The Siren Song of Cartoon Catgirls

This guest post by Robert V Aldrich appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

As  young teen, I grew up with the unhealthy belief that female sexuality was a subdued and subtle thing.  This was a misinformed viewpoint that had been fostered predominantly by growing pretty firmly in the mainstream.  Countless songs on the radio, shows I watched on TV, and movies I rented from video stores, all depicted women in the same way: no matter how assertive or aggressive they may be in their day-to-day lives, when it came to anything even remotely sexual, they turned into timid kittens hiding under the bed, fragile things needing to be gently encouraged and carefully wooed, lest they fold up entirely.

Fortunately, I also grew up an anime fan (or an otaku if you really want to be pretentious about it), so this malarkey was dismissed with all the subtlety of a rocket-powered chainsaw when I first watched 1988’s Dominion Tank Police and saw the Puma Sisters distract a SWAT team with an impromptu strip-tease.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/mi5GFuvCIp4″]

So, let’s go ahead and get a few things right out of the way.  Yes, they’re fully formed adult women with cat ears.  Unless you’ve never seen anime ever, that really shouldn’t be anything new.  And yes, they’re stripping out of nurses’ uniforms.  Because, again, it’s anime and why wouldn’t they?  Pretty much all they needed was for one of the Puma Sisters to be holding a riding crop and the scene would have hit some kind of bizarre fetish hat trick.

But here’s the thing: as hot as that scene is, what makes it so remarkable and stand out against so much cheesecake in anime (and entertainment in general) isn’t the sexiness, the fetishistic imagery, or even just the animated near-nudity.  What makes this scene stand out is the way it characterizes the Puma Sisters.  They aren’t timid about their bodies or the affect it has on others (re: men).  They are fully aware of that effect.  And they don’t just know it; they know how to use it.  And they not only know how to use it, and do so, they enjoy it gleefully.

This is a paradigm-challenging depiction of women that would go through me like a shot, and one that would be shared among many of the anime fans during this era.  It wasn’t just “cat-girl strip-tease.”  That would have been fun, but immediately forgettable.  What makes this so remarkable was the manner in which the Puma Sisters conducted themselves, commanded the attention of everyone and everything around them, and used their sexuality as a nigh-literal weapon.

 

To fully understand the impact of this scene – or just to make sense of its zaniness – one must take a step back and understand the whole show–Dominion Tank Police, by the legendary Masamune Shirow (best known for Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell).  In Dominion Tank Police, Newport City (and presumably the world) live under a dangerous pollution cloud, necessitating people to wear gas masks at all times when outdoors.  Tangentially related, crime has gotten so bad in Newport City that a branch of the police employ tanks in their pursuit of law and order (the titular tank police).  Opposite the tank police is Buaku and his gang of criminal mercenaries, who have been hired to steal valuable chemicals from a research hospital.  The mystery of the chemicals’ nature, use, and origin unfolds across the four installments of the series (a follow-up series titled New Tank Police, released in 1993, follows an unrelated story).

 

Anna and Uni, the Puma Sisters, are Buaku’s primary partners and ostensibly his muscle.  They seem to have little interest in crime aside from it being more entertaining than any of their previous employment (different media portray those previous jobs as everything from stripping to the suggestion that they’re androids built for sexual service).  As a result, they tend not to take their heists very seriously, the police very seriously, or even Buaku very seriously.  This is best demonstrated by the very scene in question where they decide to distract a SWAT team with a striptease simply because the lighting’s really good.

To further understand the significance of this scene, you have to understand when and where it was seen.  Namely, it was seen by teenage nerds in a pre-Internet age.  Nowadays, anybody with a smart phone can find digital images of extreme sexuality, but in 1988, you had to work for it. You had to know what movies to rent from the video store and at what minute-mark to watch up to.  And that was just for live-action stuff.  If you wanted to see a cartoon with anything even passing for erotic, you were almost definitively out of luck (Rule 34 was a long way off).

More than that coming from a pre-Internet age, Dominion Tank Police came out just as the 80s cartoon boom was dying.  Transformers was in its pseudo-fifth season which was just repackaged reruns, while Robotech, She-ra and others had been off the air for a while.  While Dominion Tank Police wasn’t the only anime movie to come out during the Japanimation period, the others were totally different genres and largely devoid of sexuality.  On top of that, it would be another five years or so before the 1990s Anime Invasion would get underway.

This was also a time of cultural upheaval.  The Cold War was ending, with the fall of the Berlin Wall eminent.  There were more channels on TV than there were hours in the day.  “Straight Outta Compton” was redefining music, while “Smells Like a Teen Spirit” had yet to deflate the bloat of rock which dominated the airwaves.  There was magic in the air in those days.  So much change was happening all around us.  And so to go to Blockbuster and see on the new releases shelf a section labeled Japanimation, and to see cartoons unlike anything any of us had ever seen?  It was a transformative experience, to put it mildly.

 

As evocative as the scene of the Puma Sisters doing their thing might be, and as culturally-charged a time as the release of Dominion Tank Police might have been, much of the success of this scene is owed to the music.  “Hey Boy,” by Riko Ejima, is a haunting song that, while seemingly chaste in that it seems to be singing about dancing, captures something deep, deep in the soul.  Reading the words won’t do the lyrics justice, but they are:

“Hey, let’s dance, to the hot beat

Hey, hey boy

The heated heart, feel it

And look at me

Hey, let’s dance, don’t be so shy

Hey, hey boy

Don’t be so hesitant,

Let’s dance

This dressed-up town…

This running music…

Hey boy

Nothing intricate…

There aren’t any rules tonight.”

We’ve all heard songs about sex.  Some use love as a metaphor for sex, while others use dancing.  And some are straight-up explicit.  But what they all generally have in common is that most are sung by men.  In the rare instance that a song about sex is sung by a woman, it’s almost always passive.  This trend has thankfully started to change recently, but it is a new phenomenon, less than twenty years old.  In the preceding eight decades or so of broadcast music, women have never been depicted as sexually inclined, adventurous, and certainly not aggressive.

Underground music notwithstanding, the music that’s seen radio play (and thus what most people would have access to in a pre-Internet world) has almost always been passive.  Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” puts the onus upon the partner.  ABBA’s “Voulez-Vous” sings about enticing a partner to buy the drinks.  Janis Joplin sang about wanting to convince the man in “Take Another Piece Of My Heart.”  Even Madonna, who almost invented the modern version of the “sexually-aggressive-woman-in-music” image, had songs like “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Like A Virgin” to her name at this point.  She sang songs about sex, absolutely.  And that was groundbreaking, no argument, but they still took a passive role.

“Hey Boy” is totally different.  “Look at me.” “Don’t be so hesitant.” “There aren’t any rules tonight.” All of this sung with a sultry voice over a shifting tempo.  For an entire generation of anime fan, this was the very first time we’d ever heard a woman sing not that she hoped we would do something for her, not that we could do something together, but that she was going to take us by the hand and teach us something about ourselves.

That sexual aggression, combined with the cultural blindsiding that took place by seeing sexually charged cartoons, would burn this scene – and its song – into so many minds.  That haunting score invokes a magical time in our lives when animation became more than just cartoons, when women could take the lead, and when life in the world started to get real interesting.

 

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Robert V Aldrich is a writer and geek chic commentator.  When not writing at various websites and periodicals, he writes serials and other stuff for his own website, TeachTheSky.com.  He has a new novel out, Rhest for the Wicked, that he’d reeeeally love for you to check out.