released 31 mar 01 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* On reading reviews of SABRE MARIONETTE J, it sounded like something I might find to my taste. I tend to like really silly, slapstick anime like CAT GIRL NUKU NUKU or DRAGON HALF, and I thought SABRE MARIONETTE J (SMJ) might fit the bill. The premise was a group of spacefarers, all male, ended up being stranded on a deserted planet. They cloned themselves to propagate, but for some reason they couldn't engineer females -- come on, folks, males have XY chromosomes, females have XX chromosomes, how hard can that be? But I digress ...
Anyway, to introduce females to the society they built femme robots named "marionettes" as servants and bodyguards -- any use of them for, uh, other purposes is carefully ignored in the story. The marionettes don't have much in the way of personality, that technology being lost. The premise of this story is that, generations later, a young guy named Otaru, a martial-arts student trying to make his way in the world, stumbles in succession onto three marionettes who do have personalities -- named Lime, Cherry, and Bloodberry -- who move in with him.
The end result is that we get yet another anime series involving "somewhat befuddled young guy" surrounded by "crazy females with bitter rivalries" -- think TENCHI MUYO or OH MY GODDESS. Other elements in the story involve Otaru's swishy neighbor Hanagata, who has the hots for him (think lots of more or less heavy-handed gay jokes, with Hanagata always getting hit over the head), and the military rivalry between Otaru's country, a classical Japan clone named "Japoness", and its neighbor, a Nazi Germany clone named "Gartlant".
I got through the first series on autopilot, as little of the humor reached me -- and I suspect habits of political correctness instilled from working in big bureaucracies may have soaked into my head, since I found the basically harmless gay jokes on Hanagata distinctly uncomfortable. There were a few minor things I found entertaining -- I was amused with the marionette warriors from Gartlant, for example, who managed to wear Nazi uniforms and still be scantily clad, and some of the pop theme music was fun -- but otherwise SMJ made no impression on me. The production values were mediocre, the scripting was unimpressive, and I'd basically seen it all before in different forms.
Admittedly, I tend to be fussy about the anime I like, but I still have to judge this series as mediocre in every respect. If you like run-of-the-mill anime, you might like this, but don't expect anything special from it.
