Parasite Dolls

This is more of a 7.5 or a weak 8. Good cyberpunk anime. If you like Akira, A.D Police Files, Battle Angel, Ghost in the Shell or those type anime, you won't be disappointed. Animation is good and it starts slow, but picks up good. Decent violence and gore. Fits in well with anime from the 90's and has high rewatchability due to only having 3 episodes. Cheap to buy online and I recommend it if you like other animes I compared it too.

This is one of my favorite anime of all time. It takes place in Bubblegum Crisis universe, but you don't really need to watch that anime to pick this one up.

It is some old school, hand drawn, gritty cyber-punk. It is very adult themed, with ideas about human sexuality in the age of androids being interwoven into the story.

The soundtrack is really, really good. It is some underground type EDM stuff that goes really well with the dark drawing and atmosphere of the whole show.

Old school cyber punk style anime is kind of my thing, and this is one of the best ... out there.

The story in Parasite Dolls is tepidly interesting, but it's also very derivative. It borrows many aspects from other cyberpunk films, such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. This would be fine, but it also doesn't do any of the things it borrows quite as well as the originals did. What we're left with is a disjointed story that seems more like an excuse for some forced drama and action instead of a coherent and interesting tale.

The characters do manage to be somewhat interesting, and are introduced rather well in the first episode, giving the viewer a good sense of their personality, and ... their relation to each other. However, the show also fails to build upon them, and in the second and third episodes they fall into the background while the show continues to bring it's convoluted plot to the forefront.

The story is accompanied by a cheesy sounding, but still somewhat entertaining soundtrack that doesn't amaze, but gets the job done well enough. The voice acting (in the English Dub) similarly, doesn't amaze, but is also not horrible or grating to listen to. Overall, the audio is pretty standard, and doesn't seem very good or very bad.

The most positive thing I can say about this OVA is that it was fairly impressive in terms of the animation. Everything moved very fluidly, and the characters all had unique, yet not outlandish, designs. However, the art styles also seem a bit mixed. In the first two episodes, the art seemed pretty consistent. However, in the third episode, there's a slight change in art style, and it gets overloaded with subtle CG effects. Because of that, it doesn't look quite as good as the first two episodes, and it complicates what would have otherwise been purely a traditionally animated OVA.

Overall, Parasite Dolls is a cyberpunk anime that tries too hard to emulate aspects of other popular cyberpunk films. It tries to carve out it's own niche, and attempts to create some interesting characters, but with each new episode it slowly loses it's appeal, and ultimately never capitalizes on it's initial potential. By the end, all that's left is a husk of a show. One that I enjoyed, but still wonder about how much better it could have been.

I give Parasite Dolls a 6/10.

Parasite Dolls is set in the universe of the anime series Bubblegum Crisis(BGC), which is a futuristic world that involves battles between man and machine. The OVA also happens to join the ranks of the previous spin offs of the series: A.D. Police: Serve and Protect, and A.D. Police: Files 1-3. I'll start by pointing out as mediocre as it is, this is definitely the best of the BGC spin offs, because to me both incarnations of the A.D. Police were very close to utter trash and this is coming from a fan of the franchise. Parasite Dolls has quite a bit going for it, ... but it does have a few issues keeping it from being a must see title.

Parasite Dolls has its moments in the visuals department. The very beginning suffers from lackluster animation, character designs, and backgrounds. It definitely starts out with the look of a low budget OVA. Eventually, the series picks up with the visuals in the later episodes. The artwork becomes a little more pleasing to look at with pretty backgrounds and the well use of lighting and camera angles. The action scenes are limited because the anime attempts to push the story through its characters. However, the action scenes really aren't impressive in the least bit. They completely lack imagination which happens to be the trend with all of these spin offs. The animation doesn't suffer from stills, or an over abundance of reused cells; but there was one moment where it was definitely inconsistent. One of the side characters named Angel, whom had the appearance of an African American female with white hair, all of the sudden was Caucasian with white hair. This type of inconsistency is just in your face and is very hard not to notice.

The soundtrack is alright at best and it delivers a cyber punk feel. The opening song called "Get on the Beat" is a techno track with an electronic beat. The background music which is almost of the same type has a nice sound as well. I especially enjoyed it in a scene where it was dimmed down to the point where only the bass can be heard. I really didn't have a problem with the English cast or the Seiyuu. They were both fine to me and seemed to fit well with the character types.

The series is definitely meant for those whom are familiar with the BGC mythos, because the organizations such as A.D. Police and Genome have already been covered in detail. There is a certain story point covered here such as the purpose of Boomers. Therefore, someone whom is unfamiliar with the franchise will still know what's going on, but there will be questions that aren't fully answered or answered at all.

The series is broken into three separate stories. I definitely give the series credit on the stories despite how derivative the series may be overall. It does ask the same age old question: Who is the real monster, man or machine? There happens to be dual plots taking place with one concerning the Boomers developing emotions, along with the sick perverted minds of man. The writing is pretty strong developing both through some disturbing content. However, I felt the actual ending didn't exactly wrap everything up on a strong note.

Character development is very shaky from where I see it. The main characters Buzz and one of his subordinates a female named Reiko Michaelson are given a bit of depth; but there were situations injected that really didn't go anywhere, and it came off as meaningless filler. The interactions between these two could have been jettisoned altogether and focused on an additional character whose actions played a part into the ending. This would have given the series a more satisfying conclusion. In all honesty, most of the boomers were developed better.

One more thing that bothered me is the exact same thing that bothered me with the other spin offs. Other than dealing with androids or cyborgs. The series doesn't have a real futuristic feel. The original BGC trumps this as well in regards to the futuristic atmosphere. The weapons, landscapes, vehicles, technology all seems too modern. This is some of the reason why Ghost in the Shell and even Armitage have little competition in the sci-fi and cyberpunk department; and if anime studios continue churning out stuff like this. They may never be toppled.

All things considered, Parasite Dolls is slightly average at best and that's pushing it. The series does contain soft sex scenes, nudity, and disturbing images, however the meaningless comedy that ruins a series image is completely non existent which is a good thing. I mainly recommend this to fans of BGC and die hard cyber punks. If you enjoyed either one of the A.D. Police spin offs. Then give this a shot.

Highs: Dark setting, mature themes

Lows: Action is not impressive nor very imaginable, not for everyone

Parasite Dolls is an OVA that has a very encompassing atmosphere and world, but it regressed into silly edgelord aesthetics. The story is disjointed and confusing, with numerous plot incongruences. Such as a character getting blasted the fuck up in an explosion, we’re talking about a normal human in this instance, and then they’re shown surviving it? How? Why? Your questions mean nothing to this anime.

• There is also an elongated and unnecessarily graphic scene, where a batshit insane dude is fucking a girl from behind and then shoots her in the back of the head, and her brain matter splatters everywhere and he ... keeps fucking her corpse. Those kind of things made the series less entertaining for me, though it seemed as if the creators were doing that to establish a bleak atmosphere. Shock shlock is nothing that a refined viewer should be expected to put stakes into.

• The director of Patlabor was one of the two head directors on this project, so there are some similarities in how their cyberpunk worlds feel. You can also expect it to be exceedingly dark because the script writer who penned Vampire Princess Miyu (TV) and Texhnolyze wrote this script. I think that this OVA can be very appealing to watch, based on the aesthetic and atmosphere alone… Only, keep in mind that this OVA is not something that I would ever consider good.

• Parasite Dolls is in the same universe as Bubblegum Crisis, though two VERY different takes on the world. The basis of the story is very similar to many other science fiction premises: Who is truly in the wrong, man or machine? Like, Ghost in the Shell. There are weird inconsistencies with the cells and animation frames.

• One of the side characters named Angel, who had the appearance of an African American female with white hair, but in a different scene, suddenly was Caucasian with white hair. This type of inconsistency is just in your face and is very hard not to notice. It’s like that one episode of the D.N. Angel anime, where Risa Harada suddenly has red hair instead of brown.

• The characters and the story aren’t memorable at all. The only thing that I can piece together from my watching of it, was that there was a cool cyberpunk worldーspecifically there is a scene that I admired where there’s a landscape shot of the protagonist on the balcony of his overly-mechanized apartment complex and the scene pans away to the buildings towering above everything, like a futuristic Tower of Babylon, ominous hopelessly resides and we’re left to marvel at the scenery, while the sound of a saxophone that slides as smooth as liquid, and the experience drips into the viewer’s senses. Parasite Dolls is haunting. Though ironic that the atmosphere and world are the pinnacle of the experience in Parasite Dolls, seeing as it’s already a pre-established universe. Parasite Dolls is something that was seen often in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

• The Matrix monotony and pessimism was ran rampant in the cyberpunk community and anime series like Armitage caught its fever. I enjoyed this trend, but they were mass-produced so heavily at the time that most/I mean like probably 90% of the things produced were garbageーmanufactured in the form of short OVAs. Like the mass amount of TV series we get now (via streaming), there used to be nothing but trash OVAs back in the day that you would watch once from a video store, just to have something to watch with friends and a box of cheap, slimy pizza.

• Overall, the series could have been much better. It’s okay to watch, like once, but nothing that requires further exploration. Literary works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) and the Robot series (Isaac Asimov), as well as other animated creations like Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, or Astro Boy are better representations of the theme. I give a hard recommendation for Texhnolyze, if you enjoy a similar type of story coupled with a soul-crushing atmosphere. All and all, I give Parasite Dolls a 3/10.

Parasite Dolls is different from most cyberpunk works that I've seen in that it is specifically fixated on sexual fantasy, and the role of the object and subject therein. It's rather violent, but it's not an action packed series; it has a typically pensive Chiaki Konaka script. If you like the slow, thoughtful series he's worked on, especially where cyberpunk themes are involved, you'll probably enjoy this. If not, it is only 3 episodes, but be warned that it features a good deal of graphic violence, including sexual violence.

Checklist:
Art - Quite good
Sound - Not bad
Characters - They serve their purpose

Buzz, the "main character" I guess, ... has an emotionless working relationship with his ex girlfriend Angel, represses his emotions over a past tragedy, cannot envision Reiko as sexually viable, and pathologically presses the issue of his boomer partner's inhumanity and lack of emotion. In other words, he's the obligatory guy who's more like a cyborgs than the cyborgs are. Other than a bit of investigation, providing direction, and picking on his boomer partner, he is actually not involved in the drama (until the last 10 minutes when a bunch of stuff is revealed which I won't spoil, but it doesn't affect this analysis much). Rod is the boomer partner. He doesn't understand social mores very well. Maybe he's a bit more human than he seems, who knows, he's not really a major part of the story. Reiko, who's another officer in Branch, a special... branch of the A.D. police that investigates these boomer related cases, is actually much more a part of the action, and apparently emotionally invested in the drama that's unfolding through the case(s) Branch is working on.


Onto the analysis (spoilers to follow):

Why is it that a sultry radio personality is hysterically disturbed when her assistant (a boomer) develops a sexual fantasy about her? Is it because boomers aren't supposed to, which gives rise to a sense that something's gone horribly wrong, or is it simply because it complicates her work relationship with a man she views as her sexually uninteresting subordinate, which gives rise to a sense that something's gone horribly wrong? Is it a sign of transgressive madness or a sprouting case of humanity?

What's with the young upper class socialite orgy in which the participants get off to a live and direct virtual reality feed of everything a berserk boomer feels and senses as it goes off on a spree of mad violence, rather than the feelings and sensations of the bodies in front of them? It's the eruptive transgressive violence that satisfies them, the vicarious experience of unlivable, unacceptable acts of destructive rage, realized through the tool of a boomer's body, rather than sexual intimacy and copulation. It's Videodrome meets VR, and it's much more taboo and therefor more novel and stimulating than sex.

Why is it that a man (never mind "his" real identity for now) is targeting and brutally murdering boomer prostitutes? Is he disgusted by them because they're boomers, or is he disgusted by them because they look like women? Does he choose to murder boomer prostitutes because he can circumvent the guilt that would besiege him over mutilating real women since despite his misogyny, he can't as easily convince himself that they're somehow subhuman as with the boomers?

Why is it such a facile achievement to use a boomer as a tool for sexual gratification, but so disturbing to think that they could want or achieve sexual gratification for themselves?

A woman cannot fully become the object of desire as effortlessly as a boomer, or in fact at all, because a woman is saddled with her inextinguishable subjectivity. This is what Reiko comes to recognize when she runs into the gorgeous boomer escort Eve, who gives Reiko, herself undercover in disguise as a prostitute, advice on appealing to men. "She's a boomer, but she's more of a woman than I am?" Perhaps Eve sees through the disguise entirely.

Yet as Eve begins to awaken to subjecthood, she loses her ability to perform as object of desire, and disturbed by herself, blinded by terror, she destroys the men who pay to use her body. This tension between subject and object is always present in the sexual situations that arise throughout the series. Repeatedly we see humans pretending the boomer, the tool, the object, is the sexually objectified subject, while retaining the certain feeling that the boomer is still a mere object. Yet horror strikes when said object becomes the objectified subject for real. For boomers, subjectivity is a malady treated with nano-machine filled drug capsules covertly distributed by the company that makes the boomers. In fact, the same company also made the "man," actually a machine in disguise, that's been going on a boomer prostitute murdering rampage: the boomer crusher. Genom is covering its own tracks from the shadows, after fucking up the design of its sex bots that shouldn't exist.

The story thus provides a valuable probing of the questions of femininity and beauty: what are the values of these concepts to civilization? What do we think of women? What would we do to them if we knew they didn't have minds of their own, and there were no consequences for our treatment of them? Is it really because the boomers are inhuman that we feel comfortable unleashing violence on them, or is it just because we can convince ourselves they're inhuman and still turn away from the evidence to the contrary, as it slowly begins to pile up like snow? In the story, the brutal murder of the modified boomer prostitutes is essentially ignored, except for the fact that it is causing Genom its money and reputation to have its models running around defecting and being destroyed. Is how the boomer prostitutes are treated really all that different from how sex workers and fantasy images of women (i.e. stylized girls in fiction) are treated in our world? I wonder if the anime doesn't make the difference between our treatment of apparent object and apparent subject too obvious and clear cut.

And there is the always present throughline in cyborg centered cyberpunk, the notion that the tragedy is that the cyborgs seem to be more than mere machines, perhaps more human in some ways than the humans, despite how they come to be treated as humanity's lesser Other, a corruptive force or even enemy to mankind, but that's not emphasized so much here. That's part of what sets it apart from other series of a similar kind. The ostensible motivation of the main villain in the final episode is to eliminate all boomers because the access they give lesser men to their sexual fantasies, to a FEELING of power, is one both too intoxicating and unearned. It makes people comfortable being weak, arrogant, when the weak should be serving the strong (perhaps in the boomers' stead. The boomers can be sacrificed if the Weak members of society are still there to be tools).

But the truth is, the villain doesn't believe any of this at all. He's merely adopting this platform because the ideology behind it is one that has earned him power and support from people who actually do hate the boomers. Ultimately, it doesn't seem to matter what motivates a person's actions. The simulation is just as good as, if not better than, the real thing. The simulation may as well be all there is, so long as we can turn our heads away from what makes us uncomfortable in our beliefs and actions.

What a strange OVA.

Parasite Dolls is a Bubblegum Crisis spinoff, but takes a far more serious tone than that main series. The concept of a "Boomer" is explored in more cool ways here, but its otherwise pretty different.

I was all ready to add Parasite Dolls to my list of one of my new favorite cyberpunk anime, but sadly, it didn't quite end up that way. While the first two episodes are fantastic, right up there with something like Ghost in the Shell Innocence, the last on ends up ruining most of the fun as it goes completely off the rails. I'd rate the first ... two episodes a high 9, but the last one more like a 6.5.

I would probably say it's still worth a watch for cyberpunk fans, as it really nails pretty much everything for awhile there. But be aware that it doesn't end up anywhere near as good as it starts and it might even be in your best interest to skip the last episode entirely.

Really interesting series. It's quite derivative from other cyberpunk movies like blade runner or ghost in the shell, so don't expect something groundbreaking, but thanks to a great art style it creates a really immersive atmosphere. Furthermore, the characters and their interactions are well designed and Chiaki J. Konaka never disappoints at the writing. The main problem with this series is that it never capitalizes on its potential because of its 3-standalone-episode structure, never really delving into the themes it deals with. This is a shame because it could have been one of the best cyberpunk-crime anime out there.

If you already like cyberpunk-themed series or ... Chiaki J. Konaka works you should definitely see this and personally I don't know nothing about A.D. Police universe but it was still enjoyable.