MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
Here's another one of those one-shot anime OVAs. KOCHO seems to have been released in Japan alongside a couple of live-action movies that same year, all of which adapted a manga of the same name. The manga only endured about two years and is not well known today, so it's likely that both the anime and live-action projects were a quick cash-grab for a franchise winding up in the same year as the videos. As for the American market, it was much easier to place a translated 30-minute anime into video stores than any of the full-fledged serial shows.
Only a couple of translated manga-adventures were available to me online, but they were enough to give me a sense as to how ordinary high-school boy Kosaku gets mixed up with a ditzy girl exorcist named Kocho. These are almost the only continuing characters in the series' first two episodes, but the anime clearly jumps forward in time to introduce two or three other characters, one being Kocho's sister, who competes with the titular heroine for Kosaku's heart. The demons with which Kocho contends are not especially imaginative, so it's quite possible that the anime is not a direct adaptation of any story. The action takes a back seat to sexy fanservice, with Kocho's persona being that of a ditz who's often not aware of her own pulchritudinous charms, but who can also deal out a few hard slaps to any male caught ogling her. The use of traditional Japanese exorcism methods provides the only hint of symbolic complexity here, but I doubt that the full series ever got much better than this offshoot.
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