Sukeban Deka (1991) Anime OVA Review

Sukeban Deka is a 1991 action crime anime written and directed by Takeshi Hirota based on a manga by Shinji Wada. The manga series was highly successful in Japan, which gave way for a full live-action TV series and 3 films inspired by the same story. This particular OVA starred Kazue Ikura, Akio Ōtsuka, Akira Kamiya, Hiroshi Takemura, Kenji Utsumi, Masako Katsuki, Naomi Uchiyama and Saeko Shimazu. Juvenile delinquents were a pretty big issue in Japanese society at the time and media related to it gave way for a fiction subgenre that focused on the female variety and it's subculture, Sukeban Deka (Delinquent Girl Detective) being one of the prime examples.

Saki Asamiya is a young delinquent who gets taken out of her cell by the police in order to go undercover into the social structure of a dangerous school ruled by the wealthy Mizuchi sisters, girls who belong to a crime family and fight for control and to be head of the organization. Saki does this in order to get her mother out of death row and to gain her freedom.

Such a premise gives us an action-filled vehicle that goes at 200 miles per hour and has very little time to breathe or rest, establishing relationships, settings and ideas in little time but with a lot of dynamism and a playful nature. It's stylish and lyrical, highly poetic and potently dramatic. It's an excellent piece of the genre that takes advantage of its medium. Everything is executed with precise skill by the animators and the crew.

This is probably the best example of an OVA series that, while surprisingly short, is able to construct a proper dramatic structure that has the same effect in getting you attached to its characters, both main and secondary, in such a small time frame. One example is the girl that the protagonist meets and is then attacked at the end of the first episode. The series doesn't waste time and introduces her right away. Her dialogue is succinct and to the point but the VA's give the lines some personality and emotion. We have some brief scenes of her that are well juggled between other plotlines but also presents us her intimacy (her home, her hobbies, her aspirations, what she sees in life) that gets us closer to her in a single brief but effective scene (through the main character's point of view as well). Because of this, when the tragic event happens we are more invested in her as a person, the stakes moving higher and higher with every event and we understand why the protagonist cares at the same time.

I really love how overdramatic and heightened character's reactions are. The VA's really give it their all and embody their characters with perfection. They yell and grunt and shriek in the right tone and register to make everything more expressive and understandable. This doesn't stop at the voice actors' performances, the direction also emphasizes these intense emotions via angles and visual techniques in order to solidify and express a needed emotion.

The constant array of action and events might have gotten tiresome it wasn't for the tricks they pull and the clever ways they are able to disguise the corners they cut, either by cutting away from the most laborious fight sequences with many characters by focusing on another character while we assume a battle takes place or by using eye-popping visuals to summarize events. You can tell, because of the fast pace, that this was a TV series or a long manga that had time for everything to take place before it became a 40 minute two-part OVA (80 minutes at most) but it all helps to give it some energy and make it consistently entertaining without losing the meat of the story.

A totally recommended OVA in every sense. It's quick and strong. Obligatory for all anime fans.

Cat's Eye (1983-1985) Anime Series Review

Tsukasa Hojo's Cat's Eye was a manga series (one of the highest selling) serialized in Shonen Jump from 1981 to 1985 and was eventually adapted into an anime series that ran from 1983 to 1985 with 73 episodes. The series followed the Kisugi sisters: Rui (older sister), Hitomi (middle sister) and Ai (kid sister), a trio of art thieves who under the alias of Cat's Eye try to gain back their missing father's art collection from museums and private collectors. Detective Toshi, female inspector Mitsuko and the police chief go after Cat's Eye whenever the girls leave a card telling them when and where they will strike next, but they are almost always outsmarted by the girls and most of their heists tend to be successful. A major conflict is introduced by the fact that Toshi is Hitomi's boyfriend and he has no idea that she is part of Cat's Eye, even when the café the girls run has that exact name.

Influential and empowering, the show was known for its highly capable and skilled female protagonists, even creating a very intimate feeling of sisterhood featuring clashing personalities that give us some funny arguments between the trio. Strong, clever, cunning, daring, deceiving, just, loyal and confident, these sisters are not only role models but also present a very modern version of female thief characters in fiction as they are not just romantic interests for others but people with full lives and motivations. Along with Dirty Pair, these were breakthrough incarnations of older tropes.

When it comes to the anime you can expect some fantastic J-pop and Eurobeat music performed by Anri accompanying rhythmic aerobic dance animation during the opening as nearly psychedelic abstract visuals showing the girls moving their bodies with fluidity and grace, sometimes hand drawn and other times rotoscoped. The ending theme Dancing with the Sunshine is also a true banger and both songs fit the overall style quite perfectly.

The story structure in each episode is kind of formulaic and somewhat loose in continuity but not completely episodic either. Every episode will feature Cat's Eye hatching a scheme to steal a painting, but some unforeseen event or element will destabilize it momentarily until the girls find a way to turn things back around as they pull tricks to fool Toshi and the policemen after them. Sometimes the girls are facing mobsters, other thieves, motorists, kidnappers or rich guys with deadly traps in their compounds. There's enough variety and intrigue, sometimes beginning with a baffling or out of nowhere visual or storytelling device that throws you off but that begins to make sense once the plot unfolds.

The talent of the writers relied on coming up with intriguing way of making you guess how the heroines will escape capture and the tricky and convoluted techniques they could employ to create a perfect alibi and never be caught outside of the café, although, sometimes it feels like they are cheating with some almost incredible or tricky twists. However, these tricks also give it some charm even if at some moments they stretch verisimilitude a bit because there are a lot of contrived plot points and coincidences in their plans, either that or they rely on the police officers and detectives being too dimwitted but nothing that truly breaks the story at any point.

Some aspects of the relationship between Toshi and Hitomi are a bit too unbelievable as there are only so many times one can let a coincidence fly by without the characters wising up to the real identity of the thieves but at several points Toshi comes close to solving the case by putting together the girl's patterns and the connections to the artist and the crimes but things don't quite work out for him.

The romance aspect is vital to the show's narrative as it really brings contradictory emotions to any kind of possible resolution that you can imagine. You want Toshi to succeed so he can marry Hitomi, but you don't want the girls to be caught either. Other pieces of media like the 1997 movie deal with this part of the story in a different way.

Director Yoshio Takeuchi did a great job at putting together a faithful adaptation of the spirit and story elements from the manga into an exciting and thrilling show that consistently did enough variations of its premise and formula without feeling stale or repetitive. I wont spoil the ending but I gotta say that incorporating the fictional element to play out a possible closure to the main storyline but without actually having it take place in the world of the series was a stroke of genius. It was a perfect ending that's not really an ending.

A highly recommended series for anime fans or lovers of caper stories.