Dragon Half

Once upon a time, there was a King who wanted a local dragon slain. He hired a brave knight to rid the land of her, but in a strange twist of fate, the knight wound up falling in love with the dragon, and running away with her to enjoy a long and successful marriage. The king was angry, but his attention would soon be diverted by a beautiful, mysterious woman who fell head over heels in love with him. The two were married, but when their first child turned out to be a baby slime, he learned her dark secret... His bride was also previously a slime, who used a magic potion to obtain human form! But he wasn’t the only one to father a half breed, as the knight and his dragon bride also had a daughter... A dragon half, born with human form and various draconic features. Their feud, never truly settled, would be inherited by their offspring, as Mink, the dragon half, and Vena the slime half, battle it out over the ultimate prize... The heart of their favorite teen heartthrob hero, Dick Saucer! Or at least tickets to his concert.

If you’ve seen your fair share of nineties anime, you’re probably aware that this decade saw a massive boom of short-length OVA anime releases. With the economy having crashed at the end of the eighties, and an overseas market just beginning to explode, production companies began to push titles in this format because they were cheap to make, as they were often rushed together on a shoestring budget, and they were easy to make a quick buck off of, especially for the casual and curious viewers in other countries, whose exposure to Japanese animation was probably minimal at that point, and who had probably never seen anything like the cell-painted oddities that were being produced for a far wider range than just child audiences. The stories in these OVAs were usually pretty compact, as the ones that were adapted from manga had to lose a ton of re-existing story content to fit the medium, and even the original stories were often highly derivative in the way they chased popular trends and blatantly ripped off the far more popular titles that actually had a fair bit of faith and resources poured into them due to their perceived marketability.

Dragon Half is one of these titles, hailing from the early nineties, but in my opinion, it’s also one of the better looking ones. Most OVAs were made severely under-budget as they didn’t necessarily need fluid movement and jaw dropping action to appease western markets that were only looking for something different anyway, and as long as you gave them the sci-fi heroes, bloody action, savage gore and gratuitous nudity that they had never seen in a cartoon before, who cared how bad the animation was? But of course there were exceptions to this. There were a handful of auteur directors who had the clout to turn their three-episode shovelware into legitimate works of art, and while Dragon Half didn’t exactly have one of those(although director Shinya Sadamitsu did have a fair bit of low key directing experience going into this), but it DID have the benefit of being produced by Production IG, a studio that’s synonymous with the term Maximum Effort, and who always tends to be at the forefront of animation technology in their country.

Now, Dragon Half may look cheap at first glance, but don’t let that fool you... The visual style of the series is firmly in line with the visual style of the original manga, albeit slightly tweaked to bring the wackiness of the material from a nine up to an eleven. Faces go off model on purpose. Key frames occasionally drag on a little too long on purpose. All of the super-deformed chibi humor and the janky movement that follows is on purpose. Dragon Half was intended from its inception to be a wacky random gag comedy, and while the manga did feature a longer and more focused story(or so I’ve heard, I haven’t actually read it yet), the anime condenses everything into two episodes of hyperfast comedy that uses it’s visual derpiness to the best possible effect. Because this is Production IG, a company that never says “fuck it” under any circumstances, a ton of effort went into the visual direction and cinematography, even if it is difficult to appreciate that what with the breakneck pace of the story. The backgrounds are intricate and lively, even when they’re featured in the shortest shots possible, and their budget allocation game is top notch... From shot to shot, IG knows exactly how much money is needed at any given time, and they never waste a single penny where it’s not required, making for an overall pleasant aesthetic that supports the pacing and comedy perfectly.

I don’t have a lot to say about the music, except that the ending theme is one of the strangest I’ve ever come across. The song each episode closes on is literally just the main character singing non-stop gibberish nonsense over a medley of famous Beethoven tunes. I don’t know how I feel about this, except that it’s undeniably memorable, and it stands out among every other ending theme I’ve heard. The english dub was an early ADV effort, which shouldn’t be surprising given their once firmly held reputation as the company that would pick up anything the other companies wouldn’t, but I don’t mean that as a negative at all because, one way or another, ADV at the time were the perfect doorstep for this OVA to land on. A lot of Japanese humor relies on wordplay, as a lot of Japanese words can have wildly different meanings depending on context and pronunciation, so a lot of jokes wind up getting lost in translation... But thankfully, ADV is usually pretty good at working around that, finding decent English replacement puns, or just omitting them entirely in a way that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

And because this is an early ADV project, it’s also yet another time capsule of classic anime voice actors from that particular stable. To match the hyper joke-a-second comedy style and the main character’s hyper motor-mouthing, the protagonist Mink was played by the legendary Jessica Calvello, who employs the exact same brand of insane delivery that would later injure her voice box while recording for Excel Saga. Calvello is one of my favorite voice actors of all time for her ability to spit like Eminem while still showing off her undeniable acting chops, and thankfully, only voicing two episodes of this show means she didn’t have to hurt herself to pull it off. On the other hand you have her rival, the haughty princess Vena, played by one of my least favorite actors, Amanda Winn Lee. Her voice has always sounded rocky to me outside of Evangelion, but due to the nature of the material, she works fine here. Still, out of the entire ADV crew, I feel like Jessica Boone would have been a better choice. The rest of the early gang is here, with Andy McAvin and Brett Weaver playing hilariously incompetent minions, and Tiffany Grant making a hilarious last minute cameo. It’s a fun dub, it does an admirable job representing the crazy source material, and I highly recommend checking out.

So I’m pretty damn sick right now. It’s not covid, it’s just a cold, but because I have been taking enough NyQuil in the last few days to kill a horse, I figured I’d put another far more serious review I’m preparing for on pause to tackle some good old fashioned random gag comedy! I noticed about a week ago that Amazon Prime had Dragon Half, an ancient OVA that I’m honestly surprised hasn’t been lost to time like Puni Puni Poemy, so I figured I’d revisit it and try to figure out why this thirty year old bite size oddity is still in print to this day, still easily available online, and still so well-received that even Amazon Prime is still streaming it. Also NyQuil. NyQuil was definitely influencing this decision. At first glance, Dragon Half was exactly how I remembered it... A mile-a-minute hyper comedy that keeps throwing jokes at you with every breath it takes, to a point that just by the law of averages, you have to laugh at some of it. Like I said before, the voice acting complemented the delivery of the comedy perfectly, and while there were a fair amount of jokes that fell flat, none of them were particularly annoying or cringey. It was, to put it simply, the kind of humor I’m perfectly willing to enjoy for exactly two episodes.

But then I started noticing something, and while I did pause to wonder if this was just my deliriously over-medicated mind talking, but there seemed to be at least some small hint of sophistication to the comedy. Nothing terribly deep, mind you, but it felt noticeably elevated compared to other gag comedies I’ve seen before. For one thing, there’s nothing truly random about it. Sure it’s a wacky as fuck premise, but it all fits together in some bizarre way that fills out the setting. Speaking of the setting, the story is taking place in a generic RPG world, but a human and a dragon can raise a family together peacefully in a decent looking house with no issues, there are elements of modern day technology sprinkled in, and it just feels... Right. Like all of these out-there, anachronistic details just are what they are, and none of it feels especially world-breaking. It become apparent pretty quickly that this show is highly self-aware, and while a lot of that comes from the original manga’s tongue-in-cheek attempts at parodying fantasy RPGs like Dragon Quest and the then recently translated for Japan Dungeons and Dragons, where it’s literally a story of a teenage half-dragon girl going on an epic quest to conquer a dark lord so she can have a chance of sleeping with the celebrity she’s been stalking, it really does feel like the writers involved had so much material to work with just out of the genre alone that they didn’t need to resort to random bullshit to entertain the viewer.

There is so much about the fantasy RPG genre that’s ripe for parody, and while I can definitely think of examples that have been done, it never feels like it’s been done enough, and true to form, there are some surprisingly well crafted jokes in this show that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Remember the slime who became human to marry the king? She was attracted to him because he has a balding, vaguely slime-shaped head. That’s fucking funny. The king’s court magician uses dry ice to create the mysterious fog that heralds his entrance, and that’s fucking funny. Seeing a knight and a dragon as this adorable married couple enjoying the domestic life as dedicated parents is inherently funny, and there are jokes like this throughout the OVA... Some are presented right up front, some are hidden in sight gags, almost all of it is pretty tightly timed, and unless you were watching with subtitles, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any jokes that were lost in translation... The humor in this show could be potentially abrasive for some viewers, and I get if you wound up noping out of it really early out of annoyance, but I stand by it.

I think the reason this OVA has outlived titles like Puni Puni Poemy is that rather than parodying the anime trends of the time, the humor in Dragon Half has a more timeless quality to it... The genre it’s parodying has defiantly stood the test of time, lending a sense of relevance to these damn near thirty year old jokes, and fast-paced slapstick gag comedy is a permanent anime staple, whether you like it or not. Of course, having said all that, there is a story to this OVA... It can be kind of hard to decipher if you aren’t paying attention, but even in episode one alone, there is a strong story being told, full of recognizable beats, unexpected twists and a distinctly coherent plot that only starts to go off the rails in episode 2. There was an attempt made to make it feel like this breakneck pacing was just part of the joke, but no matter how you look at it, it’s hard not to see the outline of what was once a genuine epic. Like I said, it’s not their fault, they had to condense the first two story arcs of a seven volume manga into a two episode anime... Which was supposed to be four episodes, but got cut back due to lack of interest... But while they may have failed to tell the original story as it deserved, I feel like they accidentally created something even more impressive.

Breaking Dragon Half down to its simplest elements, what Production IG created, whether intentionally or not, is the purest example of an abridged series that I’ve ever seen, and hell, it might even hold up as the original abridged series. I know some people are going to want to point their fingers at Ghost Stories, but that was never an abridged series. Stephen Foster might have rewritten the dialogue in a manner that’s similar to most popular abridged series, but he didn’t abridge anything. When you abridge a story, you shorten and simplify in order to make it more digestible for a certain audience. Wishbone books are abridged. This is what abridged series on youtube were like, before they evolved to the point of rewriting and transforming the material in the creator’s own image, but what Dragon Half did is closer to the original Yugioh abridging... The writers cut out a ton of material, compressed everything down to the barest possible plot points, and used comedy... Most of which was taken directly from the manga... To create a new experience that’s both representative of and mutually exclusive to the original property. As a result, it doesn’t have the strongest or most immediately coherent story on its own, but it’s more than funny enough to be worth an hour of your time, and hey, it DID drum up enough interest in the manga to get it released stateside.

Speaking of which, you can find that manga series in English from Seven Seas entertainment, and you can find the anime pretty much anywhere you go to find anime. The original ADV and more recent Eastern Star DVDs are available and affordable from several online retailers, and it can be streamed on Amazon, Crunchyroll and Youtube. Yes, the youtube version is technically illegal, but you get some cool retro trailers out of it.

I suppose it’s fair to say this is not the definitive Dragon Half experience, and it would probably plummet from relevancy pretty hard if a more accurate traditional series adaptation were ever released, but for what it is, I think this is a pretty neat OVA. Even when completely divorced from the original manga and presented on its own, with no context whatsoever, it’s still managed to stand the test of time where so many similar and in some cases far younger projects have fallen by the wayside. The overall style, in terms of the visuals, pacing and comedy, is probably not for everyone, which is to say nothing of the fact that comedy is already subjective in the first place, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if certain viewers found this kind of anime in general to be abrasive and highly annoying, and if it kept up this pace for the length of a full series, I’d be inclined to agree. But for only two episodes, clocking in at less than an hour of material, this basket case has just enough substance in it to be enjoyable without overstaying its welcome, and it certainly doesn’t drag on.

I give Dragon Half a 6/10.