually the gag of embarrassment and the male lead being tormented for a mistaken comment or being in the wrong place of mind (or actual location) at the wrong time, and ending up being called a pervert, which is not for everyone even for anime fans. That idea of male sexual neurosis, whether intentional or not, is found in a lot of anime, and befits this story with hindsight. The difference here is that this has an outlier tone which affects this too, that a lot of it is very light and fluffy sex comedy, with the bright colours and tone of early 2000s anime, but contrasted by the twists of dark humour. The most prominent is that, even if played for light hearted chuckles in tone, we will be seeing a lot of Sakura’s intestines and guts being split over and over, lovingly animated in his repeated dismemberment by Dokuro.

The tone is perfectly set up in the opening credits song, redone with newer lyrics for the second set of episodes released in 2007, a charming ditty from Dokuro's perspective where even if she will maim, disembowel and mutilate her crush, it is out of pure love, infectious and completely setting up the cutesy misanthropic tone. Dokuro-Chan does not play safe with its humour when it wants to, its eight fifteen minute episodes for the first series placing itself in regular slapstick with added gory violence, and deeply weird one-off gags which are strange with clear knowledge that is the intended result. Dokuro decides, rather than kill him as assigned, that she will try to change Sakura whilst becoming smitten with him, but that this pretext is more that he is stuck with an impulsive id of an angel who likes him but also indulges her pure obsessions whether beneficial for him or not. Sakura will die a lot at her hands and the Excalibolg despite the initial promise to protect and change him, usually because of her reactions to his lewdness (or accidentally seeing her undressed), or even trying to get a mosquito off him at one point with the club. It is to the point permanent psychological trauma is likely from the many deaths and resurrections he has had.  The lack of consequence, or anyone else reacting badly to this even among his classmates, who at times do witness this carnage, is part of the joke, even if eventually there is the current that he is crushing on her despite being attracted more to other classmates.

The resulting work for the first "series", eight fifteen minute episodes compiled into four full ones, is to be honest one you would not show a person if they are new to anime unless you knew their sense of humour or taste in the perverse was strong. A lot of it inherently would baffle or even make someone uncomfortable, particularly many of the sex gag are about near nudity or perceived sexual innuendo with its teen cast, despite never showing anything actually explicit unlike some sex comedies have. It is the kind of work, out of context, which supports all the clichés that give anime a bad name, and one has to remember that Reiko Takagi, who voices Sakura, is actually an adult voice actress who however manages to make Sakura sound like he is actually voiced by a young teen boy, one who will be battered and smashed into chunks of meat repeatedly by Dokuro. Within context however, the really misanthropic humour actually softens the discomfort and a lot of it feels like it is playing up to clichés only to twist the knife into them. Dokuro is the lovable heroine if you can get into her headspace. Alongside the cliché of the female lead beating up the male lead for a perceived (even accidental) slight of perverseness being taken to an extreme, she is very much an anti-heroine, someone who can destroy for the sake of it, as much as lovable in her earnestness for Sakura and her growing crush for him.

It is, however, a relationship has its difficulties, whenever she will eventually even say very random and illogically things, and is suggested to have tortured a teacher to start a club entirely devoted to the sport of watching woodwork glue dry. In the wrong frame of mind, these characters including Sakura may put you off, but the clichés they are as characters meant to be add to the dark humour. Such as the fact, when his class is informed he will eventually cause the entire female gender to be stuck at the age of twelve, they do not defend him in the slightest, and were already going to beat him up or ostracise him beforehand. The sole exception is Shizuki, whose crush on him is countered by his to her, undercut by Dokuro blundering through, and their own chemistry as the leads who clearly have fondness for each other, playing to the cliché of a love triangle with actual seriousness. This does emphasis, at the end of the day, this was always going to play in the source as a conventional teen romantic comedy, but that the set-up is deeply surreal. Then there is another angel (with horns) called Sabato, who with an electric cattle prod powerful enough to kill a sperm whale is there to murder Sakura but you feel sorry for, as the joke is how to torment her over and over, forced to live in the streets, and under a bridge cold and miserable, to the point the end credits song is from her perspective as she is miserable and cold.

All these characters exhibit the tropes of their archetypes - Sakura is the typical "potato-kun" generic male lead, a term I am using from online slag as many male protagonists have a passiveness with a sense of being stand-ins for viewers, to the point they have the danger of being blander than a raw potato, contrasted by fighting against his puberty badly as a teenager whilst trying to be a good person. Dokuro is mostly depicted as a bright, light voiced ditz who happens to have a giant spiked club. The clichés of some anime and manga, the sex comedy, is contrasted by the hyper violence or the perverseness of some of the gags, even cruder ones like the fact that, in this series' dogma, if you remove an angel's halo (as razor sharp as a sword) it causes one to have continuous and life draining diarrhoea. For all its crassness, there are moments which are deliciously peculiar. Surreal anime comedy is distinct from surreal comedy in other mediums and other animation from other countries, and a production will win me over if it manages to use its visual style, the writing and/or pure strange ideas to least get a memorable highlight or two. No series, in one episode, is just dumb when it inexplicably references Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, only with the protagonist Gregor Samsa waking up to discover, in a surreal dreamscape of a bedroom, he has grown a bug in terms of morning wood with the sexual anxiety metaphor apt for Kafka, as well as be a good joke when half of these sex comedies in anime, as alluded too, do end up being the existential nightmares of teen males when they reach and pass puberty.

There is, even for a work which clearly does not have a high budget, also moments of real experimentation too. The class rep, in the first episode when Dokuro is introduced to class as a student, is turned into a monkey, with a real stock image of a howler monkey used for his head in jerky stop motion. It is a joke paid off in further episodes on when she turns someone into a dog, or when the second series, just four more additional episodes, there is now a giraffe and a few others in their class from incidents we do not see. Little oddball flourishes, such as cutting to two wild bears looking nervously briefly watching at the carnage of Dokuro playing on Sakura in a river (with sweat drops signifiers for this), show even if the humour is crude and playing to vulgarity at times, it does so with a wink. Even those cruder jokes are helped by one of the huge advantages animation has, that you can exaggerate to an extreme, make even your female characters, no matter how cute and colourful, distort and even look corpse-like when the halos are unfortunately removed, including the strength of the voice performances from the cast.

This explains so much about its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, even if all his productions are animation made by staffs of various collaborators. Working in comedy greatly, he likes broad and heightened extremes. When this applies to horror, even a goreless work like The Lost Village, the exaggeration is there and a dichotomy can arise in what was intentional or not with any work I will see of his in what was a success, what was not, and what was deliberately done as a joke or deliberately cutting the legs under expectations. Certainly as well, he does eventually lean further to absurd comedy through the first season, something to bear in mind even if still with the twisted logic of the original premise. The one crux for this production thought is that, for better and for worse, whilst this does have an ending in the first season, it really does not conclude the story. How you would conclude this premise I have no idea, and it would be compelling to know how the source material did so. Two years later, a sequel of four episodes (leading up to an hour's length) was created. It is, in honesty, bonus material. Set after the first series, with new characters fully introduced like Zakuro, Dokuro's nine year old sister who is yet in voice and appearance like an older sibling remotely not of that age, it is more a series of one-off scenarios with the cast even next to the first season, which was a set of one-off stories itself like Sakura being invited to the cinema by Shizuki on a date. Like the original, it is bright and cheerful in a good way in terms of appearance, but there is also clearly a sense of the series moving more to its sex comedy, lightly humoured tone than the first series, jettisoning most of the more twisted jokes entirely.

The first series had some weirder jokes, like explicitly referencing North Korea multiple times, and whilst the second series has its moments, including Dokuro trying to get Sakura is eat living chocolate versions of himself for Valentine's Day, there is a clear change in tone even if aspects, like dismembering Sakura at least once per episode, remain.  One of the things which does work in those later episodes favour is that they just emphasis some of the weird jokes from the first season, which feel weird even in context then from cultural differences, and let them be expanded upon. The entirety of the “Sensitive Salaryman” running joke grows thanks to these two series, a one off gag about a TV series (with a film spin-off) starring a man who emotionally and physically cannot live a day without his body riddled in hyper-sensation; I still do not get the joke in its full meaning, and the figure really only crops up in the background as a TV series character who got a film adaptation, but it works as a strange gag. More as it allows as well the multiple times the tie-in “Sensitive Sausage” branded food to be unfortunately in Sakura’s vicinity for ingestion for the second season, a tie-in probably requiring health warnings unless you want to be curled up in the foetal position with your body writhing in hyper-sensitivity, and hear that melancholic moaning that cues up in the score when the salaryman is evoked, which is what ultimately made the joke funny for me. And this feels deeply weird on purpose for any audience regardless of their native language and culture, and is one of the moments where the second series does have highlights to appreciate. For the most part, it feels like bonus material in the truest sense.

The original, even if the sequel still has Sakura being smashed to bits by Dokuro constantly, is in itself enough, especially if there was a sense of losing its misanthropic attitude. It feels too short as a fully fleshed out story, but the most subversive moment where the show there ends is trying for a dramatic conclusion, the cliché of the magical figure being forced to leave for her world which the show plays straight and has had enough time to have built up to. Knowing the premise is based on clichés eventually works in its favour as it is mixing the cute with the lurid and the serious. (More so, in the least expected scene, when the final episode even has a sombre and strangely ill-eased sequence of Sakura without memories of before and feeling he has lost something whilst spending time with Shizuki at a cafe). The entire running gag that this is effectively a male protagonist who is a submissive among more stronger and openly sadistic female figures, with the women in their twisted ways lovable and he the butt of the jokes, is pretty striking too from the first season, a trope that I have found finds itself in these sex comedies even if they still raise concerns for sexualising the female leads and, especially with the "harem" genre, the idea of all these female characters in a variety of romantic shapes all vying for the conventional male lead's affections. A lot of them end up, even if by accident, being about the male being entirely out of his comfort zone to confident figures, and here it is more obvious, so much so that whilst the episodes have grow stronger with hindsight, I do see the danger with the second series, if this had continued, of losing the female cast’s original tones in favour of more submissive fan service figures, which is no way near as entertaining. I see with the second series, when it spends an episode about the cast taking a bath together, that this even if you are a fan of the medium that can get past the sex comedy could have dangerously lost its initial spark if we got more from this narrative.

Whether you could have actually gotten this on to a further longer work, in mind to it likely needing to be censored for the television screenings for even the gore, is merely a guessing game. A title like this however presents, even in its own ballpark, the idea that you can parody the clichés of your genres but still be earnest in them. One joke far less palatable as the show aged, that Dokuro wishes to change Sakura because his older self would have lead half the world's population to being permanently twelve years old, has not helped, but most of this is a timeless joke which has aged well and allows one to still like these characters, the oddball couple who, even if one is not attracted to the other, will realise in the end he loves her as dearly even if he has yet to say "I love you" beyond friends. The reference to romantic comedies early on was a nod to this, as it is a joke as old as a screwball comedy from thirties Hollywood like Bringing Up Baby (1938), without Katharine Hepburn repeatedly bashing Cary Grant in the face with a club, but the exasperated male lead dragged along by the firecracker of a personality still found in many stories across mediums, and gender swapped, into the modern day. The idea of people who work together despite one being as much a frustration to the other is universal, and with Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, the joke comes with a very sick sense of humour too in this case.

Abstract Spectrum: Cute/Dark Humoured/Wacky

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) Girls und Panzer might seem surreal still for outsiders to anime as a franchise about an all-high school female team of World War II tank drivers, in a world where they are kept and used for non-violent public activity, and it is considered a martial arts commonly practiced by women. To an anime fan, this is just Tuesday night viewing, so the bar for surrealism in premises is different.