Kimera is a one-part OVA, 45 minutes
in length.
Selected scene from Kimera, 1996: An
Air Force official maintains a roadblock on a rural mountain path. He
is armed, and there are numerous uniformed soldiers clearly visible
in the background, as well as the flaming wreckage of an overturned
army-green transport. As a bystander approaches to, y'know, see what
all the fuss is about, the official levels his assault rifle, its
muzzle six inches from the man's head, and says “you can't be here,
it's dangerous, run!” The bystander does the absolute last thing
that any thinking human being would do: Pushes the barrel of the gun
aside with his hand and demands to know WHAT, exactly, is dangerous
about this situation. Yes, it soon becomes clear that this particular
OVA takes place in a very special setting, a hilarious pseudo-reality
crafted with such bumbling ineptitude that it eventually makes the
logic of our own world seem warmly inviting by comparison.
There’s nothing remarkable about the
way Kimera looks. It’s cheaply made. The backgrounds are flat and
minimal, and the color palette consists mostly of a muted mishmash of
grays and dark greens which, combined with the generally low
production values and lack of ambient lighting, give the OVA a very
dull and industrial aesthetic. The design work isn’t much better;
Kimera’s human characters have square, blocky, seemingly
featureless faces with dime-a-dozen expressions, while its monstrous
villains look like half-baked concoctions of various oozing creeps
from B-grade sci-fi films the world over. The animation itself can
vary, and at its best it’s actually not too bad, offering suitably
squirmy movements for the abundance of disgusting, gore-seeking
tentacles. However, speed lines, quick cuts away from action, and
other budget-savers are just as abundant, providing for a weird
fifty-fifty split between modest but acceptable animation and
terrible animation. Quality control appears to have been skimped on
altogether, and the show can’t maintain a constant level of visual
detail for more than seven or eight minutes at a time. Some of the
more consistently animated portions of its blessedly short running
length include a gratuitous sex scene and a thirty-second shot of a
man’s organs exploding out of his chest and forming a neat little
pile on the ground. These serve as good indicators of where the
priorities of the work’s creators lie, if nothing else.
Kimera’s score bats a perfect
zero—without fail, when there was music playing, I found myself
wishing there wasn’t. Oh, the music itself is plenty awful; its
constituents include squealing, high-speed violin compositions,
overwrought operatic organ pieces, and vaguely 80s-sounding
synth-rock, none of which should have ever been allowed the privilege
of existing, much less coexisting within a single forty-minute span
of time. It’s all bad enough that I feel sorry for whoever was
tasked with integrating it into the OVA in a way that would benefit
all parties involved. That poor soul must have tried, because Kimera
usually at least attempts to put two and two together and play music
that is supposed to be sad over scenes that are supposed to be sad,
fast-paced music over scenes of action, so on and so on…but,
honestly, the effort was doomed from the start. The soundtrack is
such an ill-considered, intrinsically conflicting mixture that it's
pretty much unworkable, and it's the factor that pushes some scenes
in Kimera over the thin line between “weird and nonsensical” and
“unintentionally laughable.”
In fairness, it's hard to not laugh at
a story like this one. Kimera posits that earthly legends about
vampires are actually the result of alien beings from another planet
(who survive by sucking the life force out of other beings) landing
on Earth in the past. Lately there has been turmoil on the vampire
homeworld, they're in danger of becoming extinct, and now three
vampires/aliens have crash-landed their spaceships on Earth with the
intention of starting a population of vampires there and using humans
as their livestock. The key to doing so is the female vampire,
Kimera, who is captured by the Air Force and kept in an underground
lab. Our two lead characters encounter Kimera before she's captured,
and one of them falls in love with her. Okay, so the concept itself
sounds like the demon-spawn of many terrible, terrible things, but
they could make it work if the execution were good enough.
Unfortunately, it carries all the hallmarks of hacky storytelling.
There are unexplained leaps in time, unexplained transitions from one
scene to the next (at one point the setting changes, as if by magic,
from an Air Force facility in the middle of nowhere to a bustling
city). Most of the backstory is revealed through a short flashback
which occurs thirty minutes into the OVA, which is quite untimely, to
say the least. The progression of events is hectic, cluttered, and
everything in between, and while it's not quite bad enough for me to
say I couldn't tell what was happening, it's pretty close.
The next time a work of fiction
introduces its two protagonists as “the hardest working corn cereal
salesmen in America,” a fact seemingly slipped in just for the
purpose of explaining why said characters know each other and why
they are driving through a deserted, mountainous, Air Force-patrolled
region in the dead of night, I'll probably take the hint and go watch
something else. Their names are Osamu and Jay (or Main Character and
Blonde Guy, if you prefer). Their personalities initially appear to
be pretty clear-cut—Osamu is a tepid and uninteresting everyman,
Jay is a constantly ribbing, buddy-buddy jokester type. We've seen
them before.
However, there is a gaping discrepancy
between what these characters are supposed to be and what they
actually are. Our two “cereal salesmen” break into government
laboratories plastered with warnings about biohazards seemingly on a
whim. One of them spends a good portion of the OVA french-kissing a
green-skinned alien succubus who has never even spoken one word to
him. Jay is the bystander mentioned above who appears to think that
swatting a loaded gun out of someone's hands is a good idea. It's one
thing for characters to make devastatingly stupid and irreversible
decisions; that's certainly not a problem in and of itself. To err is
human, as humans like to say. However, in reality and in well-written
stories, these would be weighty choices, potentially carrying great
consequences; the kind of choices that nobody would make without
putting some good, hard thought into it. But neither of these average
Joes appears to have any regard for life and limb. With the exception
of an initial, brief “this might not be a good idea” from Osamu,
the two treat breaking into an Air Force laboratory like it's a
prank, giggling with schoolyard glee about whether or not they'll
need a password to breach its giant interlocking doors (and they
don't, because that would make sense). And so Kimera rolls on, with
nobody ever pausing to consider anything, gape at any of the
fantastic events that occur, or do anything that would cause real
human beings to understand them or feel a connection to them. Point
being that these are only “characters” in the most cold and
mechanical sense; they're wheels that turn thoughtlessly to carry the
plot to whatever ridiculous landmark it wants to visit.
Ironically enough, it's something in
the same vein as that quality which prevents me from giving Kimera
the lowest possible score. I don't think this OVA is meant to be
taken as a joke, yet, having seen it, it's very hard to think of it
as anything but. Do I recommend watching this? No, definitely not.
It's excessive, poorly written, poorly presented, cheesy, and
constantly straining to cover its own screwups. But it's not truly
mean-spirited, and there's a (very) little something to be said for
this tiny universe where everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, are
brick-stupid, and the switch for common sense, reasoning, and
decision-making is covered with cobwebs which permanently tether it
in the “off” position. In spite of and because of its silly
incompetence, it inspires just the tiniest bit of admittedly
condescending affection, enough for me to turn the dial one unit to
the right of where it probably should be. Kimera says “take me
seriously,” and we can only shake our heads and smile knowingly, as
if gracefully rejecting the outlandish request of a child.
Score: 2/10; terrible.
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