Anime Review :: Key the Metal Idol

Director :: Hiroaki Sato
Language :: English Dub
Runtime :: 15 Episodes (13x30 min. 2x90 min)
Genre :: Drama. Sci-Fi. Cyberpunk.

A truly great short anime series is the kind of thing you can bang out on a Sunday afternoon. It'll start with lunch and poppin' on a new title and before you realize it the final credits are rolling, it's dark outside, and you can't believe how quickly the day's gone by. I can remember sitting totally lost in the beautiful world of Kino's Journey or laying in bed with a cold but still enchanted by the whimsy of Jing: King of the Bandits. However, it seems like an entire lifetime has gone by in the time it's taken me to painstakingly drag myself through Key The Metal Idol. In fact, in some ways it has...

Since I first stepped into the world of Key, my dad's passed away, I've moved, and my best friend has gotten married. Albeit that those things just happened to all taken place over the span of a month, it really does feel like a significant amount of time has passed since I was first introduced to the little robot girl who spoke exclusively in the third person on her quest to become human.

In the first installment of Key, the leading robo-lady's grandfather passes away and in his final message to her he reveals that she only has a short time left on this world before her battery runs dry, but there is a way for Key to go on. If she can make 30,000 friends, Key can become a real girl. Upon learning the rules of the world I'd entered into, I sat at my computer with a gob struck look on my face and could only muster up a quiet "oh god" as I realized the fate I was doomed to for the next nine anime-hours of my life.

I can remember the first day I excitedly started the series just to realize that, what seemed like hours later, I'd actually only watched three episodes. I can also recall the joyous feeling I got when I assumed I was nearing the end only to find that I had completed a mere eight episodes. Now, I may be painting a grim picture of the series and it's not completely without some decent qualities. The world itself is inventive at times and the villain is a right dick who's well constructed and pretty haunting, and if you can stomach the pop idol worshiping nonsense that story itself isn't terrible, but the pacing. My god, the pacing.

The thing that takes what could have been a cute little robot-girl-Pinocchio story into such a grueling task is the fact that there's very little cause for what's happening on screen the majority of the time. What one minute seems like establishment of character relationships the next winds up irrelevant. Development often happens only to then be undone or explained away as a fluke as the cast are randomly exploded, ripped to shreds, or simply vanish into the scenery. (Not that the series is particularly violent, but when they time is right, Key does like to go for the gusto.)

There's also the assault of very annoying quirks peppered throughout like Key's third-person speak and meanwhile-back-at-evil-headquarters cutaways that rarely make sense or serve a purpose other than to establish "yeah, these guys are jerks."

The most exciting episode, ironically, is the first feature-length one, "System" wherein two of the characters (one from the good camp and one from the baddies) deliver simultaneous monologues explaining all the story that the series had yet to bother with before the final confrontation. That might sound like an exaggeration, but I'm not kidding, the entire episode takes place in a park and the aforementioned evil headquarters. No development. No action. Nothin'. Just a conversation and a soliloquy. And, yes, it really is the best 90 minutes of the entire series. Mostly because after all that work making it to that point, you're finally rewarded with a glue-and-duct-tape together explanation of why everything you saw over the last seven hours mattered in any way. The final episode is the inevitable showdown at "the big concert" ...not to give too much away.



The decision to end with two feature-length mini-movies is something that I'd have loved were Key a more enjoyable experience. I can't imagine how fun it would have been to have FLCL or either season of Black Lagoon end with a couple of movies that close the story arc (as opposed to the usual anime move of tossing in an out-of-sequence unrelated movie at the end. ...I'm lookin' at you Cowboy Bebop.)

Despite coming together fairly well in the end and certainly not being the worst thing I've seen (or rated for Oh Tetsuo) I can't in good conscious recommend anyone go dig up this series simply for the sheer amount of time and will-power it takes to plow through.

Anime Review :: Battle Angel [1993]

My next incoming review for Oh,Tetsuo! was (well, and still hopefully is) Key The Metal Idol. A sort of bygone cyber relic that passed me by growing up that I just never really got around to finally watching. By the fifth episode, however, when the lead character had said her name (spoilers: it’s "Key") in the third person at least six hundred times and I was treated two and a half hours of wasted conversations about pop stars with no tangible plot development outside of the absurd premise, my patients were wearing thin. I decided to take a quit trip back (and thankfully a short one at that) to one of my absolute favorite little pieces of cyberpunk bloodbath goodness, just to make sure I haven’t lost my mind. I mean, afterall, maybe I’ve been so spoiled by the slicker animation, better voice work, and cohesive plots of modern anime that I’ve just lost all love for the murderous robo-girls of the 1990’s.

Battle Angel [OVA] [1993]
Director - Hiroshi Fukutomi
Language – English Dub
Runtime – 70 Minutes
Genre – Action. Drama. Cyberpunk.

For those unfamiliar, Battle Angel is a two-part OVA based on a manga series titled Gunnm, and… I’m not going to go into the details of the story in its entirety. Not for lack of wanting to, in fact the more copy I put in this post, the more fantastic artwork from the series I get to post along with it. No, it’s just that trying to explain Gunnm to explain the Battle Angel OVA is sort of like trying to catch someone up on the entire history of the X-Men books to get them ready to see the movie. It’s unnecessary, the world the story takes place in gets explained away about five minutes into the film, and knowing about the period that Marrow was an X-Man or the brief but important story of Maggot doesn’t really enrich the experience of watching Hugh Jackman say “bub.”

Like the slew of recent Marvel movies, Battle Angel is a film adaptation in the strongest possible terms.

So we've covered that it's good hatin’ material for purists, let's get down to business (see, blah blah blah, and I get to put more artwork in.)

While scavenging through a dump for parts on the outskirts of Scrap Iron City, cyberphysician Daisuke Ido comes across the shredded remains of a cyborg body that is miraculously still alive. Ido takes it home and transfers the still living… aspect of it into a new cyborg body and names her Gally. (It’s never really covered in the anime whether it’s her brain or ghost or whatever sci-fi philosophy we’re actually dealing with that’s “still alive”)

Within no time (no, seriously, we’re talkin’ about 5 seconds of screen time) Gally is up and about being chipper and charming and taking an interest in Yugo, a young lad who does maintenance work for Ido. He takes little interested though, as he’s far more concerned with one day making enough money to go to the majestic floating city of Zalem that hangs over the slums of Scrap Iron City. A place it’s soon made clear that Ido himself and his colleague Chiren were once residents of, and a place that Chiren herself too has designs on getting back to by any means necessary.

Another abrupt jump-cut later Ido, who’s already managed to be quite a mysterious character in a scant 10 minutes, is spotted sneaking out at night by Gally who tails him to find out that he’s secretly a bounty hunter, and, seemingly not all that great of one at that. Luckily, in the midst of a foiled attempt to stop a murder, Ido himself is saved by Gally who, as luck would have it, is a ruby-eyed murder machine. Gally herself takes up the cause after finding out about her new abilities …and the fun begins. As, aside from trying to recover the lost memories of her past, she just… REALLY loves killin’

From there heartstrings are tugged at, clusterfucks are developed, hope is squeezed out of you, and heads are torn off. But hey, it wouldn’t be fun for you if I told you the ending.


It’s hard to properly rate Battle Angel.

The artwork is magnificent, and Gally is one of the most likeable… murderous robot girls in the history of anime (marvelously voiced by Larissa Murray(?), I might add, although, I can’t tell if that’s the proper ADV credit or the notoriously awful UK/Aus release Viz had. Blame IMDB.) The action is stunningly choreographed and the story has far more feel than the usual hack-and-slash fodder. Imagine everything good you’ve ever read about Kite. It’s like all of that except actually good.

A wonderful juxtaposition of the struggles of heaven and hell on earth.
…but also a short and sometimes sloppy one.

For all the ungodly drab series that were treated to at least 12 episodes it seems almost criminal that Battle Angel was doomed to be shorter than a feature film, and, because of that, choked a little and not allowed to grow naturally with heavy reliance of abrupt jump-cuts and a few too many monologs that explain away the plot.

Sort of a random reach into the vault, and definitely 15+ as far as the kids go (three boobs and some occasional on-screen gore), but while it’s got quite its fair share of flaws, it’s most certainly a mini-classic by cyberpunk standards.








Not that I’d ever endorse torrents, especially of material who’s American copyrights are owned by the mighty ADV, but, ya know, there maaaay or may not be a dual audio copy floating around on Demonoid.

…just sayin’.

Anime Review :: Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Director - Kenji Kamiyama
Language – English Dub
Run – 26 Episodes [2002-2003]
Genre – Cyberpunk. Boobs & Guns. WHOA-BOTS!

Being a huge fan of the original film from my day's as a young lad, I was reluctant to dive into what initially stuck me Ghost In The Shell: The Animated Series. I'd caught a handful of episodes on Adult Swim in random spurts and, without giving it a fair shake, came to the conclusion that I was about ankle deep into "blah blah spandex, blah blah techno, blah blah shooting shit" waters.

Years of really well produced family-oriented anime films trumping most anything action-based mixed with a really horrendous Armitage III sequel had hardened my heart to the "bullets and bitches" genre, but after the drudgery of sitting through the uncut versions of both Kite and Mezzo Forte, I figured if anyone was going to be able to single-handedly redeem how I feel about skin-tight body suits and gunfire, it was going to be Major Motoko Kusanagi.

Now for those familiar with the 1995 classic, but relatively unaware of (or disinterested in) the series, the stories take place around the same characters but in alternate continuities, and the story is a little more slick and ready-to-digest for public consumption. It is, for all intents, a pretty straight-forward crime-drama set in the same future as the original film. So, the setting itself gives Stand Alone Complex a bit of a leg up on it's often banal competition.

To clue you in on it's particularly grim (and pretty awesome) vision of the future would really require more space than is befitting a review so I'll link some supplementary information at the bottom on the philosophy of Ghost, but the gist is basically that your soul connects directly to the internet.

Stand Alone Complex (season 1, commonly referred to as "First Gig") follows the exploits of Public Security Section 9, an intelligence agency headed up by Daisuke Aramaki, a delightful and sly old man with a ridiculous haircut. It's key members: "The Major" Motoko Kusanagi, our building-jumping, fully-prosthetic lead lady; Batou, Section 9's meat-faced lead investigator; and Togusa, an all natural ex-police detective. Section 9 also involves a handful of others who get less than ten-or-so lines the entire first season, sooo we'll skip them for now.

The story-arc of the season follows the squad's investigation into a case from six years prior known as "The Laughing Man Incident" after a strange sequence of events and new information.

Despite some unpleasantness along the way (The Major's absolutely fucking ludicrous thong-unitard/leather jacket combo and the awful closing theme song immediately jump to mind) Stand Alone Complex makes for a fun and occasionally gripping ride. There's a bundle of story twists, wonderfully choreographed action, and some much needed comic relief provided by some delightful little blue robots called Tachikoma.

While The Laughing Man story arc gets a little too convoluted at times, and the season spends a little too much time trying to establish the boundaries of it's universe rather than just existing in it and forcing the audience to keep up the pace, Stand Alone Complex still not only puts most other "boobs and guns" anime series to shame (not a hard task,) it manages to keep it's pace over a full-length season and captures the imagination like you'd never expect.

Foibles aplenty, what makes Stand Alone Complex recommended reading though is where it goes next

Ah yes. ...a cliffhanger review.




Extra Reading:
Wiki: The Philosophy of Ghost in the Shell