Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai Season 1 (2013)

a.k.a. Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories

Director: Tomoya Takashima

Screenplay: Hiromu Kumamoto

Voice Cast: Kanji Tsuda as the Story teller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

The review linked to below comes with knowledge that, starting in 2013 and with more series being produced up to 2024 itself, Yamishibai may still continue into 2025 onwards. Taking the tradition of kamishibai, a form of paper play storytelling and theatre, and amalgamating it in a "micro-series" with urban legends, ghost tales and moments of general spooky misanthropy, it won me over. tIn mind that future series will even tie into cult cinema, with Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl (2008)) and Takashi Shimizu (the Ju-On/the Grudge franchise) getting involved from the second series onwards, and I cannot wait to get to the future series.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Hantsu x Trash (2015-16)

 

Director: Hisashi Saito

Screenwriter: Keiichirō Ōchi

Based on the manga by Hiyoko Kobayashi

(Voice) Cast: Maaya Uchida as Chisato Hagiwara; Yūma Uchida as Yōhei Hamaji; Kenta Matsumoto as Nakajima; Saki Yamakita as Maki Hayami; Shizuka Itou as Manami Miyoshi; Yurika Kubo as Mai Shinozaki

Ephemeral Waves

 

As an anime fan, as with other mediums and their sub-genres, you do find your coming against tropes which are not defendable. Do not expect a defense here with one of the more prominent ones in anime here, which studio Hoods Entertainment’s Hantsu x Trash really emphasizes, the type of sex comedy which includes content which would be viewed as sexually inappropriate conduct from male characters to female ones. This is however something you do not just find in Japanese animation but found in comedy from other countries, my British heritage bringing up the cases in our past in television and cinema which can be pointed to for this. The tropes in anime are those that have been commonplace - such as male characters peeking at girls in the shower, inappropriate groping and things we have rightly challenged as unacceptable in the modern day as time passed - which would be a struggle to explain to an outsider of the medium to stereotype. By the third episode of this curious straight-to-video fragment, this sadly fully falls into this type of comedy, but I also get an example where, even when I will gladly give the production a kicking for these aspects, I also find material even accidentally working in unexpected ways even if on a morbid level. In this case, like a lot of sex comedies in anime, how many no matter how tasteless feel like a young male character's sexual neurosis as a premise with that the gag to mock.

Deciding to choose this as a subject may surprise some readers, of all the titles to flag up in the non-anime reviews, except that I have always been fascinated by what I have called the "ephemeral" and strange, this an example which cannot be defended for most of its length, but is definitely a "curiosity". From the get-go, there will be the preface now to not have to repeat this, of it being very questionable content. I will also admit finding it fascinating in terms of a sex comedy that did get some morbid laughter from me, not spoken as a hypocrite but that, when it is not about objectifying its female cast, is also however a story about dumb horny men obsessed merely about the bared female breast who are the real butt of the humour. It is tame even in the 2010s when this was released next to what you could get on PornHub and other adult sites even animated, and does present this whilst the punch line is with the male characters being inadequate, pathetic and/or idiots who are punished for their behavior. The punishment is insufficient, even if one character does get a baseball bat up an intimate area, but how much of this feels swashed in the tensions of our lead becomes the central part of this.

It also presents my fascination with dragging up ultra obscure items you the reader may have never heard of, as this is obscure even for anime fandom and is likely not known of at all by many who even know some of the obscurer cult gems in film. These three episodes, two over twelve minutes, the third over fourteen, were just meant to be promotional items, part of a trend of creating tie-in anime that comes with the manga, the first bundled with the 8^th volume of the manga on October 6^th 2015¹, the second bundled with the 10^th volume of the manga in June 6^th 2016², and the third and final one bundled with the 11^th volume of the manga on November 4^th 2016³. Together, they are not politically correct, a sex comedy about the high school male water polo team who is more interested in the female water team, though I will say ahead of time that I have suffered through far more tasteless and sexist content I have unfortunately come across than this. This does feel closer to American sex comedies of the past in tone, only with the presentation of the jokes seen in anime. The issue with this is not the premise but where the humour comes from, in that spying on the female team bathing, as in the third episode, is something that in real life would rightly be challenged. The other part of the humour is more interesting, and becomes more striking in what is barely more than one whole episode of a story which never gets any semblance of a plot until near its end. What little you get here is that these male characters are figures who even find the sight of seeing a bared breast a monumental moment of their life, the kind of joke that transcends history and is not problematic to do as a joke because the target, close to the bone, is the heterosexual males themselves.

The source material was originally published Weekly Young Magazine, originally also the home of the original Akira manga which became the legendary 1988 feature film. It is also a publication that in the 2010s published the likes of Does a Hot Elf Live Next Door to You? (2019–2021) by Meguru Ueno, which just emphasizes that sex sells. Let us get the elephant out of the room that, deliberately including the review outside of the anime sphere, there is a dangerous cliché to dismiss Japanese pop culture like anime for being perverted, where in reality pop culture in many countries, not even touching their fans’ interpretations, have their layers of explicit (or implicit) eroticism or horniness to them. A lot of the dismissal of Japanese pop culture for “perversity” is a red flag for implicit racism, even if we who love anime admit so much of it you would be embarrassed to be caught watching or if more for those with a greater open mindedness to fetishes and comfortable in their sexuality. Factor in too that, in Japan, Studio Ghibli films rule the roost and their longest running animated show, still going since 1969, is Sazae-san, a work by Machiko Hasegawa that follows the titular character, the matriarch of a family, and if about family situations for comedy. These really fetishistic and erotic works in anime and manga, whilst prolific, are an undercurrent to animation, with Hantsu x Trash a real obscurity. Hoods Entertainment made their bread and butter on titles like this, which might not help the argument, but for all the stuff an outsider would raise their eyes at from their catalogue, such as The Qwaser of Stigmata (2010), infamously the animated show about breast milk powering one’s super abilities, we forget that whilst titles like this are brazen and proud to tackle subjects like this, mainstream sex comedy can be as perverse if using humour a self defense mechanism to justify the scenes. Case in point, once ago in my teen years we had American Pie (1999) as a mainstream film, where the title comes as a punch line to someone actually fornicating with a pie as a joke. That film was done with a mocking sense of shame which just differentiates the line between comedic effect and proudly over-the-top sexual fantasies, especially when you consider the most explicit sequence, with actress Shannon Elizabeth as a foreign exchange student who has the prominent nude scene, is presented in the same tone as Hantsu x Trash would have had. That it allows the viewer reveal in the nudity, but ends with a male lead being so out-of-his-depth a potential loss of virginity is as abruptly neutered for him as it could have happened, with his bruised emotional state the joke.

Episode One introduces our protagonist Yōhei Hamaji, a poor guy doomed like many male protagonists in these sex comedies to have a crush on a girl in his school but be under the confused whirlpool of his hormones. He is an archetype that transcends various story types from one country to many, from Japanese animation to US eighties sex comedies, that of a likable prat who is less problematic than his peers, far unscrupulous in their horniness, but still curious about the opposite gender. It is to the point here that if any girl or woman was to show interest to him, his cluelessness will cause him embarrassment in his attraction to them. Like characters in any adolescent romance, his true love is his senpai Chisato Hagiwara⁴, one of the committed members of her water polo team, even if like the other men in his team he has hormones, and like them really has a fixation on the female breast.  This is the fetish of the anime, and these short episodes have no qualms in the slightest in their lewdness, and drawing them in various states, but it also is not that different again from other sex comedies from other countries. In British sex comedy, even in our more tame sex humour, alongside a lot of older and younger men who got bothered by the idea of having sex, many of the jokes with them included a fixation on busty female characters. This is the tamest of things for Hantsu x Trash to have a fetish with, even next to other more extravagantly made and longer anime which, even if not further explicit, a probably more lewd even when there is no nudity. If anything, especially writing this as a heterosexual male writer who can self critique himself, it causes one to look at the obsession with cleavage size by men with a surrealism to it. When you step back, it is peculiar a part of the body of a gender is an obsession symbolically in terms of desire, even in art let alone anime like this gunning for the low hanging jokes.

Episode One shows the trope common in Japanese anime that, whilst still objectifying the women, the men are punished painfully for comedic effect, which has always been a curious side to Japanese anime and manga in their sex comedy in that they constantly undercut their male characters. In work targeting men audiences in their gazes, they depict their stand-ins as completely immature figures a lot of times. Even what could be seen as a gay panic running gag undercuts itself in presentation here, where Yōhei keeps imagining erotic fantasies of Hagi-chan, whilst recuperating in the nurse’s room, only to keep envisioning Nakajima, a team member who looks in his late thirties with sunglasses permanently on, at the end as the one appreciating his caresses. It is the main joke for that episode, whilst for the rest of the three the crisis for him is that, whilst Hagi-Chan is the woman he loves, Yōhei is someone clearly who has both an obsession with large breasts, and is emotionally immature. It is to the point he finds himself coxed whenever any woman, with an ounce of confidence in her desires or an accidental situation, causes the hormones to kick in and turns him into an utter dimwit. What could seen a tasteless homophobic joke in the first episode, with imagining Nakajima every time he fantasies about women in his life, comes off more like a Freudian barrier to Yōhei’s desires, the Super Ego kicking but with an added accidental tone suggesting his denied bisexualility. In a smarter, and more creative anime sex comedy, this would have been a joke that would have been something to run with, here is just due to the strange tone in presenting it without thought to its accidental layers causing my mind to leap to these conclusions. That he loves Hagi-chan for her personality, whilst burning for her physical beauty and curvaceousness, but would not mind buffing his team leader’s nipples even if he tries to deny it. It is for reasons like this I find interest in these less great sex comedy anime, with how for so many even when they come from the crass side, to always objectify the female characters, to go for the crap joke, that there is however a rife amount of psychosexual neurosis to the humour that, if weaponised properly, would be great comedy in another context. That is the one thing that I can appreciate even for something which is quite a cheap production to tie-in to a manga, which does look of its budget in the minimal use of locations, and how the second episode does look the weaker in production in comparison.

One joke from the first episode exemplifies what this could have done if it was not going for the low hanging fruit, the lead’s mind envisioning Chisato being seduced by one of her teammates Shinozaki, someone who is very physical with her friends. In a more complex show than the fragments we got, this would have been compelling, even if tasteless, for imagining the sexual id of a guy who is confused in a lot of ways about his sexuality even if there is one girl he loves dearly. In context it can be viewed as a cheap ploy at lesbianism as a fetish for men than someone’s real sexuality, but could have been a joke that worked in imagining how absurd his desires are, especially as his own superego cock-blocks him every sequence in the first episode, the joke his own disjointed and confused fantasies than at the expense of the female cast. That is as much trying to stretch out a sex gag which most would roll their eyes by excusing it through a layer of amateur interpretation, but that becomes the most interesting thing, even if by accident, through how much of this does follow this. Constantly it becomes a curious gag anime about the strangeness of the male libido, even if the work is not great. It becomes instead less that actual quality of the work which is of interest, but what it accidentally does.

This is still an anime about the male water polo team being perverts, even with episode three having them trying to spy on the female team so Yōhei learn the nipple colour of the woman he loves, which is the episode where I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. It is where the loose string salvaging this anime fully snapped, even if it does led to one male character gets punished by having that baseball bat up a painful area. One recurring joke I will defend in these episodes, because they are all at the expense at the male cast, is the idea they have, because they are all sexually naïve, that they presume just touching a woman in the right way on their breast will cause them to orgasm. Even for a virginal reader of this review, I would hope they realized this is not something that would work; even presuming touching a guy on the chest would have a similar effect should be considered to, because anyone presuming that with the instantaneous effect is being an idiot and a terrible lover. One character who could been seen as problematic nowadays is the female teacher character, neither helping in breaking teaching ethics as in episode two, she even makes a promise to let the male team touch her breasts if they won a match, three seconds only each, and has a desire for Yōhei beyond the boundaries of teacher-student relationships. That set up for episode two, and the disappointment that the entire male water polo team are this stupid to think they can be romantic gods in just touching someone once, is however the one joke even in an un-pc anime which I will defend because it is entirely about her absolute disappointment, and what utter idiots the male characters are portrayed as.

Every time it was entirely when a clear theme was up front as the joke, of how every male character here is as thick as a brick, even Yōhei, is where you see a spark here. It is the kind of premise which, for all the content here with is clichés from previous anime and not aging well, still hits close to home as a joke at mocking the male heterosexual libido. More so, as I have seen titles which have casual edged into sexual violence and far more misogynistic content, this feels more antiquated. Plus with this Super Ego slant to how the joke always punished the male characters, even if the plots here are not defendable and yet reward with their explicitly topless nudity, does make this have a sick sense of humour against the audience who would have wanted these episodes for the casual nudity. Here there is a scene of all the swim team on the floor just from touching their teacher’s breasts, or that she has beaten them all up for not following the three second rule, the exaggeration here of these male character coming off as something itself ridiculous to laugh at, that image in itself the encapsulation of what is clearly the joke but also unintentionally the theme, even a neurosis, running through this.

I have not really even described the visual appearance of this show, and that is for a reason, as it is a cheaper tie-in production, where at times you do see it is a cheaper production. It also barely covers a premise, really a tie-in to the manga for that reasons. A story is hinted at, a romance between a sex fixated Yōhei who yet wishes to be a good person for Chisato, a romantic triangle set up in the finale episode with another girl on the water polo team with a crush on him. Her story is with the added touch though it does play it for a dubious reason; that being her appearance as a physically attracted young woman to boys has caused a huge emotional crisis, undercutting her confidence in herself unless she was able to get past that she stands out physically to men and be able to be self-confident and/or dismiss them. This is another moment that in another anime would have been the right moment to challenge, even in a comedy, the uncomfortable idea of guys even at a young age sadly getting into objectifying the girls in their classes without realizing it in their own clueless hormonal problems. Not many of the cast are set up beyond this, though the premise of a sap like Yōhei trying to balance between water polo and his libido is a premise that could be good, as most could, if focused and were trying for more than clearly here. That this is not really a water polo genre story, and likely is not in the source manga, is itself disappointing because, as a genre hybrid, a sports show combined with absurd sex comedy and romance would work, or least be something really original.  Even if it had stayed perverse and lewd, in a better world, and anime has been able to do this with confidence and without shame, you can have stories which are proudly horny but also emotionally rich and good. It can be to the point they could be dismissed by outsiders to anime as showing the medium as perverted, but in their existence anime can be proudly pro-sex, positive about that and equal opportunity in progressiveness.

The result, just over thirty minutes, could have been cut into a one-off straight to video tie-in, and it feels like a pilot to a series which never came to be, only establishing what is an initial set up. In terms of a comedy, I found aspects funny but with the caveat that this is going to put off someone who, understandably, cannot get past its tone and humour choices. Hantsu x Trash has one scene of a character losing his mind to the point he gropes a female character, which in another context would be offensive even next to the other scenes, but for the most part we are dealing with a type of humour here which has just aged badly. For the rest of this, the idea of someone being so clueless about the opposite gender, males here to women, but attracted to them that they do stupid things like spy on them, is something that can be covered but you could not portray with the same attitude that you still see in some anime like this. It was also something you even saw with 2000s sex comedies I grew up with from the West, even if you played the joke still as the males being idiots, so this problem was always not of just one culture. This particular example evokes a micro-series anime named Colorful (1999), and whilst the question of whether its content is defendable means revisiting it, it’s humour was less sex humour for the sake of sexualizing the female cast, but instead vignettes about men trying to see women in their underwear, or the garments under their clothes, but the jokes entirely about how ridiculous these men were, and the punch lines making them look like morons. Whether that has aged well or not is to debate, but you look to these works which are as much the joke is a guilt reflex of the creators, and they are fascinating even if Hantsu x Trash is very conventional even in the genre.

In the perfect world, these types of sex comedies would not involve this type of sexual harassment humour, and the depictions of sexual content even when kinky would be emphasized in terms of interesting character dynamics, psychological sides even for gags, or even positive depictions of sex. Hoods Entertainment even adapted a manga that would immediately come off as gross fetish material for anyone outside of the anime fan base but had a surprising level of depth to it as a deliberate contrast to this, showing they could do this. It was a work called Mysterious Girlfriend X (2012) about a young man who finds himself in a romantic relationship with a strange girl whose salvia is addictive to him, a strange fetishistic premise turned into a work around this fetish, brazenly, but where you still have a pair who really liked each other and embraced this quirk of the relationship.

You could have expanded Hantsu x Trash away from its questionable sex comedy humour into something as interesting, even if fetishistic, in terms of a sex positive comedy with a lot of goofy humour, but this is a slight production, obscure even by anime fan standards. It managed to produce far more here in typed words than what these thirty plus minutes should have. No premise, unless just undefendable as an idea, is not possible to make into something good and also without being tasteless, and sadly whilst one wishes there was an erotic water polo sex comedy out there which was more wholesome and progressive with this tone, even if still breast fixated, this review also presents another issue found in the Japanese anime industry. That, if you dig, you find so many animated fragments, usually built as tie-ins for manga and in some cases pure one-offs, which never had a conclusion and just exist as half-finished dreams. I can envision imaginary, superior takes on the stories, but the reality is that the actual animation is not this and barely in existence as was the case here.

 

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1) Hantsu x Trash Manga Bundles Original Anime DVD, written by Karen Ressler and published by Anime News Network on August 23^rd 2015.

2) Hantsu x Trash Risque Water Polo Manga Bundles 2nd Original Anime DVD, written by Karen Ressler and published by Anime New Network on April 24^th 2016.

3) Risque Water Polo Manga Hantsu x Trash Bundles 3rd Original Anime DVD, written by Rafael Antonio Pineda and published by Anime News Network on September 9th 2016.

4) Maaya Uchida and Yūma Uchida, the voice actors for these lead characters, are siblings, which is somewhat an odd casting choice as romantic leads. That is not a slight against either of them, Maaya the older sister and both prolific in their careers. It is just an odd choice which I hope they found funny in hindsight to what happens in the show. 

The World YAMIZUKAN (2017)

 

Director: Noboru Iguchi

Screenplay: Noboru Iguchi, Oolongta Yoshida, Takashi Iizuka and Uuronta Yoshida

Voice Cast: Takumi Saitou as the Storyteller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

The really obvious aspect, if surprising thing to learn of, that needs to be brought up is that the director is that Noboru Iguchi behind The Machine Girl (2008), who has been a collaborator with the studio behind this micro-series a few times, studio ILCA. The Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories franchise is one of their longest (and ongoing) works, over multi series adapting short horror stories told in a way based on the kamishibai method of story-telling, street storytellers who used illustrated miniature stages, with YAMIZUKAN being very much the more explicitly inspired by Western (especially American) horror tropes. The best way to approach this series too, for the best experience, is to not try to take it all  seriously, as some of the plot twists in this work are clearly ridiculous on purpose. Still gleefully macabre, there are however times where this feels like a send-up on the genre, and to those who can appreciate even the plot twists that come out of nowhere, this will be a worthwhile experience just in terms of the experimentation in the varying animation and illustration styles brought in too. Even live action to really catch viewers off guard.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Non-Abstract Review - Amethyst: Princess of Gem World (2013)

From https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/2/24/Amethyst_Princess_
of_Gemworld_%28Shorts%29_Episode_Level_3_Random_Encounter.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20130728141857

Director: Brianne Drouhard

Screenplay: Amy Wolfram

Based on the comic book series created by Gary Cohn, Ernie Colon and Dan Mishkin

(Voice) Cast: Sophie Oda as Amethyst; Eric Bauza as  Pegacorn; Keith Ferguson as Prince Topaz; Grey Griffin as the Frog Mayor; Tara Strong as the Frog Prince; Nicole Sullivan as the Jalapeño Vendor

Synopsis: Amethyst is playing a video game, a high fantasy adventure, only to be sucked through the hand held console screen and turned into a princess of this weird little world.

Here's a work that'll be difficult to elaborate on but not by fault of its director Brianne Drouhard or any of the production staff* - the issue is that, with what they were given before this micro-series was cancelled, this DC comic property only consists of seven episodes which are only two minutes or so long each. Thus it's effectively a short film or a test project when put together; something clearly worked hard on in what creativity is still at hand, but handed an ignoble fate of a lack of length, where even micro-series from Japan of more limited animation and ridiculous premises like talking farts can at least get over twenty minutes if you combine all the episodes in a marathon.

The work was part of a series of projects called DC Nation Shorts, small shorts based on obscurer DC Comics properties which were shown between their other, more conventionally long animated work on Cartoon Network, such as DC Super Pets, inspired on the time Batman and Superman had their own animal sidekicks in the Silver Age of comics, or imagining Batman villain Riddler as voiced by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Reading up on them, including one animated by Aardman Animations of all people and a live footage version where real life professionals demonstrate the equipment of these characters in practical reality, it's an inspired idea and I want to see all of them. As much because that, whilst I got bored out of my skull by the modern Marvel Studios superhero film template, I am still fascinated and growing in fondness for these types of characters. If I could afford American comic books at a price closer to their Japanese counterparts, in terms of value for money, I'd be less inclined to read more famous creations like Spider-Man or Superman either, but delve into comic book history's strange oddities and cult figures. Some are legitimate cult icons - like Swamp Thing, the living embodiment of nature who became a greater figure in DC Comics when the legendary comic writer Alan Moore had a hand in changing him drastically. Some are misbegotten - like Man-Thing, Marvel's swamp creature now unfortunately living as the poor man's Swamp Thing. And some truly ill-advised ideas I read up upon and still want to read - like Marvel's U.S. 1, a truck driver hero with a cybernetic brain, which could pick up CB radio transmissions, and armed with a super-equipped big rig truck

Among these, Amethyst is also intriguing in a positive way - from 1983, the era of My Little Pony and He-Man, it was clearly meant to be a high fantasy story for a female audience; here, from a female director and a largely female production crew, this premise was re-tweaked for the modern era. In this version, Amethyst starts off as a bespectacled nerdy girl who, once transformed into Amethyst the heroine, finds herself increasingly baffled by what she encounters, immediately from the village of frog people proclaiming her a heroine of the realm, and yet using her smarts to succeed, including the idea that peppers in video games are really, really hot. This leads to the fact the series would've taken the piss out of high fantasy and role playing games, immediately evoking for me a Japanese straight-the-video anime series which tragically only had two episodes before it also got canned, Dragon Half (1993), which ran with its high fantasy setting into utterly ridiculous and hilarious consequences. The reference to anime isn't far off either, clearly influenced by it in aesthetic and also that the first joke is a parody of the magical girl genre, of female characters who transform into heroines like Sailor Moon, where the costume change sequence found in them takes place here in mid-air, not bad for Amethyst until the dimensional pocket said transformations always take place in disappears and one is still falling down in the sky.

Sadly, and this is a justification for typing an expletive as it perfectly sums up the situation, the creators of this production were given a shit deal in that, even without the factor that Amethyst was cancelled, they only had enough time for a tiny little plot they had to quickly resolve. Sadly, a project like DC Nation Shorts, whilst absolutely compelling as an idea, can become its own worst enemy in terms of how short the projects within it could be, as was the case here. What you get here is only a minimal plot - which Amethyst must face an evil male character named Dark Opal - and a little of the world to see including its denizens, worst as you barely get to meet characters like Prince Topaz, the last person to take on Dark Opal only to be left a living skeleton, found in a cave and suffering from chronic apathetic depression and a lack of confidence in himself. It's not a lot in all honesty to work with as a viewer.

But thankfully, there are still signs of what could've been, and Episode 3 is the best episode to show this. Whilst needing to wash, she finds herself encountering a very perverted living tree, one who is watching her bathe, as well as there being the incredibly dark humour of living flowers nearby who argue among themselves who'll be eaten by her horse and reveal in their devouring by the steed. It's a clear sign that the series, if it existed in a longer form, would've still appealed to a young audience but would've had an eccentricity that appealed to adults. The best thing is that, by all accounts, those great gags were directly inspired from the source material, an obsession in the art with even rocks having faces and therefore being alive. This is a great argument for the virtues of adapting source material, even the strangest details, as with this example you get a great idiosyncratic aspect of this fantasy world that would've been used further. The same applies as much to those pastiches which, rather than the dreadful Family Guy style referencing style of merely referencing something for a joke, it's implemented in a way that still works without getting the references.

Sadly, this is all we have, less than ten minutes. We barely see this heroine or her worlds, which was why the review was going to be originally more middling, not a criticism of the show but a wonder if there wasn't enough to get a lot out of from bad luck. However, with hindsight there was a lot still to like, even if having to intricately dissect from what little was there. It's just a shame, in this significantly more positive review, there's just that much left to actually watch.

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* Without any hesitance, this review references back to a podcast episode for the show Cancelled Too Soon, which covered this micro-series with Drouhard herself, so I'll include a link HERE.

From https://www.dccomics.com/sites/default/files/video/
AM05_H264_BattleoftheStormyPeaks_thumb_ju765tagw5_.jpg

Plastic Neesan (2011-2012)

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/
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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.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w780/cHk2O8BExRkSLwZ1QhqLFtrU2l9.jpg

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.

From https://ikilote.net/Galeries/News/
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