Amazing Nurse Nanako (Japan 2000)

Rating: **
Review Date: 12/31/00

Divided into four+ installments.

Is this the state of anime these days? How depressing. I think it should have been called "Nurse Nanako's Amazing Breasts" instead. From Taro Maki, the genius behind the excellent "Tenchi-Muyo!" series and the lackluster "El-Hazzard" series, comes a new story about politics, space aliens, secret scientific experiments, and a dimwitted girl named Nanako who everyone is interested in for some reason. On the one hand, it has an interesting science fiction aspect to it, as the evil American military and the equally evil Catholic Church are working together to learn more about an alien lifeform that was secretly retrieved from outerspace. And then there's Nanako, the sweet, but ditzy and clumsy assistant to the brilliant and eccentric Dr. Kyoji. She loves Kyoji with all her heart, but he merely uses her as a tool for his bizarre experiments. Nanako's physical attributes are appalling. I thought the breast physics in Tecmo's "Dead Or Alive" were ridiculous, but at least they could be turned off. Nanako's breasts on the other hand are downright offensive. Huge and misshaped, and made of some super wiggly-jiggly substance that has a mind of its own, her boobs are all over the place and constantly in motion - a fact that the camera is keenly, and tastelessly, aware of. Ugh. The show tries to play it off as light-hearted humor, but it just comes off as being stupid and gross. And as if that isn't bad enough, the preview for the second episode boldly states "if you don't buy this episode, you won't see Nanako naked!" How's that for blatant marketing? But I guess that just proves the audience that the filmmakers are shooting for. But it gets even worse... The DVD has bouncing boob menu screens and a "bonus video" that compiles all of Nanako's mammary jiggling from the first two episodes, just in case you need a quick and concentrated boob fix (complete with goofy sound effects) and are too lazy to watch an entire episode of the show. Sadly, Nanako's tale and her amazing breasts are not interesting enough to warrant watching subsequent installments of the series.