Otaku no Video

"It's not like I'm ashamed of my past or anything!"- Former Otaku

Preface:

Otaku no Video is a very insightful and introspective (with a touch of mockery) movie that contains both a slightly parodical animated version of the origins of studio Gainax, and live recorded interviews conducted by Gainax of former (and current) Otaku of the time- 1991.

Very nontraditional in many ways, it's not completely anime, and not completely live action, but a blend that presents relevant cultural information regarding the Otaku. It's broken up into two parts; one, an animated movie about a guy named Ken Kubo and his stereotypical fat, geeky otaku friend ... Tanaka, and the second part is a series of the aforementioned interviews in segments called "Portrait of an Otaku".

The animation first:

Kubo and Tanaka were college friends; Kubo the typical Gary Stu kind of guy- tennis team, has a beautiful girlfriend, scholar, and everything seems right in his life, except he's rather bored. He meets up with Tanaka by chance in an elevator, and from that fateful reunion on is slowly drawn into the Otaku lifestyle of making fanfiction magazines, garage kits (modified figurines), and eventually full on anime and video games in an attempt to become the OTAKING- King of the Otakus!

After rising to the top, Kubo and Tanaka get screwed, and then have to decide what it was that was really important to them- the grubbing, hand to mouth lifestyle of being an artist and original creator, or selling out and making all the money. There's only one true path for the Otaking, and that's to take it beyond the stars.

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The pacing is broken up by the interviews, but the narrative is both engaging and humorous, along with providing a very loose version of how Gainax was started, and their goals of shooting for the stars, both in animation and in business practices. It's very interesting to see how Otaku no Video inspired later works, and drew from the doujinshi (amateur produced works) that put Gainax on the map. Real life science fiction conventions Daicon 3 and 4 (1981, 1983) are explored, which Gainax also produced shorts for. Other character stylings and symbols seen in later works also make appearances, like Kamina's glasses on a building, robots from Gunbuster, and more.

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Portrait of an Otaku:

Through a series of live interviews, the movie also explores the lives and disparate interests of those who call themselves Otaku. Garage Kit Otaku, Military Otaku, Anime and Manga, Fanzines, Cosplay enthusiasts, and Fan Video Otaku, and even an art thief are all shown, and asked series of questions that either mock their interests and lifestyle, or that give some insight into what it is that drives them to their obsession.

While it's believed that the people interviewed were either Gainax employees themselves (who created their studio to put a name behind their amateur original works, and thereby personifying some of these stereotypes), some of it is plainly staged. Hideaki Anno himself is shown as a Hentai-game addict, even. Typically, the faces and voices are censored, so it's still unknown who some of them are. It's interesting in that they're making fun of Otaku, and at the same time themselves, because that's how Gainax started out: geeks making their own originals to hawk at conventions.

The portrait section also provides some hilarious statistics on what Otaku are interested in, and how different groups see different themes. A foreigner was also intereviewed, and it was stated that some 50% of those surveyed come to Japan solely out of anime and manga fandom, and the other half either "like" or "are not opposed" to it. A fanzine convention survey of 100 Otaku revealed that only 15% of them had cosplayed, and an overwhelming 60% had not. Of those 15 that responded yes, the "Otaku who did cosplay tended to be repeat offenders".
Another survey included those who "talk to themselves", of which the overwhelming majority with 70% did.

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There's also a deep sociological background to Otaku culture; stemming from how a more collectivist culture like Japan operates vs an intensely individualistic one like the US. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered" they say, and to a point, it's true. In a collectivist culture, the ideal person fits in with their group, their family, their society, and don't express their individualism much when around others. In private, they can be a night and day different person.

The Otaku have long been branded as "no life losers", and in a sense shunned from their culture as they're perceived "deviant", no different from the US, really. People with anime and manga obsession, people obsessed with doomsday preparation, zombie fanatics, etc.-all these groups share a common thread in that they're on the fringe of 'normative' society. In that, they find a bond together, and create their own subculture outside of the norms.

For anyone who's interested in the Otaku culture, this half mockumentary is a great video for insight into what it was like back in the day, even if it's somewhat parodical. In all honesty, what they portray satirically here is not far from the truth, neither in 1991 nor in 2015. There are tons of people out there like the ones shown in this movie, that are obsessive enthusiasts of different fandoms, and though their interests may be broad, they're all bound by a label that sets them apart- that of the Otaku.

Ken Kubo was just your ordinary Japanese college student. He had a beautiful girlfriend, a passion for a sport he was genuinely talented at, and a satisfying life with little to no problems to worry about. Everything was going just fine for young Ken, when he ran into an old friend from high school who’s dedicated his life to a surprising hobby. Tanaka, having put on a generous portion of weight since their last meeting, has fallen into otaku culture, a certified never never land where adults turn their backs on conventional society to pursue every possible facet of an underground counter-pop-culture ... revolving around obscure, esoteric subjects such as animation, idol singers, special effects movies and even military paraphernalia. He initially raises his eyebrow at such juvenile fare, but soon finds himself slowly being sucked in, and before he knows it, he gets in way over his head and begins to change on a drastic level, losing both the respect and affection of his girlfriend along with any hint of his old social life.

Having left everything behind, Ken quickly realizes that the only direction he can move is now forward, so that his newfound passion doesn’t have to be a dead end. Instead, he dedicates his life not only to experiencing otaku culture, but changing it, and becoming one with it, so that he may one day become one of the greatest otaku the world has ever known. With the help Tanaka and the rest of his nerdy, passionate friends, Ken Kubo begins to climb the ladder of success as a content creator, overseeing the production of model kits in both Japan and China, all of which is a part of his grand plan to unite all of the otaku of the world in harmony under his rule as the Otaking, leading up to his grand ambition, a future theme park called Otakuland! But when his best friend turns his back on him and sells him out to hand the company over to the least expected person imaginable, will Ken be able to land on his feet, and will the otaku of the world ever live to see the day where they’ll be respected by society?

One of the first things you’ll want to know about Otaku no video is that, unlike most anime, it’s not entirely animated. A good chunk of it’s running time consists of live action interviews conducted in mockumentary style with different kinds of otakus, and these segments are spliced throughout the ova. I’ll talk more about those later, but more importantly, with only two 40 minute episodes and large portions of film that didn’t need to be animated, you might think it would be really simple to set aside a decent budget for the animation portions. And come on, this is Gainax, even a lot of their earlier works are more or less impressive in the visual department. this is unfortunately not the case, as the animation in this OVA is bare bones at best. It can be unbelievably distracting when there are tons of motionless people in the background, which is sadly all too common, and the best looking scenes are the ones where the only things happening are conversations. The opening video was decently animated, but the rest of the product just looks cheap.

Well, I say it looks cheap, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it looks bad. There really isn’t much going on in the animated sections in terms of action, so there really isn’t any content that can feel short-changed over their shortage of change. Yeah, the backgrounds full of frozen people can be distracting, but most of the content is serviceable enough, with no excess funds needed. It doesn’t really look like Gainax style animation, but at the very least, it does look like Gainax style artwork. The characters have an aesthetic that’s very much of it’s time, but is still pretty easy on the eyes. People are more or less realistically proportioned, at least from the neck down, with your typical anime facial constructs being really the only thing keeping them from looking real. Characters also cosplay in several scenes, with the costumes they’re wearing being of incredibly detailed quality, more than accurate enough to satisfy any purists sitting at the table. It’s not a great looking anime, but it looks fine.

So, we’re all otaku, right? I know I am, and obviously you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t have some level of interest in the anime medium. We all love watching animation from a certain bow-shaped archipelago, and as long as we all have that in common, we can more or less live in harmony together. There may be some truth to this, but where people tend to differ is where it comes to their otaku origin stories. We all discovered and embraced anime differently, from people who watched kids anime from a young age to people who just so happened to have their imaginations sparked by that one anime film they saw at a friends’ house. In Otaku no video, the main character was a normal, average person, and he was drawn into otaku culture from his old life because... Well, they’re not clear about what exactly started it, but it was either his friends’ level of passion, the fact that he could watch and out of print TV show on taped cassettes, or seeing that one girl in a fur bikini cosplay. Whatever it was, he came into the fandom as an adult, and was drawn in from the outside world. I don’t know about you, but this couldn’t be more different from my story.

Unlike Ken Kubo, I was born to be an otaku. If you follow the original Japanese definition of the word, someone who’s obsessed with something to the point of over-indulgence, that’s pretty much always described me. As a child I was an otaku for Power Rangers and Xmen, then I moved onto Star Wars, and later on in life I’d have similar experiences with RWBY, MLP Friendship is Magic, and the WWE. I would focus on these things so tightly that I would scare my friends and family away from the same properties. to this day, my brother still feels an aversion towards anything I get into. Seriously, after I got my PS4, his drive to buy one himself instantly died out, and he never touched mine in the year that I’ve had it. I have a tendency to approach things cautiously and skeptically, but then to dive in head first as soon as my toe’s in the water. I’ve had numerous otaku-like obsessions throughout my life, but looking back, none of them hit me as hard as pokemon did. That franchise landed me like a prize bass, and it ultimately worked as my gateway anime as a result, just like it has for a lot of people.

I went HARD into pokemon. It dominated my life to the point that I could see myself being one of the people interviewed in Otaku no video, were it made today. I don’t feel comfortable going into relevant experiences without a mosaic covering my face, but trust me, it wasn’t healthy. Thankfully, it’s proximity to Cardcaptors on Kids WB set me on the beginning of a much better path. Cardcaptors(No, not Cardcaptor Sakura, and I’m not proud of this) soon took over for it in my heart, and managed to get me into fanfic writing, which got me into writing in general. I would eventually move onto other TV anime, such as Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, before titles like Azumanga Daioh, Excel Saga and Chobits took me deeper into the medium, seeking out titles that weren’t immediately available at the time. Getting a full-time job also really helped, as it’s allowed me to pour money into the medium, often to my own detriment, and I eventually wound up giving back to the community through a blog that I’ve been running for four years strong. My obsessive tendencies haven’t gone away, as I still feel the need to buy merchandise and become a part of everything I get into, but I doubt I’ll ever grow out of that.

Now, why did I go out of my way to tell you all about my journey as an otaku? Well, first of all, because Otaku no Video doesn’t really offer a lot of discussion points of it’s own. That may sound harsh of me, but second of all, I can’t really relate to any of it, as my story is so obviously different from theirs. I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of people out there who can watch this anime, point to the screen at various moments and proclaim “Yeah, that’s how it was for me,” but I really can’t. Maybe I’m not the target audience, because I didn’t come up the way they did, I’m not well versed in classic anime(I mean come on, most old shows are at least one hundred episodes long), and I don’t feel so attached to the sanctity of otaku lifestyle that I need to see it given a blowjob just to feel more contented with my own life choices. I didn’t catch most of the references, I don’t feel compelled to look them up, and while I’ve been able to acknowledge the existence of passion as a positive life lesson before, it doesn’t feel as important here.

Part of it has to do with the fact that this anime wasn’t really intended to have a great story attached to it. One of the over-all themes I picked up on was one of nostalgia, and sure enough, I’ve been told by a few sources that Otaku no video is a semi-autobiographical tale about the founding of Gainax, through the love, passion, tragedy and triumph that got it where it is today... As well as 18 years in the still-distant future, because hey why not be optimistic? I don’t know how much of “Giant X’s” history accurately represents Gainax’s own tale, but it does offer a strong argument for no compelling story or plot being needed. After all, if you’re telling someone’s real life story, there’s no call to embellish the facts for the sake of entertainment. Well, you can say that, but when you’re telling your life story in 1991, and you’re patting yourself on the back for events that take place in 1999 and 2035, maybe throwing in a little spice to keep the viewer entertained isn’t the worst thing you can possibly do. I’m just saying.

Because as it is, I certainly didn’t hate this anime, but I also found it really difficult to get invested in it. Rather than an actual story, it felt like footnotes, only giving us about one brief scene from each year of the fictitious company’s history, and who the hell knows what happened inbetween? For all we know, the guy with the weird sleeping habits had a drinking problem. For all we know, Ken and Tanaka were almost turned against each other by a love triangle with the cute cosplaying lady. For all we know, somebody’s parents died, affecting their attitude and convictions. All we ever get is “This happened, then this happened, then this happened...” And while all of it is relevant in some way to the over-all plot, I felt so little attachment to the stakes and characters that I found myself dozing off multiple times during the much more fast-paced second episode. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing, because from what I hear, one of the things I missed was seeing a porn enthusiast who’s trying to find a way to circumvent Japan’s decency laws jerk off on camera. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get to see that.

And speaking of the live action segments, they are pretty interesting. They act as a counterbalance to the anime’s shameless trumpeting of otaku pride by showing off the other side of the coin, how these types of obsessions can dominate and potentially ruin a person’s life. It’s not entirely negative, of course, and offers a fair and honest look at the real human faces behind otaku culture. It introduces us to people who are obviously deviating from social norms, but to them, what they’re doing is completely normal, even if it results in perpetual virginity. Everybody they show us is fascinating in their own way, from a military geek who’d fit in quite well with America’s paintball culture, a gashapon enthusiast who likes to disassemble merchandise he gets and construct his own parts for them if they’re not to his liking, somebody who records rare video(I’d like to imagine he, or a close relative, is now making a killing off of youtube), and even a few criminals who buy and sell animation cells from anime production companies. This alone would make up for a lot of the anime’s failings, if it wasn’t for the overwhelming evidence that all of these interviews were staged, and starred Gainax employees under false names.

Otaku no Video is available from Animeigo in both video cassette and DVD, which despite being out of print for respectively twenty-four and fourteen years, is still pretty easy to find online at an affordable price. There’s no english dub, but honestly, I don’t really find that surprising.

If you can’t tell by the length of this review, I had a very difficult time writing a piece on this particular OVA. It almost defies review, because by it’s very nature, the story it’s telling doesn’t need to be fleshed out or well written. It had a very specific goal, to cater to a very specific group of fans, which just happen to be the same kinds of fans that Gainax is made of. Even 26 years later, modern day otaku who grew up on the anime of the seventies and eighties can still find a fulfilling experience in it. I guess that’s why, at the end of the day, the word that I think best describes Otaku no Video would be esoteric, and that’s ultimately why it’s so hard to place a rating on it. I haven’t watched a lot of older anime, and with my time now being eaten up by a full time job and a blog that I need to constantly be writing reviews for, I probably never will, once again considering just how long a lot of those shows ran. I feel bad giving it a negative score when I’m so very explicitly not part of it’s target audience, especially seeing how beloved it is to people from it’s intended crowd, so I guess in the end there’s nothing I can do but take it on faith and shoot for the middle ground. I give Otaku no video a 6/10.

I cannot express my displeasure with this anime enough. This went between an incredibly cringey and unrealistic story, to a low quality interview between the interviewers and otaku from the 1980s. I am amazed at the high reviews for this. I will separate this between the anime part and the interview part, in what is hopefully better executed than the movie itself.

ANIME:

Story: The story is quite nonsensical, and feels like a random conglomerate of events that loosely match up with the interviews. The ending makes very little sense, and almost feels like it is going against what the entire theme of the movie is supposed ... to be (basically, don't fall into the trap of becoming an otaku).

Art: It's from 1985, what is there to expect?

Sound: Once again, it's from 1985. It's fine.

Character: The main character, Kubo, somewhat feels like a puppet of the creators rather than a full-fledged character. He falls into the trap of becoming an otaku, but that is where the realism ends. He jumps from one idea to another, and none of the other characters have any depth. Very little is noted about Kubo himself, other than that he has/had a girlfriend, and has incredibly odd dreams after being pushed around like a cue ball.

Overall: Nothing stands out very much other than a terrible story.

INTERVIEWS:

Story: There isn't much of a story, but most of the interviews are somehow related to the anime portions. The interviewer asks multiple questions about the lives of the interviewees, ranging from past experiences to sexual habits. Some of the interviewees are just plain weird, others seem like normal people who are down in the dumps. At one point, the interviewers practically assault somebody who appears to be trying to just go about his normal day.

Sound: I think the sound was fairly normal quality for such an old show, but the first interview stands out to me as being particularly horrid. You can hear every time he breathes in, as though the microphone is sensitive in the wrong place, along with a fan running in the background. One of the people interviewed was from the U.S., and although this may be due to where I seen the movie, the subtitles did not match what he was saying at all.

Polls: After every interview, the narrator shows the watcher several charts depicting responses to various questions, from whether someone has hear of garage kits, to whether they had sex before marriage. These polls are practically taken as fact by the movie, and are used to create assumptions based upon an incredibly small portion of people (usually 100). The process of choosing people is also not explained, so it furthers how unreliable the results may be.

Overall: This is what killed it for me. The idea was certainly interesting, but between weird audio, and unreliable statistics, it didn't feel like it made sense to be included within the movie.

CONCLUSION: This is my first review, because I could not believe how high the ratings for this were. Otaku no Video is overall pretty terrible, from a low-quality story to faulty information. I would definitely skip this, and look for something better to occupy your time with. 2/10