Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, What Did I Just Watch?

 

• Genre : Comedy, Ecchi, Slice of Death, Supernatural
• Episodes: 8 season 1 and 4 season 2
• Studio:

High school is a confusing age for a young man when his thoughts turn to fancies and his body starts going all weird and stuff. We’ve all been there. Those moments when you start to realize some people around you are just really really interesting, and you want to do things with them. It’s a time when we withdraw and bit to discover ourselves and need a touch more privacy. Too bad for Sakura-chan whose questionable future choices have landed him with a houseguest angel who has a penchant for bludgeoning people to death and particularly Sakura. Well, that’s one way of keeping the old blood flow going.

Because I have an *interesting* sense of humour, I kept using images from Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan in my essay posts. For those of you familiar with the show, this may raise some red flags with regard to my posts… In any case, beyond the few comically bloody screencaps that I had been using over and over again, I really didn’t know anything about the show. When I saw it appear on Crunchyroll I figured I should give it a watch out of a sense of kinship if nothing else. Imagine my surprise when I found out this was an ecchi title…

Dokuro-chan is a pretty old show. The internet says it aired in 2005/2006 but I had to adjust my image ratio for this show. Yup, it is in 4:3 aspect ratio. That’s how old this show looks. And it’s not just the square image. In every respect I can think of, it looks old.

The designs are classical and very cartoonish, the animation is a little jumpy at times and often employs exaggerated ragdoll physics. Even the colour palette sticks close to primary hues with little gradient or contrast effects. But even saying all that, I can’t really say it looked bad. Sure, the designs are old school, but I liked them. And the animation may lack fluidity by today’s standards, but it was also fluid and often amusing. The director even used a few creative choices in changing styles and interesting framing. So, to sum it up, Bludgeoning Angel looks old but decent. And the voice acting was pretty fun. I reminded me of the quickfire style of shows like KonoSuba and Saiki.

One little caveat about those visuals, I stand by my views that they are not bad at all, BUT I wasn’t watching this show to watch an ecchi. Why does that matter? Well, I’m not sure it does. But the characters in Dokuro-chan look like cartoons, there’s no way around it. I have a feeling that it’s not as sexy or appealing if what you’re looking for is attractive anime bodies. The characters aren’t very detailed and art consistency suffers occasionally. The show is very badly rated, by viewers that usually like the ecchi genre and the silly visuals may have something to do with that. It’s just a guess mind you.

Besides, it’s not like the “narrative” wouldn’t give someone plenty of excuses to rate this series low. How can I explain this, I would say it’s about 65% completely random nonsense humour and another 35% bad taste, with some cartoonish cleavage thrown in for good measure. Oh, and it is incredibly violent! Like gore and blood splattered over every surface at least twice an episode. I should probably also mention that episodes are only like 12 minutes (i.e. those 8 episodes of season 1 are actually 4 episodes split into two halves), so that means an explosion of carnage every 6 minutes.

On the bad taste side, we have frequent pedophilia and diarrhea jokes as well as some very outdated views on homosexuality. On the random side, well it’s absolute nonsense. There’s little point in trying to list it.

And yes, I liked this show. Look, I can’t defend it. It’s one of those things I really couldn’t recommend to anybody and it makes me seriously question my sense of humour, but I giggled pretty much the whole way through. It should be noted that I am a fan of absurdist nonsense. This is a type of humour that’s annoying to a lot of people but I enjoy it a lot. If you don’t, stay very far away from Dokuro-chan.

Second, there was something deeply playful about both the extreme violence and bad taste humour. It felt silly or even downright stupid but never malicious or exploitative. Our main guy Sakura finds himself naked as often as all the girls combined (maybe more). There’s no accidental groping or harassment and all the OMG my clothes fell off in public scene are met with swift and very painful retaliation from the victims, which made me feel a little sorry for Sakura instead of for the girls. An unexpected switch.

Finally, the extremely cartoonish nature of it all sanitizes a lot of the material. No matter how deluded a viewer may be, there is simply no way anyone can think characters or situations like this happen in any way. The second season features a visible animation boost as well as a considerable ridiculousness boost. I appreciated both!

Despite the large number of scathing reviews, I noticed that the Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan includes light novels, manga and video game adaptations so I guess there’s at least one other person who enjoyed this series.

If you have seen the show, let me know what you think. I’m super curious. Also please don’t judge me…

Favourite character: Shizumi-chan (sometimes you desperately need one normal character as a foil!)

What this anime taught me: What brains look like scattered on wallpaper

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Marketing is the hangover.

Suggested drink: Classic Bloody Mary

• Every time Sakura-chan gets almost killed by Dokuro – take a breath
  • if he actually gets killed – gasp!
• Every time we har Shizumi-chan’s character theme – take a sip
• Every time anyone’s face gets super-deformed – take a sip
• Every time a new supernatural creature appears – take a sip
• Every time Dokuro reads a dirty book – bow chika wow wow
• Every time we see Sakura’s inner struggle – take a sip
• Every time Dokuro turns someone into an animal – take a sip
• Every time there’s a blood splatter – get some seltzer
• Every time people get murdered out of embarrassment – stretch
• Every time there’s a pedophilia joke – be uncomfortable
• Every time we see the sensitive salaryman – Cheers!
• Every time an angel loses their halo – get ready

 I’m not sure if any of you are interested in more screencaps of the show, nevertheless, I am going to add a few here and more over on Pinterest.