Director: Tsutomu Mizushima
Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima
Based on a light novel by Masaki
Okayu
(Voice) Cast: Reiko Takagi as
Sakura Kusakabe; Saeko Chiba as Dokuro-chan; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki
Minagami; Rie Kugimiya as Sabato-chan; Akeno Watanabe as Zakuro-chan; Atsushi
Imaruoka as Umezawa; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Daisuke Kirii as
Seargent/Zamuza; Fumitoshi Miyajima as Nishida; Reiko Takagi as Minami-san
"It can't be helped that the class representative has been turned
into a monkey, so Dokuro-chan may sit next to Sakura-kun."
Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, to use its full name, could be seen
as a true stereotype of anime. A young teen male has a guiding angel, a cute
girl, protecting over him, with wacky sex comedy hijinks ensuring. Even if a
parody of these tropes, it might prove an eyebrow rising take on them for an
outsider to the medium, so this title does come with a caveat that it is an
acquired taste. However, considering immediately into the first episode she
kills her charge with her giant spiked club the first moment she is introduced,
caught getting changed in his room, only to resurrect him as she will do at
least two more times that same episode, we are dealing with something more openly
twisted in its humour than other anime parodies or sex comedies. It really
works as a parody for people who have actually seen anime tropes it is
parodying, but as much of my interest in this straight-to-video production,
whilst slight in length is seeing it take the stereotypical love-hate romantic
relationship found in many stories, not just animated, and take it seriously
whilst with its macabre sense of humour, as if there could have been a version
of this with a regular of romantic comedies, Jennifer Aniston, could constantly
bash her love interest's brains out everywhere only to oops, resurrect and
apologise for this over and over.
The story of this production, and
this theme of love even if the female lead will kill the lead, is also as much
to do with its director Tsutomu Mizushima
for me, who I fully believe has always approached his career as an animation
director with a macabre sense of humour, which is more implicit as he is the
screenwriter for this two series straight-to-video production too rather than
just their director, adding a greater connection potentially to the material. Mizushima has fascinated me for a while.
Arguably, as much of this may be for the wrong reasons, as his stints in horror
after Dokuro-Chan have been divisive
to say the least. This is where the question of what is intentional or not gets
confusing, but also compelling, as there is a title like Another (2010), a supernatural mystery series, which violently
contrasts its serious tone with over-the-top deaths that you could call
comedic, such as the first being an unfortunate encounter with an umbrella and
a staircase. The Lost Village (2016)
really comes in as the production which raises this concern. With its main
composition by the acclaimed screenwriter Mari
Okada, a huge figure in anime, let alone a significant and prolific female
screenwriter in the industry, who has even directed a theatrical work named Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
(2018), it was a very divisive television series, one which many would
argue was terrible, but has been argued to have been a satire of the genre
which took people by surprise. Between a character who has forever stayed with
me and could have been a character here in Dokuro-Chan,
Lovepon, a young woman even a tragic back story whose obsession with execution
becomes delightfully absurd, and material that even for horror would be balked
at, like a giant monstrous silicon breast implant, it emphasised the really
unpredictable nature of the director
Mizushima.
Because of how many tangents
there are in his career, I have always been wary of dismissive some of these
projects even if they were failures. Even for the work of his that is more
wholesome, like the Girls und Panzer franchise1,
Tsutomu Mizushima has also had a
streak of misanthropy found in his career, especially in the comedies from his
earlier productions in the straight-to-video format. These are the points,
including how gory he could get with his horror work to a hyper-exaggerated form,
which raised this question of deliberateness for me as an anime fan. An obscure
set of shorts less than thirty minutes long for online viewing, Plastic Neesan (2011), is an absurdist
comedy about a group of model making schoolgirls which never got to model
making, and was instead about characters who could be really spiteful or just
weird. There was also Magical Witch
Punie-chan (2006-7), which envisioned a magical girl if she was the evil
despot heir of a magical kingdom, an inspired and dark premise which went as far
as a comedy as having her cute animal mascot as an indentured slave constantly
trying to murder her. The infamous one of this trio is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan itself, as whilst the USA also got Magical Witch Punie-chan, Dokuro-Chan was the one which gained a wider attention when it was
released in the United States by Media
Blasters back in the day, a straight-to-video work which is brazen with its
tone despite juxtaposing it against its fluffy presentation.
This, including its source
material, a light novel series, is clearly a parody of a couple of works. Ah My Goddess, originally started as a
1988-2014 manga by Kōsuke Fujishima,
was about a young man who accidentally summons a titular goddess to his world
as a new roommate; famously, as nodded to in a joke here, is Rumiko Takahashi‘s Urusei Yatsura, a legendary manga (including its animated
adaptations) where a young teen male finds himself with a female alien named
Lum living with him on Earth. Dokuro-Chan herself is an angel from the future
with a halo and a giant spiked kanabō club called Excalibolg, which she can use to both resurrect the dead
unscathed as well as splatter a torso into chunks with one swing. The tone of
the straight-to-video series, and why it may raise an eyebrow from anime fans
as much as non-anime viewers, is that the initial set-up is legitimately
twisted despite most of the story in these episodic episodes being more a sex
comedy in the traditional sense from anime. In context to the fan base, even
some of the lewder jokes are normal, but the cutesy tone occasionally gives way
to jokes which with hindsight are quite transgressive, softened yet
paradoxically heightened by the tone.
Dokuro-Chan was originally
assigned to the past to bump off the male lead, the young teenager Sakura
Kusakabe, as he was foretold to accidentally defy God by giving people
immortality despite being the typical horny male lead, one whose hormones make
it impossible to get past a girl he takes interest in without embarrassment.
Where the joke might be more shocking nowadays, casually used as part of the
humour, is that for the price of immortality, it meant finding immortality by
accident by permanently stunting women from growing biologically from twelve
years old. With very casual jokes of people calling Sakura a paedophile much to
his horror, it never gets any further in terms of transgression, but is
causally brought up to torment him quite a few times and emphasises that,
whilst portrayed as a light hearted comedy, this is for the first
"season", not conventional in episode number or length, it taps
occasionally on bleaker humour whether it has all aged well or not multiple
times. This is the kind of joke that occasionally appears within this, which
means I would not recommend this series for most. It also falls back into a
type of sex comedy which is common in Japanese animation, including a potential
issue for anyone outside anime fandom that many sex comedies involve teen leads
in general, as here, that will also not be for everyone either. A lot of this
in this case, as per the genre's tropes, is usually the gag of embarrassment
and the male lead being tormented for a mistaken comment or being in the wrong
place of mind (or actual location) at the wrong time, and ending up being
called a pervert, which is not for everyone even for anime fans. That idea of
male sexual neurosis, whether intentional or not, is found in a lot of anime,
and befits this story with hindsight. The difference here is that this has an
outlier tone which affects this too, that a lot of it is very light and fluffy
sex comedy, with the bright colours and tone of early 2000s anime, but
contrasted by the twists of dark humour. The most prominent is that, even if
played for light hearted chuckles in tone, we will be seeing a lot of Sakura’s
intestines and guts being split over and over, lovingly animated in his
repeated dismemberment by Dokuro.
The tone is perfectly set up in
the opening credits song, redone with newer lyrics for the second set of
episodes released in 2007, a charming ditty from Dokuro's perspective where
even if she will maim, disembowel and mutilate her crush, it is out of pure
love, infectious and completely setting up the cutesy misanthropic tone. Dokuro-Chan does not play safe with its
humour when it wants to, its eight fifteen minute episodes for the first series
placing itself in regular slapstick with added gory violence, and deeply weird
one-off gags which are strange with clear knowledge that is the intended
result. Dokuro decides, rather than kill him as assigned, that she will try to
change Sakura whilst becoming smitten with him, but that this pretext is more
that he is stuck with an impulsive id of an angel who likes him but also
indulges her pure obsessions whether beneficial for him or not. Sakura will die
a lot at her hands and the Excalibolg despite the initial promise to protect
and change him, usually because of her reactions to his lewdness (or
accidentally seeing her undressed), or even trying to get a mosquito off him at
one point with the club. It is to the point permanent psychological trauma is
likely from the many deaths and resurrections he has had. The lack of consequence, or anyone else
reacting badly to this even among his classmates, who at times do witness this
carnage, is part of the joke, even if eventually there is the current that he
is crushing on her despite being attracted more to other classmates.
The resulting work for the first
"series", eight fifteen minute episodes compiled into four full ones,
is to be honest one you would not show a person if they are new to anime unless
you knew their sense of humour or taste in the perverse was strong. A lot of it
inherently would baffle or even make someone uncomfortable, particularly many
of the sex gag are about near nudity or perceived sexual innuendo with its teen
cast, despite never showing anything actually explicit unlike some sex comedies
have. It is the kind of work, out of context, which supports all the clichés
that give anime a bad name, and one has to remember that Reiko Takagi, who voices Sakura, is actually an adult voice actress
who however manages to make Sakura sound like he is actually voiced by a young
teen boy, one who will be battered and smashed into chunks of meat repeatedly
by Dokuro. Within context however, the really misanthropic humour actually
softens the discomfort and a lot of it feels like it is playing up to clichés
only to twist the knife into them. Dokuro is the lovable heroine if you can get
into her headspace. Alongside the cliché of the female lead beating up the male
lead for a perceived (even accidental) slight of perverseness being taken to an
extreme, she is very much an anti-heroine, someone who can destroy for the sake
of it, as much as lovable in her earnestness for Sakura and her growing crush
for him.
It is, however, a relationship
has its difficulties, whenever she will eventually even say very random and
illogically things, and is suggested to have tortured a teacher to start a club
entirely devoted to the sport of watching woodwork glue dry. In the wrong frame
of mind, these characters including Sakura may put you off, but the clichés
they are as characters meant to be add to the dark humour. Such as the fact,
when his class is informed he will eventually cause the entire female gender to
be stuck at the age of twelve, they do not defend him in the slightest, and
were already going to beat him up or ostracise him beforehand. The sole
exception is Shizuki, whose crush on him is countered by his to her, undercut
by Dokuro blundering through, and their own chemistry as the leads who clearly
have fondness for each other, playing to the cliché of a love triangle with
actual seriousness. This does emphasis, at the end of the day, this was always
going to play in the source as a conventional teen romantic comedy, but that
the set-up is deeply surreal. Then there is another angel (with horns) called Sabato,
who with an electric cattle prod powerful enough to kill a sperm whale is there
to murder Sakura but you feel sorry for, as the joke is how to torment her over
and over, forced to live in the streets, and under a bridge cold and miserable,
to the point the end credits song is from her perspective as she is miserable
and cold.
All these characters exhibit the
tropes of their archetypes - Sakura is the typical "potato-kun"
generic male lead, a term I am using from online slag as many male protagonists
have a passiveness with a sense of being stand-ins for viewers, to the point
they have the danger of being blander than a raw potato, contrasted by fighting
against his puberty badly as a teenager whilst trying to be a good person.
Dokuro is mostly depicted as a bright, light voiced ditz who happens to have a
giant spiked club. The clichés of some anime and manga, the sex comedy, is
contrasted by the hyper violence or the perverseness of some of the gags, even
cruder ones like the fact that, in this series' dogma, if you remove an angel's
halo (as razor sharp as a sword) it causes one to have continuous and life
draining diarrhoea. For all its crassness, there are moments which are
deliciously peculiar. Surreal anime comedy is distinct from surreal comedy in
other mediums and other animation from other countries, and a production will
win me over if it manages to use its visual style, the writing and/or pure
strange ideas to least get a memorable highlight or two. No series, in one
episode, is just dumb when it inexplicably references Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis,
only with the protagonist Gregor Samsa waking up to discover, in a surreal
dreamscape of a bedroom, he has grown a bug in terms of morning wood with the
sexual anxiety metaphor apt for Kafka,
as well as be a good joke when half of these sex comedies in anime, as alluded
too, do end up being the existential nightmares of teen males when they reach
and pass puberty.
There is, even for a work which clearly
does not have a high budget, also moments of real experimentation too. The
class rep, in the first episode when Dokuro is introduced to class as a
student, is turned into a monkey, with a real stock image of a howler monkey
used for his head in jerky stop motion. It is a joke paid off in further
episodes on when she turns someone into a dog, or when the second series, just
four more additional episodes, there is now a giraffe and a few others in their
class from incidents we do not see. Little oddball flourishes, such as cutting
to two wild bears looking nervously briefly watching at the carnage of Dokuro
playing on Sakura in a river (with sweat drops signifiers for this), show even
if the humour is crude and playing to vulgarity at times, it does so with a
wink. Even those cruder jokes are helped by one of the huge advantages
animation has, that you can exaggerate to an extreme, make even your female
characters, no matter how cute and colourful, distort and even look corpse-like
when the halos are unfortunately removed, including the strength of the voice
performances from the cast.
This explains so much about its
director Tsutomu Mizushima for me,
even if all his productions are animation made by staffs of various
collaborators. Working in comedy greatly, he likes broad and heightened
extremes. When this applies to horror, even a goreless work like The Lost Village, the exaggeration is
there and a dichotomy can arise in what was intentional or not with any work I
will see of his in what was a success, what was not, and what was deliberately
done as a joke or deliberately cutting the legs under expectations. Certainly
as well, he does eventually lean further to absurd comedy through the first
season, something to bear in mind even if still with the twisted logic of the
original premise. The one crux for this production thought is that, for better
and for worse, whilst this does have an ending in the first season, it really
does not conclude the story. How you would conclude this premise I have no
idea, and it would be compelling to know how the source material did so. Two
years later, a sequel of four episodes (leading up to an hour's length) was created.
It is, in honesty, bonus material. Set after the first series, with new
characters fully introduced like Zakuro, Dokuro's nine year old sister who is
yet in voice and appearance like an older sibling remotely not of that age, it
is more a series of one-off scenarios with the cast even next to the first
season, which was a set of one-off stories itself like Sakura being invited to
the cinema by Shizuki on a date. Like the original, it is bright and cheerful
in a good way in terms of appearance, but there is also clearly a sense of the
series moving more to its sex comedy, lightly humoured tone than the first
series, jettisoning most of the more twisted jokes entirely.
The first series had some weirder
jokes, like explicitly referencing North Korea multiple times, and whilst the
second series has its moments, including Dokuro trying to get Sakura is eat
living chocolate versions of himself for Valentine's Day, there is a clear
change in tone even if aspects, like dismembering Sakura at least once per episode,
remain. One of the things which does
work in those later episodes favour is that they just emphasis some of the
weird jokes from the first season, which feel weird even in context then from
cultural differences, and let them be expanded upon. The entirety of the
“Sensitive Salaryman” running joke grows thanks to these two series, a one off
gag about a TV series (with a film spin-off) starring a man who emotionally and
physically cannot live a day without his body riddled in hyper-sensation; I
still do not get the joke in its full meaning, and the figure really only crops
up in the background as a TV series character who got a film adaptation, but it
works as a strange gag. More as it allows as well the multiple times the tie-in
“Sensitive Sausage” branded food to be unfortunately in Sakura’s vicinity for
ingestion for the second season, a tie-in probably requiring health warnings
unless you want to be curled up in the foetal position with your body writhing
in hyper-sensitivity, and hear that melancholic moaning that cues up in the
score when the salaryman is evoked, which is what ultimately made the joke
funny for me. And this feels deeply weird on purpose for any audience
regardless of their native language and culture, and is one of the moments
where the second series does have highlights to appreciate. For the most part,
it feels like bonus material in the truest sense.
The original, even if the sequel
still has Sakura being smashed to bits by Dokuro constantly, is in itself
enough, especially if there was a sense of losing its misanthropic attitude. It
feels too short as a fully fleshed out story, but the most subversive moment
where the show there ends is trying for a dramatic conclusion, the cliché of
the magical figure being forced to leave for her world which the show plays
straight and has had enough time to have built up to. Knowing the premise is
based on clichés eventually works in its favour as it is mixing the cute with
the lurid and the serious. (More so, in the least expected scene, when the
final episode even has a sombre and strangely ill-eased sequence of Sakura
without memories of before and feeling he has lost something whilst spending
time with Shizuki at a cafe). The entire running gag that this is effectively a
male protagonist who is a submissive among more stronger and openly sadistic
female figures, with the women in their twisted ways lovable and he the butt of
the jokes, is pretty striking too from the first season, a trope that I have
found finds itself in these sex comedies even if they still raise concerns for
sexualising the female leads and, especially with the "harem" genre,
the idea of all these female characters in a variety of romantic shapes all
vying for the conventional male lead's affections. A lot of them end up, even
if by accident, being about the male being entirely out of his comfort zone to
confident figures, and here it is more obvious, so much so that whilst the
episodes have grow stronger with hindsight, I do see the danger with the second
series, if this had continued, of losing the female cast’s original tones in
favour of more submissive fan service figures, which is no way near as
entertaining. I see with the second series, when it spends an episode about the
cast taking a bath together, that this even if you are a fan of the medium that
can get past the sex comedy could have dangerously lost its initial spark if we
got more from this narrative.
Whether you could have actually
gotten this on to a further longer work, in mind to it likely needing to be
censored for the television screenings for even the gore, is merely a guessing
game. A title like this however presents, even in its own ballpark, the idea
that you can parody the clichés of your genres but still be earnest in them. One
joke far less palatable as the show aged, that Dokuro wishes to change Sakura
because his older self would have lead half the world's population to being
permanently twelve years old, has not helped, but most of this is a timeless
joke which has aged well and allows one to still like these characters, the
oddball couple who, even if one is not attracted to the other, will realise in
the end he loves her as dearly even if he has yet to say "I love you"
beyond friends. The reference to romantic comedies early on was a nod to this,
as it is a joke as old as a screwball comedy from thirties Hollywood like Bringing Up Baby (1938), without Katharine Hepburn repeatedly bashing Cary Grant in the face with a club, but
the exasperated male lead dragged along by the firecracker of a personality
still found in many stories across mediums, and gender swapped, into the modern
day. The idea of people who work together despite one being as much a
frustration to the other is universal, and with Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, the joke comes with a very sick
sense of humour too in this case.
Abstract Spectrum: Cute/Dark Humoured/Wacky
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
========
1) Girls und Panzer might seem surreal still for outsiders to anime as
a franchise about an all-high school female team of World War II tank drivers,
in a world where they are kept and used for non-violent public activity, and it
is considered a martial arts commonly practiced by women. To an anime fan, this
is just Tuesday night viewing, so the bar for surrealism in premises is
different.