I’m in the middle of writing a post on Queen’s Blade, and in it I make the point that in an awful lot of anime, there’s this unspoken expectation the audience has that at some point they might get to see the female characters naked. This is despite the fact that, post-Evangelion, TV broadcast anime has gotten a lot more conservative in its depiction of nudity.
While Queen’s Blade bucks that trend in it’s treatise on the impracticality of women’s combat gear in fantasy fiction, there is another approach a show can take with this expectation. That is to lay on the teasing of possible female nudity heavily, all the while giving you rampant male nudity instead. Gurren Lagann did it in episode 6 (or at least it did in the unedited DVD version) and that plot device is pretty much what happens here.
When Ataru hears that Ryouko is having a party in a bathhouse, he becomes determined to figure out a way to peak on the ladies side from the men’s. Soon the Stormtroopers and Mendou are also involved, but try as they might they are unable to catch a glimpse. Meanwhile Cherry and two of Mendou’s bodyguards get incredibly drunk.
This slowly escalates through the episode until after various attempts to subtley spy on the girls fail, they decide to climb the dividing wall instead. Mendou and Ataru decide they don’t want the others spying (Mendou doesn’t want them looking at his sister, Ataru doesn’t want them looking at Lum), which leads a mass naked brawl between them – and the funniest gag in the whole episode when the Ryouko’s Kuroko enter and censor everything as the fighting is happening. In a neat reversal of the way these things usually go, when the girls hear the boys’ raised voices, they actually consider spying on the boys.
Before they can do that though, the wall gives way and the naked guys end up in the women’s side. Only to discover that the girls were all wearing swimsuits anyway! Which is the exact same gag Gurren Lagann used.
Another episode that feels more like the show did in those 2nd, 3rd and 4th production batches. Lots of use of the Stormtroopers and a melancholic nostalgia that never seems to be there in the manga. Not many episodes left now that have Ito or Oshii’s direct involvement. Then the episodes 107 onwards are bit of a mystery to me.
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Screenplay: Kazunori Ito
Storyboards: Motosuke Takahashi
Director: Iku Suzuki
Animation Director: Motosuke Takahashi