Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 10

Key: The Metal Idol, episode 10, “Bug.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

Hard to believe we have only a few episodes left until it’s time for the two movies.

Akane and Key are still looking for their big break, but it may come in the form of the creepy, bespectacled naked dude we saw in the two episodes previous. As it turns out, Tataki, who knows a lot of the ins and outs of the idol industry, recognizes him: He’s none other than Hikaru Tsurugi, a genius with many careers and his hands in many projects.

Tataki holds up the bug from the phone
The bug from the phone

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 9

Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 9, “Return.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

This episode continues to ease us into the second phase of the series. Still without any major action sequence, it largely centers around Akane and Key’s efforts to break into the idol industry

As the episode proceeds, they get false leads but also talk to several people who like their recommendations. In particular, the name of Tataki apparently has clout, though he had earlier demurred when they went to him for references.

Sakura talks to that one guy in the video store
That, unfortunately, is what she said.

Tataki is at this point an ambiguous character: He’s a square-jawed, masculine guy, but at the same time he is president of a Miho fan club and apparent lives for nothing but fannishness. However,  he has real influence in the industry, indicating he’s not just some geek.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 8

Key: The Metal Idol, episode 8, “Go To.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

There has not been any distinctive shift in tone or content, but this episode nonetheless represents the beginning of Key’s second arc.

Although the story here picks up immediately where the previous episode left off, this is in a sense a transitional episode as it has little action and only minimal advancement of the story.

A naked dude holds a business card
NAKED DUDE WITH BUSINESS CARD. NAKED DUDE WITH BUSINESS CARD.

Sakura has taken on the role of Key’s manager and now tries to get her work as an idol. Having no connections of her own, she first goes to her best friend Suichi Tataki. Tataki is the president of a Miho fan club, and Sakura hopes he has connections. He doesn’t, but he does warn Sakura and Key away from working with Minos Productions, which hosts Miho; Minos is a front organization for Ajo Heavy Industries, and it apparently exists for no reason except Miho’s promotion.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 7

Key: The Metal Idol, episode 7, “Run.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

Man, this show can be brutal. The first third of this episode is an extremely bloody and magnificently directed action sequence. So far, I’m consistently astonished at how good this show is: Arresting imagery, compelling story, intriguing characters. It’s a brooding nail-biter.

This episode continues from the cliffhanger of the episode previous: Sergei, the stone-cold killer working for Ajo Heavy Industries, has marched into a meeting of a snake cult and begun killing everyone to get to Key, who’s currently unconscious after performing an apparently miraculous healing. Key’s longtime bodyguard Wakagi shows up, and he and Sergei proceed to seriously maim each other. Prince Snake-eye, foolish yet sympathetically portrayed, tries to intervene—and pays for it.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episodes 5 and 6

Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 5–6, “Scroll,” Parts 1 and 2. Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

We are six episodes into the show, and young Key still hasn’t got down to the business of becoming a music idol, though she is apparently convinced that is her only chance of getting 30,000 friends. In this two-parter, however, she manages to become a literal idol when she is taken in by a snake cult.

Key and Snake-eye sit in a temple
Snake cult.

Miho, or rather, the pilot who operates Miho, is in the hospital and is extremely sick after her encounter with Key. Nonetheless, Ajo insists that she will be forced to perform again shortly.

We begin to get more details about Ajo and his robots. The machines are powered by some kind of material called “gel,” which must be kept at very cold temperatures.

We have no real details at this point, but it’s apparent that piloting the robots is a painful experience, as Sergei appears to be in great pain when he does it and Miho is actually dying from it.

Close-up of Miho in bed with breathing mask
Miho’s in a bad way.

At the same time, the robots are hilariously vulnerable for machines built for war. Akane encounters one outside her apartment and destroys it by stabbing its eye. Another goes out of control, apparently because Key is having an emotional moment again, and begins strangling Sergei—so he too destroys it by breaking its eye.

Sakura deactivates a robot by stabbing its eye
Sakura takes out a robot.

They need to do something about these machines so that damaging one optic sensor doesn’t deactivate the whole thing.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol’, Episode 4

Key: The Metal Idol, episode 4, “Access.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

A harrowing episode, “Access” shows us what the show is capable of when it’s at its best. It can be a good thriller when it wants.

Let me get you up to speed and mention a few points I didn’t bother to discuss or got wrong in our essays previous. First, when Key went to Miho’s concert, she met up with Tataki, the guy who is close friends with Akane and also, apparently, president of Miho’s fan club. After Key prematurely ends the concert by killing Miho’s robot avatar, Key and Tataki wind up at a rooftop restaurant.

And we have to appreciate Tataki’s financial shrewdness here, taking Key to a restaurant: Key is undoubtedly a cheap date since she doesn’t eat.

Key and Tataki look on in panic
Key and Tataki.

Meanwhile, Sergei is hunting for Key. We now know that he’s the one who killed Key’s grandfather, and to find Key, he sends a robot after the sleazy photographer, Seiichi Tamari. First killing Tamari’s bodyguard, he confronts Tamari on a high tower that just happens—another unlikely coincidence—to overlook the rooftop restaurant where Key and Tataki are.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episodes 2 and 3

Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 2–3, “Cursor,” Parts 1 and 2. Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Crunchyroll.

Critics of Key: The Metal Idol often complain that it is a slow-moving show, and they’re not wrong. We’re already three episodes in (episodes 2 and 3 are a two-parter, sort of), and the story line still hasn’t taken off. However, the visuals are arresting, and there are enough intriguing details that it doesn’t feel sluggish.

Key holds a bouquet and lies on a park bench
Key being sluggish.

Sakura, the best friend Key improbably ran into while in Tokyo, has taken Key into her apartment. What brought Sakura to Tokyo in the first place, we aren’t told, but she survives there by working numerous part-time jobs. After an evening of pizza delivery, she works all night at a video rental.

The sleazy pornographer we met in the first episode comes after her, though less aggressively than the first episode’s cliffhanger implied he would. As it turns out, he not only photographs naked children in his bedroom, but also works for a corporation that produces music idols. He wants Sakura to sign on and is willing to harass her until she agrees. Although tempted by the money, she turns him down, and she has a male orbiter named Tataki with a knowledge of martial arts who’s able to drive the sleazeball off.

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Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episode 1

Key: The Metal Idol, episode 1, “Startup.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.

Available on Amazon Prime.

A bizarre OVA that appeared from 1994 to 1996, this is a series I have wanted to see for a long, long time. I noted some time back that it was out on Blu-Ray, but after that it fell off my radar.

In the meanwhile, it has appeared on streaming services. Amazon has added the English dub, but Crunchyroll has the Japanese original. I only discovered the sub while writing this post—so I watched the first episode in the dub, but will watch the Japanese version from now on.

It is a noirish version of Pinocchio, the story of a girl robot on a quest to become human—a quest that draws her into both an international conspiracy and the seedy underbelly of Japan’s idol industry.

Coming as it does from the early Nineties, when a lot of Japanese anime creators thought unintelligibility equaled depth and when both Blade Runner and Neuromancer were casting long shadows across Japanese pop culture, this show is famously weird. It’s weird perhaps most of all because of its mysterious director, Hiroaki Satō, who as far as I know has no other credits to his name. He crept onto the scene, made a competently directed anime skewering the world of Japanese idols, and then crept away again.

Key's new body
Key examines her new body.

I am really excited to finally watch this series, so I am going to review it one episode at a time. I have not seen it previously, so my comments here are off the cuff. Any criticisms I make come with the caveat that they may be satisfactorily answered by later episodes.

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Walpurgisnacht: ‘Little Witch Academia’

Witches get stitches.

Little Witch Academia, directed by Yô Yoshinari. Written by Yô Yoshinari and Michiru Shimada. Music by Michiru Oshima. Studio Trigger, 2017. 25 episodes of 22 minutes (approx. 9 hours and 10 minutes).

Available on Netflix.

Today is Walpurgisnacht, the second most important day in the magical-girl calendar, so now is a good time to discuss one of the most popular cute witch franchises of recent memory, Little Witch Academia.

This title first made its appearance in 2013 and 2015 as a duo of short films that were generally well received. The original film once had its home on Crunchyroll (if memory serves), but a quick check reveals it is there no longer.

The concept was adapted into a 25-episode television series in 2017, and it found a home on Netflix shortly thereafter, where it still resides. A mostly pleasant and sometimes silly coming-of-age story, Little Witch Academia is basically “Trigger does Harry Potter.”

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A Comparison of ‘Smile Pretty Cure’ and ‘Glitter Force’

Don’t you cry tonight.

A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.


She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.

For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?

Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)

I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.

But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.

Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.

Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.

So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.