Kiddy Girl-and (Kiddy Grade 2)

The original 2001 Studio Gonzo series Kiddy Grade is one of my favorite "guilty pleasure" anime series of all time... Not that it's a terrible show and I don't want people to know that I like it, just that it's so much fun, so huge, so well animated, and so action packed and dramatic that the name of the series alone makes me feel perverted whenever I say it out loud or type it. Kiddy Grade. Grade that Kiddy... *Shudder*

The 2009 sequel to Kiddy Grade, aka Kiddy Girl-and ("and" what we're never told), is a complete waste of 12 hours of anybody's life, and unfortunately it's probably a waste of around 2 - 3 years of the lives of the animators who worked on it and had to draw the thousands upon thousands of frames needed to bring this shitfest to fruition. Kiddy Girl-and is everything that its predecessor is not: It's shallow, it's written for 1st graders, it doesn't make a lick of sense when you take a step back and think about it, it's small and not epic in the least, and you very much dislike all of the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers main characters from the very beginning (unless you like to fuck dogs when their owners aren't looking... Yes, if you like the two main protagonists of this series, and their 7 year-old sidekick who acts like a 3 year-old with the Downs, then you are a dog fucker). This sequel talks down to the viewer constantly, and tries its hardest to make you believe that three children with the combined IQ of week old roadkill are the only hope for the entire UNIVERSE in its darkest moment.

What made this betrayal of storytelling even more heartbreaking for me was the fact that something like 4 years ago Studio Gonzo originally released a 7 minute trailer for the upcoming 2nd series of Kiddy Grade. It had tons of imaginative fights, every old character making a big appearance (even if they were in new bodies, they were still recognizable), and even quite a few new people we'd never seen before, doing new and cool things that we'd never seen done. In short, this 7 minute trailer was 1,000,000 times more fulfilling and fun than the whole of Kiddy Girl-and, and most of the cool teases we got in that short preview proved to be nothing but wet dreams by the animators seeing as NONE of the awesome parts made it into the final product. In fact, the two main awesome heroines of the first series, Eclair and Lumiere, barely show up in Kiddy Girl-and at all (only for 5 eps total, and two are flashbacks where they have maybe 4 lines at max). Oh, and the leader of the whole GOTT special forces unit in Kiddy Grade — the stone cold uber-bitch herself, Eclipse, who proved to be all but impossible to kill by two special assassins and by blowing up a building on top of her — dies off screen before events in this awful sequel even get started.

What the fuck went wrong? It's like Kiddy Girl-and is a terrible fan-fiction written by two giggling girls who hated everything about the original show.

Okay, let me back up here and start by telling you about the story; I have to give you a basis for my disappointment in order for you to fully appreciate how much I want all those involved in this animated abortion dead for screwing up what should have been an automatic home run if they just stayed the well established course created by the first series. No, I don't mean that I wished they redid the basic storyline of Kiddy Grade in a pointless follow-up, but only that they at least kept the same characters that we already loved. But I digress.

Kiddy Girl-and starts off 25 years after the big hoopla at the end of Kiddy Grade with the entire cast of survivors from the first series battling a planet that's in the middle of exploding and destroying the entire Milky Way. The explosion is averted (well, only stalled actually) when Lumiere and Eclair use their super-duper ES G-class powers of time and space to turn the area around the planet into a stasis field that slows the kaboom down to just a few miles of expansion a year... Which ain't so bad really. Wait, what? Powers of space and time? Maybe it's been a few years since I've seen the original Kiddy Grade, but I seem to remember Eclair being super strong and fast, and Lumiere's super ES power being that of an uber computer hacker... Did the Kiddy G writers fall into the shitty trap of "secondary mutations" that the X-Men people did back in the early 2000s?

Anyway, that's just the first revisionist bullshit moment of this show. After that we jump another 25 years into the future and we're introduced to our two lead characters and the two newest Galactic Organization of Trade and Tariffs, I mean Galactic Trade Organization (renamed because of bad memories of the GOTT after the events of the first series) ES-member trainees: Ascoeur and Q-feuille. Ascoeur is the pink-haired dumbass who can teleport short distances (like halfway across a small room) and can't think a situation through past her own bobbing waterhead, and Q-feuille is the unemotional robot who can throw tiny candy smoke bombs. After watching Eclair lift tanks, jump 100 feet into the air, and punch giant robots in the crotch in the first series I kind of found myself slightly disappointed here. You can tell that the GTO is scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Oh, and instead of acting as receptionists for the GTO when they're off mission (while still keeping them on the clock and in a position to stop terrorists and people who want to harm any government employees in Galactic HQ), our new heroines (and I use that term loosely) are waitresses in the swanky new super skyscraper that the GTO is housed in... Which means lolicon wet dreams come true as the girls parade around in skimpy waitress outfits all the time.

And soon we're introduced to Di-Air, a 7 year-old blonde girl with the brain of a toddler... No, that's not fair to the mentally handicapped toddler. Did I mention the toddler was mentally handicapped? Jesus fucking CHRIST! EVERY character in this thing is fucking retarded! They're all either blind sheep following the big boss bad guy because he's handsome and a douchebag, or they can't think their way out of a wet Tampax box! Pretty much every situation in this show is brought about because somebody did something stupid — not because the bad guys are exceptionally cunning (they are not), just that the good guys are sooooo dumb. Well, and the bad guys too.

Whatever. Back to the plot. Ummmmm, well, we follow Excon and Q-Tip and Die-Air for around NINE episodes as they bungle up their waitressing jobs or accidentally fall in and out of trouble like wacky teenagers in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Only not half as wacky as they think they are. Because the writers don't understand that not all humor has to be wrapped up in dopey girls tripping themselves up, dumb characters doing stupid things, or 7 year-old girls making out with everyone. Ooooooh yeah, you read that right, this show basically exists so that we can see Di-anna (the held-underwater-too-long 7 year-old) use her special power by kissing people to juice up their own ESPer powers. And it's not just a light peck on the cheek, nosireebob. Di-Ariel sticks her goddamn tongue in their mouths (you can see both their lips and cheeks moving when kissing. Trust me, that's what she's doing). And on top of that there's some heavy tones of incest as brother and sister continuously make out. Wow... Just like the original. (For those of you who have yet to see the original and can't understand sarcasm, no, Kiddy Grade is not that freaky. NOTHING is that freaky.... Other than Kiss X Sis.)

Damn! Once again I veered off. Okay, so the two ES wannabees (and their toddler in training) bumble around a lot, but soon find themselves in a bit of a pickle (a shit-pickle) when the G-Society (remnants of the Nouvlesse uppercrust Terrans from the first series) shows up and tries to take power away from the (apparently totally underfunded and understaffed) GTO, which seems to be made up entirely of maybe 12 people. The G-Spotciety succeeds on their first (pathetic) attempt to undermine the ONLY galactically unifying government, and turmoil (TURMOIL I say!) engulfs the cosmos. Yeah, the G-Spectres have some (uninteresting and brainwashed) super ESPers too, but fuck them. It's their gorgeous fuhrer, Geacher or whatever, who leads them on to Nazi victory of his seemingly universe-wide eugenics program that would do Hitler proud.

Oh, no, wait. He just wants to reignite the slowed down super explosion that Lumiere and Eclair kind of stopped, and destroy everything. Because that's what bad guys do, right? They just destroy. Because they're hermaphrodites. I swear on Jesus' grave, THAT IS REALLY his reason for doing all this killing and causing all this destruction: Geaschebag is a dickgirl. He's futa. Chew on that.

Goddammit I hate this show.

The ONLY thing that I enjoyed about this entire series was the very last five minutes. After the really lame attempts to blow up the galaxy (gee, do you really think they'll succeed?) Eclair and Lumiere are freed from their own space/time bubble, and during the end credits we're able to finally see the two of them in all their awesome glory again as they interact with all the retards from this series. Honestly, if the creators wanted to make this sequel look even just slightly better than it was they should never have allowed this; in these last few minutes we remember just how great Lumiere and Eclair really are, and just how much MORE annoying Q-Tippy and Aschool are in comparison. Christ it hurts.

What did I think of Kiddy Grade 2: Kiddy Gradier? In the end I find that I must give it a 43 out of 152 Points of Manly Rossmanliness. It was not fun, not exciting, and it was a boring story that was kind of painful to sit through, and the name is even more fucked up and wrong than the original's. I personally cannot believe that anybody involved in the first series had anything to do with this one. Fuck 'em.

Oh, and what's up with Gonzo making subcharacters totally unbelievable trannies just for terrible running gags?

....................Seriously? This is the sequel to that fairly amusing show about the young hu-man women in tight and short dresses beating people up from a short while ago? How is this possible? What were they thinking? Do they want to get arrested for making prepube chicks engage in wet and sloppy lip keesing action with bustier womenz while they fondle itty bitty titties? I hope they all burn in Robot Hell for making my visual sensor take all this garbago in. Burn, wretched Asian pedophilic animation peoples, burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn. Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn. Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn.

I, Robot Pedro, take an enormous robot dump on this animated television series. Robot Pedro wins.

Rossman here. Unfortunately I got Kuni in a HUGE heaping helping of trouble when I made him watch this show. Apparently there's this list, see, and Kuni's name is kind of on it. And because of this list he isn't allowed to come in contact with, or even see young girls... Even animated children. ESPECIALLY when said animated chillun make out with grown women and teenagers. So, maybe when he's done with his genitalia-electroshock therapy he'll be able to give his thoughts on Kiddy Girl-and. Damn it though, I knew I should have waited to call the FBI and cops until after he turned in his review draft. Hindsight is 20/20, my friend.