Bruce Von Stiers

We Americans have been spoofing and lampooning ourselves forever. Caricatures are sometimes what we do the best. But why should we be the only ones to do so? The Japanese also have wonderful senses of humor. And it can definitely be shown in a DVD release I just watched from AnimEigo. It is a lampoon or “mockumentary” of an animation studio. The title of this film is Otaku No Video. It is a “fictionalized history” of the famous Japanese anime studio Gainax.

Otaku no Video can be loosely translated to mean video of the fans. And this is kind of what the whole show is about. We get to meet fans and workers of the studio who have interesting, bizarre and sometimes hilarious things to say and do.

The DVD is broken down into two sections. The first is Otaku no Video 1982. The second is Otaku no Video 1985. Each section deals with a specific time in the life of the studio. There are also line drawings of the various characters from the animated portion of the film. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are live video segments interspersed with the animated ones.

The storyline goes something like this: Akira Kubo is a college student who mainly goes to class and plays tennis with his girlfriend Yoshiko. Akira happens to run into an old friend named Tanaka. This old friend is not a big time manga freak. Tanaka gets Akira interested in manga and they even go to an otaku club.

When Akira eventually becomes immersed in the manga lifestyle Yoshiko leaves him. He then begins a new life first making models and then branching out into establishing an animation studio. Things move on from there and even turn into a weird but funny fantasy where Akira wants to rule the world

For those of you who like English Language versions of anime, this isn’t for you. The film is done in Japanese, with or without English subtitles. You can watch just the live action interviews, the anime or both together.

The interviews are interesting and funny. You get to meet some obsessed fans and people behind the scenes. There is a guy who tapes off shows but never has time to watch them (he reminded me of myself, having watched the final May ER episode in the middle of June).

There are liner notes included with the DVD disc. They point out certain things in the show to look out for. One in particular that I missed was in the liner notes as a “sign of the times” kind of thing. It made a reference to Tanaka using a Sony Betamax to show videos. We all know that the good old Betamax machines are sooo extinct. The liner notes are done on a light card stock.

As I haven’t followed manga too closely, I may have missed out on some of the inside jokes and subplots of the story. But for the most part I got it.

Otaku no Video was fun to watch, even if it wasn’t dubbed. I just had to get used to reading the subtitles. It has a lot of good anime sequences and the live action interviews are hilarious.

You can find out more about Otaku no Video at the AnimEigo web site. It can be found at www.animeigo.com