When I watch the old Warner Brothers cartoons, or Tex Avery stuff from MGM, the comic violence doesn't affect me. Maybe it's because the characters are anthropomorphic animals, and are sufficiently different from humans so that I don't identify with them.

When I watch anime that includes ridiculously excessive violence against characters which are as close to human as anime characters ever are, it just isn't funny for me. Perhaps it's because the material in question really is crap, but I know that I've had that kind of reaction to shows other people have indicated that they really liked.

It is possible to overdo it. (Dokuro-chan, anyone? Not for me, thanks.) The first time I tried to watch Girls Bravo I gave up after two episodes. I saw the hapless hero get beat up, stomped on, and run through a machine that should have turned him into hamburger. From context it's clear I was supposed to laugh, but I didn't laugh at all.

Of course, Girls Bravo is a stupid show anyway. Eventually I came back to it and watched all the way through the end of the second DVD. After seeing an attempted lesbian rape at gunpoint, which was also supposed to be funny, I decided I was wasting my time. There's four more DVDs of it out there, but I sure won't be getting them.

Muteki Kanban Musume can be translated pretty well as "Unrivaled Poster Girl". (There are other ways it could be translated, but I think that was what they intended.)

Japan has a lot of tiny neighborhood restaurants, selling oden or ramen or various other traditional stuff, and of course always sake and beer. They're a bit like neighborhood pubs, except that they don't quite have that same dark-and-dingy connotation. Quite often they're family businesses, and if the family has a daughter, teens or twenties and at least passably good looking who works there, then she'll be part of the attraction and help bring in the neighborhood men as customers, albeit just because it's nice to be around pretty girls. She isn't expected to "put out". The term kanban musume refers to such girls, and they're almost like mascots. (Or so I've been told.)

It was released here as "Ramen Fighter Miki". It was one of the earliest titles that Media Blasters released sub-only. I had already watched some of it as fansubs, and I wanted to encourage MB anyway, so when the first DVD came out I got it. In my last order I got the other two.

I didn't finish watching the first DVD when that was all I had, though I got most of the way. Part of the reason why is that it has a lot of extreme comedic violence -- and Miki is often the victim of it. She's drawn as a really cute girl -- most of the time, anyway -- and it made me cringe to see her getting thrown into a wall or clonked on the head by her mom. Coyotes, yes. Pretty girls, well, that's not the same. (At least they didn't show us any blood.)

On the other hand, I really did enjoy a lot of it. I think the problem was just that I was in the wrong frame of mind. I need to keep telling myself, "Tex Avery. OK? Tex Avery. This is anime as if it was done by Tex Avery. They're just cartoon characters. She isn't really a pretty girl. She doesn't feel any pain. Tex Avery. Tex Avery."

I'm gonna try it again. And try really hard to remember that it's farce, not story. This is about energy and sight gags and weirdness and really a lot of energy. It isn't a character show. Go with the flow. Go with the flow of it. Tex Avery. Tex Avery...

UPDATE: I used to go see the annual Tournee of Animation series every year. I don't even know if they'e still making the things. But one year they decided to include a Tex Avery appreciation. They commissioned a handful of cartoonists to make cartoons in the style of Tex Avery. I remember two of them very clearly, because one of them truly understood what Tex Avery was about, and one of them was completely clueless.

The latter said to herself, "Tex Avery did wolves, so I'll do a wolf." The cartoon was a wolf singing in a nightclub, a ballad. It was slow. Nothing much happened. It was about as far from being a Tex Avery cartoon as you can imagine.

The other guys, the ones who did know what Tex Avery was about, did a cartoon about cave men and dinosaurs. Lots of energy, fourth wall breaks, entirely unpredictable, running gags... It didn't use any character that looked like anything I remember Tex Avery draw, but it was definitely a Tex Avery cartoon. It was wonderful. I really wish I could see it again, but I don't have the slightest idea what it was called.

I do think that Muteki Kanban Musume is part of the rich lineage established by Tex Avery, and I need to keep thinking in those terms. She ain't a pretty girl, Steve; she's a cartoon character. Tex Avery. Tex Avery.

UPDATE: Author comments.

Hell with this. There's no secret anymore. Pete comments.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:38 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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