Synopsis

.....you know, I think I'll just skip to the review on this one.

Fields	USA Info	Japanese Info	Image
Title		Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan
Alternative	撲殺天使ドクロちゃん
Dates		March 12, 2005 – September 10, 2005
Company	Media Works
Creator	Masaki Okayu
Director	Tsutomu Mizushima
Genre	Ultra Violent Magical Girlfriend Comedy
Related	Jungle Wa Itsomu Hale Noichi Guu, Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan 2, Dai Mahou Touge

Review

Originally published on "Where No Anime Goes Unpunished."

I recommended this to a friend of mine. The conversation on IRC after the fact went something like this:

Friend: As for, Dokuro-chan...WTF?!

Me: LOL

Friend: No, seriously...What the fuck?!

And believe me, this anime warrants that particular statement.

Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan is a show about a boy, and the angel who loves him............yeah. The title translates out to either 'Beat to Death Angel Dokuro-chan' or 'Club to Death Angel Dokuro-chan,' which, to be honest, is kind of semantics in this context.

This show is one dark lighthearted comedy. It starts out with Sakura Kusasabe, your basic anime male, voiced by a woman, walking home from school with the girl he hopes to enamor. He then walks into his house, up to his room and stumbles upon Dokuro, who just happens to be changing. In typical anime fashion, she screams, blames him for this, whips out a club, and knocks him into the stratos...

No wait...she knocks half of his head into bloody chunks causing a spray of blood that was censored on Japanese TV and makes what happened in Kill Bill look like a two day old paper cut. After which she pirouettes with her Vorpal Crushing Rune Evil Spiked Club of Ultimate Obliteration +50, code named 'Excaliborg' (geez, even the name gives me the chills), and with a magical phrase I won't even attempt to repeat here, she causes him to respawn. After which he screams at her concerning her latest foray into Sakura homicide.

When she's happy, she kills him. When she's trying to help him, she kills him. When she's playing with him, she hurts him BAD then kills him. As an angel her physical strength rivals Superman's, but her moral center reminds me of something out of the depths of Hell.

This girl is the ultimate expression of the neurotic anime female who blames the main character for all of her screw ups. Mind you, she's actually here in this boy's life because of a screw up he's going to make in the future...a big one.

Sakura doesn't know this 'til later on in the first episode. Mind you, each episode is only 15 minutes long, but the show lasts a half hour, so you wind up with either 4 or 8 episodes, depending upon your viewpoint. All he really knows about her is that she tries constantly to interrupt his studies (with a humorous aside to typical anime males being total wastes of space when she tries to compare what she's doing with what some girls do in manga) by attempting to play with him at first, and then giving him a peep show next (you should see his good and evil halves at this point...fucking hilarious. And on that note, what is up with that skull?) She even pursues him to his school, whereby she proceeds to enroll, turn classmates into animals (one dog and one monkey to be precise), and generally make his life a living Hell, as she won't even let him die.

Turns out the reason for this is given to him by another angel, sent to perform the follow-through that Dokuro is reluctant to. This angel is Sabbat, and she initially tries to lure Sakura to her with a show that would have any straight teenage boy begging for anything she had, and then attempts to terminate his life with an electric cattle prod set to a voltage of Darth Sidious hooked up to Megatron's fusion cannon. Here you also find out two things about angels, when Sabbat convinces Sakura to do away with the only thing protecting him, IE: Dorkuro-chan. 1: Their halos are sharper than a samurai sword's as Sakura does a nifty impression of one of the Crazy 88 after grabbing Dokuro's and 2: The loss of their halos causes explosive diarrhea...I don't know why. As Sakura runs from the temptress turned Unreal Tournament player after 10 kills, they eventually find themselves in front of the school body while Sabbat tells them all what he's going to do in the future.

Eventually Sakura, obsessed with eternal life, will discover the secret; however his apprentice will kill him in his sleep...err, hang on...

Ah, here we go. What will happen is, he will discover the secret to eternal life. But in the case of the female of the species, it'll stop their development at about...12 years of age. Not only has he gone against the will of God by cracking the secrets of the Tree of Life, he's also made the world into a place for pedophiles...she intimates he did this deliberately. Dokuro-chan was originally sent there to take him out before he did that, however, it appears that Dokuro figured he could be redeemed and had fallen in love with him as well...so she wouldn't do it (and this was why she kept interfering with his schooling, figuring if he didn't gain the knowledge, he'd not be able to do that in the future), and that's why Sabbat was sent in. His class, they themselves not exactly good people, are suitably nonplussed.

And to be honest, that's about the extent of the meat of this show. The rest is basically watching as Dokuro makes Akane Tendo look like a Saint concerning her treatment of a significant other.

For some, it would get old. For me, they had it just right. They kept the series short, they used the abused anime male stereotype to its ultimate conclusion quite well, the trips into Sakura's mind were hilariously well choreographed, and the fanservice suitably teasing.

Someone needs to be Excaliborged, permanently, for that damn opening song, however. Dokuro's VA can't sing for shit, but her singing works with this incredibly catchy song about how Dokuro shows her love...in ways that would make the most masochistic of masochists go, "That just ain't fucking right."

Truthfully, you need to appreciate a somewhat psychotic sense of humor to appreciate this show. Fortunately, I fit that bill. It's violent, EXTREMELY violent...even Japan censored parts of the broadcast of this. The teasing fanservice was, at the point they used it, just there to mess with the audience, as they honestly could have done FAR worse considering what else they put in this show. However, it was short enough the running gag(s) didn't get old, at least, not for me.

As a personal observation, the only way Sakura was going to win in this show was to loose all fear of death, even permadeath. He had to realize that he could not overpower her, could not stop her, could not get away. And until he realized this, he was in a Hell of her making...once he did this, she'd have had no power over him, and he could have easily done whatever, til he got his way OR someone killed him for keeps. I think, perhaps, that's exactly what happened towards the end.

I'd say give this one a go, but one really needs to appreciate the anime conventions this blatantly, and quite violently, mocks; as well as the gallows nature of a lot of the humor. More blood was spilled in an episode of this then in ten episodes of Fist of the North Star or Elfenleid and I was laughing my ass off every single time. This one is not safe for sanity, so I recommend you loose a bit of that before even attempting to watch it. And for God's sake, fast forward through the opening credits before that theme song gets in your head and you loose what little marbles you may have left.