Parasite Dolls

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95 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released:10/19/2004
Reviewed: 01/18/2005

I am not the reading type, my friends will back that statement up. To be more specific, I don't read fiction. Though it might sound strange I have absolutely no qualms about sitting down and pouring through an immensely boring law journal, some of these things arrive at my house by the quarter year, but I can't tolerate most forms of what you might call literature. It's a curious anomaly, then, that I read Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep some four or five years ago. As you might have noticed this is sort of my "go to" when talking about things related to my favorite franchise of all time.
The laws of cause and effect govern something about my love of robots and my reading of Philip K. Dick's short story. Since I'm pretty sure I've been enamored with Bubblegum Crisis since its inception, five years after my birth, I can assume that I liked robots first and enjoyed Dick second.
Har har. I made a pun.

Then, it's an interesting eventuality that I can point out one of the more important sources for the preponderance of sexually charged android thrillers about humanity that have come out in the animated medium over the past two years. Not like you really need to for this OVA, a spin off of a TV show that itself was a remake of an OVA borrowing so much from Bladerunner that its fifth episode could almost be considered plagiarism. But plagiarism with lesbian overtones, which is much more palatable to my delicate tongue. If only academic honesty policies worked that way!
Parasite Dolls, set in the woefully named Genom City, is trio of tales about a group of A.D. Police misfits who spend their 9-5 lives working out of a rundown warehouse. I don't know, maybe in Japan they can't afford proper offices, desks, or light fixtures for their police force.

Normally Parasite Dolls would have me with just the robot-cop thing. The show is (supposedly) 90 minutes of cops blowing up robots, abusing robots, and potentially using robo-derrogatories. What of that sounds bad? Not a whole lot. I've spent more money on a single night of bar hopping that produced less sexual arousal than stating those few words aloud, as I just did. Well, it worked again and now I'm totally hard up for some serious robot beating.

You can see why it'd be very irritating to me that this OVA stumbles along for its whole length without really getting anything done. It shows promise, there's an angle about drugs that make robots go berserk. Okay, I'm listening. There's a sultry spy with white hair. Right, keep going. This sounds like the experience to end all robo-experiences! This is not the case. Instead Parasite Dolls spends all its time introducing plot threads that never going anywhere and having a whole cast of characters who are so inert it's infuriating. Included is a boring story about a robot hooker who has pipedreams of humanity. Here the episode is only 25 minutes long and nothing gets brought up that Ghost in the Shell: Innocence didn't do better.

The "We're still AIC, but our robot budget ain't what it used to be" animation doesn't help, but the real crime is that Parasite Dolls doesn't ever give us the hint that it knows what it's doing. Like a retarded kid trying to eat an ice cream cone the show stumbles all over itself, falling into the mud and trying to salvage whatever it can, unaware of the social gaffe it's committing. Kimball is a boomer cop, but we're never told why he's allowed to be one when the job of the A.D. Police is to kill boomers. Angel, the sultry spy, ends up not doing anything but being sultry. What ends up actually being explained is so cliché it hurts. Buzz, the veteran in the squad, refuses to use a gun. I almost tore my front teeth out when they let slip that it was because he accidentally shot a little girl. It was cooler when Reginald Vel Johnson said it in Die Hard.

What we have here is the standard one-shot OVA complex. The creators of this show have the idea that we possess knowledge about the universe and characters not available to us. In fact, we apparently know them quite intimately so there's no reason to introduce or explain them! The sole bit of hope comes with the conspiracy arc of the 3rd episode. If the entire show was a fleshed out version of this then it might not have been a gigantic pile of crap, Joel agrees. Being more clear about their focus instead of meandering along thirty different routes with thirty boring characters would be a start, not placing arbitrary leaps of time in-between episodes might be good too. Why say there's a space of five years if the characters are all exactly the same? Why suggest that the main character is going to be the scapegoat in a giant conspiracy if you exonerate him in the NEXT SCENE?! What the hell, man, If I can't get my quality entertainment from moving pictures, I might just have to go back to freaking words.