Kimera

I've decided to review a god awful Yaoi title for LGBTQ Pride Month! I believe the last time I did this was for "Boku no Sexual Harassment" back in 2016, so it's been far too long! This is the story of Kimera: Gender/Sexuality or as its better known in America, Kimera: Gay Vampires from Outer Space!

Kimera was created by the same woman who wrote Boku no Sexual Harassment, so we're off to a great start! The animation studio behind Kimera was Animate Film, who mostly did in-between animation for larger studios. However, they did create a few independent projects apart from Kimera, most notably ... the ecchi classic Plastic Little, directed by Satoshi "King of Breasts" Urushihara. Here is where things get messy. Myanimelist doesn't actually list a director for Kimera. If I go to Anime News Network, it lists "Kazu Yokota" but that name doesn't pull up any other results outside ANN. So likely the director used a pseudonym because he was too embarrassed to be credited with this piece of shit. One of the few people who wasn't too ashamed to be credited was veteran animator Yasuomi Umetsu. This is a man I've talked about in many of my reviews. He was the founder of Studio Arms and worked on a lot of schlocky, hyperviolent OVAs during the 90s and early 2000s. He directed Kite, Mezzo Forte, and was lead animator on several popular anime. Notably, he was the lead animator on the first and last episodes of Elfen Lied.

Kimera was based on a shonen-ai manga that ran for 20 chapters or 2 volumes. However, the anime tries to cram those 20 chapters into a single 40 minute OVA. Unsurprisingly, the anime is an incoherent mess of random asspulls and rapid fire exposition dialogue that has no emotional impact and just leaves the viewer dazed. One of the villains tries to cram the vampire race's entire tragic backstory into the last 5 minutes of the OVA! It's basically that scene in Mars of Destruction where the aliens randomly say "We were the real Earthlings all along!" about 20 seconds before the ending and expects that to be meaningful to the audience!

The plot is about a Japanese cereal salesman going overseas for a business trip and discovering an alien capsule containing a beautiful, androgynous alien. Seriously...a cereal salesman?! There aren't even any Japanese brand breakfast cereals available in America! Of course, this is the writer of Boku no Sexual Harassment and this is very consistent with her poor knowledge of international business in that series. Anyways, the cereal salesman is driving through the desert and suddenly is stopped by a military barricade. He gets out of his car to ask questions when suddenly there is a series of explosions and police start fighting the alien vampires. The salesman runs for safety into some kind of warehouse and sees Kimera inside what looks like one of the healing tanks from DBZ. He then does the logical thing and immediately starts kissing the glass. Kimera wakes up and starts kissing the glass in return. Talk about love at first sight! After killing some police and army dudes, the vampires fly off and it cuts to the next scene where cereal salesman and his business partner are being grilled by some government scientist. Fortunately, they get released because the lead scientist is the father of salesman's partner. What happens next are a series of battles and exposition dumps in which we learn that alien vampires abducted humans and created a bioweapon named Kimera who can wipeout Humanity. However, one of the alien vampires had second thoughts at the last second and is now teaming with human scientists to kill Kimera and avert the extinction of Mankind. The other alien vampire wishes to wipe out humanity as revenge for humans killing hundreds of Vampires in the Middle Ages, who came to Earth as peaceful ambassadors and were killed despite never actually doing anything to humans. The vampires end up killing each other and the salesman is told that he must finish off Kimera or else all of Mankind is doomed. Salesman decides to breed with Kimera and likely sacrifice all of Mankind purely out of passionate lust. The sex was just THAT good! Sure, all of Humanity is a heavy price to pay, but Kimera really hits that G-spot when he's getting plowed from behind.

The art is this anime is pretty sloppy and was definitely rushed. However, some of Umetsu's character designs are decent. That's honestly the only good thing I have to say about Kimera. This is a Yaoi series that kind of forgot the actual Yaoi scenes and relied on its plot...which was rushed to death and made no sense. I've seen this piece of shit twice now and there is still SOO much I don't understand about this plot.

Kimera was released by ADV as an ecchi series, but they were instructed by the Japanese producer to not refer to it as a yaoi. Kimera is instead referred to as female and this was marketed towards heterosexual males in the US, since they were seen as a larger fanbase than fujoshi. However, Kimera is clearly drawn to be male and this strategy did NOT work. Horny teens bought this hoping for boobs and instead got gay shit! lol. I think that's a huge part of the reason this has a 3.20 rating on Anime News Network and is rated there as one of the top 10 worst anime of all time. Don't get me wrong, Kimera is fucking horrible. It's a BAD anime, but it's not as technically bad as the only other series to score in the low 3s on ANN. It's honestly pretty funny to imagine a horny male otaku in 2001 paying 40 dollars for this on DVD thinking it was like Plastic Little and getting gay vampires from outer space. The nerd rage that this series caused on release here in America is honestly the best thing about this series. I would give this a 2 if ADV did this purely to be trolls, but sadly it was just the Japanese producer trying to make money through dishonesty. So sadly Kimera will have to settle for a 1.

Selected scene from Kimera, 1996: An Air Force official maintains a roadblock on a rural mountain path. He is armed, and there are numerous uniformed soldiers clearly visible in the background, as well as the flaming wreckage of an overturned army-green transport. As a bystander approaches to, y'know, see what all the fuss is about, the official levels his assault rifle, its muzzle six inches from the man's head, and says “you can't be here, it's dangerous, run!” The bystander does the absolute last thing that any thinking human being would do: Pushes the barrel of the gun aside with his hand and demands to ... know WHAT, exactly, is dangerous about this situation. Yes, it soon becomes clear that this particular OVA takes place in a very special setting, a hilarious pseudo-reality crafted with such bumbling ineptitude that it eventually makes the logic of our own world seem warmly inviting by comparison.

There’s nothing remarkable about the way Kimera looks. It’s cheaply made. The backgrounds are flat and minimal, and the color palette consists mostly of a muted mishmash of grays and dark greens which, combined with the generally low production values and lack of ambient lighting, give the OVA a very dull and industrial aesthetic. The design work isn’t much better; Kimera’s human characters have square, blocky, seemingly featureless faces with dime-a-dozen expressions, while its monstrous villains look like half-baked concoctions of various oozing creeps from B-grade sci-fi films the world over. The animation itself can vary, and at its best it’s actually not too bad, offering suitably squirmy movements for the abundance of disgusting, gore-seeking tentacles. However, speed lines, quick cuts away from action, and other budget-savers are just as abundant, providing for a weird fifty-fifty split between modest but acceptable animation and terrible animation. Quality control appears to have been skimped on altogether, and the show can’t maintain a constant level of visual detail for more than seven or eight minutes at a time. Some of the more consistently animated portions of its blessedly short running length include a gratuitous sex scene and a thirty-second shot of a man’s organs exploding out of his chest and forming a neat little pile on the ground. These serve as good indicators of where the priorities of the work’s creators lie, if nothing else.

Kimera’s score bats a perfect zero—without fail, when there was music playing, I found myself wishing there wasn’t. Oh, the music itself is plenty awful; its constituents include squealing, high-speed violin compositions, overwrought operatic organ pieces, and vaguely 80s-sounding synth-rock, none of which should have ever been allowed the privilege of existing, much less coexisting within a single forty-minute span of time. It’s all bad enough that I feel sorry for whoever was tasked with integrating it into the OVA in a way that would benefit all parties involved. That poor soul must have tried, because Kimera usually at least attempts to put two and two together and play music that is supposed to be sad over scenes that are supposed to be sad, fast-paced music over scenes of action, so on and so on…but, honestly, the effort was doomed from the start. The soundtrack is such an ill-considered, intrinsically conflicting mixture that it's pretty much unworkable, and it's the factor that pushes some scenes in Kimera over the thin line between “weird and nonsensical” and “unintentionally laughable.”

In fairness, it's hard to not laugh at a story like this one. Kimera posits that earthly legends about vampires are actually the result of alien beings from another planet (who survive by sucking the life force out of other beings) landing on Earth in the past. Lately there has been turmoil on the vampire homeworld, they're in danger of becoming extinct, and now three vampires/aliens have crash-landed their spaceships on Earth with the intention of starting a population of vampires there and using humans as their livestock. The key to doing so is the female vampire, Kimera, who is captured by the Air Force and kept in an underground lab. Our two lead characters encounter Kimera before she's captured, and one of them falls in love with her. Okay, so the concept itself sounds like the demon-spawn of many terrible, terrible things, but they could make it work if the execution were good enough. Unfortunately, it carries all the hallmarks of hacky storytelling. There are unexplained leaps in time, unexplained transitions from one scene to the next (at one point the setting changes, as if by magic, from an Air Force facility in the middle of nowhere to a bustling city). Most of the backstory is revealed through a short flashback which occurs thirty minutes into the OVA, which is quite untimely, to say the least. The progression of events is hectic, cluttered, and everything in between, and while it's not quite bad enough for me to say I couldn't tell what was happening, it's pretty close.

The next time a work of fiction introduces its two protagonists as “the hardest working corn cereal salesmen in America,” a fact seemingly slipped in just for the purpose of explaining why said characters know each other and why they are driving through a deserted, mountainous, Air Force-patrolled region in the dead of night, I'll probably take the hint and go watch something else. Their names are Osamu and Jay (or Main Character and Blonde Guy, if you prefer). Their personalities initially appear to be pretty clear-cut—Osamu is a tepid and uninteresting everyman, Jay is a constantly ribbing, buddy-buddy jokester type. We've seen them before.

However, there is a gaping discrepancy between what these characters are supposed to be and what they actually are. Our two “cereal salesmen” break into government laboratories plastered with warnings about biohazards seemingly on a whim. One of them spends a good portion of the OVA french-kissing a green-skinned alien succubus who has never even spoken one word to him. Jay is the bystander mentioned above who appears to think that swatting a loaded gun out of someone's hands is a good idea. It's one thing for characters to make devastatingly stupid and irreversible decisions; that's certainly not a problem in and of itself. To err is human, as humans like to say. However, in reality and in well-written stories, these would be weighty choices, potentially carrying great consequences; the kind of choices that nobody would make without putting some good, hard thought into it. But neither of these average Joes appears to have any regard for life and limb. With the exception of an initial, brief “this might not be a good idea” from Osamu, the two treat breaking into an Air Force laboratory like it's a prank, giggling with schoolyard glee about whether or not they'll need a password to breach its giant interlocking doors (and they don't, because that would make sense). And so Kimera rolls on, with nobody ever pausing to consider anything, gape at any of the fantastic events that occur, or do anything that would cause real human beings to understand them or feel a connection to them. Point being that these are only “characters” in the most cold and mechanical sense; they're wheels that turn thoughtlessly to carry the plot to whatever ridiculous landmark it wants to visit.

Ironically enough, it's something in the same vein as that quality which prevents me from giving Kimera the lowest possible score. I don't think this OVA is meant to be taken as a joke, yet, having seen it, it's very hard to think of it as anything but. Do I recommend watching this? No, definitely not. It's excessive, poorly written, poorly presented, cheesy, and constantly straining to cover its own screwups. But it's not truly mean-spirited, and there's a (very) little something to be said for this tiny universe where everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, are brick-stupid, and the switch for common sense, reasoning, and decision-making is covered with cobwebs which permanently tether it in the “off” position. In spite of and because of its silly incompetence, it inspires just the tiniest bit of admittedly condescending affection, enough for me to turn the dial one unit to the right of where it probably should be. Kimera says “take me seriously,” and we can only shake our heads and smile knowingly, as if gracefully rejecting the outlandish request of a child.

This anime would have been more tolerable if the music wasn't so terrible. Most notable, 38 minuets into the show one song during the only fight scene included dialog from what sounds like a phone call. A woman saying something like "Your payment for your insurance is approximately 4 weeks overdue, no insure company will ever take you with your insurance...". All of the music and stock sound effects were just bad. And yes this was the original Japanese version. Maybe they did a better job on the English dub, but I haven't seen it. If this anime was ... any longer than 45 minuets I don't think I would have ever finished it. The first scene of this show shows a lot of promise to be a bizarre and unique anime. This atmosphere diminishes throughout the movie up until the end. If I could suggest anything just read the manga if you're really interested, but I wouldn't recommend watching this ova.

Me being me, I love seeking out & watching really awful anime OVAs. With me also liking to write reviews on these said atrocities on occasion, I have come across some real stinkers such as Dark Cat, Sword For Truth, Kennel Tokorozawa, & Kite to name a few. Kimera just so happens to be another victim about to face my wrath. I’m kinda hoping this will be somewhat bearable, but we’ll find out I guess.

Story: 1/10

The story is completely incomprehensible. The “plot” is supposed to be about this guy named Osamu finding the titular character & protecting her I think? The only thing we ... really know about Kimera is that it’s a guy that looks like a girl, though it’s rather confusing at first. Because Kimera looks exactly like a woman, it isn’t until we see a shot of his chest that we realize it isn’t a girl, & instead a guy. Basically nothing happens until like the last 15 minutes of the movie. Where the main villain whose name I forget because the villain is just that forgettable. The villain goes on about some betrayal nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter because it isn’t mentioned before these events, it isn’t explored, & it sure as shit isn’t brought up after the villain dies. Osamu saves Kimera from dying, he drives off into the sunset with ultimately nothing being resolved, & me having barely any idea of what happened during the OVA, & still having barely any idea whilst reflecting upon it. There are two big issues with this plot, the story is both uneventful, & incomprehensible. Barely anything of note happens during this OVA. There’s what? A rape scene that lasts all of 5 seconds & the OVA acts as if it didn’t happen once its over? A tedious exposition scene about this betrayal that isn’t brought beforehand, & isn’t explored upon? Honestly, this OVA is so uneventful. At least in something like Garzey’s Wing, or Shoujo Tsubaki, there was stuff happening. Oh yeah, so two more things before I go on about the characters. Osamu & his co-worker Jay are supposed to be cereal salesman, yet we never see them doing anything of the sort, in-fact, the bulk of their working environment takes place in a laboratory, ya know, a place you’d go if you wanna sell cereal to people. Osamu’s motivations for why he wants to save Kimera are also non-existent. He just sees her & falls in love because? I don’t get it. I know somebody is probably gonna rogue “but you don’t need a reason to love something”. Here’s my thing, I don’t think you need a deep reason to love something. It can be because she has a mouth & I would buy it. Just give me something please. Lets take Neon Genesis Evangelion as an example. Now, my memory is a bit hazy on this specific detail. But if I remember right, Hikari stated that she likes Toji because he’s a nice guy. I could possibly be wrong about that, but my point is, she has a reason, however shallow it may be to like Toji, & I completely understand her motivations/reasons. Osamu on the other hand has nothing, & seeing as I like neither him, or Kimera, I can’t get behind either of them.

Characters: 1/10

I honestly don’t have much to say about any of the characters because they themselves don’t have much to say or contribute to the narrative. Osamu is the main character. His partner Jay is the more rational of the two. Kimera is the title character who barely speaks & sucks people dry. The villain whose name I can’t remember is evil. The characters are nothing beyond the 1st dimension & it’s absolutely pathetic. While the characters in Shoujo Tsubaki were also nothing beyond the 1st dimension. They at least had something going on with them make them memorable.

Art: 4/10

I’ll be honest. The art isn’t the worst thing out there. Environments can actually look half-way decent at times. The tentacle monsters are somewhat ominous, & the color design at least looks better than Shoujo Tsubaki. The character art, when it’s on model, can actually look like there was some effort put into it. The problem is, the character art is almost never on model, so the character art looks bad in most instances. The dog at the beginning of this movie is one of the worst looking dogs I’ve ever seen in any anime. If there’s even some slight credit I can give to Kimera. It’s the art. I’ll give it to the character designer of Kite, he’s consistent. His art can be good, but there’s always a blemish somewhere in between the cracks

Sound: 2/10

The voice acting isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I wouldn’t call it good. But it’s half-way acceptable I guess. They rarely emote, & range certainly isn’t apart of the vocabulary on any of these individuals. Though, I’ll chock that up to poor voice directing & the fact that they’re working on Kimera, so it’s not like it’d do them any good to actually try in the first place. The sound mixing isn’t particularly great. It can be difficult to hear sound effects a lot of the time, & taking a note from Kings Game, the sound effects barely leave an impact because there’s seemingly a delay to the connection point. The audio quality is really bad, muffled, staticy, it’s not good audio quality. This came out in 1996 by the way. I know this is a low budget OVA, but I at least expect the sound quality to be halfway acceptable. The music is practically nonexistent

Overall: 1/10

While there may be some silver lining in there, this is honestly one of the worst pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. With its incomprehensible narrative, with underwritten characters, a plot that really makes no sense once you actually start to think about. Plot points that aren’t explored. Plot points that get brought up out of nowhere. Awful structuring, flat directing, & decent character art (when it’s on model). I was bored out of my mind watching this, & when I wasn’t bored, I was angry at the fact that I was watching Kimera. On the offenso-scale I’d probably give this like a 7 or an 8. It’s above Dark Cat & Sword For Truth, tied with MD Geist, but below Cipher. It isn’t the worst OVA I’ve ever seen, but it comes pretty damn close honestly. My final rating for this one is going to be a 1/10