Saber Marionette J #1 Bandai 200 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 04/17/2001

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I fooled you didn't I? Yeah, I thought it'd be pretty funny to play a little mix up game on all of you and do the second re-review of this series first. See, the only problem with that was that the Saber Marionette J DVD collections really know how to get you with the cliffhangers, I do believe every single set of DVDs ends with one. So, not having seen this show in about two years, I was pretty surprised last week when I found out I was in the middle of the quest of Otaru and the marionettes to take down the evil land of Gartlant and save their little fief of Japoness. 'But who are all these people?' you might ask. I'd be certainly glad to enlighten you, as that's the whole reason for me writing this anyway. Otaru, your friendly neighborhood fish merchant, just went from poor to super poor. The reason for this? Well, we'd have to start at the beginning for that. Some time in the past the earth was deemed uninhabitable and a bunch of people were sent out to find a new planet...problem is there was a crash and only six men survived, by cloning they were able to cotinue their existance, but that's about it. I'm not exactly sure how the magical cloning of the future, but I guess the dial of their E-Z-Bake cloner is set on "Man".

 

Which is a dire situation indeed. These six guys split up and some three hundred years later there's six city-states all around the world mimicing cultures on earth. These men, however are rather lonely and therefore create robots called marionettes to provide them with compansionship and the like. Surprisingly enough they're not used for sex, and anyone who does something like that is regarded as a pariah. Even MORE surprisingly, the only incidence of homosexuality on the entire planet seems to lie with Otaru's ridiculously flamboyant neighbor Hanagata. Hanagata however, seems to have a funny way of showing his affections. When he orders his goons to give the poor fish monger a good thrasing, our man Otaru finds himself floating down the river (quite literally). Sometime later he ends up at a forgotten history museum (which later in the series we find out is like two blocks from his house). Inside, through the wonders of "the law of anime coincedence", Otaru manages to wake up the very special marionette Lime.

By special, I mean 'short bus' special. Lime is the kind of girl who is easily distracted by shiny objects, the kidn of girl who has to have a rhyme to remeber how to tie her shoelaces. Painfully cute in a way that is voiced to perfection by Megumi Hayashibara. I know I put the hate on her for Cowboy Bebop but this a part that's more suited to a woman with such a high voice (i.e. : All of Japan). Regardless, she's much prefered to someone the likes of Maggie O'Hara, whom you might recognize as Kitty Pride from X-Men Evolution. To be quite honest though, it's like the whole freaking CAST is from that show. Otaru is voiced by the same guy who did Nightwalker on that show, and a certain latently homosexual robot pilot to boot. I don't care for this dub one bit. But I also don't care to read subs most of the time so I just buckled up and watched it dubbed. You know what happens when I watch nine episodes of anime subtitled? Hell, I don't know. Let's just hope that dire day never comes. I just wished that Lime wasn't voiced as a "Like, whatever" kind of girl. So we get a couple episodes with Lime before Otaru finds the next super special marionette Cherry in, of all places, an out of order restroom. Yes, that is the perfect storage place. Thank you Japan. Cherry's the perfect housewife on the outside, but a devious...manipulative ltitle bitch within. I don't like Cherry, but what I don't like MORE is the fact that that constant joke of "You have small tits" gets applied to her. What is up with that Japan?

 

Finally we're introduced to Bloodberry, who's the only one that actually knows how to fight. She's rude, sassy and a redhead...so of course I like her, your milage may vary. Bloodberry, like Cherry, pops out just in time to be all Deus ex Machina (or Deus ex Latrine, in the case of Cherry) and save everyone from the evil marionettes of Gartland. It seems that fake Germany has a bunch of smarter than the average robot girls and some plans of conquest to boot. Tiger, Panther and Luchs** are sent out every once in awhile to get totally thrashed and maybe prove that Japan doesn't like Germany. I think the reason why I like Saber Marionnete J is, while it's a harem anime, it defies all the general conventions of that type of show. Otaru's pretty self confident, there's nothing really overtly sexual (aside from a quip or two of innuendo from Bloodberry) and there's none of that icky weird pedophilia that seems to find its way into every other show of the type. I can't stand to give a show like this a perfect rating, but it's sure as hell better than the norm. I can't argue with lines like "Better not look away, or you might die".

**Okay, her name's really Lynx buuuuut, Bandai was asked not to call her that, and instead opted for the German name instead. Now, I have to wonder why this was asked in the first place. Also, I have to wonder why they didn't just change all the names to their German counterparts. My guess is because the German world for "Tiger" is very close to the German word for "Our people look nice and jolly but we'd really love to feast on the succulent marrow of American babies".