Cutie Honey was written in October 1973 by Go Nagai. It's generally agreed to be the first magical girl warrior series. While magical girls existed before Cutie Honey, they were generally slice of life series about solving mundane problems with magical powers. Cutie Honey was the first example of a series with a magical girl fighting supernatural evil with her powers. Instead of one long continuous series, Cutie Honey is made of many alternate universes, all loosely connected by the central character Cutie Honey. Cutie Honey is an android who is usually also a schoolgirl in her civilian life who seeks vengeance on the nefarious Panther Claw organization for the murder of her father, usually defeating them via her transformation abilities and gadgets. It's notably more violent and sexual then prior magical girl series.
3 Reasons I love it:
1: The series is very versatile. Cutie Honey has been ultra light-hearted goofy comedy, serious emotional melodrama, and both at once. Cutie Honey has been ultra sexual fanserice with dirty jokes, cutesy girly shojo, and both. It can have very violent brutal action scenes or be goofy fun or both. It has been totally plot focused, completely episodic, and somehow both. Different versions of the series emphasize different parts. My favorite version, Cutie Honey Flash, is probably the least sexual and the most girly shojo and very emotional and dramatic, but I love all versions of it. It's versatility means you can connect with the central story in a multude of ways. You can relax with Cutie Honey, laugh with it, or cry with it. You can watch for serious emotional moments and story or laugh at sex jokes. It's very wholistic feeling and really takes advantage of the versatility of being a superhero magical girl series with a variety of tones and plot structures.
2: Honey herself is a massively versatile character. Feeding into the last point, Honey does a great job of being a character who core concept is clear but allows a lot of room for experimentation. Generally speaking Honey is a clever driven warrior of love, but otherwise a relatable teenage girl. Her ability to change form, to create weapons out of the air, and the general properties of the Airbone Element Soldifier means you can do a massive amount with her powerset, complementing the versatility of the potential stories.
3: The series is a very interesting genre fusion. I always love when you take two genres or two of anything really that are clearly distinct and manage to mash them up in a way that it feels seemless; in other words not when the two genres are distinct from each other and create contrast, but when they naturally feed into each other. Cutie Honey is an odd amalgam of the 60s science fiction that was idealistic about humanity, or at the very least of science's ability to elevate humanity and the dark crime noir dramas of the 70s. These things don't seem like they should go together but they feed in very well, with the science fiction being more so a flavor or setting for the core noir story. In the same way that people have observed that Harry Potter stories are at their core mystery stories that are in a Fantasy Setting, Cutie Honey are crime stories in a science-fiction superhero setting that can quickly shift from goofy 60s science-fiction in the form of tokuatsu and 70s crime thriler in the form of Panther Claw's heists.
3 Flaws:
1: I don't mind dirty jokes. To be honest, I often find them quite funny. That said I get really uncomfortable at anything related to sexual harrasment. A lot of versions of Cutie Honey, save Flash really, tend to have sexual harrasment jokes which make me uncomfortable. The manga also has gross humor which I don't personally like, although it's fairly tame.
3: This one may take a bit to explain but Honey is really overpowered. I don't agree when people use overpowered to just mean "powerful". "That character can move faster then light, that's overpowered!" or "That character can perform 50 different techniques, that's overpowered!" That just means the character is powerful, overpowered in my opinion means the character breaks the setting. Goku and Superman are powerful but not overpowered, their powers are pretty reasonable for their setting and their enemies. Saitama is overpowered in a gag way, he breaks the setting purposefully to be funny. Magical Girls Pre-Honey were also like this, the joke was that little girls had godlike magical power to solve their mundane problems with. Honey also has this but we're supposed to take her conflict seriously. This is hard to prove but to give some examples: Some of the recurring Panther Claw agents powers are things like shooting fire out of her hands, or making web like a spider, or Sister Jill who is basically a really strong whip-user and is their leader. You know what Honey's power is? The Airbone Element Fixing Device lets her make ANYTHING by changing the particles in the air. In the original manga, she beats 10 of the strongest Panther Claw agents at once. In Flash it's shown that Honey's transformation can destroy the Earth, in a setting where bombs, bullets, a boomerang and swords are relevant threats. In Re she absorbs the energy of every nuclear bomb at once. Honey has the magical deus ex machina of earlier magical girls, but is in serious stories where fighting opponents is supposed to be the point.
Favorite Part:
My Favorite part is from Cutie Honey Flash where Misty Honey makes Peace with Cutie Honey after seeing the love her "twin" has with their father and fuses their airborne element fixing devices to give her the Hyper Honey Form in a heroic sacrifice. It's a really moving moment that highlights Honey's character and is a resolution to Misty's arc of envy of Honey's position. Misty Honey is in general my favorite Cutie Honey villain.
No comments:
Post a Comment