| about
trismugistus.com
and digital-bondage.net
are my web sites.
trismugistus.com
is where I upload my anime, manga and tv&film reviews,
and also where I occasionally post short stories and longer
works I've written.
digital-bondage.net
is my wallpaper site and provides anime, manga and other
desktop wallpapers in a variety of resolutions. I also
have a few tutorials and some resources, such as psds
for you to download.
I also run a site called scan-city.org,
which provides scans from the latest japanese anime magazines
for you to download and use in your wallpapers.
You can also read my blog here
or check out my anime list here. |
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| details |
| The Genre: sci-fi |
| The Format: 45 minute OAV, released on DVD by
ADV |
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| The plot: Maki, Reimi and Yuka may not look
like ace crime fighters, and to tell the truth,
their not. For now, they're stuck with the tedious
and degrading duty of traffic patrol. All that changes,
however, when Yuka gets herself kidnapped. To save
their friend and co-worker, Maki and Reimi must
suit up in their high-tech, skin-tight battle armour
and teach the kidnapper that when you play with
fire, you're going to get burned! |
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| opinion
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| Something that always amuses me about western
anime fans is how they often state “originality”
as being one of the reasons they like anime. They
claim that anime is different, that it breaks moulds
and offers truly original ideas and shows.
And this is of course true.
To some extent. |
The fact is it’s true of any entertainment
medium. There are those that are truly original
– the innovators, the geniuses, the
true artists. And then there are those that
simply fill genres. They are the entertainers.
They offer you things that aren’t necessarily
that original, or that different, that maybe
you’ve seen a dozen times before.
The point is that there’s nothing wrong
with either, really. You see, there’s
nothing wrong with a bit of simple entertainment,
something that makes you smile or laugh in
the right places, even if you know the jokes
are already coming. Something that gives you
explosions and actions, but doesn’t
really require you to think in any way.
Not everything has to be dynamite. Not everything
has to blow you away and make you think.
I’m rambling, but what I’m getting
around to is that Anime has just as many genre
works as their western counterparts. However,
the reason anime fans often state originality
is that these genres are new to them. |
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Imagine if you’d never seen a movie in
your life before and someone showed you every single
Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. You’d probably
be stunned – amazed at the newness of what
you were watching. In fact, you’d probably
be just as amazed by the genuinely awesome Terminator
or Predator films as you were by the awesomely poor
Red Sonja or Raw Deal.
In fact, until you’d seen a lot of movies,
you wouldn’t be able to place the few you
had seen in context. And that’s what happens
with a lot of anime fans. They approach the medium
fresh faced and dewy eyed (or is that fresh-eyed
and dewy faced, I forget) and are amazed by everything
they watch. Then a couple of years down the line
they realise that the Japanese are doing exactly
what they do in the west too – recycling the
same basic ideas and concepts.
Which brings us neatly to Burn Up (kinda). At last.
Y’see what I was kinda expecting from Burn
Up was what I’d gotten from Burn Up excess.
I was already familiar with Burn Up Excess (which
is a sequel to this, of sorts) from fan-subs and
around the time that Burn Up Scramble was being
released as a box set I figured, hey, why don’t
I get them all in?
I figured that since I’m, shall we say, not
averse to the big boobs and big guns brand of anime,
I might as well get all four incarnations of the
Burn Up franchise (is that the right phrase to use,
I wonder? It seems out of place when you’re
not talking about Hollywood movies.) for quadruple
the, er, pleasure, as it were. |
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What I wasn’t expecting was that the original
Burn Up would basically be from a different era.
The thing about excess, as I mentioned, is that
it’s pretty squarely sat in a niche. Along
with that niche comes a particular style of animation
and character design.
However, the original Burn Up turned out to be
sat in another niche. Anyone familiar with early
Masamune Shirow work, the first Bubble gum crisis,
or anything else from that era will know the style.
The hair is big, the eyes are quite round and girls
are kinda shorter and rounder.
It’s very... eighties.
More modern anime style tends to go for less expansive
hair-dos, squarer eyes and the girls tend to be
of a slimmer build. |
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And along with the character designs come
a whole host of other clichés from
the eighties era. It’s odd, because
Burn Up was actually made at what would be
the extreme tail end of this period and so
I must admit I hadn’t realised the later
shows would be such a leap.
The plot for Burn Up is therefore pretty
basic, involving one of the girls getting
kidnapped and the others having to rescue
her. The characters are all part of some sort
of “special SWAT” unit, which
was pretty much ‘the thing’ in
the 80’s, and so they single-handedly
slice their way through all the baddies.
There’s a few twists in their, but
one of the limitations the show faces is its
extremely short running time. At only 45 minutes,
it tries to cram in lots of staples of this
sort of show, but doesn’t really have
time to address them properly. The classic
example is the ‘special’ tough
bad guy, who is singled out from the masses.
Normally this character would be involved
in some sort of show down with one of the
girls where she’d be beaten, only to
get the upper hand at the end. But because
of the limited time frame, this doesn’t
happen and the bad guy is taken out in a quicker,
less predictable manner. |
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So in other words, this restricted format actually
kinda helps burn up stand out a little from the
crowd. It also means things rip along at a cracking
pace, leaving you little time to dwell on anything,
or indeed get bored in any way.
That’s not to say this is particularly brilliant
stuff. The animation is quite low grade, and the
sound quality is not great, with a noticeably sparse
sound track as well.
There’s also a big problem towards the end
which was presumably a result of this tight runnign
time. We see the main bad guy being cornered by
the police and there’s a young girl involved
there. Now I don’t want to give too much away,
but there’s a point where you think to yourself
“he’s going to use her as a hostage”.
But in actuality nothing happens and you just here
one the cops in the background saying “yaya,
we got the guys.” or somethign similar. Which
is most odd.
Overall, I’d say Burn Up is ok if you happen
to come across it for next to nothing on e-bay,
for example, but I wouldn’t go out of my way
to get hold of it. |
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| summary |
| The Summary: Fairly generic babes and guns late-80s/early-90s
style anime – it’s a passable diversion. |
| The Score: 2/5 |
| The Pictures:
(click for larger versions) |
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