Archive for the Cutie Honey Category


Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection (English)

January 10th, 2019

Many years ago, I was given the 1985 reprint of the 1973 manga Cutie Honey.  When she gave it to me, artist Rica Takashima mentioned that this was the very first magical heroine who didn’t need a man to help her (and the men actually get in her way more than once.) I’m a huge Go Nagai fan, so was thrilled to read this tale of death and destruction, breasts and body-shifting. It was, as I expected, horrible in the best possible way. I never expected to see it translated into English. 

Here it is, translated into English! By my bud, Zack Davisson! Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection is a must-get for, well, pretty much, either everyone or no one, depending on what you like to read. ^_^ 

In this original story (well told once again in the Cute Honey Universe anime last year) Kisaragi Honey learns she is an android with supernatural abilities, and is pursued by the Panther Claw gang, led by the odious Sister Jill, her boss Panther Nora, and an Island of Dr. Moreau‘s worth of creepy animal-human hybrids.

In attempting to hide from Panther Claw, Honey enrolls in Saint Chapel Girl’s School (which itself is the ur-ridiculous-girl’s-school-name in Yuri) and meets Natsuko, Na-chan, who falls hard for Honey on sight. Natsuko isn’t alone in this, Honey is the object of desire for students and teachers alike. She also ends up being the object of  desire for the obscene Junpei and Danpei Hayami, as well as being admired  and supported by journalist Seiji Hayami – who ends up being damseled for his efforts. Aside from that, there is a little bit of ugly lesbian sex in the form of two of the teachers at Saint Chapel, and a bit of non-consensual BDSM, as well.

Honey is not successful in hiding out at Saint Chapel, instead bring danger upon the school. With many casualties. As I said when I reviewed the Japanese edition, “The end of the main part of the story is violent with a capital “Oh my god!” Which was made truly appalling by the light-hearted romp that was the final chapter in which Honey destroys Sister Jill and sings her own musical theme.” 

I love Go Nagai. Have I mentioned that? Well I do. I love that he layers cute and awful here to make a mille-feuille of WTF.  This manga is brilliant and horrific at the same time and, not despite the horror – but because of it. 

Ratings: 

Art – Godawful except when its not
Story – Violent and weird, except for the cute bits
Characters – Creepy, unless/until they aren’t
Service – 100%
Yuri – 15%

Overall – Brilliant

I am beside myself with joy that you, too, are able to read this manga, and I hope you will. Much of my inspiration as a Yuri fanatic is because of Nagai’s work. This is a piece of our history, kept in a softcore scrapbook made by creepy Uncle Go.

 





Yuri Anime: Cutie Honey Universe (English)

October 22nd, 2018

I finally had a chance to sit down and finish up the Cutie Honey Universe anime, streaming on HIDIVE (where apparently all the Sentai Films series stream, finally!) And, well, honestly, I think it was a darn near perfect iteration of this classic magical-girl adventure. The main story echoes the original manga pretty closely through the first half. Honey’s father is killed, Saint Jogakuen is attacked by Panther Claw, many people die. But in the second half, the series takes a new tack…and I really like it.

For one thing, in this version we get the very gay Aki Nastuko we’ve always deserved. Seduced by Inspector Genet, in love with Honey, this Na-chan is the right one. It was with no surprise, therefore, that we couldn’t keep her. :-(

Inspector Genet / Sister Jill was perfect. Perfect. Obsessed, evil, manipulative…absolutely perfect.

I’ve been watching Cutie Honey for a couple of decades and I’m gonna have to say – this was exceedingly close to what I would call the “ultimate” Cutie Honey. It doesn’t even end with the school in smoking ruins and dead bodies everywhere, so that has to count for something. 

Ratings:

Art – 10 
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Service – 10
Yuri  – 9

Overall – 10

While I still have dreams of butchy Na-chan of Cutie Honey-a-Gogo! and Honey getting together, Cutie Honey Universe runs a close second.





Cutie Honey-A-Gogo Manga (English)

July 8th, 2018

From the moment you see the brokeback pose and the modern-yet-Op Art cover, you know that you’re in for a ride with Cutie Honey a Gogo. And then you look at the credits: Original Story by Go Nagai, Honey’s creator, Story & Art by Shimpei Itoh, creator of Hyperdolls and artist for Taisho Yakyuu Musume, with cooperation from Hideaki Anno, the Director of the 2004 Cutie Honey Live-Action Movie and you know that this manga is going to be out of this world. 

And so it is. 

Cutie Honey a Gogo is a 2007 iteration of the eternal heroine Kisaragi Honey, aka Cutie Honey, a transforming android, who fights against the grotesque and violent Panther Claw, run by Sister Jill. 

This volume has everything I could ever want in a Cutie Honey story. Nat-chan is strong (and angry) and goes a little soft because of Honey, Sister Jill is obsessed, useless authority figures abound, random and pointless BDSM is inserted and, in the final pages, at St. Chapel Girl’s School (woo-hoo!) we get a sweet little bit of Yuri between Naoko and Ayu.  Couldn’t ask for anything better. 

If I haven’t been clear, let me be plain – this is a bluntly violent manga in which there are many casualties, but not as violent the original manga in which no one survives. 

But then, as someone on Twitter noted (but I cannot find the post to credit) Dirty Pair sounds filthy, but it’s not and Cutie Honey sounds innocent, but it’s not. It never has been. When you step into a Cutie Honey story, expect fanservice and death to follow.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Shimpei Itoh was a great choice
Story – 9 For a Cutie Honey story, this pretty much is exactly right.
Characters – 9 Same
Service – Yes, duh. Itoh does a terrific job of translating Honey’s transformation into sequential art
Yuri – Dribs and drabs. Let’s call it a 3

Overall – 8

I’m so glad to see this most excellent iteration of such  a timeless, yet always questionable, series. ^_^ 





Cutie Honey Universe Anime (English)

May 31st, 2018

Cutie Honey Universe is the most perfect version of the original Cutie Honey manga ever made and it is a treasure that should be instantly enshrined in whatever Halls of Fame anime may have.

In 2005, I reviewed the 1985 collection of the original 1970s Cutie Honey manga, which I described as “…one of the grimmest, most violent and depressing stories I’ve ever read!” and “On the whole, I really liked it, except when…oh, hell, I’ll admit it. I thought it was brilliant. Brilliant, disturbing, weirder than anything I could come up with on acid, Cutey Honey was, and is, a lesbian manga icon.” 

Ans since then, there have been dozens of anime, manga and live-action (both movie and TV) reinterpretations, some of which have been good, like Cutie Honey-a-gogo and the live-action TV series, and others which have been brutally awful, like Cutie Honey Seed. 

But we’ve never before see anything like the story in the original manga in anime format. And so I tuned into to the newest iteration of this series, Cutie Honey Universe, currently streaming on the HiDive platform, with no particular expectations. Imagine my delight, then, when we meet Kisaragi Honey, a student at St. Chapel girl’s school, with the most horrific, ugly, sadistic teachers.

…

No, wait, forget I ever wrote that sentence.

Imagine my delight when we meet Jill-sama, a sadistic, lesbian psychotic and her alter ego, Inspector Genet who is everything awful and wonderful about 1980s anime, from her blue eye shadow to her seductive creepiness. 

  … 

Okay, forget everything I just said. Once more from the top.

Cutie Honey is pervy in a wholly tiresome way, with dissolving clothes and T&A and creepy gropey guys as “comedy” and an evil psycho lesbian bad guy and a very likely love affair between Honey and Na-chan and horrible lesbian teachers and extraordinary violence. It’s awful in a dozen ways , as we must surely expect from Go Nagai’s vision. 

I love it so much I can barely express it.

This is the Cutie Honey the world has been waiting for. Well, it’s the Cutie Honey I’ve been waiting for and clearly my love and admiration is more important than anyone else’s.  

Ratings:

Art – 10 
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Service – 10
Yuri  – ? TBD, but I have my eyes on 10

Overall – 10

It’s perfect. 





Yuri Live-Action: Cutie Honey the Live

December 17th, 2007

It’s not like Cutie Honey the Live is good or anything. In fact, it’s pretty horrid; a veritable blivet of pandering, service and pervtastic-ness. And yet…I love it. Like Ikkitousen and Kannazuki no Miko, I can look past the stuff crammed into it to pander to the somewhat-lower-than-lowest-common-denominator to see something worth watching.

Like all of the versions in the Cutie/Cutey Honey mythos (barring Cutie Honey Seed) in this edition, Kisaragi Honey is the android daughter of the brilliant Professor Kisaragi. Like the original CH manga, Honey is a schoolgirl and her best friend and roommate at the White Rose School (Shirobara Gakuen) is Aki Natsuko. In this incarnation Na-chan is sadly reduced to a cringing dweeb – a far cry from the hyper-competent, muscular, gun-toting public peace officer I loved in Cutey Honey a-GoGo.

After the initial story of Honey’s existence and the death of her father, this Live-Action TV series deviates from the previous incarnations. Hayami Seiji is a homeless doofus who fancies himself a suave guy and crack private investigator. He’s really just an amusingly jerky guy. The kind of role a young Bruce Campbell might have played.

Honey this time is a bit bubble-headed, but likeable. She has no ego or pride, which makes it virtually impossible for the school bully and her henchchicks to make fun of Honey – something that they keep trying to do and at which they fail amusingly every time. I prefer Honey to be a bit more on the ball, but I have to give this actress some real credit – she’s got some actual stunt skills and does not at all suck in the role.

Panther Claw seems to be run by four leaders (who in my head I call Black Claw, Silver Claw, Scarlet Claw and the to be named, but probably Cobalt or Gold Claw.) Black Claw is a super-suave, bilingual metrosexual and Silver Claw is a schizoid personality. They are both good fighters and play a variety of freakish games that utilize society’s most pathetic people, to make money. (And while I wouldn’t swear to it, I believe that the old guy who keeps winning the games is Go Nagai himself.)

Scarlet Claw just showed up a few episodes ago and with her, the first real sign of Yuri. (I knew we’d get some eventually. Along with the panty shots and dress-up and other fetishy stuff, Yuri’s a good bet in CH.) By day, she’s a teacher at a high-end school and she’s clearly seduced several of her female students (and, just as clearly has no time for her male ones.) She also has a really disgusting egg fetish thing which I found quite nasty, but she made up for it by having an aesthetically pleasing costume as Scarlet Claw. :-) (The two guys just wear suits. Boring.) Scarlet Claw is totally an EPL. Thumbs up.

Now, here’s where the story starts to get good. In this incarnation, Honey is not the only AI-system android. Early on, we encounter the world’s most miserable girl, Miki. Where Honey lives happily, going to school, playing with Seiji and his homeless friends and generally being hopelessly cheerful, Miki’s existence is full of misery and grim, with a side of despair. We first encounter her in a girl’s juvenile detention center – and no one likes her there. Poor Miki. Only, she’s not helpless and when the Panther Claw start killing girls mysteriously at juvie, Miki takes matters into her own hands. Where Honey wears a red heart pendant, Miki wears a blue spade and also becomes a “Cutie”-type android…although I blank from calling her Cutie Miki, ’cause she such a miserable soul. ^_^;

Miki transfers to Honey’s school, but rebuffs Honey’s attempts at being friends. Miki learns that Honey is also an android, but manages to keep her own existence as one secret. Miki’s awesome – and kinda hot too. Scarlet Claw has some fun groping her, but of course she and Honey escape the evil clutches, etc, etc. Miki’s actress also has some decent physical skills, but not as much as Honey’s actress.

And that, I thought, was going to be that. Only, I was totally wrong. Yay!

In one episode, the school bully and her henchchicks recruit Miki to destroy Honey’s reputation. Cleverly they come up with a plan to make Miki do bad stuff and blame Honey, so it will sound like Honey’s doing the bad things herself. The first thing they try is to steal money from a sweet, naive rich girl. But she’s so eager to help them that she gladly hands over a lot of money and the bully and her henchchicks freak. “Put that away!” they yell. “Someone’s going to steal that!!” Trust me – it was funny. The rich girl walks off bemused, but concerned for the person she thinks is Kisaragi Honey. Several episodes later, the same rich girl, Yuki, is kidnapped. Because she’s charmingly loopy, she tries to help the kidnapper, eventually meeting the real Honey and engaging her assistance. Together, they save the day – and the life of the kidnapper.

In episode 10 Yuki, once again in the story, eventually confesses to Hayami (well, threatens him, really) that she’s in love with Honey. So, they go on a date. Unfortunately Hayami comes along and you know this isn’t going anywhere, but yay! Yuki’s in love with Honey! And that’s not even the best part. Silver Claw and Black Claw double-team Honey and beat her unconscious. Yuki runs up, demanding to know what they are doing. When they send their Panther Claws mooks after her, Yuki presses the white diamond pendant she wears and – lo and behold! – we’re up to three AI-system androids. Yuki leaps another notch up in yayness. Yuki’s actress is clearly a dancer and has pretty much no “fighting” skills – her moves are very PGSM-style “fighting.”

All of this leads me to believe that we are one Claw and one android short on the series, because it defies logic to think that we have a heart, a spade and a diamond, but won’t be getting a club. And here’s where I *just* had a brilliant thought. ^_^Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing evar if Na-chan was the fourth android? Just thinking out loud, but…cool, huh?

Once again, do *not* be watching this show if panty shots, breasts, maids, nurses and other staples of the fanboy fetish closet bother you. This series is not subtle or classy. But if you can either deal with those things and like me, watch around them or if, heaven forfend, you actually enjoy them, and you like Yuri, Cutie Honey the Live is another notch in Go Nagai’s headboard.

Ratings:

Characters – 7
Story – 5, with moments of 8
Live-Action Adaptation of Manga/Anime – 8
Yuri – 6
Service – 827

Overall – 7

I find the ending sequences rather charming, too. For the most part, we see Honey fighting the masked Panther Claw dudes in a fountain – and she looks like she’s having a blast. The song totally fits her. When Miki arrived, we saw her fighting the PC in the same fountain, looking considerably less cheerful. Again, the song fits her. Now that Yuki has arrived, this week we got *her* fighting the PC, same fountain, and a song for her. It’s kind of cute, actually. Here’s keeping my fingers crossed for Na-chan being the fourth.