Parasite Dolls

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.