Super-powered clones of history’s greatest men hunt for rare German books, in their way stand the agents of the British Library – The Paper, Miss Deep, Joker and Drake Anderson (American mercenaries don’t get cool codenames).
Hideyuki Kurata’s multimedia project spans anime, manga and light novels, with fairly loose continuity between them all. It posits a secret, eternal struggle between an immortal couple, Mr Gentleman & Grandmother, each in control of the knowledge bases of the United Kingdom and China respectively. That back story is all heavily buried in this OAV series, which plays out like a 1960’s British telefantasy that never was, with plenty of nods to the likes of James Bond, The Avengers, Thunderbirds and The Saint.
The only thing that brings it down a couple of notches is that the animation is occasionally too ambitious for some of the animators. The problem stems from the character design, which to start with is very complicated, and further exacerbated by the decision to frequently animate the movement of each character’s hair and clothing.
Anime heroines are often scantily clad, not just titillate, but because it’s easier to animate naked people than clothed people. Catching the movement of clothing is a tricky thing to do well. So when you’ve got a lead character like Yomiko Readman who’s wearing at least three layers of clothing and has long untidy hair, then you’ve got to raise your game somewhat. Taking that into account it does an admirable job in keeping the number of clumsy looking scenes to a minimum and excelling when it comes to the action set pieces.
Dirt cheap at the moment in the UK, despite a few translation errors on Manga Video’s part (unseen character Nenene gets her name translated when it appears on post-it notes in Yomiko’s flat), it’s definitely worth purchasing.