Review of Kite

There was a time when A Kite (or Kite) was the most famous porn anime before it was completely overshadowed by Sei Shoujo’s creations (especially Bible Black) and why not? I mean it is an adult oriented movie that is not only porn, but also a heavy action packed film, a crime thriller and a psychological drama too! Sounds amazing on paper but its execution is far from being equally good.

The plot is about two teenagers, a guy (Oburi) and a girl (Sawa), who work as assassins for two corrupt private detectives, and she is also constantly abused by one of them and carries with a tragic past.

The main problem this film has is its duration; it lasts for only fifty minutes and tries to pack all of the aforementioned elements, what could go wrong, right? Well, almost everything, but let’s go by parts, starting with the few positives things I can say about this title.

The production values are very good, even impressive for a hentai title, and even more when you take in count that this was the first work that studio Arms made, yes, there are some quality drops but to the most part it has a very solid visual presentation. The character designs are rather unique and there’s a lot of detail to them, even in their genitalia and body fluids, the motions are really fluid on the action sequences, which are packed with a lot of detailed and very well drawn graphic violence and big explosions. The sex sequences have good motions too, along with lots of positions and camera angles. And I must not forget to mention that the film did a good job depicting a neo-noir aesthetic with its rotten city filled with dark colors and the use of lots of shadows, everything accompanied with a splendid direction, at least when it comes to visual department…

You see, the sound department is not as polished, the sound effects and voice acting are overall good, but the soundtrack is not. Actually it’d be more accurate to say that is great but is terribly handled, as if they just told the guy that played the saxophone: “ok, do it” and they didn’t know how to integrate it to the movie afterwards, it even results in some unplanned comical moments.

Visual department and sex sequences aside, there’s nothing more that I could praise about this film; the good ideas were there but the handling of them wasn’t good at all. I can sort of accept that the plot is actually dark and the tone remains serious to the very end, but even that is debatable. With a runtime this short and so many things to portray, the plot comes off as rushed and the characters feel inconsistent. The movie spends most of its time in sex scenes that not always serve a purpose in the story and action sequences that, even if they are well animated as I said before, last for too long and take valuable screen time that is not invested on Sawa’s personal drama; and are also so over the top that you can’t take them seriously from a certain point. Her story is shown mostly in briefs flashbacks; because sex and gore seem to be more important in the director’s mind. The whole story doesn’t even have a good ending since it ends with a cliffhanger.

Sawa is the most inconsistent character here, the first time she appears kills someone with ease, then feels sorry for an old woman, then seems to be an android that can kill easily, have her eyes wide open and never looks at Oburi and looks at the camera instead with a soulless expression, then she jokes with him while you can tell that there’s a romantic relationship building up between them, and all of that in only the firsts 13 minutes of the movie! Imagine how much she is rewritten throughout the whole film. As for the rest, they are not even worth to talk about, the two antagonists are complete one dimensional assholes so the viewer can easily hate them right away, and then there’s Oburi, a guy that overreacts and shoots at a basketball for a stupid reason and there’s no more information about him, seriously.

So down to it, the movie is just a mess. The action is not good because it’s too exaggerated and you end up laughing on those scenes; the thriller part is not captivating because of how little time there’s invested to it, the drama is boring because you barely know something about the characters, and the one you know the most about is constantly being rewritten, the plot is erratic due to a short runtime wasted on style instead of substance, and also lacks a proper ending, and the tone is not so serious either, because of how unintentionally comical the film is sometimes. The only solid things in this ambitious movie end up being the porn scenes and the visual presentation.

A Kite is just bad and does not deserve its praise, I know that it shocked people for being an animated porn movie with plot, but if this is how well it can handle it, then it should have aimed for something much more simple yet polished, like 15 bishoujo, and lots of other hentai did.

And the worst part of it is that it received a sequel ten years later that doesn’t even have any well-made sex scene or good animation; Kite Liberator is just a complete disaster in absolutely every department.

A Kite 3/10
Kite Liberator 1/10