3 Episode Taste Test: Kiddy Girl-and

Kiddy Grade has had a troubled upbring­ing: ori­gin­ally aired in 2002 by a still vaguely respect­able Gonzo, it was an unre­mark­able series until past the half-way point when it briefly became excel­lent then dipped back down to a sim­mer­ing mediocre. Not­able only inso­far that it was dir­ec­ted by Keiji Gotoh who also did the superb Mar­tian Suc­cessor Nadesico, apart from the endur­ing appeal of its numer­ous racy promo images it sank without a trace. Four years later a sequel was announced and a teaser released shortly after­wards; the full product failed to mater­i­al­ise until almost two years after that with Kiddy Girl-and. The wait hasn’t been par­tic­u­larly unbear­able, it has how­ever been long enough to for­get the minu­tiae of the first series.

“A plot strapped to this ship will only exped­ite its sinking”

All semb­lance of plot, char­ac­ters and sense are thrown out the win­dow leav­ing a col­our­ful, high-pitched husk of a series. The lead char­ac­ter is naus­eat­ingly upbeat and with a voice that sounds like a cat attack­ing a chalk­board, a sonic assault that is worsened by the insipid plot lines of the first three epis­odes. From break­ing into a “high secur­ity” area to secure some dessert to a tedi­ous argu­ment between part­ners, it feels like a regres­sion to a neo­lithic phase of storytelling: all cudgels and grunts with a total lack of sub­tlety. That it fea­tures an under­wear plot in the first epis­ode (some­thing the sem­inal My-HiME waited for the fourth epis­ode for) and a bath scene in the open­ing minutes of the second demon­strates just how keen this series is to attract viewers.

With the lead char­ac­ters bereft of endear­ment, it is up to sec­ond­ary char­ac­ters such as the delect­able Tweedledee or the burly trans­vest­ite voiced by the instantly recog­nis­able Minoru Shiraishi to provide relief from the screech­ing tor­ment of watch­ing the main plot. The first epis­ode — while res­ol­utely ter­rible — did provide a meas­ure of hope for the remainder of the series, heark­en­ing back to the “visit plan­ets, solve prob­lems” M.O. of the ori­ginal, the sub­sequent epis­odes oblit­er­ate any hope of this how­ever and fur­ther plumb the depths of inept writ­ing. When com­pared with its closet recent rel­at­ive, Sora o Kakeru Shoujo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Space) which itself was unwatch­ably mediocre, Kiddy Girl-and comes out worse with little to noth­ing to recom­mend it upon.

The only good thought one can have about the series is that, given such a dire start, things could only get bet­ter. A plot strapped to this ship will only exped­ite its sink­ing, neither the set­ting or first sea­son storyline are craf­ted well enough to sup­port any kind of devel­op­ment. Indi­vidual scenes at times can seem almost self-knowingly bad, sly nudges towards par­ody but it quickly becomes obvi­ous though that they are just ill-thought out attempts at humour. May­haps fur­ther epis­odes will hit a more wel­com­ing stride or, more likely, neither improve nor worsen and remain stagnant.

Just as the open­ing is simply scenes from the cur­rent and pre­vi­ous epis­odes, the series is ulti­mately lazy: anim­a­tion is con­spicu­ously reused, storylines are soul­less rehashes of any num­ber of other shows and char­ac­ters are bey­ond even curs­ory tit­il­a­tion. Kiddy Girl-and isn’t even a wasted oppor­tun­ity but a ter­rible idea from the out­set, even the abjectly bored would be bet­ter off star­ing at a wall than watch­ing this and it would take naiv­ete or mas­ochism bey­ond the ken of mor­tals to endure past the first three epis­odes. ¶