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GinRei Special

November 3, 2005 on 7:28 pm | In Giant Robo | Comments Off on GinRei Special

The three episodes that make up Giant Robo‘s “in-between episodes” GinRei Special, Barefoot GinRei, Steel Armed GinRei and Blue-eyed GinRei may as well have been called “Naked GinRei”.

It is difficult to argue the canonic value of these three side stories, but they are occasionally insane and undeniably fun.

In the first episode, Ginrei notices that her China dress has gone missing, and she must solve this mystery quickly! The second episode is a wild and crazy adventure involving Daisaku defecting to BF (here Blue Flower), lots of drag and the apparent drinking of a Shizuma drive.
The third episode is a wild west trip by Ginrei and Tetsugyu into the desert to find something that is at least semi-serious.

The tone is set with the first scene of the first episode, which features Ginrei in the shower. It is then more accurately set by the second scene, in which Alberto takes a shower and the camera gives its audience an eyeful of his backside. Director Mori Takeshi is truly a master of equal opportunity.
The first episode is funny if a little straight-laced, with some remarkably sexist dialogue from Ginrei herself (“a woman never lets a man see her without her makeup”), until it gets to the ending, which has a huge amount of pay offs and insane nosebleeds.

The second episode is slightly less coherent due to its editing together of two stories, one of which is entirely devoted to the Experts of Justice and Big Fire getting drunk; it was incredibly hard to follow but was wildly hilarious as a result. I won’t pretend to understand the idea of robots with panties, and I’m not certain what the Blue Flower Hotel had to do with anything, but I really don’t care. It’s rare to get something as inspired as this while keeping some semblance of a brain intact; I only wish that director Iida Umanosuke had taken some of this flair with him when he worked on this year’s Tide-Line Blue.

The third episode is almost entirely normal, with the exception of the fact that it has a Ginrei bathing scene; when you’re onto a good thing, you stick to it. It was fun to watch, but was nothing like the other two and more like a genuine stand alone episode TV episode, but with more deaths than television normally affords its characters.

The peak of all of this is that no new music was composed for GinRei Special, and so the epic Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra score remains in place for scenes involving the dissolution of Ginrei’s dress; true genius found in the madness. I suppose that nothing can equal the insane production values of the genuine Giant Robo OVA, but GinRei Special looks damned good to me. If only all anime good be this clean.

GinRei Special is one of those delightfully paradoxical anime: it has very little value if you’re unfamiliar with the material from whence it sprang, and it doesn’t really fit into that universe. Distance it a little from Giant Robo, but not so much that you can’t remember that great OVA, and GinRei Special delivers some nice action, some good laughs, and a heck of a lot of naked Ginrei.