Birdy the Mighty: Making High School awkward for everyone

Ever have one of those days where you wish you could be someone else?

And then that day comes and you find yourself gaping into a mirror wondering why you are wearing your sister's dress, wearing make-up and heels that don't fit and you're standing in a bus station men's bathroom in an unfamiliar city?

Uh, me either.

Anyway, let's talk about Birdy the Mighty, a personal favorite of mine, but I don't know about squeezing it into the top 10 since there isn't enough to satisfy my greedy anime hunger. So let's just consider this a brief break from the top 10 and go with a strong anime recommendation.




Watch this.

Now.


(Opening for the second season of Birdy the Mighty: DECODE, the opening music and theme present the darker tone and bittersweet romantic element draped over the entire season as well as a constant re-visitation of Birdy's most traumatic moment in her life)

A boy wanders into the line of fire from an impulsive alien police officer who kills him accidentally. As punishment, officer Birdy is forced to atone for her mistake by allowing him to timeshare the use of her body while his actual body is repaired/replaced. Before your mind goes anywhere interesting, note in the opening Tsutomu clearly being a different person than Birdy? That's due to the wild alien technology keeping him loaded up in her body leading to interesting social awkwardness and one of the most unique anime action pairings ever concocted.

Despite how it sounds, it's similar in many ways to Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde more than Ranma. You have two separate, yet equal personalities that vie for dominance, but can speak to the controlling personality at any time and the dominant personality at the time is always represented in the body's physical manifestation. Mind you, it's an accurate physical manifestation as Tsutomu does not have any of Birdy's powers at his disposal, nor does he look remotely like Birdy when he is in control. Likewise, Birdy is always stronger than Tsutomu and while she can alter her appearance to assume her part-time modeling gig (...what?) as a human, her normal appearance is the default when she takes control.

It's like a scifi and psych geeks got together and this was their lovechild. It's entertaining just thinking about how that could work and how it could devastate someone's social life. They toy with that a little in the OAV, but it never reaches full satisfaction because the girl of Tsutomu's dreams and her discovery of his secret isn't a primary plot point. Hell, his dad has more experience dealing with the body-swapping between Tsutomu & Birdy than his girlfriend (...well, girlfriend in progress) does and his reactions are purely used for comic relief.
The TV series by comparison has a slightly more clinical response of wiping memories and forcing family members out of town to ensure convenience to the plot and a gender-shifting teenager.

Anyway, let's break some things down...


(A music video showcasing the original series' action scenes, as for the song I dunno. It's japanese. The Youtube description is german so... Hey look, a lizard guy!)

The OAV

The original OAV was a 4-part, 2 arc exercise in awesomeness. Birdy follows an alien kingpin here who establishes a partnership with an old japanese scientist all too eager to test his ideas and new alien tools on unwilling subjects in order to engineer humanity into mass-produced, obedient super-soldiers. Meanwhile, Birdy has to face off against waves of mercenaries, thugs and robots as she picks up the pieces left behind in the wake of their flagrant experimentation in her investigation hunting the monster that killed her mother.
The story plays fun, fast and loose with assistance from in typically awesome Madhouse studio fashion making for a gorgeous visual feast boasting satisfying combat, beautifully captured motion in animation and STYLE.


(BUSTED!!! The OAV shows Birdy following a badass fight with Revi's right hand robot, Tsutomu is surprised when after transforming, his date that was just about to leave gets a close-up visual of him transforming from a woman. Awkward!)

If I had a gripe about the OAV besides the fact that I wanted it to go on longer, it'd be the usual weasel in my trousers: A bad english dub. The dub is just fucking terrible. I cut a lot of slack too because it's a decent dub, well.. that's not true. It's awful. It's a soulless beast that preys on my happiness. The one thing that makes all its other flaws seem lighthearted by comparison is Tsutomu's voice actor, I could forgive so many aspects of the lifeless, piss poor dub with a lazy ass script ripped almost directly from the subtitles verbatim if it were not for Tsutomu's horrible portrayal. The cracking, high-pitched and screechy sound that gurgles forth with Tsutomu's lip flaps can cause actual brain hemorrhaging and loss of testosterone if exposed to the sound for extended periods.

Regardless of the dub, the original content is excellent and the dub is sufferable and even fun when Tsutomu isn't talking! I'd recommend giving it a shot, but finding it on DVD is hard since CPM's US Manga Corps died out so until the dust clears I'd just keep an eye out. I'll update this post when/if some charitable soul picks up the license and re-dubs or re-distributes the OAV.

In the meantime, let's move on to the TV show that it spawned...


(BtM:Decode season 1 opening)

TV Series, Birdy the Mighty: DECODE

The TV series leaves the distinctively great art style behind, but takes on a much darker tone with more involving depth than a 4 episode series could provide. Instead of merely milking borrowed story elements new situations, characters and problems are introduced in a much more intricate and complicated story.
Revi and her thugs play a big part in the story like before, but their actions are much more brutal than before. But the problems on Earth are bigger than Revi as other aliens followed her there as well as some half-finished experiments for testing. Tsutomu is forced to make some tough decisions and test how far he's willing to go down the rabbit hole when he finds a way out.

As the series proceeds further, there's also a number of refugee aliens and escaped criminals being murdered in Japan and things keep coming back to Birdy. Lines become excessively blurry and cause a major conflict for Birdy in particular because her past literally comes back to haunt her and the darkest moment of her young life keeps coming back to her as bodies begin piling up with herself as a primary suspect.


(A highlight reel from spanish fansubs showing most of the wild, spastic violence you'll sample in Decode. There's drama too, but that's not so easy to work into a trailer purely about violence.)

The TV show pulls less punches of the physical and emotional sort than the OAV by being especially violent, but has the core of its action replaced by excellent sci-fi drama and exposition, which is great because if you watched the OAV and wanted to know more about Birdy then you won't be disappointed as you even seen Magus get in on the action during flashbacks (imagine a giant cyborg cockroach wielding a pistol in each hand... wow... just wow).

The story stands out a lot for me. They go all over the place in terms of Scifi tomfoolery between meddling with the fabric of time, teleporting, flying, freezing, downloading brains, timesharing bodies, eating bodies MiB style and wearing them like Edgar suits, wearing holograms, submitting to fanservice requests and providing a sad, lonely superheroine with some strangely satisfying closure as well as fleshing out Tsutomu as a stronger character than he'd been represented as before and putting him right through the emotional ringer.

Sure, from an outside observation it looks so cute and cuddly, but then things get dark and scary as people are dismembered, devoured or WORSE and the way it navigates between the light/dark appearance is genius. I gush, true. That's only because the end result is THAT good. I avoided this damn show like the plague when US Manga Corps plopped their terrible dub onto store shelves because the packaging was mostly pink and I couldn't conceive of why I would want to watch it despite the reference to Kawajiri-san on the box of Vampire Hunter D & Ninja Scroll fame.


(Future Shock - the closing theme for the first story arc played to a bunch of stills starting with a really good side-by-side shot of Birdy & Tsutomu.)

I couldn't believe how stupid I felt after all the times I had passed it up. I assumed this was some Sailor Moon-esque, sparkly girl show when that could be nothing further from the truth. Well, there are moments you'll start wonder... and then you'll see Birdy get leap out of a bathtub naked and Tsutomu's dad will walk in and stare just a little too long. So... yeah. Oh, and then there's the bone crunching violence and eating people alive. Yeah, that puts things in perspective.

Birdy the Mighty is a great sci-fi story with compelling dramatic elements dotted with landscapes of frenzied action and an orchard or two of lighthearted comedy. It's a unique show with a unique feel and a personal favorite of mine that I would like to share with you.


(End of the OAV, Tsutomu suffered aesthetically for Birdy's last minute save, following a cheesy exchange of warrior words between Gomez & Birdy, Tsutomu ends up late for school again as the credits roll)