Heathen Review #2: So Kawaii!

[StealthySkeptic]

Heathen Review #2: Upotte!!

Previously on Heathen Reviews: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Hello and welcome to another Heathen Review, where I take a look at media through the eyes of an amateur philosopher that sacrifices animals for funsies and will be burned in hell by a loving God for not kissing his ass. I'll get to the Book of Eli and possibly Don Jon soon...but for right now...

Oh dear.

hock:

I think we can all agree that Japan is a weird place.

Exhibit A:



That's the way, uh huh uh huh, Losty likes it, uh huh uh huh...

Exhibit B:



An emotionally stable individual in his natural habitat.

The upside of this, of course, is that Japan is very sexually liberated. Very often to a scary degree, but thankfully they don't have the obsession with controlling female libido that America does. These two forces combine to create odd situations. For instance, marriages are entered into more to gain instant respectability as unmarried women are deemed to not be not respectable, and yet it's not taboo for women who are married to cheat. That's why AshleyMadison, the famous adultery website, reports that Japan is one of its biggest markets with more than a million users, and fastest growing.

I'll get to all that (as well as Japan's bizarre fetishes) in the Philosophy Review in a moment. But first, let me tell you a tale of woe that begins, like so many others, with a bet made last Saturday between an anime loving friend and I. If he couldn't get through his pirated download of God's Not Dead without laughing, he would have to borrow and watch my Blu-ray copy of The Room that my girlfriend got me as a gift because we both love its awfulness. If I couldn't then he would lend me his copy of Upotte!!, which he picked up two years ago for $70 on eBay based on one of his other friend's hilarious recommendations. Guess who ended up nearly dying of laughter.



"Damn! I almost had Stealthy's soul! Curse you, atheist ninja!"

As per usual with all Blu-rays and DVDs that I watch, I'll be reviewing this disc on my Sony BDP-S3100 Blu-ray player, Spectre 32'' 720p display, and Coby two-channel stereo sound bar.

Show Review

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I'll let the Internet Movie Firearms Database do the synopsis for this one:

"Upotte!! is not just any anime detailing guns, the guns themselves live to tell about it! Upotte!! follows the story of anthropomorphized guns FNC (Funco), M16A4 (Sixteen), SIG SG 550 (Sig), and L85A1 (Elle) and their adventures in Seishou Academy. The school is divided into three different groups, Submachine Guns (Elementary School), Assault Rifles (Middle School), and Battle Rifles (High School). Their goal in the school is to come out as the most useful weapon there is. This media follows through their life in Seishou Academy and the (mis)adventures the human and guns have together."



Th- th- th- that's all folks!

If you're scratching your head at how, for instance, these guns can be girls yet also pull guns out of thin air, there are so many leaps of logic from the premise alone that to try to wrap your head around everything would be a fool's errand. Just turn your brain off for this one. There are also plenty of arcs and some semblance of a main plot does emerge towards the end of the 10 episode main series. But despite this odd setup, the story is pretty much a paint-by-numbers slice-of-life boarding school anime...with classes being live fire exercises...but since the girls and their body parts are like real life guns they don't die...or do they?

I don't watch much anime because of the constant things shows like this often gloss over. But it was (rather surprisingly) enjoyable to go with the flow. The main reason for this is the core four characters. Without giving too much away, their moe personalities reflect those of their nationalities (much like, say, Hetalia if you enjoy that show) and the weapons they're based on. For instance Sixteen is the loud, brash, brave leader of the group who can only work in short bursts due to her three round burst. I strangely ended up caring about these guns, their foibles, their antics, and their (mostly lesbian) middle school crushes on other personified assault rifles...

Uh............



Uh............

Sorry, but StealthySkeptic's brain experienced technical difficulties. Thank you for your patience.

A lot of the humor is of the "haha they're guns" sort that at least gave me a smirk (most of the time). Those sort of references are punctuated every so often by informative animated snippets detailing the history and mechanics of the weapons in question, which I thought, as a fan of first person shooters, were entertaining without being too expository. But the main strength of the show is those characters.

I think a lot of why I did has to do with the fact all of their traits combine to develop the guns about as well as you could expect over such a short series. I also really enjoyed the action despite myself, which was suspenseful and always dramatic. It seems the pacing between the two sides of the story is pretty good, except for the cheesecake fanservice. Oh my Flying Spaghetti Monster, the goddamn cheesecake!

What is it with anime and its tendency to have about a bazillion panty shots as well as lingering on pre-pubescent bodies all the time?! I get that this is Japan, but...ew. These...lesbian...gun...girl...characters are clearly in middle school. Plus, all of the fanservice is nothing more than filler that oddly makes a show depicting guns slightly misogynist and borderline pedophilic. This is the most glaring flaw of the show. Thankfully, most of the naughty bits are censored, so I was able to ignore this for the purposes of this review, but if you're uncomfortable with that sort of thing, run far away from this show, and possibly from borderline-hentai anime and manga in general.

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Disc Review

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For such a unique idea, the animation on this show (which the video is entirely composed of, except for live action stills of ammo boxes booking each chapter) and the character designs are equally generic. It's well-drawn generic stuff, though. Except for some (ahem) steamy scenes in the bath houses, the line work is very sharp. And, for a low-budget anime, the backgrounds and lighting especially are very beautiful, approaching Miyazaki level quality at times which was impressive. Meanwhile, the show is presented in Japanese (with English subtitles) and English audio dubs in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The English dub was good, but I preferred the Japanese dub as it allowed me to accept the unreality of the universe more easily. However, other than how tinny some of the gun sounds were, the audio was clean and did what it needed to do.

Besides the standalone opening and closing animations (with some catchy J-pop songs that will definitely worm in your ear), the only bonus feature on the disc is the Original Video Animation that served as sort of a pseudo-pilot for the show before it was aired on Japanese TV, which is an enjoyable enough summer romp where the girl...gun...things are camping by a river. (It doesn't work well as a pilot though, so I prefer to set it as the REAL finale since I was annoyed by the end of the show proper).

It's also the only place on the disc where you will see uncensored nudity. However, I feel my friend got ripped off. If you're interested in checking out Upotte!! the English subtitled version is streaming for free on Crunchyroll and Hulu, and the OVA is available elsewhere online. Even now that it's $35, there's too little here to recommend buying this Blu-ray Disc, but I would maybe get it if you REALLY like this show and it goes on sale on Amazon or something.



Move along, pardner.

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Philosophy Review

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Before you tell me in the comments, yes, I understand. But I feel that a lot of things that could offend Westerners about this show are perfectly acceptable to Japanese, such as the depiction of literal guns who are also literally schoolgirls in a school environment. I feel the most important thing to touch upon before I get into that aspect of the themes of Upotte! is that difference between the Japanese and Western styles of storytelling (not always, but sometimes).

It seems that anime of the type that Upotte!! falls into (moe and- barely- lolicon) is more concerned with fantasy, escapism, and character interactions in peaceful environments such as the countryside, rather than on stories with the classic "witch's hat" shaped story with much introduction, buildup, climax, denouement, and/or resolution. Even Miyazaki, one of my all time favorite animators, falls into this trap with some of his movies even though he can usually balance Japanese and Western expectations pretty well. This is clearly fantastical and getting into that mindset allowed me to ignore a lot (not all) of the loose plotting.

If you approach this show from the (possible) Japanese military otaku fan's perspective, then you will also be able to set aside your objections toward the "guns in schools" imagery. My own armchair historian analysis of why this is is that, except for a sizable American presence and a token Self-Defense Force, Japan is about as close as any country can be to being demilitarized. School violence, which is a common occurrence in America, thus doesn't happen all that often in Japan. Thus, guns are seen from a distance as well crafted pieces of machinery with an equally distant history.

The feminization of weaponry (which also happens in such anime as Strike Witches) is another theme you don't see everyday in Western society, due to the usually phallic association of guns as extensions of masculinity (particularly in an atheist's FAVORITE geopolitical location, the American South. ) I think that this is because, with that distance between guns and violence in Japan, guns are almost seen (at least on this show) as toys to be played with and possessed by men once they are registered, as in the picture below (although male characters are very rare on this show for obvious reasons).

Recurring themes in Upotte!! that reinforce that interpretation are the awkward relationship between the male human teacher and their gun students (I can't believe that was actually part of a sentence) and the idea of gun parts corresponding to lady parts. And so, when characters refer to hammers firing, triggers being pulled, large barrel sizes, and a recurring joke about skeleton stocks being like thongs, you can probably guess where I'm going with this.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/0OcGgvSIg6o/hqdefault.jpg

Click the link to see one (safe for work) example of what I mean, but don't say I didn't warn you.

This relates to another key difference that I mentioned earlier between Japanese and Western audiences- whereas Westerners (particularly many Americans) are infatuated with violence and abhor discussions of sexuality, it's almost the reverse in this case. For a show involving gun battles, the violence is very tame in Upotte!! and in only once instance (that I won't spoil) does a human character ever actually get shot. However, the sexual overtones are extremely clear, with the middle school crushes and teacher-student tension that I mentioned earlier.

Japan has been open about sexuality, in my opinion, since there was a Japan. Sure, it may have been hidden underneath the respectability of the feudal system for some time, but take a look at, say, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife and try and tell me that she isn't enjoying some calamari action. Lolicon, however, really first came into Japan in around the 1970s as a portmanteau of Lolita (based on the book of the same name) and complex, meaning of course obsession.

I suspect it may have been depicted earlier than that due to Japan being Japan, but I also think that Vladimir Nabokov would be rolling in his grave, as his novel was supposed to condemn fetishization of young women, not become synonymous with it. In any case, lolicon exploded into popularity as Japan started to modernize and although there are tentative restrictions now, from a description of one of my friends, you literally cannot turn a street corner in Tokyo without finding some scandalous manga, DVD, Video CD (yes, that still is a thing in Asia, look it up), or toy.

This is the one Western bias that I cannot overcome when watching this show, even though I can at least ignore it for the purpose of the story. Why? Well on the one hand, our restrictions on child pornography and age of consent laws are there for a good reason. Children may be having sex as young as four or five (as mentioned in another thread), and the show, along with censoring the nudity, does mostly depict the experimentation that does go on in same gender boarding schools, rather than focus on male characters perving on female ones (hence the reason why I'm not throwing up right now).

But still, I believe that due to fundamental differences, Western and Japanese media will be at philosophical loggerheads on sexual issues for a while. For now, Upotte!! is able to somewhat toe the line on what's barely acceptable when it comes to Western audiences who are at least looking for an anime that's unique.

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Conclusion

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When my friend won that bet (and I promise that the minute I can, I'll rent God's Not Dead on Blu-ray and let you know what I think!) and lent me Upotte!!: The Complete Collection on Blu-ray, he thought that I would get a couple of laughs out of its many, many, MANY oddities and panty-shots and think it was enjoyably bad. The first part of that statement is true of my opinion- the second not so much. Is Upotte!! excellent, or worth buying on Blu-ray? No, and a large part of that is due to its inconsistent story, focus on filler and fanservice, and dearth of special features. But Upotte!! has good characters, fun information on gun history, and tense gun battles, and so is enjoyable good, even great at times while it lasts. I'd at least check out one episode on Crunchyroll or Hulu, but preferably away from prying eyes.

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