This Week in Anime

Yasuomi Umetsu and Young Girls with Massive Handguns

Coop
Dear reader, if you've been around the North American anime community's elder statesfolks for a bit, you've probably heard about the works of Yasuomi Umetsu. Known for his distinctive character designs, gore-filled action, and his penchant for occasionally going all the way with sexually explicit moments, this veteran jack-of-all-trades has kept himself rather busy over the past forty years with titles such as Kite, Mezzo Forte, and the upcoming Virgin Punk.

However, I mention his status as a "Jack of all Trades" because he's done almost everything an animator can do! Be it key animation, direction, or even drawing little cover art for something wicked by TM Network, Umetsu's been seemingly down for anything.

With all that in mind, let's go beyond the time and look at Umetsu's greatest hits. Right, Steve?

Wow, Lynzee is training new executive editors young these days...

Galilei Donna has my interest piqued, mainly because it's the only Umetsu-helmed work I can recall that doesn't feature characters he also designed. I see Discotek put out a DVD release of the series quite a while back. A lot of Umetsu's work has been released by the company before my tenure, except Kite—which I provided back-of-box copy for. Before I explain my first encounter with Umetsu's body of work, I just wanted to be transparent about that fact.

I have a young girl pointing a massive hand cannon at my head, too!

I wouldn't say there was a specific title that introduced me to his work. Back in the wild west days of anime in three parts on YouTube, I remember seeing snippets of action scenes from Kite, Mezzo Forte, Casshan: Robot Hunter, and New Hurricane Polymar.

I was intrigued by his sharp and dynamic character design work from the few clips I'd seen. However, since these were still the early days of YouTube, I'd also seen Kite and Mezzo Forte's most infamous sequences when I was way too young to be watching them. It left a weird impression of me at times—one that made me go, "This action is cool, but what did I just see?" That experience kept me away from his work for a good long time, until I was the right age to watch it.

Looks like someone tripped and spilled all his ketchup!

You better believe that someone on Virgin Punk's production said something to the effect of, "you have one frame to tell the audience that this is from the director of Kite." All you need are slick character designs, intense action, and a girl with a gun running around. But on the topic of Kite's sex scenes, they don't feel as out of left field as they do on Mezzo Forte. You're seeing the situation through Oburi's eyes as Sawa is being assaulted, and it's intentionally hard to watch. More than anything else, it's informing the audience of exactly why Sawa wants out and only hammers home the lengths she's willing to go to escape her abusers. It's very much a grindhouse or exploitation flick sort of story, but I cheered when Akai finally got his. Either way, I'm glad the Blu-ray gives the viewer options with just how hard they want to go. It's not pleasant at times.

At least Umetsu gave her exploding bullets the second time around. As you said, that didn't seem like a sticking point at all for him at the time. It was part and parcel with selling an OVA—something he learned pretty fast while working as character designer and chief animation director on Megazone 23 Part II.

Whether it was explicitly porn or not, OVAs were expected to have that extra bit of T&A spice to help boost sales. That concept carried on through the 80s and into the 90s, especially for ARMS and Green Bunny—the studios behind Kite and Mezzo Forte.

Mezzo Forte is not going for the moody tones that Kite is drenched in. It's pretty darn cool to see a gun-toting girl tear up a bowling alley, then escape in a slug bug as a gang of hired goons are turned into human bowling balls.

"The Umetsu 4B Guarantee" has a nice ring to it.

Noted! But before we move further down Umetsu's 4B trajectory, we'd be remiss if we forgot to mention his directorial debut— Robot Carnival's Presence segment.

Presence is of the same breed of story, minus the exploding bullets. As Lynzee talked about in the Robot Carnival edition of The Anime Backlog, the segment is very pointedly focused on a man who violently rejects his companion once she starts to express her desires. The toy allegory used here makes it even more biting when one considers similar situations in real life. The understated nature of the segment also ensured that when there's an instance of violence, it elicits a jarring reaction from the viewer. The violence here stands in sharp contrast to Umetsu's gun-toting girl flicks, as the brutality featured there has more of a "grindhouse movie shock" vibe to it.

Now that you mention it, the fabric rendering here is spectacular. Reminds me of how fabric behavior isn't something that comes to mind straight away these days. The most impressive fabric rendering I've seen lately is in The First Slam Dunk. Those basketball jerseys had me doing a double-take every so often.

Looking at both of these sequels, Mezzo DSA seems to be a pretty standard TV follow-up riffing on Mikura's day-to-day outside the film—which, hey, that makes for a fun set-up for a longer series. But then I looked into Kite: Liberator... While it's cool to see more exploding bullet action, the addition of raging monsters threw me for a loop. Not what I'd expected going into a Kite sequel.

I don't think he will have a face after that, Steve.

Back in those days when we were fresh out of luck and had to go with her vision.

This reminds me of an opening I've watched ad nauseam without having seen the entire show...

Umetsu's directorial effort before Virgin Punk, Wizard Barristers drew me in right away with how well the action on display meshes with the theme song. While I haven't finished the entire series, the concept of police procedural that follows a band of wizard lawyers handling wizard crimes is pretty darn cool. Not to mention how the wizard lawyers also find themselves regularly clashing with the normie fuzz, too.

When Galileo enters the conversation, how could you not?

These wonderful OPs also serve to show that even if he's not working on a big project, Umetsu's always popping in here and there to do a little key animation. Take a look at his ANN encyclopedia page—he keeps himself busy.

Same, I'm jazzed to see Umetsu lock-and-load for another intense action project. Even more so as it seems like he's approaching Virgin Punk on his terms rather than a mandate to do "more Kite." I have a feeling that he's got way more in the tank than he's letting on. Like you said, whether it rocks my socks off or isn't my cup of tea, at least we'll know that it probably won't be boring.

Thank god.