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Girls Bravo Collection
High school student Yukinari has been
bullied and picked on by girls his entire life, to the point where he
now breaks out in hives whenever a female so much as approaches him.
One day he discovers a portal to a nearby planet known as Seiren, a
parallel dimension inhabited mainly by women. Accosted by the entire
randy, man-starved populace he quickly befriends beautiful free spirit
Miharu and brings her back to Earth. With a bit of luck, and the aid of
both Miharu and his shapely if aggressive neighbour Kirie, this meek,
frigid and awkward teen might just turn into something approaching a
Lothario. If the girls don’t completely destroy his life first, that
is!
The slick touts Girls Bravo as a
‘fanservice fest,’ to which I can only respond: fuckin’ A! Nubile,
scantily clad and often naked animated honeys abound, and almost every
woman Yukinari meets attempts to rip his clothes off in spite of his
effeminate protests. Even when they are wearing clothes the female
characters are either talking about sex or attempting to initiate it, or
at the very least squeezing their ample bosoms and pert rears into a
series of ultra-revealing outfits that could only spring from the
fevered mind of a hormone-ridden adolescent boy, or an adult attempting
to emulate one.
Bizarre, perverted, frenetic and totally
unique, this is certainly one for the fellas. I attempted to get my
girlfriend to watch an episode last night and she thought it was
hilarious; she simply didn’t appreciate that the Girls Bravo is
not just an endless stream of gratuitous fan service and rampant T & A,
it’s a multifaceted study of gender roles in an advertising-soaked
modern age which values beauty and youth above all other
considerations. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s T & A all the way. But
it’s fantastic, and one of the pinnacles of the oft-maligned ‘high
school harem’ subgenre.
Audio & Video
Picture quality is good if slightly soft,
character designs are excellent and backgrounds, for the most part,
lush, painterly and highly detailed. Both the English and Japanese
soundtracks are in the solid and consistent 2.0 that seems to accompany
most of Madman’s more obscure anime titles, and for once the English is
probably the superior option: the American voice cast do a superb job,
particularly ‘Michelle Ruff’ as Kirie, and on the Japanese dub Yukinari
is voiced by a female, which makes the impotent little twit sound more
like Daisy Duck than a Year 10 student.
Special Features
Not a great deal on offer here; clean
openings and closings, original openings and closings (yay!), a couple
of art galleries and a handful of trailers. |
