Stardate 20030714.1536

(On Screen): I learned a new term last night: "fanservice". I actually ran into it on several sites, especially in certain reviews of Anime DVDs, and didn't know what the term meant. Finally I found a couple of pages which defined it; this was probably the best:

“Fanservice” is a term that refers to the objectification of the female (or male) form, literally for the edification of the male (or female) fans. It involves completely gratuitous shots of various undergarments and parts of the anatomy, which while typically remaining covered (a requisite for fanservice, differentiating it from hentai or ecchi anime) are still sexually suggestive.

This page offers a far more brief definition: underwear shots (or just plain old female nudity) to satisfy the typical male anime audience.

For those who don't know, "Anime" (pronounced ANN-eh-may) refers to a certain style of animation practiced in Japan. "Hentai" is related but much more hardcore; the word hentai is actually a pretty good translation of the English term smut in terms of connotation, though it doesn't have the same literal meaning. Hentai refers to comics and animation which are strongly and distinctly sexual and some of it gets pretty rough, involving torture or bondage or child molestation or something called "tentacle rape" where a woman is penetrated, often simultaneously in multiple orifices, by long tentacles (from strange aliens) which look suspiciously phallic on the ends.

However, as mentioned, fanservice doesn't go to that same extent. It's more a matter of trying to toss in gratuitous T&A to pander to the (male) audience, for despite the attempt at an even-handed definition above, nearly all of it involves female characters. Anime is famous anyway for its rather distorted and over-idealized depiction of female anatomy; some Anime characters make Lara Croft look underdeveloped. And the idea is to toss in some jiggling, just to keep the attention of the audience.

It's not like this is anything new, of course. American movies and TV have been doing it for a long time. Sometimes the entire concept of a TV series is created simply to maximize the opportunities for jiggle, e.g. Three's Company, Baywatch, Charlie's Angels. Certainly it seemed as if Charlie had a predilection for accepting cases where his Angels needed to wear bikinis.

And there was a thriving, if somewhat obscure, genre of B-movies in the 1980's and 1990's based on Sword-and-Sorcery themes which included lots of bare breasts. Of those, easily my favorite was Sorceress. One can become extremely confused if one attempts to actually try to understand the plot in this film. Among its many mysteries is the fact that there is not, in fact, a single sorceress anywhere in the film. It does have a pair of quite well built identical twins who play the leads, the "two who are one" who are magically linked to one another. At one point one is taken by the enemies and ends up in bed; we spend most of that scene watching the other, who ends up having multiple orgasms by remote control. It's priceless!

Sex sells. (A lot of people use it.)

But in the US it doesn't sell domestic animation; that isn't something American animators have gotten into. However, it's big business in Japan, and there's a thriving market in the US for imported Japanese Anime, not all of which, I hasten to add, is sexual in nature or exploitative. In fact, there is some truly superb work being done in animation in Japan. A few days ago I finally watched a DVD of the movie Princess Mononoke and I was blown away. It's a masterpiece.

But a lot of it is exploitative, and panders to the audience, and what got me tracing this down was that in the course of random web wandering late last evening I ran into a review of a series called Aika: Naked Mission:

Well, "Aika: Naked Mission" seems like a rather sleazy title, but it isn't accurate. No, "Naked Mission" doesn't even begin to do justice to just how sleazy this anime really was. Agent Aika is a strange beast, to be sure. On the surface, things look pretty good; the art is decent, the animation's not bad, the character and costume designs are nice, and the basic plot is passable, at least for a light action flick. Had this one been a normal action flick, everything would have been just fine. Even if it had been a skin heavy action flick, ala Urushihara or Nagai Go's works, things would have been ok. But this one does something new. Instead of moving along with a normal plot and then whipping out a crude joke or extended shower scene, as you might expect, this one features short skirts. Lots of short skirts. Lots of really, really short skirts. Skirts so short you wonder why they even bother putting them on. And just in case that wasn't enough, the camera angle is perpetually fixed at about knee height. Think I'm stuck on the skirt thing? Then you haven't seen Agent Aika yet.

I'm not exaggerating here; as a matter of fact, I don't think I cou