It's almost Halloween, ghouls and gals! What scary tales has Uncle Pachi whipped up for you on this wicked week? Prepare yourself for a shocker, a chilling collection of craft that will send your spirit straight to the crypt! For tonight......I am reviewing......A FANSERVICE ANIME.
That's right. And not the good kind of fanservice anime like Kill la Kill, oh no. This is raked straight up out of the bottom-feeders, the craptastic, insulting series that objectify women for a complacent male audience. I've gone on record about lowest common denominator fanservice in my Free review, but what if we were to accurately examine one of these monsters? Let's see how that goes as I review Daimidaler the Sound Robot! Enjoy, if you dare~!
I'll admit, I partially decided to write this review because I wanted to draw the Penguin Empire commandos. Ridiculous front tails and all. And of course I had to show how #2 feels about these 'penguin brethren'. I deliberately didn't apply shading to this one as a postmodern commentary on how fanservice for a male audience is often morally cheap. I'm deep, man.
High schooler Kouichi Madanbashi is a professional deviant, getting his kicks from grabbing his teacher's chest, and peeking up girls skirts under bridges. One day he is approached by Beauty Salon Prince agent Kyouko Sonan - turns out Kouichi is a 'factor', a special human possessing an unreasonably high amount of Hi-ERo particles. This form of energy is needed to pilot giant robots pitted against the evil Penguin Empire who have suddenly appeared from an alternate dimension. There's just one problem - the only way Kouichi can activate his special powers is if he fondles a girls' breasts, and Kyouko must be coerced into becoming his 'partner'. Fight on, Kouichi! Awaken, Sound Robot Daimidaler!
Daimidaler the Sound Robot is really really really really really really really really stupid.
So, review done, yeah? What else is there to say? Actually, I can keep going. I have yet to cover an anime of the classic fanservice bent; the type of shows that air late night on national television with censor bars and excessive bloom hiding naked skin - mainly because the majority of those shows are terrible. You have Kill la Kill where the bodies on display are fairly equal opportunity and devoid of ill intent, and then you have everything else. Your Ikkitousen, your Freezing, your Master of Martial Hearts. These are action series stuffed with femme fatals on a mission to prove that women can be strong and independent, bellied by male gaze cameras that gravitate to the naughty bits and imply vulnerability via framing. It's not as creepy as the otaku culture intent on sexualizing underage schoolgirls, but it's equally as shameless. Today I am departing from my norm and taking a look at one such animated peep show: Daimidaler the Sound Robot, or by FUNimation's official English title, Daimidaler: Prince vs Penguin Empire. Spoiler alert: we never ever find out why it is a 'sound' robot.
Serialized in Enterboob magazine and a-bust-ed for television by TNK, the titstudio with the simply astounding great tracks of land record consisting of School Days, High School DxD (this show's closest relative), and Itsudatte My Santa, here we have a story about jubblies written by gazonga-fans for breast-fans. Nipples.
That's not really fair - there's a lot of dicks in this show, too! If you know one iota about Daimidaler, most likely you've seen pictures of the penguins with giant penises. Oh, I'm sorry, they're not penises - they're front tails. Right. The troops of the mighty Penguin Empire run around 24/7 with full-chub front tails which they must keep invigorated through careful stroking to stay in peak form and pilot giant penguin robots.
Okay, so I could talk about the 'heroes' of the story, the warriors of Beauty Salon Prince who use the giant Daimidaler model robots to fight evil forces that threaten the world, but why bother? Why beat around the bush - they're here to exhibit lewd behavior and to titillate the audience. Kouichi Madanbashi is a 'super pervert' whose only joy in life is fondling breasts and generally being a sexual deviant. Turns out he has a special type of life force called 'Hi-ERo particles' - the power required to pilot the Daimidaler robots, which are based off technology stolen from the Penguin Empire. Think of it like the libido system in Captain Earth if it was even less subtle. To activate his Hi-ERo powers, he must become aroused, which he can only achieve by manhandling lady parts. Enter Kyouko Sonan, his big-breasted battle partner whom he develops an unhealthy obsession with (her boobs). Kouichi must 'train in the ways of the pervert' and learn more erotic techniques for invading Kyouko's personal space, to the point that her seat in their robot is given a handy revolving function that shifts her directly in front of Kouichi, putting her body in touching range. All this is INTEGRAL to improve his skill as a robot pilot; it is the very crux of his abilities.
That's basically all Daimidaler is - giant robots powered by getting their pilot aroused. Think of all those mecha shows that exhibit euphoric subtext into how the robots get power. Captain Earth, Aquarion, even Gurren Lagann to some degree. Take that subtext and make it the direct plot of the show, and you've got Daimidaler. It's dumb and only exists to excite horny otaku that don't mind cheap made-for-tv porn.
Why the heck am I even doing this review, then? Did I like Daimidaler the Sound Robot? Parts of it, yes. I like it for the 'villains' of the show: the Penguin Empire. They are the heart(giant throbbing front tail) of the story and the only thing close to sympathetic, even if they're mostly characterized in the same vein as the one-dimensional protagonists.
I'm not gonna lie - I love the penguins in this show, not at all related to my general bias towards anime penguins. In the dimension the Penguin Empire hails from, a penguin looks less like a traditional penguin and more like a man in a penguin suit (I was waiting for the twist that they were, in fact, all humans wearing penguin suits. Sadly, such a twist never came). Their tails are also placed on the frontside of their bodies instead of the back - conveniently right where a human penis would be. "Front tail". Yeah, the front tail thing is dumb. It's entirely unnecessary, but I suppose that makes them unique, so moving on.
The foot soldiers of the Penguin Empire are like the putties from Power Rangers if they all talked and all had their own name (all mundane names like 'Bob' and 'Thomas'), but they're basically carbon copies of each other save for the Penguin Emperor and a few select troops. Their mission? To make humanity more vicarious and procreative by spreading erotic propaganda. No really. Parading the streets and passing out porno mags is what constitutes an 'attack'. Once all humans are addicted to erotica and boning themselves silly, the Penguin Empire will be able to more easily steal their healthily active libidos. The intent to their madness results in some amusing fallout, such as Kyouko's father developing a terrible fear of bananas after being assaulted with images of them in sexual context.
Despite their ridiculous intent, the Penguins are actually really lovable bad guys, for several reasons. In a classic technique of good vs evil parody stories, the bad guys and good guys are constantly being paralleled until it is eventually apparent that the bad guys aren't really that bad and the good guys are far worse. The Penguin Empire is a giant family. The Emperor is not a wicked despot, but rather treats all of his men with respect and genuinely cares for their well-being. Through their shared love of...erotica...the Penguin soldiers hoot and holler and have the time of their lives every single day - their sense of camaraderie is palpable. Later in the story, young human girl Rikantz Seaberry wanders into the Penguin Empire's ranks because OH GOLLY SHE JUST LOVES PENGUINS SO MUCH. Even though she is a human (albeit one with a high count of Hi-ERo particles), the Penguins take her in as one of their own and treat her as a member of their family.
When she is not the main punitive force against Kouichi and crew, more often than not Ritz's presence in the group is relegated to jokes of incestual adultery. She is depicted as loving penguins SO MUCH that she is literally loving them oh so much and tending to their wounds (regularly this amounts to reviving their front tails; go ahead and guess how that goes). It's more than a little creepy - in fact it's really creepy. She is given the nickname 'Morning Ritzness' by the Penguins as a pun on morning sickness - that's NOT okay by any measure. But this behavior is never depicted as demeaning or assault. Contrast with Beauty Salon Prince, where Kouichi aggressively harasses Kyouko sexually whether she likes it or not and his co-workers and boss eagerly encourage his behavior. In the Penguin Empire, the vibe is more of a giant family of men and their one sister who they all have equal opportunity to; compounded with the fact that she's totally on board with it and is generally the one who initiates the sexual activity. I'm...not really making a good case for this, am I?
Okay, so there's never any hint of full-out penguin style happening in Daimidaler; it's all soft-core sexuality. I'm not saying that makes it okay to imply that a young girl is rubbing off an entire brothel of anthropomorphic penguin men daily - that's still adultery and it's wrong. It's like......the lesser of two sexually abhorrent evils? Still, I find the treatment of women on the protagonist side far more deplorable. Assertions of a female protagonist having seniority were attempted in the 2nd Daimidaler pilot, but even then she's the one who has to be 'handled' to get sexually aroused, putting her in a position of vulnerability to a man's whims. The women are treated as cum buckets to fill up the giant robot fuel tanks. And that's way more gross and sexist than a giant family of penguins and one human girl who are possibly platonically fucking each other. Somehow. There's a level of self-awareness in the adultery jokes here that make it more tolerable than the everyday joyless ecchi harem.
Then we get to the reason the Penguin Empire is stealing libido energy from humans in the first place: they need it to get home. They don't want to hurt anyone, they just want to go home. The Penguin Emperor stumbled across our dimension when his teleporter (he was an scientist in his world) malfunctioned and sent him here. Hi-ERo particles are what power the machine, and they require a large amount to get home, hence they decide to farm the energy from Earthlings by turning them into sexual deviants. In an amusing twist, the Penguins efforts actually have an opposite effect that make them into heroes. For a brief period halfway through the series, Kouichi is presumed dead, and the Penguins seize control. Once the Penguins are the center of the world's attention, they succeed in stealing so many Hi-ERO particles that sale of pornographic material plummets because mankind doesn't find it appealing anymore. And so when Beauty Salon Prince gathers its bearings and counterattacks, the Japanese military turns on them because they're seen as a threat to human decency and morals, I.E. they are fighting for the right to be sexually deviant. They had silently always held a grudge against the Daimidaler robots because they would 'cause more wide-spread destruction during bouts in the city than the enemies they were fighting. Ultimately Kouichi's team is depicted in the right - positing that it's okay to embrace sexuality, which has its own levels of truth - but it is highly cathartic to see the deplorable, sexual harassment loving protagonists get the book thrown at them.
Daimidaler is a really dumb celebration of promiscuity and lewd behavior; as such it is generally juvenile and not worth your time. If you like anime fanservice, you can do better than this. Ikkitousen, High School DxD, Queen's Blade - these are all low brow entries to the genre that still deliver to their intended audience more succinctly than Daimidaler. If you like shows about penguins, you can do better. Polar Bear Cafe, dare I even need to mention Mawaru Penguindrum? If you like giant robots, you can do better. The robots in Daimidaler feel little more than ancillary baubles to add volume to a show about shallow eroticism. If you like parody, you can do better. Examining every single feature of this show one could see as a viewer draw, you can do better. Daimidaler doesn't excel in a single feature. Yet it's not 'bad'.
It's not good enough to recommend either, but I felt I should judge this series fairly and all in all there were some things I liked. I liked how as a parody it didn't take itself too seriously or too silly - in that regard it actually hit a good middleground. I liked the Penguin Empire for being enjoyably dumb antagonists with a bit of heart in their depiction. I liked the design for the robots, which are refreshingly atypical to what we'd normally see in the robot genre - not really cool or well-designed, but different. The best thing I can say for Daimidaler the Sound Robot is although I didn't hate it, I have no desire to ever watch it again. It's a bizarro entry that elicits a few ironic chuckles and smiles, but as a vehicle for entertainment is mostly impotent and flacid. Big stinking honkers.
You can currently find all subbed episodes of Daimidaler the Sound Robot streaming online courtesy of FUNimation. The series has not been licensed for home video release at this time.
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