天下制覇

I’m confused.

Impressions:

I’m not really sure what to say. I didn’t expect the show to be this out and out crass. Panty has sex with four men in the first 12 minutes, and they fight a giant feces monster. It’s certainly not your typical Japanese faire, but strikes me almost like… I don’t even know, some kind of weird marriage between the Power Puff Girls and Stroker & Hoop. I’m not sure that I’d want to watch a show that was like the A part of the episode, despite the kickin’ music in the transformation scene, but the B sequence was a lot of fun. Sure, part of the fun comes from seeing what kind of insane onomatopoeia they kick out (‘stripe’ means slash!), but it was certainly enjoyable.

The fairly unique and extremely dynamic visual style is obviously the big draw here, but the music doesn’t let the show down either. After Sym-Bi being the fiasco for me that it is, this almost feels more like a Tartakovsky show than his own stuff. The main quibble that I have is that the monster destruction sequences of building a little paper mache monster, setting it up against a paper background, and then blowing it up (this is ‘real’ footage) looks extremely tacky and just plain awful. With everything else being stylized and dynamic, why would you include an ugly throwback to corny sentai stuff like that?

So, at once I have a better and a worse impression of it than I expected. I’ll definitely check out the next few episodes and be praying that they follow more of the action side than the "let’s make a ton of poop and vomit jokes" side. The crass stuff is just puerile to a level that even Xebec dares not tread and really detracts from what could be a rather flashy and charming… and disturbing… show.