Yasuomi Umetsu and Young Girls with Massive Handguns – This Week in Anime

With new anime Virgin Punk hitting Japanese theaters this week, Coop and Steve break down the past works of its director: Yasuomi Umetsu of Kite and Mezzo Forte fame.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

CONTENT WARNING: This edition of This Week in Anime features a discussion of titles that contain sexual violence, blood and gore, and other potentially upsetting subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.

Full Disclosure: Coop Bicknell regularly works on titles produced by MediaOCD, having provided the back of box copy for Discotek Media‘s recent release of Kite and AnimEigo‘s release of Megazone 23. His opinions given here are purely his own and do not reflect those of his employers.

Kite is streaming on Midnight Pulp. Kite: Liberator is streaming on Tubi and Crunchyroll. Robot Carnival is streaming on Crunchyroll and YouTube. Megazone 23 Part II is streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi. And Yet the Town Moves, Mezzo DSA, and Wizard Barristers are streaming on HIDIVE. Pretty Boy Detective Club is streaming on Crunchyroll. Galilei Donna, New Hurricane Polymar, Mezzo Forte, and Blood-C are not avaiable to stream Stateside.

Steve


Coop, an alarmingly young girl, has been holding a large handgun to my temple during that entire introduction, so I don’t think I’m in any position to refuse your invitation.

Wow, Lynzee is training new executive editors young these days…

Not that I’d want to refuse in the first place! Umetsu is a fascinating and storied artist. He might not be the first anime creator you become aware of, but once you know about him, you can’t help but see him everywhere. At least that’s how it went for me.

The show that first made me aware of Umetsu was Galilei Donna. It’s long gone from streaming, and not at all representative of his usual bag of tricks if I remember right.

Galilei Donna has my interest piqued, mainly because it’s the only Umetsu-helmed work I can recall that doesn’t feature characters he also designed. I see Discotek put out a DVD release of the series quite a while back. A lot of Umetsu’s work has been released by the company before my tenure, except Kite—which I provided back-of-box copy for. Before I explain my first encounter with Umetsu’s body of work, I just wanted to be transparent about that fact.

I have a young girl pointing a massive hand cannon at my head, too!

I find it easier to work under the threat of a headshot. I’d love to rewatch Galilei Donna myself sometime, especially now that I have a better picture of Umetsu as a director. The plot goes to some wild and inexplicable places that kinda lost me the first go around, but who knows, maybe it’ll look different to me as a more seasoned anime connoisseur. Anyway, what was your inaugural Umetsu?

Such is life on the internet, for better or worse. I only knew Kite by reputation myself until recently. In this case, I’d say waiting to watch it paid off, because the aforementioned Discotek Blu-ray is drop-dead gorgeous.

Looks like someone tripped and spilled all his ketchup!

Kite is what I’d call the Umetsu urtext in regards to his predilections towards character design, style, plotting, and sleaze. It’s his gesamtkunstwerk. There’s tons of over-the-top violence and tasteless porn, should you choose to partake, but it’s also moody and engrossing. The shadows alone give it that great neo-noir feel.

You better believe that someone on Virgin Punk‘s production said something to the effect of, “you have one frame to tell the audience that this is from the director of Kite.” All you need are slick character designs, intense action, and a girl with a gun running around. But on the topic of Kite‘s sex scenes, they don’t feel as out of left field as they do on Mezzo Forte. You’re seeing the situation through Oburi’s eyes as Sawa is being assaulted, and it’s intentionally hard to watch. More than anything else, it’s informing the audience of exactly why Sawa wants out and only hammers home the lengths she’s willing to go to escape her abusers. It’s very much a grindhouse or exploitation flick sort of story, but I cheered when Akai finally got his. Either way, I’m glad the Blu-ray gives the viewer options with just how hard they want to go. It’s not pleasant at times.

Having watched the uncut version, I don’t think the sex scenes add a lot to the narrative, and I’m saying that as a sex scene defender. However, they’re most fascinating as vestigial remnants of a business model and art form that don’t exist anymore. Umetsu very candidly admits he came up with Kite as an “all ages” story originally, but got approached by producers looking to sell a hentai OVA. So he made it work. That world is long gone, now.

Not that I think they had to twist Umetsu’s arm to turn it into smut. A few years prior, he contributed character designs and storyboards to an entry in the Cool Devices hentai anthology, and—tell me if you’ve heard this one before—it involves a beautiful young girl getting mixed up with a corrupt cop and the criminal underworld.

You can see those racier elements becoming even more perfunctory in Mezzo Forte as well. The first example in that is an extraneous dream sequence—and the second just swaps out the heroine with a sex robot. I imagine, by the year 2000, both studios and directors were aware that those scenes would often have to be cut for international distribution, so they were made to be modular.
Mezzo Forte generally is a lighter and more comedic romp than Kite, too.

Kite at times feels like watching a tragedy in slow motion. Whereas Mezzo Forte is constantly throwing Three Stooges-type antics at its three lead knuckleheads. Both OVAs complement each other well. And both deliver the Umetsu OVA Guarantee: plenty of blood, bullets, booms, and boobs—often all in the same scene.

“The Umetsu 4B Guarantee” has a nice ring to it.

I give you full permission to use it next time you need to write some Umetsu copy.

Noted! But before we move further down Umetsu’s 4B trajectory, we’d be remiss if we forgot to mention his directorial debut— Robot Carnival‘s Presence segment.

Presence is a wild debut for many reasons. It looks gorgeous, of course, but it also hardly resembles anything he did afterwards.

It ultimately encroaches on psychosexual territory that’s consistent with the path that led him to gunslinging girls, but the way he goes about that here is a bit more cerebral.

It opens on a macabre yet funny spectacle as a group of snot-nosed kids play soccer with an android’s head, but it turns much darker, and does so effectively. Quite a well-directed short—especially for a debut.

Also, not quite as thematically or narratively relevant, but the fabric animation in this is unreal.

It’s not quite as ostentatious in Kite—nobody wears a big lolita dress—but there are nice creases and folds throughout.

While we’re back in the grindhouse, both Kite and Mezzo Forte were graced with follow-ups from Umetsu in the 2000s.

Looking at both of these sequels, Mezzo DSA seems to be a pretty standard TV follow-up riffing on Mikura’s day-to-day outside the film—which, hey, that makes for a fun set-up for a longer series. But then I looked into Kite: Liberator… While it’s cool to see more exploding bullet action, the addition of raging monsters threw me for a loop. Not what I’d expected going into a Kite sequel.

I respect Kite: Liberator more than I enjoy it. That’s a power move, following your iconic OVA about a teen girl assassin with another OVA that is half more of the same, and half a sci-fi B-movie, with the two threads tied together as tenuously as possible.

Doing so allows Umetsu to introduce the concept of an official police squad assigned to the International Space Station, and that’s pretty much the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
They’re really bad at it, too.

I don’t think he will have a face after that, Steve.

That’s the least of his problems, Coop. Meanwhile, the big problem with Kite: Liberator taking such a buckwild tack is that it never takes enough time to develop the stuff on the assassin side. My favorite scene is a conversation between Monaka (the Sawa-type) and her coworker, Mukai. That’s a cool improvement on Kite, giving the heroine another woman to talk and relate to, but that could have gone much further.

Mezzo DSA—the premiere, at any rate—is super fun. Leans even harder into the silliness of the cast and premise, and does so smack dab in the middle of the gun girl anime heyday. Back when titles like Madlax and Gunslinger Girl reigned supreme. A simpler time.

Back in those days when we were fresh out of luck and had to go with her vision.

Exactly.

Mezzo DSA also reminded me that Umetsu is one of the best in the biz when it comes to putting together an awesome and dynamic OP or ED.

I just rewatched the first episode and liked it a lot better than I remembered. I may have to give it another chance, too. I fell off watching the rest of it in 2014, especially after I heard secondhand about all the troubles with the production (which might explain why Umetsu took his time getting back in the director’s chair). Still, the OP is another certified Umetsu banger.

Can I fill the rest of the column just linking to and talking about my favorite Umetsu OPs? Have you seen And Yet the Town Moves recently? If not, now you have:


Blood-C‘s opening comes to mind too—talk about an intro that pumps you up for what you’re about to watch.

Galilei Donna‘s OP is also, to my recollection, the best part about the show. Song is a bop, and the OP is an impressively holistic accompaniment.


Umetsu gets so much mileage out of circles as the visual anchor for the whole thing.

When Galileo enters the conversation, how could you not?

Pretty Boy Detective Club OP is an unequivocal triumph—infectious to every degree.

These wonderful OPs also serve to show that even if he’s not working on a big project, Umetsu’s always popping in here and there to do a little key animation. Take a look at his ANN encyclopedia page—he keeps himself busy.

Once you recognize the guy, you will see him everywhere. It’s almost guaranteed he’s in the credits of at least one of your favorite anime, and he’s no stranger to high and low art alike. While his track record isn’t impeccable, I have yet to see him make something utterly unremarkable, so I’m excited to see if Virgin Punk is a return to form or something much stranger and more fraught. I’d consider it a win either way.

Same, I’m jazzed to see Umetsu lock-and-load for another intense action project. Even more so as it seems like he’s approaching Virgin Punk on his terms rather than a mandate to do “more Kite.” I have a feeling that he’s got way more in the tank than he’s letting on. Like you said, whether it rocks my socks off or isn’t my cup of tea, at least we’ll know that it probably won’t be boring.

At least we know it’ll be better than the live-action Kite, which has the distinction of using the fakest movie poster I’ve ever seen.

Thank god.