Parasite Dolls

This is more of a 7.5 or a weak 8. Good cyberpunk anime. If you like Akira, A.D Police Files, Battle Angel, Ghost in the Shell or those type anime, you won't be disappointed. Animation is good and it starts slow, but picks up good. Decent violence and gore. Fits in well with anime from the 90's and has high rewatchability due to only having 3 episodes. Cheap to buy online and I recommend it if you like other animes I compared it too.

The story in Parasite Dolls is tepidly interesting, but it's also very derivative. It borrows many aspects from other cyberpunk films, such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. This would be fine, but it also doesn't do any of the things it borrows quite as well as the originals did. What we're left with is a disjointed story that seems more like an excuse for some forced drama and action instead of a coherent and interesting tale.

The characters do manage to be somewhat interesting, and are introduced rather well in the first episode, giving the viewer a good sense of their personality, and ... their relation to each other. However, the show also fails to build upon them, and in the second and third episodes they fall into the background while the show continues to bring it's convoluted plot to the forefront.

The story is accompanied by a cheesy sounding, but still somewhat entertaining soundtrack that doesn't amaze, but gets the job done well enough. The voice acting (in the English Dub) similarly, doesn't amaze, but is also not horrible or grating to listen to. Overall, the audio is pretty standard, and doesn't seem very good or very bad.

The most positive thing I can say about this OVA is that it was fairly impressive in terms of the animation. Everything moved very fluidly, and the characters all had unique, yet not outlandish, designs. However, the art styles also seem a bit mixed. In the first two episodes, the art seemed pretty consistent. However, in the third episode, there's a slight change in art style, and it gets overloaded with subtle CG effects. Because of that, it doesn't look quite as good as the first two episodes, and it complicates what would have otherwise been purely a traditionally animated OVA.

Overall, Parasite Dolls is a cyberpunk anime that tries too hard to emulate aspects of other popular cyberpunk films. It tries to carve out it's own niche, and attempts to create some interesting characters, but with each new episode it slowly loses it's appeal, and ultimately never capitalizes on it's initial potential. By the end, all that's left is a husk of a show. One that I enjoyed, but still wonder about how much better it could have been.

I give Parasite Dolls a 6/10.

Parasite Dolls is an OVA that has a very encompassing atmosphere and world, but it regressed into silly edgelord aesthetics. The story is disjointed and confusing, with numerous plot incongruences. Such as a character getting blasted the fuck up in an explosion, we’re talking about a normal human in this instance, and then they’re shown surviving it? How? Why? Your questions mean nothing to this anime.

• There is also an elongated and unnecessarily graphic scene, where a batshit insane dude is fucking a girl from behind and then shoots her in the back of the head, and her brain matter splatters everywhere and he ... keeps fucking her corpse. Those kind of things made the series less entertaining for me, though it seemed as if the creators were doing that to establish a bleak atmosphere. Shock shlock is nothing that a refined viewer should be expected to put stakes into.

• The director of Patlabor was one of the two head directors on this project, so there are some similarities in how their cyberpunk worlds feel. You can also expect it to be exceedingly dark because the script writer who penned Vampire Princess Miyu (TV) and Texhnolyze wrote this script. I think that this OVA can be very appealing to watch, based on the aesthetic and atmosphere alone… Only, keep in mind that this OVA is not something that I would ever consider good.

• Parasite Dolls is in the same universe as Bubblegum Crisis, though two VERY different takes on the world. The basis of the story is very similar to many other science fiction premises: Who is truly in the wrong, man or machine? Like, Ghost in the Shell. There are weird inconsistencies with the cells and animation frames.

• One of the side characters named Angel, who had the appearance of an African American female with white hair, but in a different scene, suddenly was Caucasian with white hair. This type of inconsistency is just in your face and is very hard not to notice. It’s like that one episode of the D.N. Angel anime, where Risa Harada suddenly has red hair instead of brown.

• The characters and the story aren’t memorable at all. The only thing that I can piece together from my watching of it, was that there was a cool cyberpunk worldーspecifically there is a scene that I admired where there’s a landscape shot of the protagonist on the balcony of his overly-mechanized apartment complex and the scene pans away to the buildings towering above everything, like a futuristic Tower of Babylon, ominous hopelessly resides and we’re left to marvel at the scenery, while the sound of a saxophone that slides as smooth as liquid, and the experience drips into the viewer’s senses. Parasite Dolls is haunting. Though ironic that the atmosphere and world are the pinnacle of the experience in Parasite Dolls, seeing as it’s already a pre-established universe. Parasite Dolls is something that was seen often in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

• The Matrix monotony and pessimism was ran rampant in the cyberpunk community and anime series like Armitage caught its fever. I enjoyed this trend, but they were mass-produced so heavily at the time that most/I mean like probably 90% of the things produced were garbageーmanufactured in the form of short OVAs. Like the mass amount of TV series we get now (via streaming), there used to be nothing but trash OVAs back in the day that you would watch once from a video store, just to have something to watch with friends and a box of cheap, slimy pizza.

• Overall, the series could have been much better. It’s okay to watch, like once, but nothing that requires further exploration. Literary works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) and the Robot series (Isaac Asimov), as well as other animated creations like Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, or Astro Boy are better representations of the theme. I give a hard recommendation for Texhnolyze, if you enjoy a similar type of story coupled with a soul-crushing atmosphere. All and all, I give Parasite Dolls a 3/10.