Whoever would have imagined there could be enough sexy anime left to cover for another sexy anime special? Wait, no, that's actually the least surprising thing imaginable, isn't it? After all, sex and violence were pretty much the bread and butter of vintage anime - though I wouldn't want to have to say which was which in that analogy. And ultimately it's probably not worth worrying about, not when we've got quite the interesting selection this time around, with four titles that come at the topic via distinctly different angles, in the shape of Hanappe Bazooka, Weather Report Girl, My My Mai, and The Sensualist...
Hanappe Bazooka, 1992, dir: Yoyu Ikegami
For all that his work thrives on pushing the limits of morality and taste, to call author Go Nagai a provocateur is probably giving more credit than he deserves - so let's go instead with button-pusher. And Hanappe Bazooka finds him in a very button-pushy mood indeed, as a brief plot summary should illustrate: the titular Hanappe, a born loser who responds to his daily bullying by peeing himself and running away, inadvertently summons demons while masturbating to a pornographic video he's stolen, and said demons, once they're through seducing his parents and sister with untold wealth and some good, old-fashioned demon sex, grant him the power of a magical finger that allows him to destroy at will and force any woman to do his bidding. You can probably imagine by this point what Hanappe's bidding involves.
I don't mind a bit of provocation, but having my buttons pushed is usually a sure way to wind me up. The former can be a means to make us question our assumptions or step out of our comfort zones; the latter is a cheap bid to shock for the shake of being shocking, and that's not even hard to do, since as long as you know where the boundaries lie, all it takes to overstep them is the confidence you'll get away with it. And so, in theory, I'm no fan of Go Nagai. Yet, to my mild irritation, I find myself liking the adaptations of his work more often than not, and here with are with Hanappe Bazooka, 45 minutes of the most obvious shock tactics imaginable, and I honestly kind of loved it.
Self-awareness, I think, is what makes all the difference. Well, that and some rather impressive animation, that being one of the surest ways to get the best out of adapting Nagai's oeuvre. Good animation can inject a bit of nuance that's not necessarily there in the script, or sell a gag that could easily fall flat, or make us warm up to characters who are basically horrible, and all of that's the case here, with the two demons that Hanappe finds himself saddled with - the marvellously named Mephisto Dance and Ophisto Bazooka - being clear highlights. Much of what they get up to is objectively horrifying, yet Ikegami and crew keep them bound to a delicate line between nightmarish incarnations of gleeful evil and cartoonish buffoons, while also somehow making them kind of sexy when that's what the plot requires, as it frequently does given that Hanappe's family are more than pleased with the prospect of finding themselves the centrepieces of a demonic harem.
That's quite the needle to thread, but Hanappe Bazooka manages it, finding laughs in the most awful places, and somehow even conjuring up something of a redemption arc for the patently irredeemable Hanappe. When, in its last quarter, we're expected to buy a drift towards seriousness and register Hanappe as an actual human being, it feels more like yet another leg pull than a genuine lack of tonal consistency, and that brings us back to the self-awareness: it's the difference between someone trying to shock or finagle us and someone openly admitting they're messing with us, and look, this is how we're going about it - boy, you never thought we'd go there, huh? We're in on the joke, and wherever the material heads, the goal is always for us to have fun, even if it's the sort of fun that comes from giggling at absurd displays of debauchery.
Now, I appreciate that many people aren't ever going to chuckle at scenes of a middle-aged couple having outlandish sex with enormous cartoon demons, and that those people are almost certainly more in the right than I am on this one, the more so since this belongs to a breed of cheerfully tasteless anime that had been rendered largely extinct by the end of the last century. Heck, I suspect that, from distributor ADV's perspective, it didn't last even that long: at the point Hanappe Bazooka was released on VHS, you could presumably get away with this sort of thing, whereas a DVD a year or two later might have whipped up a degree of outrage wholly out of proportion to so trivial a title. But that's as may be; personally, all I ask of a nineties comedy OVA, even one so depraved as this, is that it looks great and makes me laugh, and Hanappe Bazooka manages both of those with aplomb.
Weather Report Girl, it turns out, is the hybrid of Network and Showgirls that I never knew I needed. From the former it borrows the basic concept of a struggling TV show exploiting an anchor's eccentric, damaged behaviour to boost their ratings, while from the latter it takes a female protagonist who's altogether happy to treat her body as a tool with which to gain the success she craves and to trounce any woman who dares compete with her - oh, and lots of boobs and cattiness and general depravity. And it shares with both an absolute black-heartedness and a mercilessly dark sense of humour, though, this being nineties anime, that doesn't mean we can't have the odd thoroughly silly joke too.
We can safely assume Showgirls wasn't actually an influence, since it released a year later, and though Network seems more plausible, Weather Report Girl being a fairly obscure, hentai-adjacent title from three decades ago, I doubt very much I'd ever be able to find out. Still, the similarities are more than superficial on both fronts, and even if this was just a case of parallel evolution, the intent is much the same: to point accusing fingers at a media that's always hunting for new lows to sink to in search of the slightest bump in viewing figures and then to point out that they only get away with it because that's precisely what people want from them.
At the heart of this particular media storm is our antihero Keiko Nakadai, a raging monster of ego seemingly without any capacity to think of anyone but herself, but with a great body, precisely the combination of characteristics she needs to seize on the big break of a shot at being Channel ATV's stand-in weather girl. And seize on it Keiko does, finding a tenuous excuse to show her pants to the viewing public, a stunt that almost gets her fired until the execs notice how their ratings have shot up. From there, there's no stopping Keiko, and certainly the former incumbent of the job she's just stolen doesn't stand much of a chance, no matter how underhanded her tactics. She's quick to learn a lesson that the execs take a while longer over: Keiko is an uncontrollable force of nature on nobody's side but her own, and now that she's got a taste of the big time, nothing and no-one will stand in her way. Which might suggest we ought not to be on her side either, but like all great movie psychos, Keiko is awfully fun to watch, in precisely the sort of car-crash-entertainment manner the show is mocking us for enjoying. It's not so much that we want her to succeed, or even that we don't sympathise with the poor souls who get trampled along her road to success, but her antics are so unpredictable and so gloriously lacking in restraint, taste, or decency that it's impossible not to want to see what she'll get up to next.
In keeping with its protagonist, Weather Report Girl manages the feat of being simultaneously well made and kind of unpleasant to experience, especially when it comes to the character designs. It affects the women more than the men, who are mostly just bland, as though the designers were no more interested in them than the female cast are - it's startling, incidentally, how little time the show has for even the possibility of heterosexual relationships! - while they, and Keiko in particular, are offputtingly angular and freakishly wide-eyed. That may seem a strange choice for an anime that makes a show of selling itself on sex appeal, but it works well for the satire, leaving no doubt whatsoever over which of Keiko's attributes are sending those ratings sky high. And even when it's not exactly pleasing to look at, it's always visually interesting, as you might expect from director Kunihiko Yuyama, who built himself quite the CV throughout the eighties and nineties before he sold his soul to the dark gods of Pokémon. Possibly that makes Weather Report Girl a title he'd quite like to forget he ever had a hand in, grubby and disreputable and mean-spirited as it is, but sometimes grubby, mean entertainment is precisely what the doctor ordered, and this crams quite the dose into its brisk ninety minutes.
My My Mai brings us to a couple of landmarks: I'm reasonably sure it's the last U.S. Manga Corps DVD release we'll be covering here, and that also makes it the last of their nervous attempts to introduce some slightly hentai titles into the US market, a bold move surely destined to fall flat given that a) America and Japan have exceedingly different attitudes towards sex and b) none of what they licensed was terribly good. Which isn't to say I haven't enjoyed some of them, if only for the excuse to comment on the distributor's amusing attempts to toe a line they were clearly making up as they went along, selling titles on their sexiness while steadfastly pretending they weren't so sexy as all that.
My My Mai falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, in that sometimes it's awfully obsessed with sex and sometimes, even for fairly long stretches, it's content to be a silly comedy with an exaggeratedly buxom heroine who's not great at keeping her clothes on. The concept, certainly, is suited to going either way: Mai is an all-purpose problem solver of sorts, and since she's apparently not old enough to vote and her primary assets seem to be of a physical nature, it's often the case that problems get solved with a spot of disrobing. The packaging seems to think she's a counsellor of sorts, but I'd be willing to bet that any psychiatry qualifications she has were bought on the internet, and it's puzzling that her services are so in demand that clients seek her out by name. All of which is to say that, even by the standards of mid-90s anime sex comedies, My My Mai doesn't make a ton of sense, and since it doesn't care much about its own setup and largely ditches it for much of the second episode, that only becomes truer as it goes on.
Still, let's meet Mai halfway and agree that, yes, she's a counsellor who just happens to do most of her counselling in her underwear, for all that the first story - there are four, split across two episodes of 40 or so minutes - takes pains to make clear that she's a good girl who certainly wouldn't work in a hostess bar unless she got shanghaied into doing so. This happens, incidentally, because she's trying to track down a mysterious rogue doctor, and it's only when said doctor turns out to be a client of said club, and then turns out to have a multiple personality disorder that makes him turn into a monster, that My My Mai begins to show its true colours - which is to say, this is one strange, silly show, and equally as interested in being strange and silly as it is in getting Mai out of her clothes at every opportunity.
Perhaps that explains the look of the thing, which is about as sexy as an algebra exam. It leans hard into grotesquery, and while Mai gets off fairly lightly compared with some of the cast, that's not to say there's much about her design that's actively pleasant. Even if that weren't the case, the animation is mediocre enough to suck most of the energy from any scenes that are meant to be titillating, and it's hard to imagine the viewer so starved of stimulation that they'd come to My My Mai for that reason.
This is a problem for the first episode, which struggles to take the nonsensical setup somewhat seriously and can't get the balance of tones right and ends up being weird in ways more off-putting than fun. But by episode two, there's evidently been something of a behind-the-scenes reshuffle, and while Mai is still nominally in the sexy counselling business, it doesn't matter much. Of the two tales there, the first, picking up on a trivial thread from episode one and running with it in preposterous directions, is most entertaining, but the second, a haunted house story of sorts that gets increasingly demented as it goes along, isn't far behind. Both are still quite ugly, but the ugliness is at least in tune with the material, and all in all there's quite a good time to be had. Who knows, perhaps if we'd got a third episode, that would have been something genuinely special? Yet in its absence, we're left with a puzzling little curio that's just about odd enough to be worth a look if oddness is your thing, but nothing more than that.
The Sensualist, 1991, dir: Yukio Abe
Truly, I take no pleasure in recommending titles that are unreasonably difficult to get hold of. In my perfect world, all anime would be available to everyone whenever they liked, the creators would be getting properly recompensed each time, everything would be sunshine and rainbows, and we certainly wouldn't ever have to deal with anything as appallingly hard to find as The Sensualist. We've been mostly discussing for a while now stuff that never got past a VHS and perhaps a laserdisc release, with the luckier cases curated by those copyright-neglecting folks at YouTube. But The Sensualist blows that out of the water: not only was it exclusive to videotape, it was exclusive to British videotape, and then only from the wildly obscure and short-lived Western Connection, whose dodgy handful of releases were routinely shamed by the average fansub. And this absolutely sucks, because it's wonderful, and if its visuals are dazzling on a scruffy, badly produced video print, it's painful to imagine how they'd look on Blu-ray.
An impossibility, surely; The Sensualist is almost entirely forgotten these days, and it's highly unlikely there's a single decent print left out there, the more so since you can't even get hold of it in its native Japan. And of all the injustices we've encountered here in our long trawl through vintage anime, that's one of the more anguishing, because a world that remembered The Sensualist had been made, and that, yes, artsy, sexy, trashy, gorgeous, hypnotically paced adaptations of historical novels are a perfectly valid thing for animation to be doing, would be a better one than ours. As it is, this feels like something that dropped in from another reality, one in which the boundaries of anime were much broader, its assumptions about what an adult audience might be prepared to digest much less constrictive.
The historical novel in question is Saikaku Ihara's Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko, which documents the sexual escapades of its hero, Yonosuke, from young childhood to old age. The Sensualist, wisely, doesn't try and cram all of that into a 55-minute runtime, opting instead to focus on a particular incident with an older Yonosuke assisting a dim-witted friend who's gambled a particularly precious asset on the possibility of bedding a prostitute so high class that, without Yonosuke's intervention, she wouldn't so much as speak to him. But twining around this, we have a loose overview of Yonosuke's life, conveyed in blocks of text and often abstract scenes, frequently but not always involving human bodies and their interactions, along with images of nature and sometimes of nothing much at all, though there's always just enough cohesion to remind us that, whatever else is going on, this a tale primarily about sex.
I said that The Sensualist seems like the product of another reality, and if that's partly due to the subject matter, it's as much down to the animation, which feels like a simulation of what might have happened had anime blossomed in a Japan that had never experienced industrialisation or Westernisation and had somehow carried the sensibilities of Edo art intact into the modern era. Since we're already dealing with feature-quality animation helmed by a director more familiar with being an art director, The Sensualist was always going to look nice, though by the usual metrics of frame rate and such, we're some way off the top tier. But as a florid, dizzying reproduction of another age through its own art and sensibilities, there's simply nothing like it. The imagery is routinely exquisite, not to mention imaginative almost to the point of obtuseness - there's a particularly memorable shot that gets terribly caught up in geometry for no obvious reason but to great effect - and Keiju Ishikawa's score is almost better, if that's possible, doing its own bit to first reproduce the artistry of a long-bygone age and then ever-so-steadily merging it into the present.
To what end? Well, there we come the tiniest bit unstuck, in that, if you tried to convince me The Sensualist is nothing but exorbitantly pretty soft pornography, I don't know that I could talk you round. It's neat that Abe and his team manage to make their material feel contemporaneous without even slightly sacrificing its historicity, but it doesn't actually do much to elevate a narrative that's fun, funny, erotic, and shaded with a touch of darkness (since we're introduced to a Yonosuke who's well past his prime and hardly glad about the fact) but not in and of itself up to anything very sophisticated. But then, perhaps that's the point: The Sensualist, for all its gorgeousness, for all the superficial glamour of the culture it reproduces, isn't about sophistication, it's about sex, and the many and varied joys of that extreme intimacy, and if it's sometimes a bit overly blunt in getting there, nevertheless you're unlikely to see a more lovely, entrancing, and convincing take on that particular topic.
-oOo-
I'm going to miss these sexy anime specials - which isn't to suggest we're all done with sexy anime, only that the odds of getting four such titles together in the eleven posts we have left seem rather slender. All joking aside, I do think there's often something fascinating about them, since sex is a topic that's at once as universal as anything can be and culturally specific in ways that are often not immediately obvious. It's evident by now that throughout the nineties, certain corners of the industry were experimenting with what they could - and should - get away with, and to what ends, while half a world away, the US market was asking the same questions while also struggling to adapt them to an audience with very different views and tolerances, and I for one find that all quite fascinating.
As this post illustrates, that's not to say the results were always, or often, works of great meaning and genius, but they were routinely good entertainment. And that just occasionally a work like The Sensualist would slip through makes it awfully sad that by the twenty-first century, everyone had mostly concluded that the way to mix sex into their anime was with intrusive, objectifying "fan service" that was as much a genuine way of engaging with the topic as the average action movie is a searing examination of the psychological consequences of violence. Sexy nineties anime, for all your many and varied failings, you made the world a more interesting place, and I for one will mourn your passing.
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