White Radish Perfect Collection

Original Title: N/A
Romanized: The Item, The Apprentice, and The Evil at Tentacle High
Literal:

Plot Synopsis

The White Radish Perfect Collection consists of three of White Radish's shorts.

The Item: Three cute girls--a mage, a technophile, and a superpowered transforming sailor-suited girl--set off to infiltrate an evil looking castle, fight bad things, and take The Item from the Mighty Q'thulhu.

The Apprentice: A young man becomes the apprentice of a powerful sorceress in hopes of furthering his skills. But the sorceress is more interested in gaining power through dark rituals than the study of magic, and her new apprentice may be the key to her sucess or failure.

The Evil At Tentacle High: An SD poke at what never seems to happen when big, evil, tentacled things invade schools.

Review

Rating: 2 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2003-06-08

Since this perfect collection is made up of three individual shorts, I'll cover each briefly, but first some comments on the production in general. One common thread in White Radish's shorts is the way they capture the classic anime feel, boiling down a few simple plot elements and adding a little satirical twist. The stories are bare bones (cute, scantily-clad girls fighting monsters and young boys battling evil), but their simple anime-ness, though self-aware, seems earnest, rather than feeling like a jaded parody or send-up.

These shorts' one other consistent (and consistently good) feature is their quality art; they have a traditional look (leaning toward the chubby and cute), and though the production tools are digital (as with most modern professional Japanese animation), they are animated frame-by-frame from hand-drawn cels. The resulting product definitely has an anime feel to it--simple and rather fanservice heavy, but still genuine. It's worth noting that of the various non-Japanese indie studios that have produced anime as of mid 2003, White Radish is the only one still in operation that uses cel-by-cel animation.

Now for some details on each individual production:

The Item

This is, depending on how you look at it, a distilled indie take on the "cute girls offering fanservice and action" class of anime, or a satire of it. I'll go with the middle ground, sort of a straightforward but slightly tongue-in-cheek presentation of all the required elements.

The timing in this piece is a little rough, showing a bit of that amateur air, but overall the action flows smoothly enough, and the various fight sequences came out well enough to be worthwhile. The chubby (not quite SD, but in that direction) character designs are certainly cute enough, and there's a very well done Sailor Moon-style transformation sequence. The voice cast is a tad stiff (some of the blame falling on the editing), but isn't all that bad.

The Apprentice

Of the three shorts, this is the longest, most serious, and the closest to a filled-out story (it also has no mature content, unlike the other two). In the grand scheme of things the plot is a simple one--bad sorceress versus idealistic young apprentice--but it actually flows pretty well after a somewhat abrupt start.

There are a couple of well-done demon-summoning scenes (the demon even sounds reasonably impressive), and a few minutes are spent developing the characters--the gleefully evil sorceress was certainly fun, mostly because of her expressive face. The centerpiece is probably the climactic action sequence, which doesn't have the most punchy timing, but came out pretty well and features some nice-looking magical special effects.

In all, The Apprentice shows a significant improvement over the earlier The Item, and demonstrates what White Radish is capable of; the timing is still a bit stiff, but it combines a decent voice cast, decent animation, and a simple but complete story to make an all-around worthy little bite-sized chunk of anime.

The Evil At Tentacle High

The Evil At Tentacle High is about as long as it's title--it's really just a visual joke, but it's a pretty good one. The chibi characters are cute, and despite the tentacle porn jab, it's not serious enough to be particularly offensive.

Overall, as a collection, this is a nice package--some cheese at the beginning, something more solid in the middle, and a chuckle to finish up. This collection isn't the kind of anime that breaks new ground, but in the end it's fun, which is worth plenty.

Related Recommendations

Obviously the first things that come to mind are the variety of other indie shorts, with II: Prologue from Pseudome being the most similar in terms of feel. Project A-ko and Debutante Detective Corps come to mind as other schoolgirl parodies, although I can't think of any fantasy stories with quite the same focused scope--most are more grandiose.

US DVD Review

The DVD is a basic production, distributed as a DVD-R (shouldn't be any problem playing it in most modern DVD players, but some older ones might not like the disc). The disc features each of the shorts, plus trailers for The Item, The Apprentice, and Pink Lemonade, accessible through the nice looking animated menu. The video is taken from the digital masters, so it looks reasonably good, and the audio is crisp.

Content Guide

The Apprentice is relatively clean, but The Item has a bit of nudity, and despite being short and SD, The Evil at Tentacle High does indeed feature evil tentacles doing bad things.

Violence: 2 - A bit of serious fighting.

Nudity: 2 - Some exposed skin.

Sex/Mature Themes: 3 - Tentacle rape, but it's silly and short.

Language: 0 - Nothing that I noticed.

Notes and Trivia

White Radish is currently working on an erotic sci-fi OAV series, Pink Lemonade. They also have their newest short available in Flash format on their website, which shows some further improvement in timing and execution over what's in this collection.

Availability

Available on VHS and DVD directly from White Radish.

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