Key: The Metal Idol, episode 1, “Startup.” Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.
Available on Amazon Prime.
A bizarre OVA that appeared from 1994 to 1996, this is a series I have wanted to see for a long, long time. I noted some time back that it was out on Blu-Ray, but after that it fell off my radar.
In the meanwhile, it has appeared on streaming services. Amazon has added the English dub, but Crunchyroll has the Japanese original. I only discovered the sub while writing this post—so I watched the first episode in the dub, but will watch the Japanese version from now on.
It is a noirish version of Pinocchio, the story of a girl robot on a quest to become human—a quest that draws her into both an international conspiracy and the seedy underbelly of Japan’s idol industry.
Coming as it does from the early Nineties, when a lot of Japanese anime creators thought unintelligibility equaled depth and when both Blade Runner and Neuromancer were casting long shadows across Japanese pop culture, this show is famously weird. It’s weird perhaps most of all because of its mysterious director, Hiroaki Satō, who as far as I know has no other credits to his name. He crept onto the scene, made a competently directed anime skewering the world of Japanese idols, and then crept away again.
I am really excited to finally watch this series, so I am going to review it one episode at a time. I have not seen it previously, so my comments here are off the cuff. Any criticisms I make come with the caveat that they may be satisfactorily answered by later episodes.
Synopsis
The first episode, “Startup,” introduces us to several things. The episode begins by showing unnamed characters who are apparently Japanese businessmen or government agents attempting to make an illegal sale of classified robot technology to the American military. To ensure that their deal goes through, they are counting on a scientist, Murao Mima, to develop an advanced power source for the military robots he has constructed.
The story jumps from there to an unnamed rural location in Japan, where we meet our heroine, Key. Although fully human in appearance, Key is supposed to be a gynoid created by Mima, whom she calls her grandfather. On a yearly basis, her battery runs down and Mima rebuilds her with a larger body.
Mima, elderly and frail, suffers a bad fall and dies soon after, but leaves behind for Key a recorded message—she can become human if she makes 30,000 genuine friends. The combined energy of their love will be enough to transform her into a flesh-and-blood girl.
Key realizes that she must accomplish this unlikely task before her next birthday, or she will die.
This strange and hopeless mission takes her to Tokyo, where she has no clear plans and no means of support. On her first night on the city streets, misfortune brings her way no less than three sexual predators.
The first two are a couple of mashers who apparently hit on random scrawny twelve-year-olds (I guess they’re hard up). In a moment of panic, Key releases some kind of power that overcomes a nearby robot, who then leads the mashers into an alley and bloodily murders them.
The third is a pornographer who lures Key to his apartment, promising her that she’ll make plenty of her needed friends if she bares all for the camera. An old friend of Key’s, Sakura, randomly shows up and rescues her, but the porno pimp sends a muscle-bound heavy after them.
That’s where this first episode ends.
Criticism
This first episode has a lot to get done in a short amount of time, and it’s mostly successful. Particuarly, it needs to give us a sympathetic protagonist and set up some mysteries that we hope will be explained later—though, since this is an anime from the early Nineties, there’s a good chance they won’t be.
Key is surprisingly likable. I say surprisingly because she is wide-eyed, largely emotionless, and talks in a flat voice in the third person. She’s a manifestation of a particular moe type that I personally have never liked; nonetheless, this first episode succeeds at making us feel sorry for her. That is, however, a thin emotion on which to hang an entire series, so we can only hope that the show gives us more reason to care about her in later episodes.
Aside from making the bold decision to head into Tokyo, Key does very little in this episode. For the most part, others do things for her, and some of those things are decidedly implausible. When a couple of creepers get in her face, an experimental military robot in a trench coat just happens to be walking by so Key can use whatever mysterious power she has to influence it. That power is apparently involuntary and something Key herself is unaware of, so Key doesn’t really do anything in this scene; she merely panics, and the robot does the rest.
Sakura’s sudden appearance is even more unlikely. Key naïvely walks into the apartment of an obvious predator, but suddenly gets nervous and decides she wants to leave. Then Sakura, who’s working as a pizza delivery girl, immediately shows up, recognizes Key, and pulls her out of the apartment—so the one girl in Tokyo who just happens to be Key’s bestie shows up out of nowhere exactly when Key needs her. That seems a little too convenient, and since there are two big, beefy guys in that apartment who are interested in keeping these girls against their will, its a complete mystery how the girls make it back onto the street before the bad guys come after them.
Praise
All of these imperfections, however, are typical hiccups for a first episode. In spite of some questionable storytelling decisions, there is a lot to like here—or at least wince at.
We can really say of this anime, “They don’t make them like this anymore.” This a beautiful but dark show with lush backgrounds and smooth animation, made without CGI. Like many anime of the era, it was bravely experimental, even if all these experiments were not successes.
It’s also frankly brutal in a way anime today usually isn’t. Both its violent and its sexual content are depicted bluntly, with no discernible change in tone or anything we would call “fan service.” Characters are suddenly dead in a pool of their own blood, or suddenly naked, and that’s just how it is. It has the same abruptness as the more gruesome elements in Akira, which probably influenced it. The violence is not exciting, and the nudity is not titillating. These simply form the background of the dark and gritty world into which Key has stumbled.
Conclusion
It’s way to early to have any fully formed opinion. At this point, Key is both intriguing and worrying; it’s intriguing because it promises dark forces and conspiracies and powerful agents lurking in the background, and it gives us a heroine we can root for. However, it’s worrying because that heroine so far is painfully passive.
Nonetheless, this episode is definitely enough to make me want to watch more, so I consider it a success.
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