And yes, I'm sharing. Today our awful Japan-cartoon is the 1989 OVA Blue Flames, based on Kimio Yanagisawa's original manga. It's the poorly animated story of a teenage sociopath who aims to make it to the top!! in Tokyo and bore the shit out of the viewer in the process.
This show comes from something of a subgenre: OVAs made out of long-running manga series that are essentially animated highlight reels of a certain part of the manga. These are by nature fans-only endeavors: usually with these things, you have to have read the manga to really get what's going on. Even so, I think I can safely say that the Blue Flames manga was a pile of shit. Let's get started, shall we?
Here's that protagonist, Ryuichi Kaizu. Kaizu's sole personality trait is that he's a dick. His hobby is manipulating women. The basic plot of Blue Flames repeats itself over and over again: Kaizu fucks some chick, and then he fucks her over. Intermittently a rival male character appears, and he easily proves his manliness against them. That's really about all that's going on in this show: the cycle takes about ten minutes and the show is just under 50 minutes long. There's no tension, no character, and no reason to care about anything going on onscreen. It's unbelievable in the bad way, and it gets boring real fast.
It's established immediately via exposition that because of his astounding sexual prowess, Kaizu can make any woman do anything he wants within about two seconds of his meeting her. If they say no, all he has to do is force himself on them anyway. Once he's in, you see, they're so desperate for more that they'll do whatever he says from there on in. We have to assume that his dick was built with magic by God or something because plentiful softcore sex scenes are all just this dude humping away tiredly with the exact same expression on his face every time. It's Golgo 13 sex, and in fact, if you cut out every part of Golgo 13 but the sex scenes, I'd say you'd get this show. The only time he really takes any pleasure in the act is when he's thinking of a girl who tried to kill herself because he made her rich family pay him to break up with her.
That's it. I just watched this show for you and it blows. I hate to put the thing down, because this it's exactly the kind of obscure work that I wish I could see fansubbers dig up more often. I really hope I see Anime Classic Reviews dig up more stuff like this. I mean, stuff like this, except good. And there's the whole thing. Bad is bad, even if it's from nearly twenty years ago and you've never heard of it before. The moment I discovered this existed was exciting, of course, but then I watched it. And it was terrible. If anybody ever tells you that either 80's anime or manly anime or manly 80's anime are infallible, just show them this, and set the record straight: in any age, there is still crap.
Best character design ever.
Posted by: wildarmsheero | November 23, 2007 at 10:56 PM