Anime: Kite Liberator

Surprisingly, Kite managed to get a sequel.

I know that Kite holds some relative importance in the world of anime since Quinten Tarintino was inspired enough by it to give to actress Chiaki Kuriyama in preparation for her role as Gogo Uubari in Kill Bill Vol. 1, along with having a few scenes from the anime being recreated for the music video for "Ex-Girlfriend" by 'No Doubt', and even having a live action movie adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson, but it still had a small cult following and it's not really really well known enough to inspire a sequel.

While it isn't as explicit as the first Kite, it still features a few short scenes of characters doing creepy shit with underage girls, so if you're not into that, keep away.

After the events of the first Kite, Sawa suddenly disappears after avenger her parents death with no trace of where she went. Several years later, Kite Liberator now follows Monoka, a girl working at a maid cafe who leads a double life as an assassin, much like Sawa.

And then an alien shows up. Yes, you read that right, Kite Liberator has aliens.

Well, technically they're not aliens, and it is connected to the rest of the plot, but there is still a giant monster running around Japan destroying stuff. How does a sequel to Kite have aliens, or monsters, of all things? Maybe have a similar story to the first, or include a conspiracy or two, or even just have balls to the wall action. But having a alien/monster?

To be fair, the anime does star on a space station orbiting Earth, do it doesn't completely come out of nowhere, but it's still a weird direction to take the series.

But just as soon as it introduces all of it's plots, it ends just as quickly with a cliffhanger 50 minutes later. Kite Liberator is not especially long at less than an hour later, but the original Kite was around the same length too, and it still managed to have a conclusion, even if it was left a bit vague on what the ending was.

Maybe this was supposed to be another episode after this one to resolve a lot of the dangling plot threads, but it probably didn't do well enough enough to warrant making another episode, which I personally find disappointing, because It would have loved to see what the writers would have written as the conclusion for this entry of Kite.

And to top it all off, it's sister series Mezzo Forte, written by the creator of this and the original Kite, Yasuomi Umetsu, managed to get a 12-episode series in the form of Mezzo DSA. Sure, it went for more of an episodic approach, but 12 episodes still had enough room to develop on what it was trying to do. Here, there's barely enough room to develop on the one idea that it did have.

On a technical level, Kite Liberator incorporates a few shots of CGI, which is surprisingly solid, but in a few shots where it mixes the 2D and 3D animation, it is a bit awkward. But considering that this came out the same year as The Sky Crawlers and Ponyo, I'm going to assume it had to do with the budget.

However, I am still a big fan of Yasuomi Umetsu's art style.

I can't really recommend Kite Liberator. The only people who would get anything out of it, let alone watch it in the first place, would be fans of the original Kite, and I'm pretty sure all of them would be just as confused about the plot as the people coming into it blind. And here I was thinking that my complaints would be entirely nitpicks or general complaints.

Apparently a sequel was announced back in September of 2008, but considering that it's been 13 years as of this review and nothing more has come of it, I don't think it's going to come out, which is a shame.

The first issue Kite Liberator has is being completely unrelated to the original, sure there’s the same gun but that’s not enough to call it a sequel, there’s also a Sawa lookalike but that’s about it, she appears shortly and does nothing of importance. Plus, having no connection with the previous entry leaves the cliffhanger still unresolved.

Other than that, it is completely different in story and aesthetics. What made the original shocking and popular was its crazy mix between porn, psychological drama and neo noir action and this sequel has none of that thus it looses a big part of the appeal.

The only thing which resembles the original is having a young girl as an assassin, but even then is nowhere near as captivating or well made as there’s barely any action up until the last twelve minutes or so. Also her motives are not explained at all here, I may have complained about it in Kite, but at least there was an explanation there of why Sawa has this work, there’s nothing like that here.

Not that innovating is inherently a bad thing, the second Patlabor movie barely resembles the original by keeping the core elements but it is otherwise very different from the original, and is still the best entry in its franchise.

That is not the case with this title, where Monaka’s targets does not pose a challenge, unlike in the original, and the plot scalates to a space horror where people get infected by food in space and comes down to Earth as monsters and starts breaking everything in the streets, what the heck is going on and what does it have to do with Kite? Nothing at all.

It’s even worse when the movie tries to explain everything and takes itself so seriously, is a very dumb action flick and these bits just makes it duller than it already is. The pacing is the exact opposite as it was in the original, if it was very fast there, it is very slow here, because it doesn’t have nearly as much content.

On top of that, the protagonist is just not fleshed out, it’s the same issue as Sawa in the original, whatever her background is, is vaguely shown because the focus is not on her despite being the main character and it’s in the boring space horror and nonsensical action instead. She’s more consistent than Sawa because she does not change her personality every 5 minutes, but her clumsiness, which seemed to be a facade in the beginning, gives her a moe side which clashes too much with her cold behaviour as a hitwoman (is that term right?). The rest of the cast is just there as cannon fodder and constantly breaks the serious tone the movie tries to have with their reactions.

The action scenes are even more ridiculous and over the top than they were in the original. If having two people falling high from a building over a car and making it destroy a bridge, which in turn falls over a truck was an exaggeration, imagine having a monster chasing a girl in the city, being shot with different weapons and barely receiving damage, impaling the girl, then falling off in a similar fashion of the original, having a car exploding right under him and still not getting killed. It’s even worse when Monaka remains unharmed regardless of what happens to and around her.

This movie ends with another cliffhanger and it’s even worse than the one in Kite.

It’s also not as well animated, the character designs are fine is just that they are way too similar as the ones from the previous works of this guy, quality drops are abundant and the motions are jerky, plus the camera jumps around like crazy during action scenes and it often makes it hard to focus on what’s going on. The backgrounds are well made to the most part, especially when it takes place in space, even if they have lots of CGI, the special effects are the weakest part of the visuals.

I don’t have much to say about the sound, the music is fine at times but ultimately forgettable most of the time, the sound effects are weak, voice acting is nothing remarkable and can become very silly at times. Also, I don’t know if it’s just the version I watched or something, but the volume in general is just really low.

Lastly, there’s the issue of timing, A Kite was a success partially because of the time it came out, this movie came out 10 years after and by that time there were hentai with designs by Sei Shoujo which blew Kite out of the water in that department, and there were lots of girls with guns series in the 00s as well, such as Noir, El Cazador de la Bruja, Madlax and Gunslinger Girl, which made the Kite legacy obsolete once this sequel aired.

And there’s even Mezzo Forte which combines both aspects in one, and it even came out shortly afterwards A Kite, acting as a sort of spiritual successor to it, even having Sawa as a cameo, which makes Kite Liberator’s existence even more pointless.

If I had to sum up Kite Liberator[/i] in one word, it would be: "disappointment". Note that I say, "disappointment" rather than, "disappointing". I've seen my fair share of movies that were disappointing in one way or another, but Kite Liberator was more of a "fuck-you" to the fans than it was a genuine follow-up to the original.

Almost all of the elements that made Kite what it was are missing from Liberator: the gritty atmosphere, the awkward but intriguing distance between the audience and the characters, the contrasting colors and sounds, etc. Where Kite featured a terminally depressed, cold-hearted assassin, Liberator offers up only Monaka-chan: a high-school student who (for reasons we never learn) has been trained as a killer, but has all the light-hearted character traits one would expect of high-school student anime chicks. Even for an anime plot, I found that pretty distracting - but I must admit, it's difficult for me to judge Liberator without comparing it to the original. Perhaps if this follow-up were meant from the start to be a sort of farce, much like Army of Darkness was to the original Evil Dead, I might not have taken issue with it. But that was clearly not the intent of the writers. I'm fairly certain Liberator was meant to be taken seriously. Suffice it to say, this film does not in any way measure up to it's predecessor, and if you must watch it don't expect anything great from it.

Visually, Liberator is a mixed bag. The CG sequences are pretty well done, and portions of the cell animation are drawn exceptionally well. But it seemed to me that the quality of the cell animation varied from scene to scene, almost as if different animation teams were responsible for different sections of the movie.

The plot is really where this film shows its most embarrassing weaknesses. I actually had to double-check that I was watching the correct movie during the first 5 minutes. Anyone who has seen the original will likely ask the same question I did at that point: "Um...wait, isn't this about a female assassin? What's all this about some dude designing 'space food'?" The story in Liberator takes what felt like an eternity to get going, and it's not until about the last 15 minutes of the movie that any connection to the original anime is made.

Personally, I just don't know who this movie was made for. I can't see any fans of the original watching this and saying to themselves afterward, "Yeah, that was pretty good." They are more likely to ask, "What the hell was that?" For those who never saw the original, I doubt after watching this they would still have any interest in seeing Kite.

Overall I give this 3-4 out of 10. Find something else to watch.