But that sequence doesn't need the movie around it to be of any use. There are moments that do work out of their sheer brio: there's an utterly insane shootout in a restroom that escalates until it destroys part of a street intersection and a subway station, like a Hong Kong gun-fu movie where the fluid has run out of the brakes. Too bad he didn't come up with much of a story to do justice to those ideas, and the end result is a production that doesn't outlive its shock value. It's obvious Umetsu wanted to pay homage to things like La Femme Nikita or, more to the point, Leon/The Professional, especially where the latter dealt with the power dynamic between an underage character and an older male father figure. The rest of the story is all stylistic excursions, with the uncut version of the OVA adding a number of pornographic interludes to ratchet up the notoriety even further. She grows close to a young man, Oburi, who also kills for the same corrupt cop, and the two of them plot to escape, but not without a high body count and the need for a few trips to the cleaners.Īnd that, as they say, is it. She kills, and most of the people she kills are scum who fly above the law, so clearly they deserve it, or something. He provides her with weapons - mainly, a pop-out trick gun that shoots time-delay exploding bullets - a list of targets, and protection. The original Kite, released in 1998 as two half-hour OVA episodes (released outside of Japan in a single edited-together episode), dealt with a teenager named Sawa who has fallen under the control of a corrupt cop. ©1998 YASUOMI UMETSU/GREEN BUNNY Sawa: schoolgirl by day, gun-girl by night.
I leave it the audience to decide if that constitutes a recommendation. It's better only in the sense that it makes you less sick. The surprise is that the live-action Kite may be the better of the two productions - but only because it's intermittently foul, instead of relentlessly and unrepentantly foul. Greenlighting such a product might well have been inevitable, since the bare bones of the story do lend themselves to the kind of grimy, trashy, repugnant action film likely to earn the wrong kind of cult following. You can see, then, why word of a live-action of Kite had me rolling my eyes. I put myself somewhat in the first category and not at all in the second, so I can safely say that reading up about controversy around Kite, and pondering the implications of its presence, have been far more interesting than actually watching the stupid thing. The whole of Kite is about the pushing of boundaries in salacious ways, meaning at this point in time it's mostly of interest to two kinds of people: those curious about the history of transgressive topics in anime, and those looking for a cheap thrill. Take away the infamy - the extreme violence, the graphic (and questionable) sexuality - and there isn't much left. Kite is one of a handful of anime that are famous for being infamous, and that's about all there is to it. Or, while a given title may have prominence (as described with words like "important", "seminal"), it isn't always a positive sort of prominence - no, not even when it means a live-action remake the material is in the offing. The same caveat applies to the use of the word classic, because one person's classic anime may just be old to someone else. Neon Genesis Evangelion's influence has been as much baneful as positive, spawning (if not wittingly) dozens of imitations and half-clones, and narrowing the field of possibility for anime as much as it widened it. It's easy to presume that when we call something influential, that the influence in question is always positive, when this is far from true.
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