Directors: Iku Suzuki (Episode 1), Hiroshi Yoshida (Episode 2)
Screenplay: Yū Yamamoto
Based on a manga by Masakazu Yamaguchi
Voice Cast: Yuri Shiratori as Mari Amachi; Miki Itō as Saori Minami; Tomokazu Seki as Ryo Tobishima; Akiko Yajima as Hibari Misora; Kenichi Ogata as Buddha; Kenichi Ono as Kyoshirou Inemuri; Kinryuu Arimoto as Vice Principal; Kouji Totani as Pope; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as Dark Vader; Tomohiro Nishimura as Mutsugorō; Tsutomu Kashiwakura as Scary Newspaper Man
What's Buddha doing here?
From the ultra obscure realm of anime OVAs, a two part straight-to-video work, Gautaman is a title which has only been available in the West up to the 2020s on German DVD and only known to anyone if they have found it online. It is, after years of wanting to see both parts, upon finally seeing it a work which lived up to being utterly insane but also something with two aspects to consider. One is that, unfortunately, it has content as I will get into which people will find inappropriate and uncomfortable for good reason, as this belongs to the area of anime where jokes and scenes about women being forcibly undressed and molested are found, especially feeling bolted on to a work which could have just stayed as a weird and kinky parody of superheroes with some sex comedy without this content. The more positive thing of note, and the reason why I would actually recommend people track this down if they can pass the former concern, and why I wish this had a proper Western release, is that it is compelling. It is shambolic at times, skirting copyright precariously with jokes which are just strange, but managing to juggle genres and even have emotional whiplashes. There is nothing like Gautaman even if the premise is not original, in which to protect a school for all future religious leaders, a shy Catholic girl has to dress in a stupid hero costume because Buddha of all deities rather than the Virgin Mary answered her prayers. One which manages in two forty plus minute episodes has a lesbian (yuri) subplot with a fellow Hindu roommate, henchmen like "Dark Vader", and even a bitter sweet ending.
At this school, where all major religions coexist in harmony, naturally it has an evil cult known as Black Buddha among them, who indoctrinate members by kidnapping students, to the point they even develop new personas with masks in case they need henchmen. Mari Amachi is a Catholic and a new student, insanely shy having been brought up in a Catholic school before, and having not been around men baring her father and school principals beforehand. Gautamanfor all its dumbness has virtues, including a lead character I wanted to follow and wished had more stories about, someone who is the zenith of stereotypically awkward yet cute figures, with her big red hair in a ribbon and long dress. Adding to her character with another interesting figure, Mari immediately finds a friend in Saori Minami, a practicing Hindu student she shares a room with and is eventually hiding a romantic crush from Mari.
When the Black Buddha decides to kidnap Saori, because she stopped a member indoctrinating Mari by intriguing her with religious discussion, Mari's prayers on her knees does not get the figure she would presume. She gets Buddha of all people, and if you have knowledge on the religion, it is not actually Buddha himself but someone who people confuse the Buddha for she receives for help, the jolly rotund figure, here a gold talking statue who floats, who was originally Budai, a 10th-century Chinese monk who, unlike Siddhartha Gautama who is Buddha, is a different figure honoured in Chinese and also Japanese Buddhism. He is still a figure of high regard, getting the name of "the Laughing Buddha" even if it might be confusing, which is why he is parodied here in a way which is a bit crass and profane. I would prefer to call this Buddha neither Siddhartha Gautama nor Budai, even if Budai is referenced and the name "Gautaman" Mari's alter-ego is called is clearly based on the former, as it makes more sense in this bizarre comedic anime to have this parody be his own thing. This is an incompetent deity who, floating in the background abruptly when unexpected, gives away her weakness to the villains continually and leads to a sentence of someone hitting Buddha taking place in dialogue, something that would not make sense anywhere else expect here.
Contextually this anime has a lot of similarities to the 1991-2 OVA adaptation of Kekko Kamen; Kamen was a Go Nagai creation, which managed to spin off into numerous live action films too, a concept meant to have been a joke he sent to his editor only for them to actually like it. Kaman shares this show's unfortunate interest in non-consensual sexual content in a jokey, eroticised form although was far more extreme. The titular Kekko Kamen herself, a girl with a secret persona to protect her fellow classmates at the evil Sparta Academy, was a mask with a scarf, gloves and shoes with nothing else on, completely naked beyond this. Mari as Gautaman, protector of religious freedom, is covered in costume but is more ridiculous - wearing a turban, wraparound shades, a sports bra, and Mari's power source, a sumo belt with nothing underneath.
The show, to be crass for once, is from the same well as Sir Mix-A-Lotfound his inspiration for Baby Got Back, the ode to women's behinds even though this show has none which are rendered as large. Black Buddha do attempt to find out her real identify from a plaster cast at one point in the first episode, of her behind left on an unfortunate victim as a result of her special move; leaping in the air and moving herself in a jack knife with her legs to her head to do what we, in professional wrestling parlance, sometimes have called the "thump" with the gluteus maximus to the chest at high speed. This is, again, crass, but just in all I have put, you could have easily removed some of the unpalatable moments, like a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles parody with squid tentacles molesting the female students, and easily turned this premise into just a sex comedy parody of superheroes instead. It would have improved even if still juvenile. Particularly as, whilst not nuisance and with her religious beliefs never really coming into play, the premise of Catholic schoolgirl, from a very restricted upbringing, being stuck having to become this very sexually upfront super heroine, because she does want to help people, is still amusing especially as the character is interest and the Black Buddha clan is full of oddballs and parodies in terms of the opponents.
Split into two separate OVAs, the first which is just called Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman, is merely an introduction but does show the two sides. One that unfortunately the production had to fall into perverse content that is not palatable today, such as following Kekko Kaman a little and having Saori in compromising positions including being whipped. Thankfully it also emphasises that, with some re-adaptation, the story could have easily jettisoned this content entirely unlike Kekko Karman¸ which is work that is far more problematic even if managing to be released on DVD in Britain in the 2000s. It also emphasises already how odd the OVA is, the sense Gautaman was never meant for an international audience beyond Japan. Our two lead characters Mari and Saori are named after famous female idol singers who were still very much alive at the time, which causes you to wonder how those real women might have reacted, and for a future release they had to censor the real name of the school this story is set in, suggesting immediately that the writers crossed a line in terms of Japan's copyright laws even for parody, something which has been an effect on older titles which were more flagrant in referring to real life pop culture1.
The antagonists themselves, led by a leader who is one of the male students Ryo Tobishima, are also a motley bunch of strange parodies and concepts, based upon students being brainwashed and gaining new personas to go after Mari (or in one case, "Frankenmuscle", never even getting to see action as, in a funny joke, Tobishima just bats him into a wall so his second in command, the vice principal of the school, stops interfering with his plans). When the first you encounter is literally "Scary Newspaper Delivery Man", whose secret weapon is a newspaper which is lethal to read, there is a lot of cultural aspects that have clearly been lost in translation to why that is a villain to have, either that or either the original manga author or the creators of this OVA went for something ridiculous. That is the case with an identical group of elderly students whose names are puns on Japanese numbers and whose main attacks are to impersonate animals. Yes, that is just the beginning of how peculiar this show gets, and this I would rather have than those aspects leanings towards Kekko Karman, which again is a much more problematic show considering its first villain was a Nazi dominatrix teacher. Instead here, just from the first episode, you have an explicit parody of the "Sleepy Eyes of Death" Nemuri Kyōshirō, a famous pulp samurai character known for his purple clothes who, replicating the samurai character in Kamen who cut women's clothes off, is here as a villain alongside the aforementioned Dark Vader, a giant sumo with a very suspiciously familiar looking helmet of a Disney owned property.
It does establish as well that, whilst not reinventing the wheel, there is a lot here I liked as well even if it befuddled me. There is a lot of comedy, with the usual trademarks of characters breaking from their usual forms for exaggerating which is always amusing, especially as the duality of Mari against Gautaman, who gets attention both as a hero in the school but also wearing very little, does leave the poor girl with a lot of concern and a lot of obvious jokes which still work. It also sets up the potential drama of how Tobishima actually meets Mari outside his evil persona and they fall for each other, despite neither knowing their masked identities. Episode two, titled Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman R, escalates the plot and just escalates the tone. With a different director on board, it increases in how bizarre it gets, how much more perverted the content can be, and how the emotional tone gets surprisingly serious somehow in spite of most of the work being unable to be taken seriously at all.
What was a light hearted sex comedy, with some unfortunately dated content, gets a lot more explicit, both with a scene of Mari and Saori sharing a bath with the eyebrow raising subtitle of "bottoms touching", and a parody of the famous Dream of the Fisherman's Wife ukiyo-e woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, as that trope of squid ninja, a Mutant Ninja Turtles parody that gets the joke across with its own designs2, have an expanding squid as their secret weapon against Gautaman. Again, the lewder content does put one off; the absurd moments, like a fantasy in Episode 1 of Mari being burned like a martyr on a pyre of butts rather than burning wood, is lewd and weird but comes from a more digestible and more entertaining in its weirdness rather than creepy. If it had just been as mad as a box of frogs, I would be less concerned with this review having to stress that it does cross the line a few times, where even some of the "WTF" levels of surprise would still be acceptable even if very dark in its humour. Like the likelihood one set of villains are defeated by being cooked on a giant pan in the middle of a class and being eaten by their fellow students, which I suspect was cannibalism3. A joke like that, from the second OVA, is at least tasteful in that it does not feel inappropriate, just twisted in a palatable way to surprise anyone with not datedness to its shock value.
It feels especially as if the production team were doing whatever they wanted with peculiar results. So the real final fight involves a Terminatorparody, with a character design that really looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a T-800 underneath which perilously inches towards the copyright line. So, even when the story gets serious with Mari and Tobishima ultimately having to fight despite being unaware of each other's real identities, you randomly get the sight, whilst he is ritually preparing under a waterfall, that Tobishima possesses something the size of a tree trunk between her thighs which is never a plot point and is dumbfounding as a sight joke. What you get instead of what you expect for this light hearted and dumb premise is the surprisingly bleak conclusion, where Mari risks being removed from the school by her father if she turns into Gautaman again. How he is introduced, and reveals how he knew of her true identity, is uncomfortable and definitely part of that side I wished the OVA did not have, but where it leads to with the finale suddenly turning into a drama, with Saori the sympathetic figure in love with Mari sincerely, was a surprise. One in fact that actually left the anime etched in my thoughts as much as the bizarre content before.
The two episode production is not that elaborate - distinct but certainly not one of the higher tier OVAs in terms of artistic quality - but it definitely shows just how unpredictable the format was. We thankfully still get anime like this, good or bad, in the modern day with television series, but the OVA era of the eighties to the nineties as seen here saw such unexpected combinations of genre released straight to video, both here the memorable in a bad way but also in a way which legitimately surprises. The original manga, Dengeki Oshioki Musume Gōtaman, lasted for six volumes, and is obscure despite its author Masakazu Yamaguchi having one of his works Arm of Kannon (1998-2003)available in the West through Tokyopop, so whether this adapts the work accurately or trailed off in its own direction is a question for another day. Something like this is not necessarily the best, and I could completely understand people who hated it, especially as some moments are cringe worthy. And yet I wish it was more easily available, not likely to perish outside of bootlegged digital copies, because it definitely is memorable in positive ways and for the moments you were not prepared for.
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1) Japan's laws on this and how it can affect anime can be summed up in a famous modern day example. For the 2015 update of Osomatsu-kun, a sixties comedy manga adapted into anime about sextuplet brothers, called Mr. Osomatsu, their first ever episode parodied multiple other work such as the insanely popular manga/anime franchise Attack on Titan. It was so explicit that the first episode has effectively been cancelled due to copyright, including for home media, regardless of it being for parody.
2) Knowing that Japan did try at their own licensed and official adaptation of the Ninja Turtles, in the 1996 OVAs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Legend of the Supermutants, adds an additional humour to the squid villains, especially when the official anime adaptation did not turn out well at only two episodes and was weird itself.
3) [Major Spoiler Warning] Those unfortunate squid ninja find themselves in that fate, and it definitely comes off as one of the moments of Gautaman you will remember, especially as they are clearly students wearing living squid masks, thus making it actual cannibalism [Spoilers End].