Kite Liberator

Well, this is a tricky one to review as it's something that most people will have mixed feelings about as the original Kite was a very interesting work in its own right. But as you can see from the ratings I'm part of the contingent that liked it.

Story: First off I'll start by saying that I thought it was very interesting that they made a non-hentai sequel to a hentai-pigeonholed movie. Whilst the original focused on a gritty underworld story of corruption and violence (which featured nudity), Kite Liberator takes a completely different tact and focuses more on a kind of action-based sci-fi plot. Some ... might say that the absence of sex scenes makes the anime not seem like a true sequel and I would have to agree to some extent, but I feel that to do a sequel too similar to the original would have inevitably not have been as good. Now, back to what's at hand. The OVA in general is quite well paced. Even though it is only an hour long in length, the way the plot is constructed makes it feel like a full-length movie. In it's own right, the sci-fi plot is quite entertaining but I was disappointed with massive leap in terms of content from the gritty original to something completely fictional. At least with Kite you could imagine the events happening in real life.
The story element is something that most people will have differing views on but I think 7 is a fair score for this component.

Art: Well, I have to say that this was one of the standout features of the OVA. It was excellent, to put it simply. The combination of computer graphics as well as more traditional constructions made it very pleasing on the eye. Everything was well-rendered or accurately drawn and this component stood out justifyably, fully deserving the 10.

Sound: Another case of "doing what it says on the tin". The themes worked well with the scenes throughout and the sound effects and timing were spot on. The stereo effects were really accurate and made listening to the movie through headphones much more enjoyable than through standard speakers.

Characters: I felt you could empathise with the characters in the story quite well in a similar way as you could for the first movie albeit for different reasons. The main character really kind of reminds you in a lot of ways of Sawa from the first film. The only problem I had was that story didn't fully explain some of the character details and I was sometimes left wondering about a particular part of certain characters' backgrounds.

Overall, I would have to say that whether or not you've seen the first film, this is something interesting in its own right and it something well worth watching even with some of the issues that exist within it. 8/10

You call this a sequel to Kite? How does this have anything to do with Sawa or the group of assassins she was associated with from her original 1998 series? Regardless, the plot to this movie is a bit of a mess tossing in random elements in a vain attempt to create any sense of imaginable substance such as the poorly addressed "space food and radiation mutates astronauts" side-plot, Monaka using her tasteless maid cafe job as a front for her job as an assassin and failed drama coming from what we learn of Monaka and her father. While the original Kite had a sense ... of mood and plot covering the cruel, tragic and merciless developments Sawa faced as an assassin, Liberator doesn't keep things as grounded as it seemingly goes for a more gritty, over-the-top feel and doesn't seem sure what kind of series it wanted to be with its elements of sci-fi thriller, crime action and heart-wrenching drama. All three of these don't mesh too well as the sci-fi element is way out of place with what we seen of the original series and because Monaka doesn't have any tragic developments like Sawa had from the original Kite, I couldn't find myself connecting with her as I did with Sawa from the original series.

Liberator does deliver well on the action element through its high quality presentation as it makes great use of CG and cel-shaded animation to render both the environments of Tokyo and the space station in which the show is mainly set in. Settings and characters have a great amount of detail applied to them with the color shading seemingly being brighter compared to the original series. Action scenes with characters are fluid and intense as you get to see regular gun-action and later on the enemy that emerges from said sci-fi plot.

Unless you are watching Kite Liberator purely for the action, I would recommend avoiding it or only peeking at it only once as the plotting is a mess with the elements it tries to mix around.

How do you follow what is quite arguably one of the worst anime ever made? With a sequel that is even worse! This is one of those anime that is not only bad, but has absolutely no reason to exist in the first place!

Before we talk about Kite 2, we unfortunately have to talk about Kite. The anime Kite was a 1990s hentai/ action exploitation anime that somehow gained a cult following in the US for its over the top use of sex and violence. Younger fans that haven't seen Kite would be forgiven for thinking Kite is like the early 2000s anime Gantz and ... Elfen Lied. Unfortunately, Kite is an entirely different caliber of schlock. I feel I need to explain what I mean by this, so let's rank gore and tits exploitation anime as if they were the Medieval European societal hierarchy. At the top of the Hierarchy is the Pope, which would be Elfen Lied. It overuses nudity and gore, but actually the majority of the nudity was not intended as fanservice. At least some of the gore was justified by its artistic intention of tackling humanity's darkness and eternal struggle with the redeeming aspects of the human soul. It has very obvious flaws, but also has areas where it is rather objectively excellent. It is FAR from the perfect anime, but more than good enough to qualify as the top of this dung heap sub-genre of anime. Below the Pope is the King, which would be an anime like Tokyo Ghoul. It is clearly cheap, exploitation schlock, but it knows exactly what it wants to be and has good animation along with other technical aspects that qualify it as competent at the very least. Below the King is the Noble, which would be Gantz. It is not technically as well made as Tokyo Ghoul and clearly wasn't trying to be anything but garbage, but at least a few people enjoy it. Below the Nobel is the Knight, which would be Violence Jack. It is pretty hard to defend an anime of this low quality, but at least the gore is relatively realistic and well drawn at times. Below the Knight is the Merchant, which would be Genocyber. This was an absolute MESS of an anime, but at least there were brief instances where the director was trying to do something that could have been effective if handled more skillfully. Below the Merchant is the Peasant, which would MD Geist. This is the point where you have reached absolute SHIT tier anime, but at least it had a decent soundtrack and was tonally consistent. Below even the Peasant is the Serf. Medieval Serfs were literally owned by wealthier citizens and legally counted as property rather than human beings. They could be beaten or even murdered by their masters with zero legal repercussions. Kite is the Serf.

The first Kite film is an anime that starts out trying to be a psuedo film noir/ girls with guns movie as if someone was trying HARD to rip off Luc Besson. Then it slaps the audience in the face by borrowing physics straight out of Looney Toons! Then it becomes a laughably horrid hentai in which a loli takes off a T-shirt with no bra and magically transforms from an A cup to a DD cup, so she can literally balance off the ground on the villian's 3 foot cock. Then it turns serious again and expects the audience to be on board still. It finishes by rapidly cycling between Z grade exploitation porn and a pathetic attempt at artistic ambiguity. Kite looks like it was directed by 5 horrible directors who couldn't agree on anything and each filmed their own segments and sloppily pasted the film reels together into one head exploding mess of an anime! Kite is literally TERRIBLE in every aspect. Even the art that looks like it could receive a passing grade in some scenes looks like an utter FAIL in other scenes. Kite is one of few films that was SO bad that it physically hurt me to watch it. I consider Kite on par with Pocket Ninjas, Video Brinquedo productions, or a movie by Coleman Francis or James Nguyen.

The ONLY reason that ANYONE liked Kite was because of the extreme gore and explicit hentai scenes. What did Kite 2: Liberator decide to do? Cut out all the explicit sex and tone the gore way down. Once they ripped away the only thing Kite sort of had going for it, we are left with pure, undiluted septic sludge. Surprisingly, Kite actually isn't the only example of this happening. If you look at most of the notoriously seedy "cult" exploitation films with LOTS of sex and violence, you will find that most of them had terrible sequels that ALL made the same mistake of removing the sole successful ingredient. This puts Kite in the same category with: Caligula, Ilsa She Wolf SS, Hostel, I Spit on Your Grave, and countless others. Kite 2 is a tame, vanilla version of a complete piece of shit, which makes it "bland shit" instead of even being amusing shit! The really odd thing is that Kite 2 doesn't even have the same characters as the original Kite or continue the story of the original. Kite Liberator instead becomes a campy science fiction about a "meganekko" type girl fighting bulletproof aliens from Mars that resemble Golems. The writing and characters are as shitty as the first Kite, but the action that at least before was eye catching is now boring as watching paint dry. This is one of those movies that isn't even fun to watch with friends and laugh at how bad it is!

TLDR: The story, characters, writing, and music are all still crap. The hentai scenes and extreme gore that made the original a "cult" hit have been removed, leaving an empty shell of a terrible anime. It's too boring and bland to even have that MST3K quality of being amusingly terrible. If Kite 1 was painfully stupid and bad, then Kite 2 is painfully stupid and bad+ boring as shit!

Preface:

I'm torn on Kite Liberator. On one hand, it's got the name Kite, and with that comes expectations of what made the original a cult classic: the sexuality, the extreme violence, and lots of gore. It was a great formula- it didn't need a really cohesive plot or really in depth, believable characters; it just did what it did, and did it right. It was plenty enjoyable, and right fun to watch.

Kite Liberator, on the other hand, loses some of what made the original Kite so good."Liberated" from the stigma of being billed as "hentai" (which made the original more gritty and dark in ... addition to street cred) Kite 2 takes a Sci-Fi action approach, versus the true crime/street feel of the first. Neither as gratuitously graphic nor shocking, the focus is more on the action and visuals (a 10 year difference in animation is readily apparent), Liberator could have gone by another name and been yet another short, generic action flick.

However, Liberator does retain several elements of the original Kite's feel, and that's why it makes a lesser, but ultimately watchable sequel.


Artwork and Animation: 8

There was an impressive difference that 10 years gave to Kite in terms of animation. The normal character design and backgrounds are on par with what was standard in 2008, but the CGI is on another level. In the beginning, we're treated to Star Wars Industrial Light and Magic level (on a budget) quality of space ships and the International Space Station visuals. It's 100% CGI, and has no 'anime' feel at all, but it does look great.


Sound and Voice Acting: 5

Lacking the muzak that was kinda groovy in Kite 1, Liberator's music is forgettable. The voice acting is fine, nothing special.


Characters: 5

It's been 10 years since the close of Kite 1, Sawa has disappeared, and in her absence, a new young woman has taken up the mantle of Angel of Death. Her calling card? - Vigilante justice by the gun, and an explosion of white feathers before disappearing. Monaka is our new heroine's name. Like Sawa before her, Monaka is a student by day, killer at night. Much of her "look" and methodology are instantly reflective of Sawa, though it's not particularly expounded upon as to "why" she does it.


Story: 3

Again, Liberator diverges strongly from the original with a Sci-Fi setting and the introduction of a monster that looks like a cross of Summoned Skull and Obelisk the Tormentor straight out of Yugioh. (If you don't believe me, google "Kite liberator monster" and click the second image result.) Some dubious exposition about "mutated space food" and "solar radiation" give birth to this beast on the space station, and it manages to escape to earth. Monaka, the most skilled assassin in Japan, is tasked with bringing the monster down. There's a little bit of exposition here and there, but it's mostly very straightforward. The ending leaves a lot to be desired though, as it ends on a very ambiguous note.


Enjoyment: 7

Well, Sawa's signature move, the "Super Nut Buster" is still intact, and put to good use. Liberator has some of the gruesome shootings and general brutality elements of the original, and uses them in a couple of places, but is overall less gratuitous, and suffers from it. It's still decent to watch, though.

Overall: 5

Kite is my new guilty pleasure. I want to like it, because it's not afraid to do something different, but at the same time, it's more of the same (in places). I think the score of "mediocre" is a good fit here. The gorehound in me loves Kite 1, but I'm okay with Kite Liberator having taken a different path.


Recommend?

If you liked Kite, Liberator is worth a watch. On it's own, probably not.

This one started extremely strangely as they start out in space. Sadly, it only explains where The main character’s father has been. It doesn’t follow the original story much in that the girl they call Sawa is actually a girl named Monaka Noguchi and is not the main character from the other show. They could have fooled me though since she looks exactly like the original Sawa. When we finally get to the main character, it’s about 9 minutes into it. She works at a small dinner and acts extremely clumsy even though she could kill someone rather fast. To me, this changes the story ... line drastically because it’s like she wants to kill rather then being forced to kill.

As for the new piece that they placed into it, the monsters just feel like they tried to make something more then it already was. It didn’t work out at all and made things feel choppy. Even more bothersome is the fact that her father wasn’t dead.

The ending leaves us guessing what the hell happens next and gives us no closure to the story line. The whole show was jumping all over the place and only at the end did it even show what it was trying to do.

The artwork is way different then Kite before it, being much newer and more fluid then the first. The voice doesn’t always sink up with the English voices though there was an attempt at least to do it right.

The English voice is really not that good for Monoka, making him sound way too cutesy. It’s really bothersome and high pitched making it hard to listen to. Most voices are actually really good but Sawa is not.

Kite: Liberator is the sequel to Kite which was released in 1998. Although this sequel makes references to the original by mentioning the name of the previous main character, delivers a few tidbits to draw up your own conclusions, as well as provide some background on the pistol once used by Sawa. The anime feels a lot more like a spin-off story. No matter how I look at it though, Kite: Liberator is very far from a sub-par anime and I personally think Umetsu hit a new low with this one.

It's a possibility that many of the elements in this anime can be considered as ... subtle homages to other projects, but I simply look at it as Umetsu trying to find something or anything that works. Sadly, nothing seems to remotely add up in this jigsaw puzzle equation of nonsensical madness. This story is awful from the savage identity crisis all the way down to the junk science.

The story begins with Monaka's father working on a space station slightly above the earth. Due to overexposure from the suns radiation, and in combination with a special calcium rich food he was required to eat. The man mutated into one of two hulk-like creatures with his skin texture being made of only bone (Doomsday anyone?) with very sharp protrusions being used as slashing weapons. The creature is highly resistant to bullets and is very violent. Eventually, Monaka must confront this creature.

I think the biggest mistake was to remove the noirish setting in favor of a sci-fi, with superhero elements that really didn't seem to mesh well with the Kite mythos at all. The new setting feels terribly out of place and this story isn't the least bit atmospheric. Don't expect much from the characters, as most of them are nothing more than bodies to take up space. Truthfully, almost no one serves a real purpose.

Monaka is nothing more than a bland stereotype with many borrowed personalities. She's a clumsy waitress by day, and competent gunslinger by night who makes appearances at the nick of time, and they just go on from there. After sitting back and thinking about this story and plot, I can't help but think that Umetsu lost whatever talent he supposedly had. Personally, I don't think he was ever talented to begin with.

The plot seems to tease the viewer quite a bit, by tossing out hints that one of the characters could possibly be a grown up Sawa. The necessary clues are delivered to draw up a conclusion, but at the end of the day, it's nothing more than speculation. Things only continue to drag with one uninteresting segment after another. Monaka's life is pretty boring and the viewer will more than likely find themselves impatiently waiting for the next brutal action scene.

Kite: Liberator is a very bad OVA that was even heavily panned by fans; but I'm willing to believe that some of the fans despise it mainly because there is no hardcore sex in this one. In fact, there's no sex at all. One may think that Umetsu had actually grown up since he was about 40 when he put this together. No such luck my friends, there is still very childish fan service delivered for no other reasons than just because. Umetsu is living proof that some people grow up, while others just get old.

If there are any good points to this short OVA, then it has to be the nice visuals. The animation can be very fluid when it really wants to. The action scenes can be very brutal with the first one being incredibly sick and stylish. There are quite a few gun battles, and some very sick murders involving old ladies being shot to death, along with men being sliced into pieces.

The CG animated scenes can have their good moments as well, but it's the 2D visuals that really shine here literally. The animation has a very nice clean polish. The character designs are very good as well as the artwork. Although the backgrounds lack the ambiance of the original, the color palettes are still beautiful and there is some decent camera work. The well orchestrated music score seems to fit the moods very well, but the ending them called My Sweet Home has a nice melody with some very good vocals and is definitely the standout. I found the dub to be slightly better than the sub. Xanthe Huynh does a better job to voicing Monaka than her counterpart Marina Inoue.


Kite: Liberator is a terrible title to me, no matter how good it may be in the style department, and the sudden cliffhanger ending makes it worse. I heard rumors that Umetsu was working on a sequel and perhaps that will clear things up; but the new setting, poor story, and plot to this one are hard to over look and I seriously doubt a sequel will save this chapter. This is a very good example of an anime with no direction, and as bad it is, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it has a devoted cult following. Only give this a try if you're curious, very easy to please when it comes down to anime, love violence, or a diehard fan of the director.

Highs: Visuals and ending theme

Lows: Severe identity crisis, poor story, weaker plot, garbage ending

That is the same anime compared the two previous OVA's? This has a fully reduced violence charge.Question plot left to be desired,super bone and calcification're very badly told, any bone is vulnerable for stiffer than it can be pierced by a certain type of bullet, another issue is the end, do make the end, you decides.

Worth watching? Yup! I recommend.

First of all the story is disappointing, not enough violence, the humor is misplaced (maybe because its not funny). i'd give the whole anime one big bad score if the artwork wasn't decent.

Compared to the original Kite OVA, this is two steps forward and one step back. It manages to address most of the problems I had with the prequel, the two largest being the bizarre tone shifts and lack of character development. We have a new protagonist called Monaka who has taken on the identity of Sawa from the original, and has continued her legacy of assassination (‘The Angel of Death’). Monaka is a more interesting protagonist compared to Sawa and gets a good amount of backstory. She’s likeable while also still being mysterious, we aren’t told everything about her past but we’re given a few ... hints. The supporting characters despite only showing up here and there are more fleshed out and actually have personalities. In the original OVA, every character was basically a blank slate or one dimensional. The tone and characters are a lot lighter overall but there’s still a decent amount of stylized violence here that’s cool while not being gratuitous, and the (arguably) unnecessary sex scenes are all gone too.

There’s an interesting mix of CGI and traditional animation here, and it all looks good. I particularly liked the spaceship scenes at the beginning, looked very high-budget. The art still resembles the original but given a new look; which is a great thing. That was something I really liked in the prequel.

Its not all good news though. The science fiction story starts off well but quickly turns into, well nonsense. Some action scenes aside, the original Kite OVA was fairly believable and this big bad monster story is a bit ridiculous in the context of the series. Its at least used to further the plot and show Monaka that she ‘can’t lead a double-life’ but it doesn’t fit very well. I think it would have been better to focus on Monaka and her assassin life in the first episode, then bring in the monster story in later episodes.

The absolute biggest problem with Kite Liberator that it isn’t finished. This is sadly a common problem with OVA’s based on an original story: It ends on a cliff-hanger and any plans for a sequel are dead in the water. So, it ends up feeling too much like a prologue. Most plot lines are only started here and not resolved. For example, Manatsu is obviously Sawa but here she is only introduced and her life story in the last few years isn’t covered.

If you weren’t completely happy with the prequel like I was I’d still recommend watching this one. It’s an improvement overall, but I think the complete lack of resolution does sour the experience quite a lot.

When I watched Kite Liberator, I was unaware that it was a sequel, but I really enjoyed it. I thought that the concept was very interesting and I found myself becoming enthralled with what was happening as I watched. I thought Madoka was totally badass and really liked her character, however one of the main problems I had with Kite Liberator was that the story wasn't developed enough. Lots of points felt rushed or were unexplained and I would have liked to see further development on alot of the different relationships that were present. They could have easily added another half hour of material that ... would have made it more satisfying to watch. That being said, I really enjoyed the story and the characters, I just wish I could have seen more.

This "Reboot" of the older anime, A Kite, was an absolutely failure. It made no sense, the plot was thrown around and messy. At least the original had at least some kind of sense of what the hell was going on.
The animation looked odd, and the cgi was horrible. You would hope this one would be better but it's bland. The only reason I believe anyone would want to watch this is to make fun of its horrible inconsistence. The anime tried to accomplish a sense of mystery and drama, when it fact the "mystery" is just random dialogue thrown in your face, ... completed with completely un-need panty shots!

Definitely not worth it.

Don't bother with this OVA.

There are too many plot holes, the "Sawa" here in this movie is so different from the original that I feel like they just used her appearance and replaced her character and personality.

(for example--Aren't Sawa's parents supposed to be...DEAD? Who is the man, Orudo Noguchi? What exactly happened after the ending of Kite?)

The characters were poorly developed, plot went in the wrong direction...
Did not enjoy it, aside from the fight scenes with "Sawa" (Monaka, apparently that's here name now...)

It doesn't mind that the gore and violence was toned down slightly, but it does matter if everything that made ... Kite unique is gone.

TL;DR--Very different from original.

Summary: Writers didn't really know where they were going with it and ended up with a patch work of story elements which didn't even connect.

Art work was great and the sound track complemented the story, kudos on that. Some decent action scenes too for what little there was, it's also quite dark.

The story however is a mess, I have literally no idea what happened - poorly explained space food / radiation thing that's never resolved makes a monster who attacks a girl only to realise she's his daughter, okay fair enough.

(Amazingly, there were no spoilers in that!)

Then we're going to shoe horn that ... into Kite's plot and suddenly everything explodes, it took me an hour to realise who the characters were supposed to be!

Wouldn't re-watch it, I zoned out towards the end anyway.

Overall rating: 3/10.

Surprisingly, Kite managed to get a sequel.

I know that Kite holds some relative importance in the world of anime since Quinten Tarintino was inspired enough by it to give to actress Chiaki Kuriyama in preparation for her role as Gogo Uubari in Kill Bill Vol. 1, along with having a few scenes from the anime being recreated for the music video for "Ex-Girlfriend" by 'No Doubt', and even having a live action movie adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson, but it still had a small cult following and it's not really really well known enough to inspire a sequel.

While it isn't as explicit as the first ... Kite, it still features a few short scenes of characters doing creepy shit with underage girls, so if you're not into that, keep away.

After the events of the first Kite, Sawa suddenly disappears after avenger her parents death with no trace of where she went. Several years later, Kite Liberator now follows Monoka, a girl working at a maid cafe who leads a double life as an assassin, much like Sawa.

And then an alien shows up. Yes, you read that right, Kite Liberator has aliens.

Well, technically they're not aliens, and it is connected to the rest of the plot, but there is still a giant monster running around Japan destroying stuff. How does a sequel to Kite have aliens, or monsters, of all things? Maybe have a similar story to the first, or include a conspiracy or two, or even just have balls to the wall action. But having a alien/monster?

To be fair, the anime does star on a space station orbiting Earth, do it doesn't completely come out of nowhere, but it's still a weird direction to take the series.

But just as soon as it introduces all of it's plots, it ends just as quickly with a cliffhanger 50 minutes later. Kite Liberator is not especially long at less than an hour later, but the original Kite was around the same length too, and it still managed to have a conclusion, even if it was left a bit vague on what the ending was.

Maybe this was supposed to be another episode after this one to resolve a lot of the dangling plot threads, but it probably didn't do well enough enough to warrant making another episode, which I personally find disappointing, because It would have loved to see what the writers would have written as the conclusion for this entry of Kite.

And to top it all off, it's sister series Mezzo Forte, written by the creator of this and the original Kite, Yasuomi Umetsu, managed to get a 12-episode series in the form of Mezzo DSA. Sure, it went for more of an episodic approach, but 12 episodes still had enough room to develop on what it was trying to do. Here, there's barely enough room to develop on the one idea that it did have.

On a technical level, Kite Liberator incorporates a few shots of CGI, which is surprisingly solid, but in a few shots where it mixes the 2D and 3D animation, it is a bit awkward. But considering that this came out the same year as The Sky Crawlers and Ponyo, I'm going to assume it had to do with the budget.

However, I am still a big fan of Yasuomi Umetsu's art style.

I can't really recommend Kite Liberator. The only people who would get anything out of it, let alone watch it in the first place, would be fans of the original Kite, and I'm pretty sure all of them would be just as confused about the plot as the people coming into it blind. And here I was thinking that my complaints would be entirely nitpicks or general complaints.

Apparently a sequel was announced back in September of 2008, but considering that it's been 13 years as of this review and nothing more has come of it, I don't think it's going to come out, which is a shame.

Firstly, this has little nothing to do with Kite. I guess Sawa is there but that is about it. It is a jumbled mess with no pacing at all. Nothing seems calculated. The viewer is thrown in the middle and not meant to understand what is going on. On a positive note this could have made a decent standalone series. Given a few more episodes and better title it would be solidly average. Lastly, the animation is weak. CGI breaks down when rendering the characters in the various environments making it look they are standing in front of green screen in the late 90s. Oh ... and slight spoiler, there is no ending. It just sort of stops. If you are looking for closure, look elsewhere.

Some years ago I made a review about A Kite where I tackled all of its issues and ultimately stated that is an overrated title. I also said that Kite Liberator was even worse, much worse, and gave it a rating in there, but I didn’t explain why, so here I am talking about this entry now. Expect a lot of comparisons with the original to prove my points.

The first issue Kite Liberator has is being completely unrelated to the original, sure there’s the same gun but that’s not enough to call it a sequel, there’s also a Sawa lookalike but that’s about it, she ... appears shortly and does nothing of importance. Plus, having no connection with the previous entry leaves the cliffhanger still unresolved.

Other than that, it is completely different in story and aesthetics. What made the original shocking and popular was its crazy mix between porn, psychological drama and neo noir action and this sequel has none of that thus it looses a big part of the appeal.

The only thing which resembles the original is having a young girl as an assassin, but even then is nowhere near as captivating or well made as there’s barely any action up until the last twelve minutes or so. Also her motives are not explained at all here, I may have complained about it in Kite, but at least there was an explanation there of why Sawa has this work, there’s nothing like that here.

Not that innovating is inherently a bad thing, the second Patlabor movie barely resembles the original by keeping the core elements but it is otherwise very different from the original, and is still the best entry in its franchise.

That is not the case with this title, where Monaka’s targets does not pose a challenge, unlike in the original, and the plot scalates to a space horror where people get infected by food in space and comes down to Earth as monsters and starts breaking everything in the streets, what the heck is going on and what does it have to do with Kite? Nothing at all.

It’s even worse when the movie tries to explain everything and takes itself so seriously, is a very dumb action flick and these bits just makes it duller than it already is. The pacing is the exact opposite as it was in the original, if it was very fast there, it is very slow here, because it doesn’t have nearly as much content.

On top of that, the protagonist is just not fleshed out, it’s the same issue as Sawa in the original, whatever her background is, is vaguely shown because the focus is not on her despite being the main character and it’s in the boring space horror and nonsensical action instead. She’s more consistent than Sawa because she does not change her personality every 5 minutes, but her clumsiness, which seemed to be a facade in the beginning, gives her a moe side which clashes too much with her cold behaviour as a hitwoman (is that term right?). The rest of the cast is just there as cannon fodder and constantly breaks the serious tone the movie tries to have with their reactions.

The action scenes are even more ridiculous and over the top than they were in the original. If having two people falling high from a building over a car and making it destroy a bridge, which in turn falls over a truck was an exaggeration, imagine having a monster chasing a girl in the city, being shot with different weapons and barely receiving damage, impaling the girl, then falling off in a similar fashion of the original, having a car exploding right under him and still not getting killed. It’s even worse when Monaka remains unharmed regardless of what happens to and around her.

This movie ends with another cliffhanger and it’s even worse than the one in Kite.

It’s also not as well animated, the character designs are fine is just that they are way too similar as the ones from the previous works of this guy, quality drops are abundant and the motions are jerky, plus the camera jumps around like crazy during action scenes and it often makes it hard to focus on what’s going on. The backgrounds are well made to the most part, especially when it takes place in space, even if they have lots of CGI, the special effects are the weakest part of the visuals.

I don’t have much to say about the sound, the music is fine at times but ultimately forgettable most of the time, the sound effects are weak, voice acting is nothing remarkable and can become very silly at times. Also, I don’t know if it’s just the version I watched or something, but the volume in general is just really low.

Lastly, there’s the issue of timing, A Kite was a success partially because of the time it came out, this movie came out 10 years after and by that time there were hentai with designs by Sei Shoujo which blew Kite out of the water in that department, and there were lots of girls with guns series in the 00s as well, such as Noir, El Cazador de la Bruja, Madlax and Gunslinger Girl, which made the Kite legacy obsolete once this sequel aired.

And there’s even Mezzo Forte which combines both aspects in one, and it even came out shortly afterwards A Kite, acting as a sort of spiritual successor to it, even having Sawa as a cameo, which makes Kite Liberator’s existence even more pointless.

I actually liked 'A Kite' enough to decide to watch its sequel. If one could call it that. It has literally nothing to do with its predecessor, except our MC masquerades as an assassin during her free time. So, in terms of story. There's a main plot and it's quite action heavy with a fair bit of sci-fi sprinkled in. That's all fine and good. Then there's some mild nudity, which is a few seconds of a minor's naked breasts being shown as she undresses, which was completely unnecessary in my opinion. The other major issue I had was an adult asking a minor out, ... knowing that she's underage. And he's also a cop, who was seen during the first few scenes at the start, disappeared mid-way through and made a re-appearance to ask a minor out on a date. Uh, what? What was even the point of that? Then there's the Manager character, who seemed pretty decent and supplies our MC with weaponry during the last bit. He implies that the gun he's giving Monaka belonged to someone else who disappeared a few years ago. Also a chick. Hmm.. And that a friend of his died around the time this chick disappeared. That's it. We don't get anything else. The implication is that the gun belonged to Sawa, but they don't actually confirm this is the case, which does nothing to tie the two OVA's together.

The art and action sequences are pretty decent for its age, as well as sound desgin. I could have enjoyed it more if the story wasn't so shitty.

I bought this and watched it and had buyer's remorse. Then I remembered that this is what happens when the studio demands a sequel to a work that didn't really leave itself open for one. The animation is gorgeous and spectacular. The plot and story well, what did you expect from a sequel to Kite? Cute girl with a gun murdering guys we're told deserve it. The whole space monster aspect is used to differentiate it from the original and to establish we do indeed live in a sci fi world. It's only getting a four because I can't give it a 3.5 because it's ... kind of stupid. It's only one film though, and if this were a series or even two parts it'd be an epic fail. But, you'll watch it, it'll be over, then you can move on.