Is Cutie Honey Universe Good, or a Bust?

April 16, 2018

Anyone keeping abreast of the latest news in anime will probably be aware that there is a new Cutie Honey series airing, and it definitely opens with a well-rounded pair of episodes that are significantly more interesting than one might expect from something so self-evidently lurid and lewd.

It’s a big, in-your-face kind of series with everything on display from the start, which I feel does a fine job of modernising the original concept without quite being so trashy as some of the OVA versions. Of course, this assessment is based only on the show’s opening episodes, amply front-loaded as they are with action and also exposition to provide a firm backstory for the hero.

There’s no shortage of foreshadowing, suggesting at least there is the intention of telling some kind of deeper story, and I think the decision to hold off on the exposition and origin story until the second episode works.

Shin Mazinger went more ambitious with the idea, using its first episode to present the series’ ending and leave a tragic last stand hanging over the narrative as a sword of Damocles, and beginning in media res is not exactly an uncommon technique, but it is – I think – in superhero stories often welcome. Origin stories on their own can feel formulaic, they often involve a dead relative, some kind of plot device and so on; beginning your story with that kind of infodump is very well-worn. This is elevated as a technique if the origin is not quite as it seems, and elevated further if its revelation is used to diegetic point – and here Cutie Honey Universe does offer something interesting that plays on its most interesting dynamic.

It is not subtle foreshadowing that Jill is, in fact, almost certainly Genet; this is not an important or interesting mystery in itself. Were Genet not an interesting character herself (and Jill not an interesting and apparently conflicted villain) this would barely count as a twist worth mentioning.

But Genet is presented as Honey’s mentor, superior officer, partner and – in the end of episode two – close female confidant, almost on the level of relative. She fills a lot of roles, and so it is natural that Honey would confide her past in her. When the two women embrace after a fight, and Genet comforts Honey, there is love there.

It is worth digressing for a moment here to stress exactly how Sapphic Cutie Honey Universe is; it is very much so. Obviously some measure of this is comedic (the grotesque caricatures of the teachers and bullies, two old women having sex in the park as a background visual joke), some measure of it is titillating (Nat-chan in bondage at the end of episode 1, for example, or the framing of Jill’s confrontation with Honey that puts her backside front and centre), but this is a show that is unashamedly about women. Men exist, but are the sidekicks who feed plot devices to the women, or get captured, or are used as bait; it’s a simple gender role reversal in this sort of story, and a nicely done one.

This unashamed lesbianism is what makes the Jill/Genet-Honey relationship so interesting (and makes Jill an interesting villain). She is a beautiful, strong woman adored by the male characters and uninterested in them, who openly says she is there to look out for and be there for her young protege, while they embrace after a hard-fought battle. It mixes maternal, sisterly and romantic tones, in a way. And yet simultaneously the show visually and implicitly pushes the idea that this female confidant figure is also a villain who uses women to her own ends, and lives surrounded by a harem. Panther Claw want the plot device McGuffin Honey holds, of course; this is the core conflict, the driving force of the origin story with its dead father/creator.

But episode two’s monster of the week is born from a woman who murdered her abusive husband, and Jill congratulates her for taking that stand. It is a common trope in superhero anime and tokusatsu for villains to be born from people whose flaws and vices get the better of them, bestiality emerging from latent evil. Fire Claw, however, is born almost out of Jill’s respect for a woman fighting an abuser. A transgression has occurred from a legal and indeed potentially a social perspective, but it is hardly an unsympathetic one which immediately adds some tension to Honey’s killing her. Jill creates her monsters out of women with the capacity for violence, but the series makes it clear that sometimes simply being a fighter does not make one evil.

Honestly, when that villain introduction happened, I became significantly more interested in how the series would have Jill mature as a villain and handle the revelations to come. Doctor Kisaragi made so much of Honey’s humanity (despite being an android), her capacity for love and determination and all manner of good heroic things. She fights for love and justice, takes on beautiful feminine-coded disguises and lives surrounded by women, supposedly hermetically safe from the outside world in a boarding school.

Genet lives in the more masculine-coded world of the police force, and Jill and Panther Claw combine stereotypical combinations of dangerous animals and dangerous women to form their monsters. Everyone, every superpowered individual here, is an aspect of feminine strength.

Of course, Cutie Honey Universe is by no means a perfect show; it is a good series, it is definitely an interesting series, but it has some major offputting flaws. For all the good interactions between Honey and Genet that play with relationships between women, it also uses old women being sexually active as a punchline, puts schoolgirls in their skimpies in bondage and is making jokes about the male gaze even in its opening credits as Junpei and his father orbit Honey, ogling her particulars.

But one comes into a Go Nagai production expecting crude sex jokes and breasts. It is an unavoidable, innately divisive part and parcel of the fiction. You are going to get a show about two powerful, badass women in complicated relationships, but you are also going to get jokes about how good they look and how unattainable they are. And, on a more aesthetic level, while the cinematography is frequently striking and interesting its use of a bright blue CGI field for its zero-gravity fight scenes is not particularly attractive or interesting. The junkyard fight between Jill and Honey was far better than the other fights so far because it used landscape and props (and had a very nice bit of framing of Jill against the skyline).

I think much of the series’ future will rely on how it handles the revelations it builds to, and if it can keep the brazen, blatant tone it has set up. The show might be made hard to like for some by its openness and boldness, but without it it would not be half the series it is.

Written by r042 Posted in Animation & Film, Opinion, Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged with Anime, Cutie Honey Universe