Sweetness and Light can get boring after a while, so in Lollipops, Sunshine And rrrRRRrrr, anime turns to the dark side. (R-rated and very funny)

Hat tip to Ace. I can’t believe I’m the first blogger to link this piece of deathless art.

————————————————-

Ace has had some comments indicating that some of his readers couldn’t see the point of all this, and I’ve gotten one comment along the same lines, so I will lecture a bit on Japanese anime.

Anime are animations, cartoons. The comic book equivalent is called manga. The natural audience for both is, of course, Japanese kids. There is a significant American kid audience as well these days. I have a personal interest in Japanese culture (related to the martial arts), and I am an enthusiast of the cinema, so I have watched some anime myself, and am familiar with their conventions. Some of my friends have kids who are really into this stuff, and I have been educated by them.

Anime and manga share the same concepts and terminology.

Shoujo are anime (or manga) aimed at an audience of young girls. Shoujo are drawn in a pretty and juvenile style and tend to deal with romantic or emotional, innocent and girly subjects.

They always feature bishounen, i.e., idealized, androgynous, non-sexually-threatening and beautiful young men, who commonly have impossibly colored eyes and hair. Small children and pets (chibi or CB, meaning “small”), including fantasy creatures, are typically featured in supporting roles, and serve to create a safe, family kind of atmosphere. A good chibi is kawaii “cute.”

The above linked cartoon is an aniparo “a parody animation,” in which it starts off as a typical (and very soppy) shoujo anime, loaded with chibi, but then suddenly changes to scenes jokingly featuring hints of incongruous gangsta, hentai “porno,” and macabre themes, characteristic of very different genres.

With a little investigating, I find that it is a parody of a real cartoon series, titled Card Captor Sakura, whose lead characters include: Sakua Kinomoto, Tomoyo Daidouji, the CB Kero, and such bishounen as Touya Kinomoto.

In the parody, Sakura gets an Dr. Evil Clow Card, which turns her to the dark side.