Virgin Punk Review

Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl is Yasuomi Umetsu‘s triumphant return to his big budget exploitative punk Japanese animation roots, in other words in this economy this man brought back the OVA(Original Video Animation) format of anime. If you’re a newgen anime fan like me you might’ve just stopped there and said “but I’ve seen OVA’s, Konosuba‘s were great!” and you’d be right, in the current industry OVA’s generally mean extra episodes packed with the Blu-rays as a bonus for buying the anime directly but this direct to consumer approach used to be a viable business strategy in and of itself and with none of the broadcast standards of television became the seedy underbelly of anime. The thing is, there’s alot of money in seedy things and passion based industries like animation are kinda run by perverts of every variety so with the interest there and an economy where the yen wasn’t a joke the OVA became the cutting edge of anime and while adaptations kinda languish in the format original works could thrive, depending of course on the quality of their screenplays. One such OVA and maybe the first of it’s kind I watched was Kite.

Kite is the story of a little girl turned into a ruthless killer whose missions would result in some of the best choreographed action in anime history. It was the solo directorial debut of one Yasuomi Umetsu who 27 years later would give us another story about a girl with a gun whose missions would result in some of the best choreographed action in anime history, Virgin Punk. We gotta peel off one Band-Aid first because good stories are not the expectation when watching an OVA, they’re terminally a style over substance mode of crafting anime on top of also being hentai more often than not and when sex and violence mix it’s not usually a subtle medley, these shows ain’t for the modern audience if you catch my drift.

Virgin Punk is not a hentai(unlike Kite) but it’s definitely exploitative with it’s nudity, specifically waiting until the smoking grown women whose our protagonist Ubu get’s blasted apart and mechanically reforged into her 14 year old body to start showing uncensored tits and ass. If I trusted the staff I’d say this was an intentional thematically meritorious choice, she’s only in this body because Mr. Elegance, a pedo blast from her past, wished it and so took away her agency and gave her back the body he desires. We start leering at her body through this perspective and while I found it icky and I’d hope that’s the point this industry is too full of people one police raid from a cell for their predilections to give the benefit of the doubt. I will admit I chose to watch the censored version of Kite because I don’t want that kiddy shit and all I can hope is that this series doesn’t also get rapey because at the very least we ain’t there yet. Now, THAT aside where’s the fun, what’s the selling point of this theatrical return to form for Umetsu.

Well how about that action because ho boy it’s been a minute since we got guns that pack a punch. This 35 minute work was the result of over 5 years of planning and production oh waitaminute I meant 10 because Umetsu and SHAFT got the ball rolling in 2015. The script was finished in 2016 and two years later the animation process finally began, headed by SHAFT ace Genichirou Abe and Shinya Takahashi. Than they just kept cooking. Umetsu kept doing retakes. The storyboard grew more complex. Umetsu did even more retakes. So on and so forth this production lurched onward in the recesses of SHAFT, the staff sometimes reappearing to do KA work or in Umetsu’s case direct OP’s before returning to their dungeon to perfect his vision. 7 years of animation, 35,000 drawings and Umetsu working as the main animation director to get each and every one of them exactly how he imagined. This is the pinnacle of self indulgent craft and the end results speak for themselves, or should I say scream at the top of their mechanical lungs.

You can tell this anime was built different from the first time you see its effects animation at play, a gust of wind blown from an ominous ship that billows and expands into hundreds of different individual shapes and lines, fuller than anything I’ve seen in a show recently and over in half the time. A girl jumps from said ship and the ground explodes into thousands of particles, responding to her inhuman weight in wonderfully exaggerated fashion. Then the gunfight is on and the movie shows its truest colors. Yasuomi Umetsu like’s guns, he like’s explosions, and he loves destruction and so generally he makes his guns wicked powerful, every shot tearing chunks from whatever they hit in glorious fashion. Technically we’re not Kite level exploding bullets here but the effects animation is much more lavish anyway so the results at least on locations are much more gloriously grisly. Gore though, we don’t get much of that which is maybe a disappointment or maybe a good thing because the art is so crisp it’d probably be a bit hard to stomach too much of that, if you’re not a sicko like me at least.

Our 14 year old protagonist is radicalized by the violence she see’s and becomes a bounty hunter in her own right, one with maybe the most badass throwable blade I’ve ever seen. Umetsu’s crystal clear choreography make’s the gunfights sing with unmatched precision but it’s the physicality that really sells his over the top approach, switching from outlandish acrobatics to hard hitting teeth smashing flying kicks the chaos is overwhelming yet natural and grounded in the over the top design sensibilities from this man. From top to bottom Virgin Punk is a work of utterly mastery of one’s medium and one’s desires, only Umetsu could make this storyboard and only under him could it be brought kicking and screaming into life.

The best part is, it understands escalation, finely tuned tension and release. We get a good action scene, than a great one and than suddenly Ubu’s lights are blown out and we have to sit with her and wait as she realizes her body is not her own and the worst man she knows holds the keys, capable of turning her off like she’s a prized car. Her newfound mechanical body is a prison but it’s also an opportunity, impervious to most damage it’s a weapon in it’s own right and hopefully one day she’ll get to use it on Mr. Elegance and escape his clutches. Maybe 10 years from now because we’re 20 minutes into a 35 minute feature and the action climax is calling Ubu’s name and telling her to give this body a test drive.