Retro Review – Birdy the Mighty: Decode

I may have mentioned this here in the past, but I’ll say it again for the benefit of people who haven’t had a chance to read my FAQ page – I’ve been writing first episode reviews since around Spring of 2007, but aside from some early stuff on LiveJournal, which I believe exists to this day (though LiveJournal, ugh) I ended up losing a lot of that early writing due to various factors somewhat beyond my control. But actually that isn’t the truth anymore, because I’ve been able to recover access to them recently.

One thing I’ve heard wise people say is that if you look back on who you once were and it causes you to cringe a little, that means you’ve improved as a person. That’s a nice thought, and having skimmed through some of my old writing I’d like to think that holds true for myself. I wasn’t a good writer or critic back in those old days, and I definitely expressed my share of terrible takes about anime. That said, I thought it might be fun to revisit some of those old reviews by dusting a few of them off and updating them with some of my more current opinions about the series in question, if I’ve since had the opportunity to watch them.

Disclaimer: The retro review may be edited slightly for things like spelling errors and such, as well as for language if necessary. I used to use language and/or terminology back then that I would never use now, and don’t want anyone to think that I would currently condone saying anything that is directly hurtful toward others. Anime fandom is a place for everyone. Any of my current commentary embedded in the retro review will be indicated by brackets [ ]

Birdy The Mighty: Decode – S1E1 Retro Review
First posted – August 31st, 2008

Number of episodes: 13
Production Studio: A-1 Pictures Inc.
[Here I listed the fansub release I downloaded for the review, which I’ve elected to omit]
Likelihood of US Release: Medium [I have no idea what criteria I was basing this off of, but Funimation did ultimately release the series, then allow it to go out-of-print a few years ago, so I suppose “medium” does kind of capture that situation.]

An unsuspecting student named Tsutomu finds himself in an odd situation when his body is accidentally injured by an interplanetary agent named Birdy, and they end up sharing her body until his own can be repaired.

Episode Summary

Birdy is in pursuit of a criminal named Geegar, and when she infiltrates his ship he’s already making a break for it. She follows him to Earth, where she poses as a model named Shion who specializes in space outfits in order to investigate his whereabouts. A man named “Giga” seems to be a good (and obvious) lead. That evening she follows his car, while somewhere else, Tsutomu and a friend are investigating a ruined building and are confronted by some thugs. They leave, just as Giga (really Geegar) meets Birdy (in the guise of Shion) on the roof. She transforms into investigator mode and they get into a fight. While Tsutomu is trying to escape the building, Geegar takes him hostage and tosses him at Birdy, who accidentally blows his body in half.

The next day Tsutomu wakes up, assuming all of it was a dream. When he tries to put his glasses on, he realizes that he doesn’t need them. When he gets home after school, he hears a voice in the room with him. Suddenly he’s flying through the air above the city, and when he looks over to his reflection in the side of a skyscraper, he sees that he’s not himself, but a beautiful woman. Apparently his nightmare has just begun.

Thoughts

This is another of those shows that I really wanted to loathe on principle, but I found I just couldn’t find enough to really hate it like I felt I should. I can’t say that the premise really impresses me that much – the idea of body sharing a la Kanokon [Kanokon, which involves sexy kitsune girls if I recall correctly, seems to have been my gold standard of bad ecchi anime at the point I was writing these, as it crops up in several old reviews] is a huge red flag for me, and one look at Birdy’s skimpy wardrobe was enough to make me extremely skeptical, but all-in-all it wasn’t too bad of an episode. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t watch any more unless I was bored or not busy (ha!), but I wouldn’t point and laugh at anyone who watched and enjoyed the show either.

This show is based on a manga that already produced a 4-episode OVA in the mid-nineties, and I feel like I’ve seen it before but I can’t remember enough to be able to make a comparison. Just judging from screenshots, though, I can tell that the design team did a good job of updating the look of the characters, providing them with modern-yet-recognizable designs, and just generally making sure that we don’t mistake this version for the old one. Not to mention that the animation is very nice also, which really surprised me, especially considering it was from a studio that I’m not really familiar with (my not having heard of them isn’t necessarily a measure of quality either way, but upon further research A-1 doesn’t seem to have had a hand in many other shows [reading this, I thought I was just being ignorant. It’s true, though; prior to 2008 A-1 didn’t do lead production on more than a couple of anime series]).

Still, I have to bring up the fact that Birdy’s investigator outfit is completely impractical. Oh, I know full well why she’s dressed that way, since many people like to view scantily-clad women blowing people up. But I don’t have to agree with it. Seriously, she’s got a magical thong that would make the gals of Daphne in the Brilliant Blue [this was another series I referenced quite a bit, mostly in reference to bad costume design. I mean, just look at them] jealous. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a fan of the fanservice very much, so that’s one strike against the show. Otherwise, though, my righteous indignation wasn’t set aflame too much, and I might watch some more of this. Too much more with the T and A, though, and this show is gonna be on notice, post haste. [Please rescue me from this cringe]

Pros

• The animation is quite nice and was a pleasant surprise
• The story was silly without being too anger-inducing

Cons

• Birdy must be poor because she can’t afford a whole outfit [Be careful not to cut yourself on all that edge, past me. Also, classism isn’t a good look and wasn’t then, either.]
• Body-sharing in an anime is a major red-flag for me [Not going to lie, this is still kind of true!]

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Modern Reactions

I recently completed a re-watch of Birdy the Mighty: Decode (both cours), which ought to tell you something about how I generally feel about the series at this point in time. Just to rewind back further, though, there was a point several years ago when Netflix streaming was still a novelty (get this: they used to send you DVDs in the mail way-back-when. I know!), and after hooking a Roku to my bedroom TV I was interested in trying out this function using one of Netflix’s meager number of streaming anime. For whatever reason, I landed on this one. For those of you who used the service around that time period, you might remember that you didn’t originally get a choice between subbed and dubbed anime – you got whatever Netflix had available, and you didn’t complain about it (or maybe you did, but I won’t judge either way). In any case, I watched the first cour of Birdy The Mighty: Decode in English on Netflix via an early Roku unit.

While I can’t to this day claim to have had my prejudices completely blown away by the series in that moment, what I can say is that watching it in full (or in half, I suppose) and the general passage of time gave me the opportunity to reassess some of my initial reactions. I’ve talked before about how easy it can be to see things in “black and white,” especially when you don’t have the life experience needed to perceive the inherent nuance of a situation. When I look back at myself and some of my more… youthful anime opinions, what I see is a lot of passion coupled with both a lack of knowledge (which I continue to try to remedy, with mixed success) as well as tunnel vision involving certain types of material.

One thing I seemed to be very hung up on in the original review is Birdy’s outfit, which is skin-tight and, shall we say, “strategically constructed” to provide coverage. Originally I compared it to the sort of character design you’d be likely to find in more fanservice-focused anime and I don’t necessarily think that that’s incorrect, but as in all things reality is much more complicated than “skimpy outfit = sexualized” or “sexualized = bad.” Over the last decade or so, there’s been a major and very welcome push in the convention scene to provide boundaries regarding cosplay, summed up by the “cosplay is not consent” slogan. This slogan (and similar ones) first started popping up in the early 2010’s; I personally recall seeing signage for it at CONvergence around 2012. And while it specifically refers to the fact that people dressed in costumes (even skin-bearing ones) aren’t asking to be touched, cat-called, or otherwise harassed by the general public, I think hearing it and really taking it to heart gave me the opportunity to examine some toxic internalized feelings I was holding toward (mostly) women whose choice of wardrobe was more body-conscious and revealing than my own.

That said, the issue is more complicated than simply reframing one’s simplistic perception of what clothing represents. I think it’s important to remember that anime characters are in whole the creation of human beings and all humans have ideals, prejudices and agendas, whether they actively/knowingly express them or not. The character Birdy from Birdy the Mighty: Decode is not a real person; she doesn’t have agency to make choices on her own behalf. Her design and her actions are all the deliberate product of a human being (or beings) telling the story they want to tell in the way that they want. The original author and/or the character designers of this incarnation of Birdy’s story wanted her to look a certain way. A real person can choose form-fitting clothing for reasons of ease-of-movement or personal preference; a cartoon character cannot.

On the other hand, one measure of a piece of media’s success I try to acknowledge is how complete the illusion of life is when it comes to its characters. Do they feel as if they comfortably inhabit the space that they’ve been provided? Do their actions feel like the plausible result of the person they’re portrayed to be? Ultimately this is all a big judgment call on my part and any other viewer watching the same material may feel differently than I do. I also know full well that I bring to my entertainment all manner of external baggage that no amount of internal leaps of logic can adequately offset.

This is all meant to explain that there’s no concrete set of criteria that I can reference that defines whether a skimpy outfit in a character design is “OK” or not, because those factors depend a lot on the complicated ways in which a particular viewer interacts with media and the ways in which society itself provides its own *extra special* added baggage. All I can do examine my own feelings in each case and decide for myself.

Having said all that, I found myself unbothered by the character designs during my recent viewing of the series. This is partly due to the aforementioned changes I made to my own perception, but it’s also worth mentioning that as much as the premise of Birdy the Mighty might imply annoying fanservice hijinks, in actuality there are few-to-none. The second cour of the series especially does the legwork to develop Birdy’s character and I found that to be more important to the core of the series than whatever I was getting worked-up about back in 2008. This isn’t to imply that her sexy character design isn’t meant to be a part of the series’ appeal, but its other aspects – its character relationships and its use of unique animation techniques – help define it as a series with more to say than just “space cop sexy.”

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Now that I’ve laid-bare one of my many bad takes, I’ve found it to be a fun exercise in reexamining my own opinions in light of the passage of time. Much like Lauren Orsini, I believe that we’re allowed to grow out of our terrible opinions, and that dragging people through the mud for being ignorant and saying something dumb in the past isn’t always the most constructive way to facilitate discourse. I do think, though, that we as writers owe it to ourselves to take a look at the way we were and to ensure we’re not going in the wrong direction.

Hopefully this series of posts will be a good compromise for the folks who have been asking about my old material over the past few years. Thanks, as always, for reading!