Plastic Little (OVA)

Orphaned teenager Tita takes over her father's pet shop hunter business, collecting and selling exotic animals from all over the galaxy. In port on planet Yietta (where, to feebly justify the title, there's very little plastic) she rescues a young girl who is being pursued by the local authorities. Elysse Nalerov is in big trouble; her father designed a new weapon, she has the arming codes, and the government will stop at nothing to get them. Tita and her crew decide to help her out, and mayhem ensues.

A lightweight but enjoyable sci-fi adventure made, like its predecessor Legend of Lemnear, solely to show off the artistic talents of Urushibara and Yoshimoto. While lacking a particularly strong story line, it succeeds most perfectly in the rendition of an individual artist's style into moving pictures. Unfortunately for the genre, Urushi-bara's style isn't SF illustration but cheesecake. The artist on numerous books of cutie-girl illustrations, he renders lush young flesh with glowing perfection. Yoshimoto transfers this perfection exactly to celluloid and puts a remarkable range of motions onto it, so before they take on the evil overlord, the girls can stop for a bath scene where they can compare their breasts. Not only every jiggle of every curve, but the characters' expressions and movements all give the impression of seeing the creator's original art come to life on the page. When one considers the violence often done to original design art in the cause of simplifying it enough to animate cheaply (see Vampire Hunter D), the achievement is all the more remarkable.

At the time of its release, the creators claimed that it was only a prequel to a set of other stories-though as time passed, the only evidence was a brief PL audio drama that described Elysse as a "guest star," thereby implying there was more to come. In 1999, Urushibara and Yoshimoto unveiled artwork from a new project, Femme Femme Buccaneers, charting the progress of Ann and Ricorne, a two-piece idol-singer act known collectively as Virginity. Though they promised that these two girls, along with the unshaven male pirates of the Yiettan isle of Espaniola, would soon grace anime screens alongside Tita and her crew, the wait continues, making PL2 the most delayed project in anime, beating even Otomo's Steam Boy. Owing to accidents of international pricing and rights negotiation, PL is available in separate U.K. and U.S. translations. NV