Revisiting the Works of Yasuomi Umetsu

Yasuomi Umetsu (梅津泰臣) is one of the most identifiable animators still working in the anime industry. His art style, specifically, has been uniquely identifiable since the 1980s; and while it developed over the course of nearly two decades into the amalgamation of semi-realistic qualities with unique world and fashion design senses that it is today, his style has generally been recognized as "Umetsu." However, I'm not explicitly interested in discussing Umetsu's art style itself, but rather Umetsu as a visual and production director, and as a storyteller, which I think receives less attention. To that end, leading up to his upcoming project, I've been rewatching all of his works in the past few weeks.

A trigger warning for those whom it may concern: this article will include mentions and descriptions of violence, sexual assault, and rape. The full directorial catalogue will be mentioned, some more than others, and there will be full spoilers for each of these titles:

• Robot Carnival (1987) - Segment, Presence
• Cool Devices (1996-97) - Segment, Yellow Star
• Kite (1998)
• Mezzo Forte (2000)
• Mezzo DSA (2004)
• Kite Liberator (2008)
• Galilei Donna (2013)
• Wizard Barristers: Benmashi Cecil (2014)

I've come to find myself with mixed thoughts about the overall products of Umetsu's various works. Some of them are remarkably interesting, and others not so much, but at the core of each of these ideas that he has is something interesting; it's more so the execution that feels off. That's a vague way of me saying that I think his works are the best when he clearly has themes to work off of or is at least able to focus on the absurd fun of a concept to the point that themes and the overarching narrative are otherwise secondary concerns. His works either have a clear plan that he and his staff are able to work towards, or seemingly lack a focus besides a concept of a beginning and an ending.

Presence

Presence is the fourth segment in the omnibus film Robot Carnival produced by studio APPP, and it's Umetsu's first work as a director. At a near 20-minute runtime, Umetsu also designed the characters, wrote the screenplay, and animated the short film himself, with some minor assistance from animators Hideki Futamura and Shinsuke Terasawa (please note, he didn't do things like the douga (in-betweens and trace), cel-painting, photography, or backgrounds himself).

It feels like an especially personable and undiluted work for Umetsu. The film is different from most his catalogue (besides maybe Kite) in that it is thematically a work of loneliness and regret with a constant overbearing melancholic feeling presented through Joe Hisaishi's soft music, slow tempo scene-by-scene, some focus on reflections (mirrors and water puddles), and cool, blue color design and art direction.

The film opens by building a world presiding on automatons (or androids) that walk among people before one of them gets its head kicked off by a group of schoolchildren who decide to have fun with it. There are shots sometime later showing a number of old, tossed-out shells of automatons sitting and rusting away in a trash bin. Shujinkou, the protagonist, who has a wife and child, looks at this in pensive thought. Later, he goes to a shed where he is building his own automaton: a girl. That automaton awakens and begins to showing signs of independent thoughts and desires—a personality of her own. She's attached to him, and wants to be around him, and questions her own existence; and while he shrugs it off, she comments on his cynicism and again shrugs her off. As she attempts to physically embrace him, he pushes her away.

She's shoved into one of the mirrors, which shatters, and she falls on the ground, and Shunjinkou is implied to have further broken—beaten—her with a wrench. Decades later, as an old man, he envisions her in front of him, and she explodes breaking down again, saying that she is waiting for her prince as he reaches out to her. Even later in life, he envisions her again and disappears with her hand-in-hand.

Presence doesn't necessarily tell you anything. It's almost entirely reliant on visual expression besides what the girl says to Shujinkou. Why does the film open up with schoolchildren kicking automatons' heads off in the streets for fun? There might not be any particular meaning to it, but the inclusion of scenes like that, the automatons in the dumpster, and the android girl's own existence in this story leads me to believe that there is some underlying metaphor I simply don't get—a lack of perceived worth or respect for the androids (and as a whole, a metaphor for people in general), or who knows. However, there is a connection I want to make to the girl specifically.

When the kids kick off the automaton's head, it's cleanly kicked off. Later, when Shujinkou envisions her exploding and collapsing in front of him, black blood (oil) runs down her legs. For a moment, after he shoves her into the mirror, she bleeds red from her lip. He looks at her in terror. He visits her body later and there's dried oil that spewed from where he hit her. In that moment, she was alive. Not as a physical imitation of a human, but as an idea. As a person in concept.

Umetsu says on his blog that the theme's work is "love" and that he was thinking about how there are only a "limited number of women you can meet" in your lifetime and whether he would be able to meet someone he could "truly love." He notes that he had recently been dumped by his girlfriend at the time, which may have influenced him a little.

It can make sense contextually depending on how the audience bathes in these thoughts. Someone might watch this and think about it completely differently, as a man regretting his actions in which he feared something that did not correlate with his whims and expectations—not to especially deal with an idea of "misogyny", per se; or even the reverse, in which a man is afraid of the expectations of himself that comes with an unrealistic, unconditional love. Who knows, really?

On the production side, Presence feels a bit "strange." This was still the 1980s, and Umetsu's style was still largely more realistic-esque, like what's seen in Megazone 23: Part II (1986). Without delving too deep into it, Megazone 23's second part was Umetsu's debut as a character designer, a job he got by participating in the first movie as a storyboard artist and key animator and was then asked to make the new character designs before being asked to redo all of them (the original designer was Haruhiko Mikimoto). He was also responsible for overseeing the animation as its chief animation director. Although certainly unique and with its fair share of great drawings, it's kind of a mess overall, which left him dissatisfied.

Some scenes have rough key animation, others have very noticeable in-between problems, and there are a noticeable number of cuts with movement that feels unnatural. Despite how smooth the animation is meant to look, there are places where it's almost like you can tell what is a key frame and what is not, which very well might be the case. Presence is similar in that regard: Umetsu's designs have a lot of detail, and he's intent on keeping that while also moving the characters quite a lot. It invites a strange uncanniness with quicker (or "heavier") movements especially, and the in-betweening doesn't do certain cuts justice. It's not a style that I like personally, but that isn't to bash on Umetsu's artistry.

I do like Presence. It may not be my favorite of either Robot Carnival's or Umetsu's catalogue, but it has an intimate quality that I find to be intriguing to watch.

Yellow Star

On the one hand, Yellow Star is not a work Umetsu directed: it's one he designed the characters for and storyboarded, with "Hiroshi Matsuda" credited as director at a company called "Honey Dipp." On the other hand, he's probably also the creator and screenwriter given the similarities between it and his later works, but he's not officially credited as such. Instead, a "Touboku Akutagawa" (芥川倒木) is credited in the title card and ending credits for both the creation of and the screenplay for Yellow Star—it's pretty unlikely that it isn't Umetsu under a pen name, but not a guaranteed "fact."

The general premise of this hentai is that a divorced or widowed woman (likely the former) remarries a detective, and he takes a creepy, obsessive interest in the daughter. The opening shots include repetitions of pills (drugs) falling and that girl pointing a gun at the camera, as well as the sexual assault committed upon her by that same man. Umetsu's works often find themselves utilizing this kind of authoritative, abusive relationship between characters, more specifically those involving innocent, young women and older men, and especially those of some either publicly or personally venerable status, like detectives and father figures, to involve social power dynamics. His method of writing stories doesn't often leave the villain to mystery and instead immediately ousts them for who and what they are, which Yellow Star clearly exemplifies in this intro.

Using his power dynamic and the drugs, the detective takes advantage of the girl again and again until one day she's had enough, and she decides to end it by shooting him. His partners in crime earlier on convince him to keep a bomb he uses to kill someone who might be problematic to him in the future, which they use to then kill him during his entanglement with the girl; and the story ends with them taking advantage of her in his place.

It's not an especially interesting or thematically strong work; it's to-the-point and simple. In the first place, the Cool Devices series this episode is a part of is a hentai anthology and kind of infamous for its collection of "extreme" content, even though it's arguably not that much more extreme than the average Katsuma Kanazawa project with Umetsu's soon-to-be home of ARMS (who even co-wrote episode 3). For the most part, it is a simplistic story with particular fetishes.

I'm hardly the audience, and aside from the few ideas that act as a predecessor for Kite, I don't think it's that interesting on its own, either; and Umetsu isn't involved with any part of the animation aside from designing the characters and storyboarding. Aside from those who do like said content, it's more worthwhile as an experience in seeing a sort of origin for Umetsu's common "tropes" (to use an easily digestible word, this is not to consider Umetsu "tropey"). It's interesting for that reason but doesn't have the substance nor the expressive emotions to make it any more interesting.

Kite

Kite is important. It's not the first well-animated hentai, and it isn't the last; nor is it the first to have these kinds of themes; but on its own, with or without its label as an R18 work, I think it's a fascinating OVA with an incredible level of artistry, and it pushed Umetsu into the spotlight for good reason (and perhaps for a bad reason); and in a few publications regarded as a primary influence on Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill duology.

To get this out of the way: some argue that the sex scenes in this work are important to the story, and I do agree; but that doesn't change its intended nature as a "hentai" OVA funded by Beam Entertainment's Green Bunny label, known for producing R18 OVAs like Lingeries, Sexfriend, and Maid in Heaven. Frequent collaborator of ARMS' erotica works, the pseudonymous Dr.Pochi, is also credited as a "supervisor," and as far as I've been told, his jobs on the company's works were more or less all about sexiness. These scenes serve two purposes: they are pornographic in nature, while also servicing the story's blunt depictions of abuse.

Kite is a natural development of some of the ideas Yellow Star had: Sawa is a young girl who is recruited into secret vigilante work by a detective, Akai, and his cohort, Kanie. Sawa's parents were killed, so she was essentially orphaned, with the detective taking her in and training her to be a killer to get rid of the criminals out there loose in the city.

It does start out that way, as Sawa takes on a form of so-called justice via the orders she's given and kills a playboy who assaults an old woman while she (Sawa) is pretending to be a girl he picked up; but she's not shown to have any particular sympathies for the woman herself, nor even acting on a general premise of defending her.

What is intriguing about Kite is how generally depressing it is. It's chock-full of bright and vibrant colors against heavy blacks and negative space in a neo-noir style. Albeit laden with some gnarly gore (bullets that explode inside of you), cool action, and sex on top of that, Kite doesn't come across as particularly "edgy" so much as it is plainly sad.

Sawa isn't an "innocent" girl as she commits all manner of vigilantism against those considered to be criminals evading justice and 'deserving' of judgement, such as rapists and child molesters. Detective Akai has also not-so-subtly groomed her into both the role and as an object with which he has sex with. It's a similar dynamic to what was seen in Yellow Star, this time with the protagonist groomed rather than drugged, and her working with him. She isn't "innocent," but she is naïve, and by all considerations, an adolescent who has not matured.

Akai's manipulation of Sawa and her past trauma to further his goals is not at all hidden from the audience. He collected her parents' blood and presented earring vials of it to Sawa for her to wear, so that she's always close to them. It's strange, but it's a kind of emotional manipulation that he's using. Early on in a flashback sequence, he and Kanie are revealed to have at the very least been present during her parents' deaths; and Kanie himself is, in the present, suspiciously involved with a tied-up, immobile, young girl whom he has sex with.

Again, like how Yellow Star opens with its antagonist in full view of his crimes, it's no secret to the audience that the Akai/Kanie duo are hypocrites, or at least untruthful. What was that about rapists and child molesters? It's a game of power hard at work: the power of the detective to shape the scene, the narrative, those around him, and the world; and the power of forcing oneself onto another, especially those unable to identify the fact that they're being forced upon.

Sawa meets another assassin employed by the duo, Oburi, during a job; and Oburi, despite his occupation being the same as Sawa's, represents a normalcy and dreams for a life that she doesn't have or even dream about herself: to leave the life he is living doing jobs for Akai. When they meet after the job, and after meeting up with Akai again, they sit around and they talk. There's no sex. There's no kissing. There's no romance, but they do share ideas of themselves and learn about what the other is or desires. Oburi feeding the stray cats around is a testament to the genuine heart in him, one that Sawa notices. He tells her that they're probably responsible for her parents' death, but she ignores it for now.

Knowing Oburi's intentions to "get out" of this job, Akai has to kill him before he potentially comes back with a nasty bite, so Akai sends yet another assassin after Oburi under the guise of a final job that Oburi has to complete while Sawa is made to kill a guy who... is popular and doing some sort of secret twin scandal with his twin. She kills the wrong twin, who actually put the hit on his brother in the first place and causes a mess that leads to an absurd (ridiculously fun) action sequence, and she's even able to help save Oburi just in time.

Akai and Kanie's betrayals culminate with a berating of the two younger individuals, and Akai forces himself on Sawa in front of Oburi as if to signify that she is undoubtedly his property. It's control and lust and power. Sawa acts the part even after Oburi has left, but accepting the fact that Akai and Kanie probably killed her parents, she soon kills Kanie. Akai confronts her, and she kills him. A complete revenge.

The most depressing part of this story isn't the lives that either Sawa or Oburi lead, however. Not to glance over the fact that she was groomed and made to kill... who knows, perhaps even innocent people, but in meeting Oburi, Sawa finds something to look forward to besides an unending attachment to her deceased parent. For once, she has something more than she can see in a person who treats her on equal standing.

After their first job together, Oburi does something petty and inane. Two kids are playing with a basketball in an alley outside of Akai and Kanie's hideout, and when it hits Oburi, he doesn't just give it back to them; he goes out of his way to shoot the ball in front of them and leaves. In a Chekhov's gun scenario because at the end of the OVA, just as he's gone to the store and is heading back to meet with Sawa, one of those kids shoots him while he's minding his own business and walking by. There is no extravagant finality or even a motive presented. Was she hired into the cycle to get rid of him by someone else? Did she feel that same sense of pettiness towards him, and already "in" that game, or did she just happen to find a gun? In any case, it's a loss of "innocence."

Sawa is left with nothing but her freedom from Akai. Neither a specific hope nor a dream exists. There was a vague normality and ideation she could feel with Oburi. What seems most sad is how lonely she is despite everything she did because of something so stupid and trivial as his own actions in deciding to shoot a kid's basketball, as if to encroach upon them with his own feeble amount of power.

Of all of Umetsu's works, Kite remains my favorite as his most emotionally and narratively evocative.

On the production side, Kite shows early on Umetsu's greatest strength and weakness as a type of one-man-army director: he's capable of doing a lot of different things, and yet oftentimes does too many things (for him to handle consistently well), and his works often are visually detail-oriented. There's a lot of reasons why productions collapse ranging from slow or delayed pre-production time, difficulty of animating and processing the work itself, poor committee scheduling, and so forth; and Umetsu taking a huge brunt of the work himself, especially depending on those factors and what studios he's around, can be especially difficult at times.

In Kite specifically, Umetsu was not just the director, creator, character designer, and screenwriter, he was also the sole storyboard artist, an episode director (he handled the second episode himself), an animation director (he handled the second episode himself), and still did key animation for both episodes on top of that. Kite is lucky that it worked out pretty well. I can't say anything about the production specifically, whether it was difficult or not, but it's a consistently good-looking production.

Just before Kite, Umetsu worked with Akiyuki Shinbo as the character designer and an animation director for Shin Hurricane Polymar (1996-1997); and the production situation of that OVA, according to both of them, was so dire that it had Umetsu, Shinbo, and mechanical animation director Masashi Ishihama each paint cels themselves for the second episode. Umetsu took his cels to Shinbo (the director) to ask if the colors were okay; and even though they weren't what was decided in the color coordination they had for the episode, Shinbo gave Umetsu the OK since they looked good.

While Shinbo is likely not the reason Umetsu is particular about colors, there seems to be some amount of influence with the heavy shadows and the pop of monochromatic and contrasting colors done in a similar but unique vein to Shin Hurricane Polymar. Color designer Harumi Miyagawa and pseudonymous art director Shigeru Ikehata (some of the background art staff are from Atelier Musa, so this might be the late Shigemi Ikeda?) are to be lauded. Episode director and animation director Yuuki Iwai and episode director Keizou Kuskawa (under the pseudonym Monjirou Kogarashi), who oversaw the first episode, should also be noted. Kusakawa is an especially important part of Umetsu's early works at studio ARMS since he directs (as episode director) around 115 minutes of animation (based on: 1/2 of Kite, all of another OVA, and two TV episodes). Besides that, Kusakawa is also a CGI- and digital process-interested creator that Umetsu relies on for early CG experimentation, and he does the CG for the second episode of Kite as well as helping as an episode direction assistant.

Mezzo Forte

After Kite, Umetsu pivoted to an entirely different kind of theme but retaining the pornographic elements and violent action sequences. Instead of a neo-noir semi-thriller, Mezzo Forte follows a trio who take on dangerous odd jobs as part of the Danger Service Agency, consisting of a younger girl who is a bit of a badass, Mikura; pointy-haired tech guy Harada; and the (ex-)detective Kurokawa. Go figure.

This OVA follows the trio primarily dealing with the Momoi family, who are essentially mafia or gangsters that run a baseball team in the city and are kind of insane. Momokichi, the patriarch, will kill his own players or the other teams via mysterious accidents or hits that are never traced to him, and his daughter, Momomi, is unironically psychotic and enjoys killing people for the hell of it.

Mezzo Forte doesn't have as strong themes working in its story like Kite, and it doesn't need to have them because it isn't trying to be that kind of story. The core appeal is the hijinks between the trio. The first introduction to them is Mikura and Harada trying to sell one of Harada's sex robots to two men who want to make money off of it on the 2nd floor building. One of them gropes Mikura without consent and she kicks his ass a bit. The deal proceeds anyway, only for it to fall apart when the guys decide to just take it. Mikura and Harada say a code word to get Kurokawa, some meters away in his car parked on the street, to blow the doll up. Kurokawa, however, is busy getting hustled by a former coworker from his days as a detective. He eventually detonates the doll with Mikura and Harada jumping out of the window and making a getaway.

The whole OVA is essentially that mixed with the real danger of the Momoi family when they're tasked with kidnapping Momokichi. How do they kidnap him? By spying on him when he goes bowling with his men and daughter and using a small fly robot to drug his drink with laxatives, sneaking into the bathroom when he's blasting his brains out from the other end, sleep drugging him, and trying to lift him (he is a rather rotund individual) through the vent. It doesn't work out so well, there's an amazing action scene, there are explosions, and one guy gets sent flying and he scores a STRIKE in the bowling alley, another guy goes headfirst into the wall and ragdolls Garry's Mod style—Mezzo Forte is very entertaining.

The sex scenes feel thrown in for the sake of it. Even as pornographic material, Kite's full version serves as a demonstration of the power dynamic between Akai and Sawa, while Mezzo Forte amounts to Mikura having a wet dream about her crush, the balding Kurokawa, only for it to then turn into a nightmare as she dreams of Harada getting involved. The second episode features the return of the guys with the sex doll at the beginning, getting revenge via sexual abuse, only for it to turn out that they forced themselves onto one of Harada's programmed sex robots. That part itself is narratively relevant, but Mikura's so-called crush on Kurokawa is simply... not used or ever something of importance to her character. Even for a brainless OVA, the sex scenes feel wildly out of place.

There's also a never-explained psychic connection between Mikura and Momomi that has the audience wondering if perhaps they're related to each other somehow; and Mikura shows by the end of the second episode some manner of clairvoyance or visions, which may be what she was experiencing before (but Momomi was experiencing them too, so...). It's an interesting supernatural phenomenon that comes and is never fully explained, but for a two-episode OVA, as absurd as it is, it's completely fine. Unfortunately, narrative elements like this, and even this specific instance, are a problem outside of these two episodes in the grand scheme of what is to be the eventual television version, but more about that later.

Umetsu himself did a whole lot of the work. Again. He's credited as the creator, as well as the director, character designer, screenwriter, storyboard artist, sole animation director, and key animator on both episodes. Helping him out as the sole episode director is Kusakawa (again credited as Kogarashi).

It all looks pretty good, though there are some small quality check issues, most notably the restaurant scene where the two guys show up (between the first scene and abuse scene), which leads to their hands getting stabbed by knives in one cut that turn into forks in another cut. The color design and art direction are also noticeably different from Kite, in part due to having different color designers, art directors (or, a lack of one?), and directors of photography; and in part because Umetsu was going for a muted, less bleak style with pops of color.

Kite and Mezzo Forte benefit from the fact that they have strong key animation teams with a range of individuals from Kazuto Nakazawa to Rin-Sin to Shuuichi Kaneko to Tsutomu Oshiro and the aforementioned Masashi Ishihama. As strong an artist as Umetsu and his ambitious action choreography is, neither of these works would be nearly as bombastic without these core layout/animation artists.

Mezzo DSA

Mezzo DSA is Umetsu's first television series. Released four years after Mezzo Forte in 2004, it's a mess. It suffers from weak episodic narratives and an underdeveloped overarching story with underutilized characters. The returning characters have significant deviations from their Forte prequel (DSA is a sequel, confirmed in-universe, to Forte), and behind-the-scenes production problems saw the animation collapse nearly instantly at the same time.

Studio ARMS had never produced a television series before DSA, with studio producer Osamu Koshinaka saying in the studio's now-deleted website blogs that they wanted to continue producing hentai for however long they could. They continued to produce some into 2005, but the transition to television animation had already happened. Aside from a handful of R18 episodes, in 2004 ARMS were making an attempt to produce three entire television series: Umetsu's Mezzo DSA, an adaptation of Elfen Lied, and an adaptation of Kakyuusei 2.

ARMS and its sister company Studio Kikan (later known as Pierrot+ and now Studio Signpost), from which ARMS is spun off from, are also a bit interesting in production method. Early on, they developed a system with heavy outsourcing to South Korea. Jinwoo Animation and Hanjin Animation both got a lot of work on early Kikan and ARMS works (both founded ~1994) and to this day are a heavy labor support to Studio Signpost where they're given the responsibility to animate entire episodes on their own or directly contribute half of the animation staff alongside Signpost staff; and Signpost have given the Korean studios "chief animation director" duties too.

By 2004, Jiwoo and Hanjin were barely being given the responsibility of handling entire episodes as gross outsources, but several years by then they had artists who were prompted to the roles of key animator and animation director who were helping on most of the ARMS and Kikan productions, including doing douga, cel-coloring, and sometimes background art. ARMS and Kikan still heavily gross outsourced to other domestic (Japanese) studios, too. Of their three TV works in 2004, 9 of 13 DSA episodes were outsourced, 5 of 13 Elfen Lied episodes were outsourced, and 10/13 Kakyuusei 2 episodes were outsourced. Only one of these was handled by Jiwoo or Hanjin, but nonetheless.

One outsourcing aspect of the series that was particularly strange at first was the fact that the art director, Akira Itou, was only art director for certain episodes. Those episodes had all of the background art painted at Chinese art studio Shanghai Superman. Zhu Qi from Shanghai Superman acted as assistant art director for those episodes as well. For the episodes that Itou was not in charge of, Park Myeongsik (affiliated with either Jiwoo Animation or Atelier Musa, it's hard to tell) was credited, with the backgrounds painted at Jiwoo Animation, and Itou receiving an art design credit.

DSA is the sequel to a high-action, witty comedy handled by Umetsu. With all of this work and the waning resources like Kusakawa (who didn't even work for Kikan anymore as he co-founded Arcturus/Seven Arcs in 2002 and only occasionally showed up elsewhere), this leads to noticeable dips in quality. Also, consider Umetsu's credits on the series: original creator; chief director (not on-site as much); character designer; scriptwriter and storyboard artist of the first two episodes; episode co-director of the first and last episodes; animation director of the first episode and opening; director and storyboard artist of the opening; and key animator in the opening, ending, and first episode. A lot. Again.

The first episode looks great. Kusakawa helped out as episode co-director with Umetsu, and while not as clean looking as the OVA, the two were relatively ambitious using 3D backgrounds for some action cuts and some pretty complex photographic processing here and there. The drawings looked good, the animation looked good, the colors looked good, and the art direction was solid.

The second episode was a drop in quality, but still overall decent. By the third episode, which is the first outsourced episode (to Studio Kuma), things were not great. The animation took a big hit, as did the drawings. Episodes 4-5 outsourced to Studio Perth are worse, especially the fifth episode, which has a number of blatantly bad drawings that look like they were not looked over by either the animation director or the episode director, or they just had so little time that they had to ship them out like that; and there are really apparent issues like when Mikura is looking at her reflection and her reflection turns as she hears a voice, but she (non-reflection) is clearly visible in the frame and doesn't even move.

These episodes were the worst-looking that the series had to offer, on a slightly positive note. I wouldn't say the rest were consistently good, but they were not awful. While everything up until episode 13 suffers from some limitation or some bad drawings, they were usually storyboarded and/or directed well-enough that even with bad drawings, they were not always forefront and center. Episodes 4-5 even look competently storyboarded at certain parts, but the execution fumbles.

Episode 10, as another example, wasdirected by Kusakawa, not outsourced, and has a surprise appearance by Tsutomu Oshiro animating a segment of the car chase scene that looked pretty cool. Not his best work, but pretty cool, and Kusakawa's direction was honestly good. That doesn't mean the chase scene didn't have bad animation or drawings, or that the rest of the episode didn't have its fair share, but it wasn't nearly as distracting. Episode 13, on the other hand, is a finale for finales; it's got all of the explosive action (literally) that Umetsu has defined as his ordeal of action sequences, and it looked great throughout most of its scenes. Story-wise, though, Mezzo DSA is a tremendously mixed bag. Some episodes are big highlights, and some feel like completely wasted potential.

Umetsu only wrote the first two episodes. The rest were written by Takao Yoshioka, who worked as the series composition writer (including one co-written with Shigenori Kageyama). In the premiere, some of the new characters who are introduced are an elementary schooler who decides she wants to be a badass like Mikura, the downstairs barber who runs his own service for dangerous jobs, and an assassin hired to kill Kurokawa. On top of that, the episode's story itself follows the DSA trying to stop a man (Asano) from killing another man (Takizawa) because Takizawa killed a girl Asano truly loved while looking to make money, and then developed fast-acting Alzheimer's. The client is the ghost of the girl, they stop Asano from killing Takizawa, but as far as I know Takizawa dies when the building that they're in collapses; and this guy is a murderer, but that's sad, never touched on, and the episode ends with no satisfying resolution even for Asano.

There are a lot of aspects to this first episode that I don't like. I've established it looks good, but I don't like the content. Mikura's slight supernatural abilities pop up in Forte, so an extension of that is not surprising. A ghost is not really an extension of that, which I would be okay with, but it's the only episode that has this kind of scenario. It doesn't match Forte, and it certainly is inconsistent with the rest of the series. Even episode 10, with its own supernatural element, is not relevant to its story at all until the very end as a shocking, humorous development. The other thing, and I find this to be an issue with several of Umetsu's longer stories, is that events occur in the most roundabout and needlessly convoluted way possible. I'm specifically referring to the fact that the ghost girl hired the DSA to stop Asano and her role is only revealed at the end.

Takizawa is a murderer, but he's also a tragic character. Whatever he did when he was younger has no bearing on the Alzheimer's subject, that is this homeless guy who gets picked on and is now being held at gunpoint. Asano's plan is to use some new drug that can cure Alzheimer's to get Takizawa's memory back and have him pay for what he did before the statute of limitations on his crime runs out. The girl is trying to stop Asano from killing Takizawa. Ok, sure. She explains herself to Asano, and Asano is like "Damn, alright." This old guy Takizawa meanwhile literally doesn't know who either of them are or what he himself did, and then is left to die anyway when his confused and agitated state leads him to picking up the gun and retaliating as soon as the building starts to collapse. He dies suffering from his illness, scared and confused. He'll never know what he did, either, and he simply dies terrified. Mikura saves Asano during the building collapse. That's it. Neither Takizawa, nor Asano, nor the girl are ever brought up again in the series or just this episode.

I think it's disappointing because there's clearly some theme here that Umetsu seems to have been writing. The morality of punishment when someone cannot comprehend or even so much as experience the punishment that they could possibly deserve. The theme of Asano's love, and likewise, the love for him. As wonderfully directed as it is, and I think Umetsu's direction is great, and the vocal performances are great, the episode leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

After the storyline of this episode is over, an assassin, who is after one of their lives, is introduced. Unfortunately, he and Asami, the elementary school girl mentioned earlier, are also big problems to this story: they don't feel like they do a single thing for the entire duration of the series. In every episode, they might show up for a scene or maybe a little more, but most of the time, they do absolutely nothing until the very end of the series. The assassin, Kazuto, is the worst case of this because he's meant to have a metamorphosis as a character that leads to his actions in the finale. It never comes. He never does anything interesting. He never says anything interesting. By the end of it, nothing is even known about him besides who hired him and why.

Episodes 2-3 are largely unmemorable, with the third episode having a lengthy car karaoke scene with Mikura that reuses the same couple of shots over and over again for an unwelcome amount of time. It looks terrible. Episodes 4-5 are a double-sided coin seeing the same day occur from two different perspectives, and neither of them is very interesting on top of looking pretty bad. One of them sees Mikura meet up with a girl from her past, but she is not interesting as a character or as someone from Mikura's past; she is just there to try and kill her, go figure. Kazuto shows up! And then he immediately leaves, having done nothing at all.

The first episode I'd say I liked is episode 6. Episode 6 is mostly a backstory for Harada seeing his first girlfriend, who turns out to be an android. That's it. It fleshes him out as a person who makes those robots for a living and adds a deeper layer to his character.

Episode 7 is good in concept. The story's idea is credited to Tatsuya Kawashima, who is a career douga animator from ARMS (he still works for Studio Signpost). It sees Asami and the DSA get involved with a couple who are trying to get a gang out of their apartment property. Asami feels like she is in the motions of doing something and developing as a character. There's an attempt at making the apartment complex horror-esque, but it doesn't find any motifs to latch onto, and it isn't that horrifying. It would be better because the second half has a twist: the couple are bad people! They murdered their daughter decades ago and are trying to make sure her rotted corpse hidden behind a wall isn't discovered. That's an interesting twist. It's mortifying, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired; and this is the only episode that feels like it wants to do something with Asami.

Episode 8 is the episode that Kageyama co-wrote. Mikura decides to try some sleep therapy-esque thing that puts her into dreams, but then her dreams go out of control. Kazuto shows up in her dream... huh!? I guess it's clairvoyance or something...? It's a fun idea, but it's not very memorable.

Episode 9's antagonist is a serial killer clown by night, and a guy by day. It's no secret who it is, in the usual Umetsu fashion, so there's no intrigue, and he has nothing to say besides wanting to kill Mikura, so he's like a worse Momomi from the OVA. He's simply described as a "guy by day" because there is basically nothing of substance about him besides his hobby of killing as a clown. On the bright side, this episode looks pretty good. There's more effort put into the photographic processing and the storyboards are good.

Episode 10 is fun. It has a really silly concept, and it sticks to that: some guys from a fictional Middle Eastern country want a mummy to go on tour, but accidents keep happening, so they think it's the curse of the mummy. Actually, it's just people trying to steal it. I already mentioned that this is a Kusakawa episode that has a cool sequence by Oshiro, and it's a fun episode. Kazuto shows up near the end, and he does literally nothing, like he has for several episodes.

Episode 11 is a little nonsense, but it's cool. The twist is interesting. A gang wants to protect their guy from being assassinated, so they hire the DSA, but it turns out that the killer is a program that can hypnotize you with your eyes. It's kind of like some Laughing Man-esque thing, but it resolves with the killer winning, and Kazuto actually does something: absolutely nothing, that was a lie. He engages in a fight with the DSA. That's it.

Episode 12 explores Kazuto. That's great—if only I cared. Up until this point, it feels like Yoshioka and Umetsu have made little effort to characterize the cast in their environment and with each other. The reveal of who hired Kazuto is conceptually cool, but the series didn't do anything to get to this point. The "real bad guy" after the DSA is shown here and in episode 13, and again, conflicts are shown with this person beforehand to vaguely set up this conflict, yet I cannot be bothered to care about their fight on a narrative level.

The truth of the series is that Kurokawa's old colleague, the chief of police, wants him gone, and is also in a secret relationship with an idol who is his daughter's friend. Ok, that's kind of interesting, it's a different take on the old guy and young girl power dynamic, but the DSA's solution to this problem is to show her fans footage of her and the chief having sex, and also kill the corrupt guys he sent to kill them along the way. Kazuto dies saving Mikura, but why? What about him changed? Where?

On a conceptual level, it's difficult to grasp what Kazuto's purpose in the story was because he is fundamentally irrelevant to everything that happens. Asami is shown to have changed by the end of the show but besides being around for the evil couple in episode 7, she barely develops between episodes 1 and 13; but she has a clear position in this cast. Remember when Mikura wanted to have sex with her crush Kurokawa in the OVA? That doesn't exist anymore. Instead, Kurokawa teases Harada about having a crush on Mikura in the middle episodes, which also does not go anywhere for even a second. It's not that Mezzo DSA doesn't have good ideas or capable staff members; it's simply that it fails to utilize anything it has. It's a big disappointment.

Kite Liberator

A spiritual sequel to Kite, Kite Liberator is, by all means, an incomplete story. Some might find an issue with that, some might not. Shinbo is one who did not, and he lauded Umetsu's craft of the OVA and said it was cool that it just ends at the climax of the story because Umetsu was doing what he wanted to do, and it was cool.

I'm not someone who feels the same way, but I don't think it's necessarily because it ends partway through so much as it's trying to tell and connect two stories (with subplots) and only goes out of its way to really develop one of them, and that's the narrative revolving around the space alien mutation who comes down to earth when the scientists flee. Is that inherently an issue of being unfinished? With this particular script, perhaps; but whether it was a "planned incompleteness" or went over budget/lost funding and had to be pushed out incomplete is anyone's guess, unless he's mentioned it somewhere.

I think the sci-fi part of the story is a bit more developed because it has a natural beginning and is leading to a conclusion, even if it never quite gets to its last stop on the tramline. The reason why the astronauts have turned into these weird bone beings is understood, the connection between them and the guy who is responsible is known, the Americans try to cover it up and threaten to kill anyone who leaks what's happening, and the daughter of one of the ISS scientists is the heroine of the other part of the story.

That's fine and dandy, but there's a little bit of a disconnect between these two conflicts because she, a girl being taken care of by her uncle while her father is in space, is also the "Angel of Death" who commits acts of vigilantism against murderers (note the thematic similarities with Kite and Mezzo). I have no issue with that on its own, but her story is kept in the dark, so it's difficult to connect with this girl who is the Batman Who Kills by night and an ordinary high school girl by day.

Monaka's story also involves several other stories: aside from generally pursuing vigilantism and being an astronaut's daughter, she works at a maid cafe late at night when she's not supposed to be (according to the law as a minor) which is ran by a man who is kind of a creep mainly because he maintains a "the customer is always right" attitude when the staff physically fight back from being harassed. Monaka is trying to get to another killer in the meantime, too. The restaurant owner is also involved with two brothers, one of whom Monaka killed at the start for killing several people and nearly raping a child hostage. The restaurant manager gets a call from the living brother crying about the dead brother, and he's shown to be nude and with a young girl tied to a bed.

My first angle was that the restaurant manager was selling them out to Monaka, but that scene plays out like they're partners in crime, so she might be working there to get to them and to him. Later on, there's a scene between the two of them (with her donning the Angel of Death persona/attire) and she's just casually talking to him in a subterranean office as she heads out for her next job.

Character relationships like this are never explained or developed, so it leads me to be generally confused, assuming I haven't missed anything (which is entirely possible). One of her coworkers is another point of intrigue that never fully develops, a slightly older woman who sticks her head out for the girls at the restaurant and also recognizes, in one instance, that Monaka is clearly capable of fighting due to her instinctual reactions. She's also a mother. But besides that, she does not appear again.

Then there's the cop character introduced at the start who fails to apprehend or neutralize the serial killer brother before Monaka who becomes relevant as a testimony to the "Angel of Death," and he visits the restaurant Monaka works at. They develop... something? Notice, again, a character relationship between a younger girl and an authority (a cop). He later finds out she's a minor, and she's like, "Please don't tell the school", and then he asks her out on a date. There's already a lot going on.

Monaka is not against dating this cop, despite him probably being in his late 20s (as Monaka theorizes), because she thinks older guys are better than guys her age. Sure, whatever, but where does this subplot go? Absolutely nowhere, this happens around the 40-minute mark of a 55-minute OVA. Then, there's the mysterious person who gives Monaka her orders. That never gets brought up again.

Once again, this work is by all means incomplete. Is it because of a lack of funding? Resources? Regardless, don't expect the middle of a story to tie up loose ends. There's something venerable about not conceding even to the least optimal of conditions and making things how Umetsu wanted to, but at the same time, the director's job is to be able to adapt to the situation and concede where concessions can or should be made for the benefit of the overall work. With only an hour's time to work with, focusing on a few of these plotlines rather than cutting them all abruptly may have given Kite Liberator a more memorable story experience. The core issue is, therefore, not a lack of finality, but the fact that I'm left more confused by the lack of progress for any of the plotlines or characters than anything else.

This is just theorizing; it's impossible to know how the ending would have turned out without a full script to work off of. A lot of people worked hard on Liberator, anyway, Umetsu especially. Again, consider all of the roles that he took on: original creator, director, character designer, screenplay writer, sole storyboard artist, sole episode director, co-animation director (with Shuuichi Kaneko and Yuuki Itou helping as layout supervisors), and, of course, a key animator. It's a ton of work for him, as usual. In his conversation with Shinbo in Shinbogatari, Umetsu talked about the difficulties and his experiments with the anime.

He used some CG in his prior works, but this time he was working with a studio that specializes in CG animation, Digital Frontier, who he was aware of through the 2006 live-action Death Note films (they did the CG for Ryuk, and probably some other parts). At the time of this interview (around 2008), he talked about the dwindling resources of the anime sphere as anime became oversaturated (too many shows and too many studios), and specialized animators for things like action scenes were sparsely spread out among certain series or certain studios. Without the right timing, this leads to some series having no or few specialists at all, a common problem that is even worse today with cheap industry rates, a lack of people, and a lack of time.

Liberator's schedule was also tough on him. As director and the amalgamation of roles he took on himself, he went a full year without taking any Sundays off and slept at the studio for days at a time. His and the staff's efforts absolutely show. It has gorgeous animation and some especially gorgeous layouts and art direction. The Mezzo Forte-esque desaturated, slightly bluetoned color scheme is beautiful.

It looks really good and there's only two major oversights I noticed throughout my rewatch: once when the restaurant manager talks to Monaka and his mouth clearly doesn't move, and once when the cop takes a gun he has stashed and takes a magazine he hid in a microwave out while he's being shot at: the magazine magically respawns in the microwave for the entire duration of the cut. A true infinite ammo glitch. A worthwhile viewing experience, problems and all.

Galilei Donna

Of all the works covered, Galilei Donna is the most difficult to talk about because... it's boring. From the get-go, this show is not something that appeals to me. It follows a trio of sisters who are descendant from the legendary polymath Galileo Galilei and in an Italian-esque setting with fish-themed mechas and an inheritance theft plot.

This show is an improvement over Mezzo DSA as an Umetsu television production in a couple of ways: it is a much stronger, more stable production, and Umetsu took a step back from doing so much. This time, he's credited with the show's concept, as co-creator (with TeamGD, referring to the staff), director, storyboard artist, and episode director of the first and last episodes (and the OP and ED), and he helped with some miscellaneous episode direction work in episode 8. Sword Art Online's Shingo Adachi is instead responsible for designing the characters, and all writing duties are split amongst Hideyuki Kurata, Jun Kumagai, Atsushi Oku, and Touko Machida. Umetsu also did some key animation for the OP, but didn't do any drawings otherwise (besides potential episode director corrections).

While ARMS certainly could gather staff, A-1 Pictures' producers (and Umetsu's own connections) solidified a much stronger animation team centralized at the studio. Unlike ARMS, A-1 Pictures also had relatively strong in-house photography and 3D departments at the time, so the logistics of communication and resources were inherently stronger.

A number of Umetsu's old and new associates showed up too, like the aforementioned Kaneko as effects animation director, Mamoru Sasaki, who storyboarded an episode (Sasaki was a layout supervisor on Shin Hurricane Polymar), and Yuuki Itou from Kite Liberator, who also storyboarded an episode.

Despite a stronger core team and clearly better schedule than what DSA amassed, Galilei Donna... is boring. Of all of the episodes, Sasaki's (episode 2) was the most interesting to watch because of his particular way of framing shots with foreground blocking elements, which is something Shinbo (and perhaps Umetsu, to a degree) learned while working on Shin Hurricane Polymar with him.

The underlying story isn't bad or uninteresting per se, but it does still have Mezzo DSA's problem of not focusing. It underutilizes characters and lacks intrigue to keep attention for most episodes. Most episodes see the trio running away from two different groups who are out for Galilei's inheritance, and while there are certainly themes about control, capitalism, community, and helping the weak, they are often put on the back burner, and the progression is stagnant.

Episode 6, written by Jun Kumagai, is a highlight writing-wise because of the forefront conflict between the clashing ideals and opinions of Roberto, Cicinho, the Ferrari sisters (Galileo's descendants), and the civilians trapped in a hospital during a snowstorm and a blackout together. There is a moral conflict regarding the diversion of power from the top floor to the lower floors because only a backup generator is working, and it's working to keep hospital patients alive in the top floors while the civilians slowly freeze without power. The histories and motivations of both Roberto and Cicinho are unveiled and characterize their motivations and actions.

Roberto's father was a proponent of giving to the poor, even as a wealthy man, and the poor that he gave some assistance to would not go out of their way to help him when their house collapsed on him and instead took things of value to sell. Roberto's story is about the greed of others, especially those with less, as he witnessed them abandon his father in need. His ideals grow outside of the realm of what his father tried to teach him and become an intent of subjugation. Cicinho, on the other hand, is a man who, even with very little, went out of his way to help those who were the same or had even less. His collective of outcasts is his family.

The succeeding episodes don't feel like they deliver on what was being set up, and at only 11 episodes long, still feel like they often spend their time on less interesting subjects and moments because there's either not enough content or a lack of prioritization. The final episode sees the Ferrari family fighting in court, which again fails to be interesting because of how trivial it feels getting to that point. Without a series composition writer credited, Umetsu is theoretically in charge of story organization as director, and I don't think it worked out for this series. Galilei Donna is the least memorable of his works.

Wizard Barristers: Benmashi Cecil

A show about a world where wizards exist and there's an extension of the legal system to cover wizards and magic use is baller, in theory. Wizard Barristers is a lot of fun, and even though the courtroom aspect does leave much to be desired, it is still a blast to watch.

Cecil is a 17-year-old Canadian-Japanese wizard barrister, the youngest in Japan's history, and she has just joined the Butterfly legal office. She is young, slightly arrogant, and willing to stick her nose in a case before she's had a chance to discuss it with her seniors or even meet them at the office on her first day. The first episode also introduces the police duo consisting of Quinn and Shizumu, opens with an absurdly cool action scene involving them, introduces all of the basic elements of the wizard court system, conflicts between Cecil and the other new recruit at Butterfly (who sees her as brash, arrogant, and thinks she's taking the job for a naïve sense of justice), and shows the audience Cecil's real motivation: her mother is on death row. The first episode also sets up the idea of legal discrimination against wizards themselves, the trashiness of some prosecutors, and the idea of the death penalty.

It sounds like a lot, and it introduces a lot of characters, but somehow, it works exceptionally well. Umetsu is directly overseeing the organization of the story as the series composition writer, but all screenplay writing duties are handled by Michiko Itou.

This doesn't mean that the series doesn't still fall to some of the same writing pitfalls that Mezzo DSA and Galilei Donna struggled with, but its large cast of characters are both memorable and quite likeable (or unlikeable, depending on what the story wants you to feel), and never quite feel like they aren't part of the story they're in. There's one episode in particular that even shows each of the Butterfly cast off doing some sort of hobby away from Butterfly, or they spend time talking about themselves outside of their job, which is the crux of the show, obviously, but small things like that are personable. Cecil spends some time with the members of Butterfly; some are more developed than others, and characters outside of their legal office have both roles and individual personalities.

One should not go into Wizard Barristers expecting it to be like what The Pitt is to medical dramas. It's not exactly House MD either, and there's very little legal jargon or attempts to delve deep into the court system. It is a lot of fun to watch because of how ridiculous it can get, but that doesn't make it infallible to the fact that it clearly attempts at having legal critique and a somewhat serious attitude.

Take the death sentence, for example: I'm not going to subject the series to my own view on capital punishment, but I am going to think about it from the context that the series exists in. In a show where wizard discrimination is constant and always assumed, the use of the death sentence and the rationale behind the decisions is shaky, to put it nicely. Take two of the first cases.

Episode 1 and 2's case revolves around a man on trial for the killing of a gang member during an attempted robbery. The prosecution argues that he's part of the gang, that he killed his own comrade, and they're seeking the death penalty. The judge looks as if he's about to rule on that until Cecil and other Butterfly members go out of their way and apprehend a gang member to testify that he isn't and he genuinely acted in self-defense. On the one hand, this witness barges in with the Butterfly members and the judge allows him to testify without any prior interviewing or assessment as to whether or not he's an actual member of the gang, or if he was coerced by Butterfly. The logic in the court is brutally nonexistent. He gets off with a life sentence for self-defense, even though the prosecution's argument had literally no evidence that he was a gang member, and he acted in self-defense.

The third episode's arc deals with the long, white-haired character Hachiya (nickname), who was a former prosecutor before undergoing his "awakening" and becoming a wizard. His reason for becoming a barrister isn't that he is suddenly a wizard, but that one case he did made him feel guilty because of the defendant's death. This time, he's being asked to defend the girlfriend of that defendant, who killed the guy whose testimony was responsible for her boyfriend's death sentence (though the court isn't what killed him, his power went out of control at the verdict). Despite admitting that she was blatantly misusing her magic and simply happened to kill a guy who was nearby, and it was coincidental that it was this specific guy in question, she is given a life sentence.

Hachiya's motivation for taking on the case is also plainly stupid. He's essentially saying he'll repent for causing her boyfriend's death by both arguing for a life sentence and also letting her kill him once that's done. Ok, if she does that, wouldn't they just put her on trial again and give her the death sentence for his murder? She doesn't tell Hachiya, but she also intends to kill the judge, because it's the same judge; but then, at the end says she doesn't "know the truth yet" and was looking for it. How do you intend to do that by killing everyone in the court or that was involved in your dead boyfriend's case? It's completely illogical.

A guy who is arguing in self-defense and whose prosecution has no evidence nearly gets the death penalty, and a girl who outright commits (at the very least) manslaughter (rather than a premeditated murder, which in reality it was, but ignore that) gets an easy life sentence. It's nonsensical even in this world's logic. One of Wizard Barrister's two biggest writing problems is that there are times when the characters feel as if they've been written with no brains. This is not a criticism to say that people (in the legal system or otherwise) are incapable of acting on emotion or even on stupid decisions, but too often do they make choices that are not just leaps of logic or absurd, but also out of character.

Qualms with the legal aspect aside, episodes 1-2 see Cecil spending time trying to get to know the defendant, and the reckless, illogical "let's just kidnap a gang member for testimony" is fun so it's not a huge detriment to the enjoyment. Episode 3 is nice as a look into Hachiya as a character, and he's perhaps the single most interesting character of the series aside from whatever his repentance storyline was meant to be.

Another issue is not so much of a problem because it's a lot easier to just accept and enjoy, and that's the fact that the primary antagonist and the overarching narrative are, as mentioned in one of the other Umetsu works, needlessly convoluted and still underdeveloped.

As usual, Wizard Barristers does not make an effort to necessarily hide who the villain is, so there's not much of a mystery on that end. By the sixth episode or so, the show itself is clearly showing who is doing what, it just isn't t explaining why yet. The motives are mysterious, and they do unravel pretty naturally from Shizumu's actions to chief judge Makusu's, and also Cecil's as the heroine. Her mother is revealed to be on death row in episode 1, but it's not revealed why or under what circumstances until the second half; and even then, there are more reveals to be had about that.

The journey to the end is overall interesting, but Makusu's journey to that goal is complex and relies on having access to Cecil in the first place. "The plan started 6 years ago when Cecil died and was resurrected." What? Makusu wants to use her power. She doesn't know she was resurrected from death one fateful day, she just wants to prove her mother isn't a murderer; but what about Makusu? He wants her power, so he sends Shizumu and others to put her in situations where more of her powers unlock so that he can make a pact with the demon Lucifer.

Makusu is a secret wizard much like his son (Shizumu) and wants revenge against society for the discrimination against wizards and is willing to make a contract with a demon to do that. The reveal that devils exist in this world is a cool and interesting, especially when someone close to her is revealed three-quarters in to be one of those demons and watching over her. That is a cool development, but his journey there seems to rely on the fact that Cecil both becomes a barrister and becomes a barrister in Japan, because her father is Canadian and lives in Canada. Her mom wanted her to go to Japan, so she went to Japan. What was Makusu's plan? It's not a great plan.

His motivations and Shizumu's also feel largely underdeveloped. For the chief judge to hold such an animosity over society while still playing the role of his job, and even trying to use his allies in the prosecution to get out of judgement for actions he means to twist onto Cecil, he'd have to have a pretty strong conviction, but what drives him is always just a vague "society." Shizumu is especially underwhelming because he's both acting against his job as an officer, and against his cop partner Quinn, whom he basically betrays near the end. The betrayal lacks weight because their specific relationship is hardly developed outside of the context of "they work together" and "a few mysterious things keep happening while he's around (or not...)."

Shizumu, a police officer offer in a position of authority due to both his age (25) and position, is Cecil's primary undisclosed adversary; and at one point the series has him and Cecil go on a date (it doesn't lead anywhere and it isn't romantic besides her blushing when she falls on him, I just think it's funny that Umetsu has created another character adjacent to this kind of a role). Aspects of his character are left unanswered due to his death after he decides to betray his father, which I don't think was bad, but the lack of emphasis on his relationships with Quinn and Cecil beforehand make him feel more underdeveloped than what the story seems to be trying to tell. Considering his father sees him as expendable and all of their interactions are "business"-related, his character lacks an anchor of pathos. Not everything needs explanation, but the audience needs something to connect to.

Moyo is a similarly underdeveloped character, but her nature is a bit different. Her relationship with Cecil is quickly established and maintained, and the reveal that she is a demon is (again) a cool development. I don't expect or need any explanations outside of that... but in episode 8, she does kill someone sent after Cecil as that person tells Cecil the truth, saying that it isn't time for her to know yet. In episode 11, she also helps the hospitalized Quinn, saying that it's for Cecil's sake too. These two ideas remained unresolved as to "why."

It's a lot of mixed feelings, and there's a lot of information left out because there's simply too much to nicely summarize, but that should at least go to show just how much more meaningfully the 12-episode runtime of this series is. It's Umetsu's most successful narrative in a longer format (over 60 minutes) and still the most digestible and coherent, certainly a testament to both Umetsu and Itou's efforts.

The production side is also relatively strong*. The asterisk here is that the TV production collapsed and led to episode 11 being broadcast as one of the single most slideshow-esque, incomplete episodes aired probably ever, which happened because the schedule caught up and they ran out of time. However, the Blu-Ray/DVD version of this episode massively corrected almost the entire episode, with lots of complete animation retakes. Having seen the TV version on my first watch years ago, it was really bad; but this review is about the BD version which is by no means bad.

Umetsu also did the reverse of Galilei Donna: he went back to doing a lot of different things himself. He came up with the concept, was the director, the character designer, the series composition writer, one of the three chief animation directors, directed/storyboarded the first and last episodes (the last one with two other directors and one other storyboard artist), directed/storyboarded both the OP and ED, was an animation director for the OP/ED and the last two episodes, and a key animator for the OP and five total episodes.

ARMS and producer Koshinaka were again in charge of production and both they and Umetsu were able to bring in an incredible number of talented artists and companies. All three of the outsourcing studios are primary contractors: Studio Hibari (4, 9), Actas (5), and Ajia-dou (7), whose episodes range from pretty good to mediocre at worst.

All things considered, Wizard Barristers is pretty decent.

The Umetsu Catalogue as a Whole

It's not difficult to grasp where Umetsu's general strengths and weaknesses lay across the majority of his works. On the one hand, he's an incredibly talented artist able to do a lot of work himself, perhaps by design or by necessity; but without the resources and scheduling, his ambitions can quickly and easily exceed the carrying capacity of the rest of the staff and even himself.

Those ambitions also feel as though they're the reason some works are more interesting than others, not necessarily conceptually, but in execution. Galilei Donna and Mezzo DSA are the weakest of the bunch narratively—they're unable to latch onto either strong themes, strong characters, or a strong storyline; and so even against the incompleteness of Kite Liberator or the messiness of Wizard Barristers, they fail to garner as much of a reaction (as a personal opinion, of course).

That isn't to say Umetsu is approaching either of these works without ambitions, because they're clearly there: in the design work, in the different kinds of storylines and world he's making with each of the teams even in reusing motifs and character archetypes (or designs) that he clearly enjoys. All of these anime have clear and coherently unique identities despite their similarities and they do each have their moments of glory, some more than others.

The action sets in most of these works are all incredible, but he's clearly working for more than explosive bursts of firefights; otherwise, why attempt making (at times) complicated dynamics between the cast and looking for heavier or more interesting themes? As a whole, Umetsu's storytelling can work as simple action sets and "wow hot woman" like in Mezzo Forte, but he's always striving to do something cooler or do something more interesting.

Bonus Stage 01

The weaknesses and strengths of Umetsu's work as a director also usually correlate to how good his OPs and EDs are. At least from the mid-2000s to the mid/late-2010s, Umetsu gained particular fame for his OPs and EDs, which are usually highly stylized due to his directing style and also either making the drawing corrections as animation director, or completely solo-key animating them himself.

Outside of his own works, the very first OP/ED he participated in was the Girl's High (2005, ARMS) ED, which he directed and key animated entirely on his own. It's a very basic ED, and it works. Each of the girls does a dance according to her personality, there are nice colors, and there are some nice drawings of them putting on lipstick, getting their cheeks tugged, making hand eyeglasses, a panty shot that ends with the girl kicking and "breaking" the camera lens, romanticized bishounen-style men, and it's generally just a lot of fun. It's the kind of ED that is both enjoyable to watch and looks nice, and it doesn't need to be anything more than that. It is essentially perfect as it is.

This sentiment relates to a lot of his best OPs too, some of which go further than that. And Yet the Town Moves (2010, SHAFT) is a similar type of fun that is bouncy and upbeat, and made better by the fact that the credits themselves are a part of the visuals and not just added-on telop text (at least, in the Blu-Ray version, as TBS was not so ecstatic about the inclusion). His art design sensibilities come through, and the characters dance and move around with vibrant movements.

Something else like Blood-C (2011, Production I.G) is based around violent, gory vampires and monsters going at it; and while the OP represents this with a red color theme and an emphasis on blood throughout the opening, he doesn't stringently focus on the "edgy" appeal of the series. The first 35 seconds are mostly the characters interacting and being shown off in cute or fun scenarios, like the twins dancing together in the classroom or Saya (the protagonist) sipping on a drink that is too hot in a cafe. Interspersed, quick cuts of bloodied hands appear like a backdrop of the world itself, and the credit telop is always written in a harsh red font with some characters bleeding out (reminds me of a cell undergoing apoptosis). At a cut 35 seconds in, Saya and two other characters stand in front of two large moons with silhouetted trees (in a flat, 2D, gradient-adjusted style similar to Hisaharu Iijima's backgrounds in Bakemonogatari), an angled crossbuck, and all three of the characters looking in different directions. The rest of the opening is Saya in a metamorphosis-like transformation as blood peels from her nude body, and she fights 'monsters'.

In the first Bungo Stray Dogs (2016, Bones) ED, he homes in on three specific characters (Nakajima, Dazai, and Akutagawa) and their emotional conflicts and relationships. Drowning motifs: a blue, red, and white color scheme for each character and what they represent, shadows cast from Akutagawa's red being blue and turning white in one cut. His opening for Seraph of the End (2015, WIT Studio) is similarly concerned with shadows, reflections, and the two protagonists, and also has a cool action piece at the end.

Valkyria Chronicles' 2nd opening (2009, A-1 Pictures), on the other hand, has drawings clearly corrected by Umetsu, nice-looking stylized CG (from the same person who later was CG director for Galilei Donna), and some cool shots; but the song and visuals hardly mesh, and the idea behind the opening is that it shows off one battle occurring in a city. It ends up being not very interesting as an OP and not having anything particularly worthwhile besides the drawings. It's conceptually uninteresting and fails to merge the sound of song with the visuals, which feel entirely monotonous because of the limitation of its core concept and lack of... staging and narrative or thematic quality. Cool action on its own can only get so far before it circles back around to disappointment.

Bonus Stage 02

Between Mezzo DSA and Kite Liberator, Umetsu tried to make a movie of another original project he titled Kiss and Cry, but unfortunately, plans for that work never went forward. After years of nothing, he mentioned in the 2008 interview with Shinbo that he was still looking to produce it, and again in 2009 and 2011 on his blog. Unfortunately, the project never went beyond the planning stages. He did publish a book with story and image boards, character design concepts, and other material he had drawn.

The project would have dealt with, you guessed it, a young girl who becomes involved with a mysterious killer and, albeit not technically a police officer, a prison warden, and she has psychic powers. It's standard fare for an Umetsu story, and of course, I would still watch it. Some concepts may have dispersed into his recent works, but who knows?

Extra Stage (The Future)

The future of Umetsu is quite near, though. The studio producing all of his original works since 1998 (with the sole exception of Galilei Donna), ARMS, is defunct. The production department seems to have been disbanded around 2015 (the studio's last works in this time being Isuca and Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid, the former of which he was able to make an ED for), and the company changed its legal name from ARMS to Common Sense in 2017. There was a single "posthumous" release of Ikki Touasen: Western Wolves in 2019, at which point all of ARMS' remaining staff had basically transferred to sister company Pierrot+ (located in the same building, they shared staff for essentially all of their works). In 2020, the company officially closed its doors and was liquidated.

According to his blog and an interview in Newtype March 2025, Umetsu already knew where he wanted to try producing a new work as early as 2010: SHAFT. He liked the work the studio's digital departments did on the And Yet the Town Moves opening. After Wizard Barristers, he started planning for a series at SHAFT and introduced three concepts to studio president Mitsutoshi Kubota who gave him the green light for one of them in 2015. After he got the green light, he directed the Gourmet Girl Graffiti opening at the studio. On that opening, he worked with production assistant Ryuusuke Suzuki, whom he then recommended as producer of his new project.

Yuuya Takahashi joined the project and finished the screenplay in 2016, but since SHAFT was still busy with a number of projects to be finished in the next three years (Kizumonogatari, Monogatari Final Season, March Comes in Like a Lion, Fireworks, Zaregoto, and Fate/Extra), production didn't advance to the next stage until 2018. For these intermediary years, Umetsu may have worked on developing the project, but he was showing up everywhere and donating his mind to 4-6 anime openings and endings a year. Finally, in 2018, the animation production process for his new project started.

Virgin Punk was announced as a film series in 2024 with the first film, Clockwork Girl, scheduled for a 2025 release date. For such a lengthy production time, the first "film" in the series being 35-minutes long seems like it isn't much; but considering that at least three parts are confirmed and SHAFT's star animator, who Umetsu humorously calls "SHAFT's Treasure" and who is one of three credited "main animators" on the project is rumored to have authored more than 100 cuts of animation on his own... yeah? The project was originally in consideration for release as a series, but after talks about the schedule, it was moved into being a limited film-like series that will probably be streamed or aired at some point afterwards (its only being screened at two places).

Costa Rican animator Daniela Padilla Barquero (penname DAEKO), who worked for SHAFT from 2021-2022 and continues to freelance with them, said that her small part in Virgin Punk was one of her most challenging jobs due to its high-level of detail and that one second of animation took one month to complete.

Even as far as just the trailer confirms, core aspects of a "traditional Umetsu story" are in place: a girl whose status in a chaotic environment is not stable and she specifically works as a bounty hunter going after violent criminals, and she's a badass, needless to say. Then there's this older guy whose role in the story isn't known but may serve as an interesting foil—or authority, go figure. Virgin Punk is looking at technologically modified humans, not wizards or vaguely supernatural and superhuman individuals, or polymathic descendants of Galileo. For as much is the same, it's always something new.

I don't know if Umetsu and Takahashi will pull off something narratively striking, but it's looking to be a one-of-a-kind experience.

Featured image illustrated by Sarca