{"id":83,"date":"2004-07-11T19:06:23","date_gmt":"2004-07-12T03:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/?p=83"},"modified":"2004-07-11T19:06:23","modified_gmt":"2004-07-12T03:06:23","slug":"project-a-ko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/?p=83","title":{"rendered":"Project A-Ko"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Project A-ko<\/i> is home of perhaps the most annoying character in anime history; a character so annoying that one can never decide whether to laugh or cringe at her actions and therefore end up doing both. A character so beguiling that two wars are fought to lay claim to her.<br \/>\nFeaturing an eighties American pop soundtrack and every joke that had ever been invented up to that point in history, it&#8217;s definitely a memorable film.<\/p>\n<p>A-ko and C-ko move to a new school in Graviton city. There they meet B-ko, who instantly falls in love with C-Ko and tries at all costs to extricate A-Ko from their lives. B-ko&#8217;s arsenal of robots, however, is no match for A-ko&#8217;s superhuman strength &#8230; and all the while they&#8217;re being monitored by aliens!<br \/>\n<I>Project A-ko<\/i> is clearly a collection of everything under the sun, and proud of it. Despite the mash together, it&#8217;s actually a surprisingly coherent film.<\/p>\n<p>The characters are simple: A-ko is just a girl who wants to get to school on time; C-ko is her best friend who can&#8217;t cook, is really loud and cries a lot; B-ko is the rich girl who builds robots because she wants to wrest C-ko from A-ko&#8217;s evil clutches; Mysterious Character &#8220;D&#8221; is a mysterious character who never learns his lesson. Still, the pattern works. It&#8217;s substantial without being anything at the same time, making for a mighty confusing event.<br \/>\nEach day, A-ko and C-ko come to school, and B-ko is waiting at the gate for them with a new machine to take out her vengeance. Then the aliens come to Earth and all of the Earth&#8217;s forces are deployed for one big climactic battle!<\/p>\n<p><i>Project A-ko<\/i> is considered the ultimate in parody anime. While this isn&#8217;t as much of a misnomer as <i>Martian Successor Nadesico<\/i>, one of the most sleighted titles of modern times, it still robs the film of part of it spark to call it that. There&#8217;s no doubt that there are elements of parody riddled throughout, but to call the entire thing a &#8220;parody&#8221; suggests that it alone doesn&#8217;t have a leg to stand on. It&#8217;s by no means a strong story, but it&#8217;s a well told one that was lovingly crafted. Parody suggests too much in the way of cynicism, and correct usage of the term should be enforced. <u>With an iron fist<\/u>. Loving homage is more like it, but <i>Project A-ko<\/i> is too much like <b>everything<\/b> else to be like <b>anything<\/b> else. It&#8217;s the concentration of vitality that makes it such a delight to watch.<\/p>\n<p>Moriyama Yuji, the man who seems to be responsible for almost all of Central Park Media&#8217;s catalogue, wrote directed and designed the characters. They&#8217;re all very attractive with their eighties hair styles and, at least in C-ko&#8217;s case, never closing mouths. The men went to the <i>Fist of the North Star<\/i> school of grooming, although after a while you might question whether the film actually has any men in it. It messes with your mind that way. Anyway, it&#8217;s always very well animated and designed, in a way that you don&#8217;t really see any more with the seeming death of mechanical otaku writers and directors. They&#8217;re probably still around, but now they care more about the environment.<\/p>\n<p><i>Project A-ko<\/i> is another &#8220;spirit of the eighties&#8221; anime; this is compounded by the music, which was actually outsourced to America. As a result, the soundtrack is a haven of sci-fi music that only the eighties could yield and glorious, wonderful eighties <i>motivational love songs<\/i>! A mixture of industrial sounds and pop make the film more memorable than it already is, with its scarily masculine men and penchant for destruction.<\/p>\n<p><i>Project A-ko<\/I> makes a lot more sense than it sounds like it does. It&#8217;s very simple, and by that token it&#8217;s too complex to write about. The layers of parody encompass a lot of anime that most of the modern generation of fans could never hope to see, but it&#8217;s funny enough by itself. Just so long as C-Ko&#8217;s scream doesn&#8217;t destroy your brain before you can finish it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Project A-ko is home of perhaps the most annoying character in anime history; a character so annoying that one can never decide whether to laugh or cringe at her actions and therefore end up doing both. A character so beguiling that two wars are fought to lay claim to her. Featuring an eighties American pop [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-a-ko"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/anime\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}