by Jaime Grijalba.
Last week, monsieur Bob Clark had for you an essay-review on one of the Tetsuro Amino’s most famous OVA, ‘Starship Troopers’, which you can check out here, and it was splendid, just as monsieur Clark has us used to: splendid writing and giving some light into unknown anime and directors. Now, for complete unrelated reasons, I finished about the same time another OVA from the same director, and monsieur Clark asked me to do something about it, and here I am, writing for Saturday Anime once again, talking to you about the latest anime I’ve seen: ‘Jewel BEM Hunter Lime’ (1996), directed by Tetsuro and written by Kenichiro Nakamura. Now, before delving in into the matters of plot and artistic evaluation, I have to explain why I decided to watch this first. Well, it’s a kind of a strange story, but at my personal blog (which you can enter by clicking my name up above) I’m visiting some PlayStation videogames from its first releases, and one of the games was called ‘Houma Hunter Lime Special Collection Vol. 1’, which follows a similar if not entirely identical plot of this OVA (in fact, I’m not entirely sure of what came first, but they must’ve been around at the same time), but with the only difference that it has no subtitles whatsoever, making it difficult to understand, so I decided to watch the OVA (which did have subtitles). At the end of the day, it didn’t matter, the game was unplayable, even after I watched the episodes, and my frustration can be read here.
So, moving along. This OVA is part of the group of ‘failed series’ that usually come out from time to time. They are a certain amount of episodes that establish a narrative, but didn’t have the aprooval from a network to become full fledged, so we get three episodes that follow a plot and certain structure that repeats from episode to episode. It feels as if it had about 13 episodes, but suddenly it finishes at number 3, without any sort of rushed closure or epilogue of some sort, it just ends with the quest unfinished and with smiles from all the characters, as if their adventures would go on forever through seasons and seasons of television, emerging as one of the cult favorite animes of all time… but no, someone didn’t think it was good enough, so it was cancelled, and to avoid all the money loss due to producing, writing, drawing, coloring and animating three full 27 (or so) minute episodes, they released it on VHS (and later DVD) for the niche audience that would be interested in this strange yet magical plot. But please, as you read along, stay with me, the plot may feel clichéd as hell, and it’d make no sense to see it for yourself (and I don’t think this is a must-see for everyone, just for anime enthusiasts), but just wait, because this has a purpose… I think.
It’s a wasteland, a magical wasteland, as we see two demons fly through a red sky chasing each other, fighting over a box full of magical orbs. Following the chase, there’s Lime, an angel-like female creature that always uses sexy costumes and almost no clothes, ranging from being a playboy bunny, a nurse, a schoolgirl… can you say Fan Service? Anyway, the demon friend of Lime, Bass, defeats the other demon as they trespass the moon portal that opens once a month that leads to our world, but at the same time the chest breaks open and the orbs spread through a city of Japan, and they must collect all of them before a month goes by, and the portal opens again, and they can come back to their beautiful red wasteland of magical orbs. The thing is that the orbs are full of power, and can turn anything in contact with it into an evil creature or monster that will cause as much damage between humans as it can, using the grudge they have against it. So, let me run this again fast: a demon and an angel must look for a bunch of orbs of inmense magical power that tend to attach to things that have a grudge against mankind, hence turning into vicious and vile monsters. Now, here I have a picture of one of them:
A monster.
As you can guess this moves away pretty quickly from its action packed prologue into a more comedy, and slowly building up into a raunch fest, with a lot of sex jokes and the almost nudity that characterizes some of the most hated parts of anime in some fanatic communities, but hey, people seem to love it, so give it to them. What’s interesting about the series and the adventures of Lime and Bass, is that they encounter one creature per episode and its their quest to know what the creature is and retrieve the orb from inside of it, but the creatures are common objects from human everyday activities that have been left out for more modern things. So, for example, the three monsters that we were allowed to see in these episodes were: an evil candle that sucks electricity out of the streets and converts people into wax, a change purse that finds out he has to do evil now that he’s a monster so he decides to steal female underwear (but when we find him, he only wants to have coins inside him once again), and an evil vaccine that has mixed a chemical that will hurt and almost kill everyone that has a shot at it (the reason for doing that is obscure, but it has to do with the abuse of chemicals… but I guess it’s just an excuse to see girls in nurse outfits, specially Lime). It’s nice to see how every episode starts with a teaser of what the episode is going to be about, or what’s getting criticized, as in the change purse episode, in which we see a lot of people using their credit cards to buy stuff at different places, it’s nice to see some thought put into the whole structure.
Now, this is like Anime 101 and at the same time just as if the director got paid by a fan-based company to make an anime series, but it fell through. I mean, the tropes are there, and most of the cliches of the oversexualized characters, the school, the gym, the strange female character who seems to be in love with everyone due to her forever smile, the mighty woman with a hammer (Lime), transformation sequences (just like in Sailor Moon, with glimpses of nudity included), flying sequences with huge halos around (like in Dragon Ball Z), the merchandise grabber [Puggy, a yellow ball that only says his name (like a Pokemon) that turns into anything Lime wants], what I’m trying to get through here is that the characters are cliched, the situations are predictable, and you can see miles away what’s going to happen, but when it’s as good animated and colored as this, you don’t really care, and expect that the bunch of new jokes that come across with each situation is good, and in this case, many of them are really good, laughing out loud quality. I think that this might’ve been a good anime cult series if it jumped forward and went full parody on the anime tropes, a chance that was missed, but was fully developed by a guy nicknamed ‘Egoraptor’, who made a series of flash animations called ‘Girlchan in Paradise’ that are just hilarious.
So, who I’d recommend this to? To two kind of people actually: those who are beginning their journey into the realms of anime and want a peek into what’s the worst tropes in the industry but with some clever twists and jokes, making it passable; and for those who are fanatics that can laugh at a simpleminded product like this and still find some values in the three creatures and their motivations, which are really the most original part of the whole thing. And the opening is good:
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Writers/Founders
After watching some of the first episode online, I can say two things– first, it’s too bad it didn’t go to series, as despite being a fairly generic-seeming combination of various anime-tropes, it has a rather cute, entertaining spirit about it; second, that it really shows how much anime depends on the workhorse journeymen directors like Amino. He’s a talented guy, as “Starship Troopers” proves, but often enough his efforts seem to be pushed into adapting previous works for animation in a rather commercial set, not too different from the old auteurs banging it out in the studio-system (though, say, if guys like Ray and Lang had only ever been tasked to direct sequels, rather than originals). Looking into th game it’s based in, it’s clear that he had to work around the previously set designs and story, in what already amounted to an interactive anime, so you see his style less here than in the Heinlen adaptation, or his “Iria” OVA, which in a weird way managed to supplant the popularity of the property it was based on (anybody else ever heard of “Zeiram”, the live action movies?). But there’s a very nice pacing to this show, and it shows his discipline. Like Rintaro, he’s one of the overlooked professionals of anime.
Jaime, It’s truly a beautifully-written and exceedingly informed essay in a genre that you have consistently examined with verve and passion. Sadly (again) I am unable to add much of value, since I haven’t seen this. It’s encouraging though that you admit it’s a good starting point for a more commited examination of anime.
“Starship Troopers” is a good place to start, with Amino. I do think his work on “Iria” is stronger, but the Heinlen adaptation has a nice, big recognizable context for Western audiences, especially American sci-fi devotees. There’s also his “Macross 7” series, and the more recent “Broken Blade” movies, both of which I’m planning to track down in good, non-streaming versions, if possible.