cokesque

Synopsis

On the beautiful tourist planet Yietta, where citizens live on a fabulous floating continent held aloft by gravity belts, Lord Guizel is determined to know the secret to turning those gravity belts into the ultimate weapon. But to do so he must capture Elysse, daughter of a murdered scientist, who holds secret information from her father.

While fleeing Guizel’s forces, Elysse runs into—literally—Tita, the 17-year-old captain of a Pet Shop Hunter ship named the Cha Cha Maru. Working purely on instinct, Tita saves Elysse—“Because,” she says, “I couldn’t not rescue you”—and brings her aboard the Cha Cha Maru. Now the entire crew faces the wrath of the cruel Lord Guizel.

But first, those girls need a bath!

Impressions

Two words: Jiggle Counter.

Ruminate on that while we get some preliminaries out of the way.

Visually, Plastic Little¹ is a shining gem, with attractive character designs by Urushihara Satoshi, renowned for his depictions of certain things which can reliably be expected to jiggle—not one of which is a bowl of Jello. The animation and action sequences stand up well for a title released in 1994.

Plot? There is a plot. It’s a familiar formula of the girl hunted for her special knowledge/ability/soul who falls into the lap of reluctant heroes. That’s about the size of it.

So many of this anime’s failings stem from the ridiculously short running time. It would’ve been much better off as a six-episode, three-hour OVA, or at the very least a full-length movie. Instead, we get less than an hour, which is long enough to get some idea about the world of Yietta and at least a vague notion of what, exactly, a Pet Shop Hunter ship does there.

The characters are always speaking in bad exposition like, “Oh, yeah. We’re staying here because the Cha Cha Maru is in port for repairs.” And while there are lots of hints about Tita and the crew members’ pasts—“You were in the military once, weren’t you?”—nothing is ever fleshed out except for…well, the flesh.

Which brings us back to the Jiggle Counter.

The most notable element of Captain Tita is the fanservice. Not that there is an exceptional amount, mind you—about 6% of the screen time is naked flesh. What’s so noteworthy is that the entire OVA seems constructed purely for the benefit of a three-minute bath scene starring Tita’s and Elysse’s pink nipples. Everything else is, “Oh, let’s throw in a whiz-bang battle with lots of clouds and explosions.”

ADV took this notion to heart for their DVD version, giving us the Jiggle Counter, the first-ever optional on-screen tally that increments whenever something—singly or in pairs—jiggles.

Random Thoughts

Plastic Little was an anime I bought back in the olden times, when you researched a prospective title by looking at the picture on the cover.

I’m not lucky enough to own the DVD with the legendary Jiggle Counter, just the subbed VHS.

Notes

¹ From where does the title come? I haven’t the foggiest idea.

² If this page had a Jiggle Counter Counter, ticking off a number every time I typed “Jiggle Counter,” it would now read 6.

- 2005-12-12 02:42 -