Nov 1, 2014
This is an interesting one.
Whilst commonly just referred to as a hentai, Kite is a lot more than that- it's more like a crime thriller/assassin drama that has a lot of (surprisingly fitting) sex in it. It belongs to the large family of hyper-violent oversexed OVAs the 90s birthed so many of. Unlike most of those, however, it's actually fairly good.
The story is fairly simple. Sawa, a girl with a mysterious and bloody past, is an assassin, trained to kill without mercy and leave no signs of her presence. She's also involved with a ring of killers and criminals, and is in a somewhat one-sided
...
sexual relationship with the boss. She later meets another trainee killer, Oburi, and without giving too much away, things go down south. It's a fairly minimalistic story, but it gets the job done and it's by no means bad.
The characters are...fairly forgettable. You have your quiet, emotionless killer girl, your corrupt gravelly voiced boss, your naive everyman who gets himself in hot water...the usual suspects. Nobody really stands out, although they at least seem to behave fairly convincingly.
The animation is surprisingly good. It has that nice look to it that only hand-painted cels do, and the animation is smooth throughout. Everything is nicely detailed and the fights are something to behold. Even the sex scenes looked decent, which is surprising as they seemed fairly shoehorned in for the sake of "eh, we need to sell this thing, let's put some bonking in it".
The music was forgettable but good. It wasn't memorable but at no point was I thinking "this music is getting on my tits". The voice acting was pretty decent- there's actually some English voice acting in the Japanese voicetrack, and against all probability it's actually good.
The sex scenes are OK- honestly they seem to be played more for drama/"This is a gritty, depressing place" than titilation, as is often the case with these OVAs. Honestly you could take them out and be left with a decent assassin movie. They don't really detract from it though, so eh.
Overall, Kite is a decent movie, especially compared to most other boobs and blood 90s OVAs. It's not very long and it's fairly enjoyable, so if you enjoy sex and violence and want to experience an obscure bit of OVA history I'd give it a go. It was never released outside of Japan uncensored, but a completely uncut version is easily found online.
Overall: 7/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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