CB Chara Go Nagai World – Go Nag-April

Disclaimer: This is an old ass post. I probably do not agree with the ideas it presents, and I in all likelihood denounce whatever is written herein. It has been preserved entirely for the purpose of keeping the history and progression of the blog visible.

Here it is. While this isn’t the last day of the month, this will be the last post of Go Nag-April, as I decided to cancel Manga on a Monday early. So, what better to cover than the ultimate Go Nagai crossover. It’s a crossover between Mazinger Z, Devilman, Grendizer, Getter Robo, Steel Jeeg and Violence Jack, all of which I covered this month, other than Steel Jeeg.

This OVA was great. It was a super enjoyable ride, filled with great characters, great comedy, and some superb animation. The OVA shows the characters from the aforementioned franchises suddenly waking up in the same parody world (which is a combination of the most important places in their respective manga) and working together to try and get back to their world. This is an absolutely fantastic premise, with tons of potential, and CB Chara Go Nagai World certainly delivers.

I don’t normally like parody shows like this, but Go Nagai World actually does it legitimately well. Unlike other shows of the nature, it doesn’t treat the characters as one-trait, 2-dimensional versions of their previous selves. Unlike these other series (e.g. Petit Eva, Flying Witch Petit) Go Nagai World’s character just act like a slightly more extreme version of their original selves. They still act in ways that real people would act, however, taken to the furthest extreme of plausibility.

But this doesn’t stop the series from having amazing comedic moments, in fact, it makes them even better. This means that the characters reactions are more varied and that they act differently around different characters, something uncommon for the Super Deformed genre. One of my favorite examples of character-based comedy in the series is the relationship Akira has with Siren and Miki, lusting for one and loving the other. This leads to some pretty hilarious scenes, that legitimately had me laughing out loud.

Other than the characters and comedy, the other aspects are also pretty good. The Animation is nice and fluid, although rarely stylized, which is kind of a disappointment as I value the later before the former, although it was still serviceable. The character designs are in general well done, and I did really like the looks of the robots and quite a few of the characters, they were able to keep the iconic feel while still using the SD template. But that’s also the problem with them, the template. I don’t know if it’s just me, but the majority of chibi designs tend to look much too similar for my liking, but these designs were serviceable none the less.

This OVA’s story goes above and beyond what it needs to accomplish. Being one of the few of its genre to actually deliver on an interesting and intriguing story, it is also simultaneously one of the few that doesn’t feel like a hollow cash grab. All in all, it was a pretty fun OVA, it wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, but it was certainly better than literally anything else that has ever been produced in the super deformed parody genre.

And with that, Go Nag-April is finally over! With that, next Monday we will be kicking off the long-awaited (long awaited by me that is, I’m super excited for this series, it’s tons of fun to make)  Old Video Animation series with a retrospective on the Gainax OVAs of the 80s and 90s. I’m hoping to have The Serial Experiment coming out sometime in October, maybe before, but don’t expect it any time soon, and I’ll probably have a new Drop Watch Hold post coming out soon as well.