I was born in 1986, and graduated high school in 2004, so it’s safe to say I didn’t grow up with youtube. Hell, I didn’t even get to experience the internet until my my teens. I distinctly remember sitting in my high school computer lab one day, wishing there was a video sharing site where you could conveniently watch music videos without having to get really lucky and catch them at random on TV.

Having said that, I do still believe that I have a connection to the site, due to the fact that I started using it in 2005, so while I may not have grown up with Youtube, Youtube did kind of grow up with me.

Fast forward to today, and it feels like people have been oddly silent about the 20th anniversary of the site, which is probably because it’s become ubiquitous enough to be considered an essential utility along the lines of electricity and water, and people tend to just forget that there was a time that it didn’t exist... Or maybe it’s because most people using it just weren’t alive when it didn’t exist.

In any case, I’ve been watching Youtube for the long haul, and over the last two decades, I’ve picked up a bunch of favorite youtubers, some of whom fell by the wayside, others of whom are still chugging along, and one of those favorites is Takena Nagao, a stop motion claymation artist whose works mostly lean towards horror, and are actually considered to be legit anime titles.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m getting into a youtuber’s work is to take a deep dive through their catalogue, and experience all the weird shit they put out when they were still new to the platform and throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick, and as I mentioned in my last Takena review, he is no exception to this. Takena has done more than just claymation horror... He’s done wrestling shorts, bizarre superhero shorts, and whatever the hell Shitcom is supposed to be.

He’s also done a couple of computer animated MMD shorts. He published two of these 3D projects almost a decade ago... Nine years, to be precise... And they simultaneously look nothing like his other work, and everything like his other work.

For this review, I’m going to be looking at the second of these, called Love Bites. It is technically the sequel to the first one, but there is almost no content in the first one to actually talk about. It will be relevant, though, so to catch you up, Kokuhaku is a POV shot of a teenage yandere waifu approaching you all flirty like and then stabbing you and reveling in your blood spray, that’s basically it.

Love bites is much longer, and one curious detail I’ve noticed is that the quality of the animation depends on whether or not you’ve picked up on the actual beats of the story. It looks really cheap and low quality at first glance, but you kind of can’t blame Takena for that, because most 3D anime do not look good, period, and the few that do look impressive have some major asterisks attached to them. FF7 Advent Children looks great because it’s basically a feature length video game cutscene with a ton of money poured into it. Land of the Lustrous looks great because it’s a story about gemstone people, so the uncanny valley effect actually works for it. I’m currently in the middle of Girls Band Cry as of this writing, and I’m gonna call that the exception that proves the rule, because it looks basically perfect and I have no idea why.

Love Bites at first looks really jarring, and that’s because it kind of is... The characters faces are just weird. Their eyes are too big, but not in a moe way, in a horrifying “I’ve seen too much” kinda way, and the way their lips are drawn is just awful. They look like ten year old boys trying their mom’s lipstick for the first time. The way they walk is also really stiff, like they’re training to be the next Robocop.

Editing-wise, there are a few poorly cut shots, like a shot of one girl walking out of the shadows, but the camera lingers on those shadows for far too long without really drawing any suspense out of the situation... But then, halfway through, everything starts to click into place. From the moment the yandere girl sits down with her victim, the story finally becomes engaging and starts to suck you in.

Taking a step back, it might take you a few watches to figure out what’s going on... It certainly did for me... But the girl with the pigtails approaches her friend, the girl with the Rock Lee haircut, who has just received a love note, and she stuffs it into her bag before Pigtails can see it. She hurries off to meet her secret admirer, as Pigtails follows her. Rock Lee sits down on the bench, only for the yandere girl from Kokuhaku to step out of the shadows to sit down next to her.

The curious way she stares implies that Rock Lee wasn’t expecting to be approached by a girl, and the subtle way she reacts to Yandere’s gaze implies she’s not sure how to respond, but the way she smiles when Yandere takes her hand implies she actually might be okay with this. By the way, once you’ve put the story together, the lengthy shot of shadows actually starts to feel a lot more effective.

Anyway, spoilers in this paragraph. Yandere pulls out a box cutter and cuts Rock Lee’s hand, before sucking the blood from her cut, and the sound design in this scene is fucking diabolical, it just feels so visceral listening to that attack as it happens. Yandere makes a psycho face, complete with wide spooky smile, until Pigtails comes to the rescue, stabbing her twice to stop her, and causing Rock Lee to faint. The fact that Pigtails was armed and ready implies that she’s familiar with Yandere, either as an individual serial killer, or as a supernatural creature. She rushes to Rock Lee’s aid, and just as it looks like they’re about to have a romantic moment, Rock Lee bites her neck, killing her as Yandere disappears from the bench, and Pigtails’ movements as she struggles against her fate look so eerie despite the limited animation budget.

The animation may look cheap, but it is still impressive, albeit within the parameters that Takena had to work with. There was a ton of effort put into making the character movements feel genuine in spite of his lack of money and experience, and to make the expressions feel relatable despite how uncanny they were. There is a real story being told, and while it may be subtle to the point that most viewers may not pick up on it at first, it’s full of suspense, eerie ambience, shocking plot twists and imagery that expertly walks the line between sensual and disturbing, and it might actually be one of Takena’s most unforgettable projects because of this.

Love Bites is not one of Takena’s best works, let’s be real. Being a complete change of medium and art forms, it was never going to be, and that might be why he never did another MMD project after this one. Still, I personally consider it fascinating just how much story he was able to tell within these harsh limitations, and it also stands out as probably his only piece of Yuri media. I could watch it over and over again, and I invite you to do the same, even if you have to look past all of its flaws in order to do so.

I give Love Bites a 7/10