- Plastic Little (1994: KSS and Perriot) 1/1 ep.
Plastic little might just be the perfect example of a fun little show that is almost ruined by fanservice. But hot damn are those tits animated well, ADV films even started their infamous “Jiggle Counter” with this and one of the Burn Up sequels. Go have a google now to see some gifs of that beautiful jiggle, go on I’ll wait for you. Anyway, Plastic Little is a one-shot anime original that was directed by Satoshi Urushihara and Kinji Yoshimoto. Urushihara has pretty much only directed this, a hentai, and Legend of Lemnear but he has also worked on quite a few projects in an animation capacity, such as Record of Lodoss War. Yoshimoto seems to be the guy from whom all the boob stuff came as he has directed a bunch of Queen’s Blade and Seven Mortal Sins. These two seem to be mates though as they regularly work with each other.
Plastic Little’s story is fairly simple. On a gas giant, at least that is what I assume seeing as the show doesn’t really tell you, there are a number of colonies floating in its ‘Sea of Clouds’. Tita, our main character, is the captain of a ship that goes around capturing exotic animals in order to sell them as pets. One day she stumbles upon Ellyse, AKA a complete idiot, who is being attacked by the army. It turns out Ellyse accidentally created super weapon for some evil dudes but only Ellyse has the password, so Tita and the crew endeavour to help her and to stop the army from blowing up everything. Pretty simple, pretty sweet, and has some nice moments. The surprising thing is that this show has some decent characters. Sure, the main pair are a bit dull and seem to fall in love, or at least become suspiciously good friends, instantly but the side characters get some nice fleshing out and the villain is super dope even though you know nothing about him.
However, it isn’t the plot or the characters that really sells this show: it is the fucking great animation. This show is almost constantly in movement and it is buttery smooth. This is the kind of thing that the OAV excels at: great set piece action scenes but also consistently smooth and frequent movement. No TV anime can match this sort of animation level and it makes a difference. The animation quality was in no doubt helped by the fact that a certain Ichiro Itano worked on the show. Sadly, the animation quality can’t be matched by the art itself. The art isn’t bad, and certainly has more detail than the average, but it isn’t consistent. Most notably the character designs all seem to belong in two different shows. You have a more rounded and cartoony style and then you have a more realistic style (which really reminds me of Lodoss War by the way, especially the main villain). There are even characters that switch between the two! This is just super jarring and I’m not quite sure why it happened, as there is only on character designer credited. The character designs themselves are pretty cool though so I can’t be too angry and the mechanical designs are awesome.
Then of course we have to talk about the fanservice. There are quite a few tits in this show and there really didn’t need to be. There is even an extended sequence of our two leads naked that simply didn’t need to exist. Now I like boobs as much as the next person, maybe even more, but in cinema I would generally like them to have a purpose that is in line with the main point of the production. Here they add nothing and are super distracting. What makes it worse is that these might be the best animated tits I’ve ever seen, really it is a treat, so I can’t help but think that that time and effort would have been better spent elsewhere. Hmmmm, this might be the first case of the fanservice being too good.
The voice acting is ok in the sub but the dub is fairly bad so I’d avoid it. They chose to give Ellyse an English accent, which was an odd decision and didn’t really work. It doesn’t help that Tiffany Grant can’t really do an English accent. The music is alright but nothing special, which again is a shame considering how good the animation is. I should also point out that everyone’s favourite Norio Wakamoto plays a side character in this, so that is fun.
Overall this is a decent sci-fi action show with fantastic animation that is marred by inconsistent art and unnecessary fanservice. I really just wish they’d made a full on titty show, which would have been beautiful, and a version of this without fanservice, then we’d have two good shows instead of one ok one! Finally, how the fuck is the name “Plastic Little” connected to this show?
Final score: 6C
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