I was a literature major in undergrad, and as I’m sure most literature majors in undergrad also thought, I reckoned I was going to be A Writer. Note that’s capital-A capital-W Writer. I was going to tick all the boxes: suffering and wretched personal relationships (so as to experience quote-unquote “real” emotions), moving to Berlin, chain smoking Lucky Strikes (or cloves—Djarum Black was my choice). My problem—apart from talent that is—is that I didn’t read. I’m being a little facetious when I say that; of course I read, but what I mean more broadly is that I didn’t engage with literature in a meaningful and thoughtful way. I was arrogant and assumed I couldn’t learn anything from other art, and so I struggled to find my voice. I thought I knew everything.

As a full-on adult all of these years later I’m embarrassed at my undergraduate self, and I wish I had opened my brain to the things I’ve loved back then in the way I do now. All of this is to say that I know nothing, and in surrendering to that knowing nothing I can learn even more.

Re: Cutie Honey is the sort of work that is so layered with influences and pop culture—a pop culture different from the one I was born into and raised within—before you even get into the original Cutie Honey it’s drawing from. The context from which I arrived at Re: Cutie Honey was from a Hideaki Anno / Gainax kick. Honestly, it would be more accurate to say it’s a Gunbuster kick.

This is all started about a month ago when I revisited Gunbuster for the first time since my teenage years and found myself absolutely mesmerized. That lead me to Diebuster—of which this very review is also a kind of stealth review—and then to Aim for the Ace! and then to Shin Kamen Rider and Shin Ultraman and now here, to Re: Cutie Honey. Across that journey I found myself soaking things up like a sponge because of how little I knew, and how threads connected through time and influence to create the art I was seeing before me.

Let me give you an example: before reading Aim for the Ace! I had no idea that Coach from Gunbuster was any sort of archetype or send-up, and so I went along into Diebuster and then found myself gobsmacked to find that the first episode of Gunbuster is a send-up of the first few chapters of Aim for the Ace!, including Oka’s coach Jin Munataka being not just the inspiration for Coach, but an almost 1-to-1 analogue. I dug even deeper however, and after then hopping over into Shins Kamen Rider and Ultraman, learned that Coach is, even more than Munataka, a riff on Ultraseven/Leo from Ultraman—including the one-arm crutch!

I say all of this to humble myself once again at the feet of Anno and Re: Cutie Honey, knowing that as I assemble my thoughts while staring at this puzzle before me, there are foundational inspirations and pieces “missing”—influences and send-ups and riffs and explorations lost on my American self. I shudder to think of how little curiosity my undergraduate brain would show at digging into this puzzle!

If you’ve come all this way, let me say plainly that I loved Re: Cutie Honey. I thought it was absolutely marvelous. It has incredible style, it’s laugh-out-loud funny while also being incredibly tender, it’s got a surprisingly forthright lesbian relationship between Nat and Honey and I think the action choreography is perfect. It’s hard for me to decide between this and Diebuster as my favorite-looking show I’ve seen in the past few months, they both look so good.

I tend to watch anime while I’m riding my indoor cycling trainer, and the room that has the trainer has an enormous window that looks directly out to the apartment complex parking lot. For Diebuster I thought sometimes, “ehhh maybe I should close the blinds?” but for Re: Cutie Honey once Honey showed up in the first scene I was desperately wishing I had closed them. It’s impossible for me to write about my thoughts on Re: Cutie Honey without talking about all of the breasts and nudity. But let me first say that I’m an adult, and ostensibly we’re all adults here: I’m not bothered or scandalized or anything like that. In fact, I don’t think Re: Cutie Honey works without the nudity.

And as a companion to Diebuster, I actually think Re: Cutie Honey informs the nudity and sexuality of that show as well—they work in conversation with Anno’s other works, including Gunbuster and of course, Evangelion. The more and more I watch of Anno and Gainax’s output and synthesize that with my knowledge (existing or new) of those works’ influences, the more I feel the connection between the message and what folks would describe as “fan service”. For a laugh, outside the context of capital-C Criticism it would be fair to describe Re: Cutie Honey as titilating to the point of bordering on Skinemax-tier hentai, but I think that’s doing it a disservice. Honey, like Nono in Diebuster, is almost unaware of her own sexual appeal and nudity and appears to have effectively zero shame. Both characters are robots who desperately want to feel human, and both are robots who fall into either an S-Type or explicitly romantic relationship with a fully-human woman, and in that process, reveal truths to the human. Part of that truth is vulnerability and connection, and what better way to demonstrate vulnerability of heart than to just be like, naked more or less all the time. Like with Diebuster taking subtextual themes in Gubuster and raising them directly to the surface level, Re: Cutie Honey takes subtextual themes from Evangelion and brings them right to the surface: our protagonist, catatonic from exertion fighting the enemy and desperately in need for human contact, is resuscitated not just with love, but with literal skin-to-skin fully nude human contact.

As I’m writing this, the art world is mourning the passing of David Lynch. Lynch was a genius and an iconoclast who created works that clearly expressed a vision; Lynch’s movies act as a gateway directly into the man’s soul, and his voice will be very missed. Anno is another iconoclast, and one whose work I must admit resonates more with me than Lynch’s. In the Anno work I’ve seen—and this includes Re: Cutie Honey—we watch as characters grapple with inexorable realities faced by we mere humans: we want to be loved, we don’t want to be alone, but we will die, and being alone is worse than death perhaps.

The final action of Re: Cutie Honey sees Jill reject Honey, saying that if she can’t be herself anymore, she’d rather die. Honey pleads with her and begs of her, “no, Jill, that’s not true!”. Honey knows that being together with someone—loving someone—isn’t surrender at all, it’s joyful and beautiful. That’s a lesson our villain never gets to learn, but that lesson is what our protagonist (Lal’c) spends all of Diebuster learning. Anno has spent his career coming at these ideas in incredibly diverse ways, including in live action! The final confrontation in Shin Kamen Rider is shockingly similar to the final confrontation between Honey and Jill.

I just have to interject here really quickly—it’s going to absolutely kill the rhythm of my writing here I’ve been building but Final Fantasy 13 is my favorite one and can I just say when I watched Diebuster and Lal’c was the princess’ name I about had a heart attack! AND MAAYA SAKAMOTO VOICES LIGHTNING AND LAL’C?! I’m like that Always Sunny conspiracy theory meme right now about FF13 and Diebuster

I couldn’t be more thrilled to be a curious adult rather than a hubristically-certain undergraduate literature major, because the understandings that can come from opening yourself to reading other art and putting together a puzzle with those connections is wonderful beyond words.

Re: Cutie Honey was a joyful ride that I really loved, and it helped me understand a lot of other works I love as well. What more can we ask for?