I do wonder if the bloggers who have lambasted this simply aren’t old enough to realise what this show actually is. It’s not watered-down porn, there’s been plenty of that already and as it tends to be the shows those bloggers like they should be better at recognising it. This is sword and sorcery, the way it used to be done, incredibly sleazily.
Those of use old enough to remember Kinji Yoshimoto’s 1987 collaboration with Satoshi Urushihara – Legend of Lemnear will recognise that this series isn’t exactly uncharted territory for the director. Furthermore, those of us who have memories of the home video boom of the eighties know that this sort of sleazy sword and sorcery is a long established genre, albeit one that has faded over time.
Here’s a few examples of the genre taken from the excellent Wrong Side of the Art site.
Note the presence of a phallic snake in every single one of the posters? There should be no surprise when that very same imagery shows up in Queen’s Blade. The show is a poster for sleazy sword and sorcery come to life.
I also don’t think people really appreciate the sheer oddness of the source material, which is very much born out of that eighties interest in sword and sorcery. It is based on a game that is not, as I’ve seen it descibed/assumed (descrumtions?), a “H-Game”.
It is, in fact, the old Flying Buffalo Lost Worlds combat book game but with characters such as Chiron, Centaur Guard and Praxides, Female Flying Gargoyle replaced with characters like Claudette: Lord of Thunder and Airi: Infernal Temptress. Essentially they are artbooks of warrior women in the “chainmail bikini” mould that can fight against other artbooks. Though the series has also added the “plate mail apron” to the lexicon of useless battle armour.
The series thus feels doubly oddly out of time, far racier than most TV anime fare and dealing in the sort of exploitation genre that’s long fallen by the wayside, replaced by parody or more serious takes on the fantasy genre. Even the source game feels like it’s time slipped from a period where Games Workshop sold topless wood elf minatures.
Despite people decrying the moe-ification of anime and creating TV shows based on erogames, in the last 15 years or so anime (and it’s fans) has probably gotten a lot more conservative and prudish. Watching Urusei Yatsura drives that home somewhat (as has collecting clips for future 198x overload posts). That show went out in the early evening, and the last two episodes I’ve watched contained more nudity than any similar show I’ve seen broadcast today.
Obviously that prudishness has helped somewhat in the ailing OAV market, where you now see new episodes giving you nudity they couldn’t show you on TV. Not to mention “uncensored” DVD releases. But it’s also created this subset of fans who can’t seem to handle anything which is sleazy, as opposed to creepy. Anime has creepy in vast amounts at the moment and they seem to handle that fine.
In fact the original artbooks for Queen’s Blade never offered any actual nudity themselves, teasing the player with a Tobias Funke-esque never nude approach to its illustrations. Which is why a quick websearch shows that unofficial printed material outweighs the official products by at least a factor of 10.
This TV show, as well as mining that vein of 80’s sleaze Yoshimoto clearly likes, is acting like one of those OAVs I mentioned above. It’s a chance for the fans of the books to see their favourite characters in a state of official undress (as opposed the mountains of doujin works the game has inspired).
Now, don’t get me wrong, the TV show is just as terrible as those eighties sword and sorcery movies tended to be. The animation is nowhere near as terrible as some have made out, benefiting on occasion by the presence of Yoshimoto’s fellow straddlers of sleaze & mainstream, Urushihara and Yasuomi Umetsu, showing up to animate some scenes. They might be perverts but they are also excellent animators.
But those who endured Yoshimoto’s stint as director on Genshiken know that while he tends to maintain a decent level of consistancy in his animation, he’s not a very a good director. He’s not even that good when it comes to framing his T&A shots. It’d be a lazy comparison to call him the Russ Meyer of anime, but Meyer had a better eye with a camera than Yoshimoto does.
And if he’s a bad director, he’s a worse screenwriter. The show moves so incredibly slowly. It’s essentially a tournament show, with the various characters fighting one another to determine the new Queen. But it’s 4 episodes before we even get one of these tournament fights. And when we do it is one of the dullest sword fights ever filmed. Part of this slow nature is down to the fact he’s got to cram in every single one of the characters from the books into the show, but it could still be done with more zip than he gives the viewer here.
So it’s utter trash, but honest trash. And if you have fond memories of the exploitation side of the sword and sorcery film genre, this is probably worth checking as you’ve probably already watched a lot worse…