NATSUKI CRISIS BATTLE (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*  

YouTube's programming guided me to this two-part anime, of which I'd never heard. A manga and a game were produced around the same time, and while there's probably no authoritative reference as to which of the three was out of the gate first, I suspect that the game was paramount. For once, the OVA and the manga are equally brief, consisting (from what I can tell) of just two episodes.

And while most anime productions remain close to their manga source material (or vice versa), here it's as if someone said to the respective creators, "Do what you like, as long as you're telling the story of a high-school karate expert named Kisumi Natsuki." The manga shows young Kisumi getting into fights with male opponents, some of whom are just fellow judo/karate students, while others are more aggressive challengers, such as the school's sumo club. The anime pits Kisumi against a rival school, some of whom wear masks during an attack on Kisumi and a friend, But NATSUKI the anime is probably only thirty percent about the heroine battling male opponents, and seventy percent about Kisumi contending with female opponents. The first part of CRISIS largely deals with Kisumi bonding with a female student adept in wrestling, name of Rina, even though the two girls are feisty enough to fight one another. In the second part, Kisumi and Rina are both challenged by another girl wrestler, Kandori, who's somewhat exceptional for the time in being a FBB (though preceded by another lady bodybuilder in 1989's ANGEL COP).  

Kandori is allied to the bad high schoolers and has some vague relationship with Kisumi's current judo sensei, but there's no love-stuff in the anime, while there's only a tiny bit of potential romance in the manga. Of the two, the anime is much more enjoyable for the kinetic battle scenes, though story-wise it's absolutely average.