A Show of Exciting River Racing and Anime Butts
There are many challenges that animation studios face. How to get the right mix of characters, story, and fanservice to get viewers to support your show. How to juggle multiple business models at the same time, including trying to get fans to buy pricey limited Blu-rays yet while supporting the move to legal streaming around the world. Then there’s a danger that the anime they’re about to release is going to have the worst timing ever, arriving right as some sad world event beyond the studios’ control happens.
There are many examples of this. A freak murder that took place the day before the final episode of School Days was to air, causing a TV network to replace the episode with the now-famous “Nice Boat” visual instead. An anime that had the bad timing to make a “tsunami” visual joke in an episode scheduled to air on March 11, 2011. The Fire Force anime beginning just two weeks before the tragic arson attack at Kyoto Animation.
Then there’s the new Kandagawa Jet Girls, an anime about girls playing a fictional sport of racing through Tokyo’s famous Kandagawa river while shooting at each other. It’s a fun show with a lot of entertaining anime butts but didn’t have the best timing, arriving just as Japan faces the worst typhoon in 60 years, which saw massive damage, including houses washing away in overflowing rivers and a death toll that keeps rising.
These sad events aside, Kandagawa Jet Girls is quite a fun show, sort of like Keijo!! but with more interesting characters. It’s set in a futuristic world of high technology where a sport called Jet Racing exists in which two cute girls get on a high-speed watercraft and race against each other, with one girl (the Jetter) driving while a second girl (the Shooter) takes potshots at the racer in front of them. The anime follows a girl named Namiki who wants nothing more to be a famous Jet Racer like her mother. She moves to Tokyo to attend Jet Racing school, befriends a strong-willed girl name named Misa, and before she knows it has been challenged by one of the local teams to a race. Which team will be the best?
Being by the creators of Valkyrie Drive Mermaid, the show is just silly with fan service, with camera angles and anime butts and low-brow yuri situations coming at us left and right. Even better is the racing game itself: the point of the guns is to make the opponents’ clothes fly off, exposing their sexy swimsuits underneath. I’m sure this will lead to lots of entertaining gifs for me to share on Twitter over the next three months if nothing else.
Kandagawa Jet Girls is more than just an anime…it’s a multimedia franchise that will include an upcoming PS4 game that allows you to run the actual races against the various teams of girls in the anime, presumably making their clothes fly off when you shoot at them. We’ll certainly carry it on J-List!
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