What happens when an anime gets so meta that it nearly becomes self parodying in the span of one 23 minute episode? It turns into delicious, gooey cheese, and it's called Fighting Fairy Girl: Rescue Me Mave-chan!
Artwork and Animation: 6
So I guess some animators from Studio Fantasia had nothing else to do, and for a couple of weeks threw together this episode. Doesn't look terrible, but there are a lot of really flat looking, low detail/low motion sections, but hey, the no-budget is part of the cheese.
Sound and Voice Acting: 10
Did this idiot Lawlmartz misclick? Nope, the audio is just THAT good.
When you've got lines like:
"We are only able to exist because of the imagination of anime fans. If they get interested in another show and aren't focused on ours, then our existence fades!" - Sylphied
and
"No matter how much you resist, everyone is forgetting about you, you stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid head!"
and the opening quote... you have a recipe for laughter. Oh, and it doesn't hurt to have some enormous names voicing the characters. Johnny Yong Bosch takes the lead as Rei, Michelle Ruff appears as Sylphied, Carrie Savage as Super Sylph, and Stephanie Sheh as the titular hyperactive tyrant toddler Mave.
When you've got the cheesiest, goofiest script ever written (and it's not only the dub, I watched both- the Japanese is too) only pros like these can deliver the lines with aplomb. Such heretofore unseen conviction of meta lines... it's crazy.
Characters: 4 (1 point for each named role)
Story: 4
Each character is a total cardboard cutout, but in a cliche ridden goof-fest like this, who even cares?
Rei is the quintessential repressed, useless weeb. His first adventure outside of his room (complete with a Gamecube!) comes at age 17, when he attends his first con. Apparently he took WAAAY too many drugs, and goes on a /trip/ he'll never forget. Rei goes to the toilet to renally excrete the LSD/PCP combination he shotgunned with a bottle of Grey Goose, and finds himself in the middle of a desert, surrounded by flying fairy babes and chased by exploding aliens armed with AIM-120 missiles!
Rei realizes that he's tripping balls, and right about the time he gets off the ground, he's being chased by a toddler sized fairy armed with a pair of combat knives, intent on carving the pale, pale skin off his body. Luckily enough for Rei, he gets yanked off the ground by an airheaded fairy named Super Sylph and taken to safety. There, he meets the other titular Fighting Fairy Girls- Sylphied the tsundere, Mave, the violent pint sized slasher, and two small fairies known only as One-chan and Two-chan, names they really despise, but offer nothing to be called instead.
After an inspirational speech and a night in a cave with 5 women, Rei and the gals head out to do battle with the big boss, an anthropomorphing satellite who intends to send the Fairies to the Sea of Oblivion, where the forgotten anime characters of the past lie in the eternal agony of past glories and popularity. I won't ruin it, but expect hilarity.
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"I gotta gotta take a trip, gotta take a trip out of this place
I gotta gotta get away, get away from the human race
I don't know what I'll see, don't even know what I'll find
I don't know what to pack, never been to a trip at the mind
Trip at the brain, trip at the brain, trip at the brain!
Do you know what I'm saying?"
-----
Enjoyment: 8
I watched it in Japanese first, just to kill a little time, and when I got to the end, it had the English cast listed, with a group of BIG names on it, so naturally I had to immediately rewatch it, and boy was I glad I did - because it got way, way better.
Overall: 6
You know what? I'll give this one a pass. It's just meta and cheesy enough to be something that's cult classic material. Despite the short run time and general nonsense of it, Fighting Fairy Girls does provide some laughs, and there are much, much worse things to blow 20 minutes on.
A great example of So Bad It's Good.
