Teizokurei Daydream

Ghost Talker's Daydream isn't a well known anime. I had certainly never heard of it prior to last week. This is unfortunate, because it has all the elements to be a cult classic. I don't mean it's great in a traditional sense, but DAMN is it ever entertaining!

Ghost Talker's Daydream was based on an extremely obscure manga that ran for 22 chapters back in the early 2000s. The manga is classified as an Ecchi/Horror that combines bad comedy and fetish pandering with edgy as FUCK content including lots of child murders and rape. Imagine a level of mood whiplash and tonal inconsistency that makes ... Elfen Lied look like Monster. Now you're beginning to get an idea of what this manga is like. Oh yeah, we're in for a trip!

The premise of the manga is that there's an albino girl with psychic powers. She can communicate with ghosts and her father is a police commissioner who wants to force her to use her powers to solve difficult murder cases. However, she hates using her powers and rebels against her father in the most EPIC way possible... by becoming a dominatrix at an S&M club. She's also the part time editor of a porno magazine. Despite her wishes, she is sometimes given an offer she can't refuse and is roped into a case where she has to solve a murder and usually exorcise the victim's spirit. If this plot sounds kind of insane, it's because it is.

However, the plot summary alone doesn't prepare you for the pit of madness that awaits. In chapter 3, our heroine Misaki is at the S&M club catering to a failing manga editor with a scat fetish. She's in the shower washing the shit off herself and singing a song about her clitoris. Then she returns to the room to find that the manga editor has hanged himself! This is played off as a joke! Some police arrive and interrogate Misaki, who has to channel the spirit of the dead manga editor and convince the cops she didn't kill him. That's what a normal chapter of this manga is like. Well, I forgot to mention the random pop culture jokes like when Misaki turns into Buttercup from the Power Puff Girls for 1 panel. This manga just punches you right in the brain!

In 2004, the studio behind Princess Tutu and Aria decided to adapt this shitty manga into a 4 episode OVA. I don't know how this happened. I don't know why this happened, but it somehow happened. Guess who was forced to direct it? Only the fairly legendary Osamu Sekita. This is the guy who directed Cross Game and was co-director of the original Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam. I don't know how they dragged him into this project, but I'm glad they did. He made a damn masterpiece!

In the first episode, Misaki must solve the murder/suicide of a young mother and daughter whose spirits are haunting an apartment. Easily the highlight of this episode is when the villain throws the little girl forward, which somehow causes her to rapidly accelerate upwards at an odd angle and splat against the ceiling. If the ceiling wasn't there, she would have achieved orbit. I think Sekita forgot he wasn't working on a Gundam anime and that this wasn't a zero gravity environment.

Then Episodes 3 and 4 happen and they are glorious!

Detective: "One dozen children were abducted, raped, and murdered! To solve this case we need the world's greatest psychic! Where could she be?

(cut to hot spring promising hair rejuvenation)

Our Heroine: (Sings) "La La La-La Lee Lee Lee Gotta grow more hair on my pussy!"

As the anime will remind you many times, our heroine is mostly bald down there because she's an albino. This is the ONLY aspect of her albinism that the anime remembers. She never wears sunglasses to block out UV light. She walks around in the middle of the day wearing basically nothing. The fact she hasn't died of cancer is her real superpower, not the psychic stuff!

While the tonal whiplash from the manga is back with a vengeance in the anime, this adaptation has a few flaws. Several plot elements from the manga are simply never explained in the anime. There's a guy who keeps stalking Misaki and taking photos of her, but it's never explained who he is! In the manga, he's a masochist who wants to enter the club but keeps getting turned down because he's only 17. Remember at the beginning of the review where I mentioned Misaki's father is a police commissioner? Well the anime NEVER explains that! She just keeps getting jobs from some mysterious voice on the phone and all we see is her yelling at whoever is giving the orders. It's never even insinuated this is her father. Another plot point from the manga is that she can also summon demons and bind them to her will. She mostly uses a demon made of hair, very similar to Bayonetta. The anime once again doesn't explain this! She's fighting some thug in a warehouse and suddenly drops trou and fires this hair/rope demon from her panties. There's no callback to it and it's never explained!

Despite all the flaws this anime has, Misaki is genuinely enjoyable. She is a confident, sexy, bad bitch! However, she ultimately does have a soft side and helps out when she needs to. Her English voice actress mostly worked on 4kids dubs and is best known for playing Mai Valentine in Yugioh. So if you ever wanted to hear Mai swear up a storm, say lewd things and sing about her pubic hair, you've come to the right place!

Ghost Talker is the kind of random, apeshit insanity you can only find in cheap, old OVAs. I call these O.B.A s for "Old. Bad. Anime." Ghost Talker is right at home alongside Mad Bull 34, Angel Cop, and all the classics of this genre! It's shocking, distasteful, absurd, and you'll probably love every minute of it!

let me get straight to the point (any plot summary will serve you well on this one, trust me): the problem with this anime is that it's not a smart idea to choose an episodic narrative structure for an 4 episode OVA. there was simply no time to develop the characters, or any meta-plot.
the basic idea of having a spiritual medium working part time as a dominatrix does seem pretty nice to me, but not even the amount of fan service will make up for the fact that it doesn't satisfy in the end.
i'm actually quite anxious to read the manga after this, but ... the anime isn't worth your time. even if you're intent on watching this because one of the main characters is a dominatrix, you'll be disappointed.
it's funny at times, the animation is quite okay, but in the end it feels completely unfinished and underdeveloped. i'm quite sure that it could have done well as a full series, but 4 episodes just isn't enough.

Misaki Saiki is a young woman who works solving cases involving apparitions as a spiritual medium together with her associate Souichiro. She can channel the spirits and allow them to speak through her, and has also been able to see them for as long as she can remember. Her ghost hunting adventures land her into unsolved murder and suicide cases. Her second job is at an S&M club working as a dominatrix to help pay her bills.-summary

This is another one of those titles that had so much potential, but was marred by very poor direction by a hack director; a complete fool who should ... have been sitting down and re-watching Satoshi Kon anime films (if he's ever watched them), to learn what it takes to make an outstanding anime that deals with such dark content. The moron in question happens to be Osamu Sekita. Ghost Talker's Daydream is among the worst anime OVA's that I came across years ago, and has been since collecting lots of dust on my shelf.

Ghost Talker's Daydream is a supernatural anime with horror elements that contains a vast amount of comedy. Among its problems happens to be that the comedy clashes very badly with the horror in an almost Elfen Lied type of way. In addition, many of the story elements seem really unnecessary, and this also goes for the secondary characters who over stay their welcomes very quickly. When you have a show that an entire secondary cast can be slightly used to not used at all, as well as a piece of the story that can be completely omitted, and the overall story can still carry on with a full head of steam, then something is very wrong. You would have to search kind of hard for poor direction like this.

I have seen some bad directing in anime through out the years, and this title is definitely among the worst to use the short episode OVA format I have ever seen. The story development is very poor. There was no real reason for the main character to parade around in a dominatrix outfit, other than to bombard the viewer with constant fan service. Her occupation as a dominatrix was barely covered and it played no factor at all in the overall story or even in the plot. It was tacked on there just because, and there are several other useless elements like these.

The supporting characters are completely disposable for the most part. The first side character to make an appearance is a girl named Ai whom is in her own bad predicament. Once her two stories were tied up, there was very little reason to keep her around. The same goes for the character Souichiro. He's the typical bumbling idiot who plays the role of the comedy relief, and does a very bad job at it. Misaki herself is almost as bad. She has the ability to battle spirits by unleashing a whip from her lower region, and during the first episode, she appears to be going through some type of ecstasy while using this attack but it's never explained why this occurs. Instead, it's dropped and she never goes through it again.

The first two stories are stand alone, while the third and fourth are two parters. The stories have some very interesting premises dealing with the demise of certain people and one even involves an unsolved child murder. Sadly, these stories are badly paced with non plot related elements being introduced. The spooky atmosphere is dealt a blow by the repeated comedy making it very hard to take this serious. There was so much room for character and plot development but they take the backseat for more fanservice, more comedy, and screen time for worthless characters. Misaki's background concerning her childhood is somewhat examined, but her character development is overall weak. The writers instead decide to focus on her fascination on growing pubic hairs because she happens to be naturally bald. Personally, I don't see the humor in this.

Although good for an OVA, the animation is not very fluid and there is a slight amount of jumpiness. The artwork has some good character designs and I'm sure some guys will get a kick out of the nudity. The camera work places a vast amount of attention on cheek and panty shots. In the music department, nothing really stood out to me but the sound effects has standout moments, like Misaki slapping her private part with handfuls of water. The BGM never gripped me in its attempt at being creepy because I couldn't take the story serious at any point. The ending theme was so forgettable to me that I don't remember any traces of it.

The anime was put into the hands of a childish director and was seriously held back due to that decision. I don't recall ever coming across any of Sekita's work before or after this; but based upon this weak effort I will go on and say that he cannot carry a story that the serious viewer would actually care about.

I have to warn those whom are not familiar with this title. Do not for any reason take serious the claims you will hear about this being for a mature audience in regards to intelligence or its artistic brilliance. There's nothing artistic or brilliant about it. This is your standard mindless anime, packed with childish sexual humor, a near rape scene, and fan service. If I were to mention any other positives about this series it would have to be the short length, and even at 100 minutes it felt too long. I couldn't possibly imagine sitting through 26 episodes of this. I only recommend this to the very easily pleased anime fan who thinks all anime is great, and that it's just the people who don't like anything.

Highs: Traces of decent ideas here and there

Lows: Hack job for the most part, not funny, disposable characters, mindless fan service