Anime in Focus RETRO EDITION: Cutey Honey Episode 1

 <- Yes, this show is every bit as cheesy as it looks. but don't worry, it's mozzarella, so it's good

In today's retro edition of anime in focus, the 70’s come out to get you. Enter Cutey Honey, one of the anime that inspired that one major anime, what was it called…. Oh yeah, Sailor Moon.

The first episode starts out showing a bunch of girls singing in a church, while an important looking one sneaks off. This is our main character named Honey (This has to be one of the stupidest names I’ve ever heard) who apparently has to get back home to see her dad about something. On her way out, one of her female teachers starts sexually harassing her, which seems weird in a show from the 70’s.

Well, on the way out, she gets a transmission from her father telling her how to activate some weird mechanism in an earring she’s wearing, which lets her transform into a body capable of performing whatever task is at hand. All of her clothes vanish briefly for this transformation, ensuring intense amounts of fanservice in this show. Meanwhile, we get a scene of one of the villains, who is a weird dominatrix jewel thief person. It’s really weird. Of course, by this point I had turned my brain off anyway, so it didn’t matter.

Anyway, when Honey gets to her fathers house, it’s been taken over by generic henchmen who all wear masks to save the animation team money. They apparently belong to some organization known as “Panther Claw,” who are looking for Honey’s father’s work. Unfortunately, while they are looking for this experiment, they wind up killing Honey’s father, who reveals that she is really a robot with transforming powers. Honey is entirely unfazed by this for some reason. Anyway, Honey decides to use her transforming abilities to assume a form capable of combat, and slaughters the whole bunch of generic 70’s henchmen. It’s actually pretty badass. Despite the shows outward appearance, the fight scenes are comparable to most action series that come out today.

The plot to this show is quite silly, but it’s very entertaining. It contains lots of fanservice, and even more 70’s style cheesiness. I’m not really sure if Honey’s transformations are supposed to symbolize different aspects of her personality, or if they were just an excuse to draw a bunch of pretty girls by the author. Either way, the show is very fun and contains some solid fight scenes. Worth looking up on Netflix or something.

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