Plastic Little: Not What You Think

She’s young, tough, a demon on a motorcycle and shoots to kill. She catches whales for pets. It’s an action story, and a love story, with some of the best-looking nudes in anime.

You may think that you have the 1994 OAV Plastic Little figured out just by hearing a few details. The main characters are two girls, sixteen and seventeen years old. Once they meet, they spend the rest of the story together: cavorting in a bathhouse in the nude, sleeping in the same bed, going up to the hills to watch the sunrise (almost always a prelude to romance in Japanese pop culture), followed by breakfast at a seaside cafe. One even tells the other “suki desu,” which can be translated “I love you.” So it’s at least partly a lesbian romance, right? More than a few Western watchers seem to think so.

The problem with this view is that, in Japanese, suki desu can mean “I love you,” but that doesn’t mean it must mean it. In fact, since this form of speech is a more casual way of expressing one’s love (as opposed to ai shite imasu), it would be more properly translated “I like you.” And in fact, Elysse says “Tita no mono ga suki desho” (“Tita, I guess I like you”). When you get right down to it, Plastic Little is not about lesbians; in fact, it’s not about sex at all.

There is, however, nudity and quite a bit of it. This OAV was created by Satoshi Urushibara, who has built his manga career on lovingly detailed female nudes (as compared to the generic nudes in some anime, which are about as anatomically detailed as a Barbie™ doll). He previously produced a work titled Chirality, and has worked before with director Kinji Yoshimoto, notably on a rather boring, by-the-numbers sword and sorcery anime called Legend of Lemnear. By contrast, Plastic Little can hardly be said to be boring.

Ship Shape

After a prologue in an underground laboratory, in which a scientist (you can tell by the white lab coat) places his daughter into an escape pod to the surface just before he is killed by the evil general (you can tell by his outrageously huge shoulder-pads; this parody of Darth Vader’s costume in Star Wars has become another part of anime shorthand), we cut to a resort hotel. We hear a whiny voice with a request all too familiar to Japanese parents in the summer: “Umi ni detai yo!” Its meaning is simply “I wanna go to the beach!” but it has a slightly different literal translation: “I want to go to sea.” In this case, the latter is more appropriate.

In a hotel room littered with pizza boxes and a Monopoly game, we see the speaker of the last sentence: a teenage tangle of bedclothes and brown hair. She yawns, and that gives the audience its next clue. All we can see in her mouth are two little fangs. This doesn’t mean that she’s a vampire or a demon or one of the many cat-girls in anime. In the shorthand of anime, fangs can also denote an alien. So not only are we not in Kansas, Toto, we aren’t even on planet Earth—no matter how much it looks like Earth.

She calls for her companions—Mei, Nichol, Mikhail, Balboa, Roger—but they seem to have abandoned her. As she dresses, a voice-mail starts to explain things for us. The girl’s name is Tita, and, while the others are the crew of a ship, she’s the captain! However, the voice-mail message from Nichol, the teenage navigator, tells Tita that, having overslept, she may as well bring lunch to the ship. One more detail: on the elevator, we find that her pockets are stuffed with candy, which she shares with some children. This establishes her yasashii credentials and also reminds the viewer that this planet, named Yietta, definitely isn’t the United States, where children are warned from the cradle not to take candy from strangers. Japan, however, is different: just as hitchhiking is not perceived as dangerous—in anime or in real life—the general notion of doing deliberate harm to children is so aberrant as to seem almost impossible.¹ While Tita is still packing the groceries into her scooter, the scientist’s daughter runs into her—literally. She’s being chased by huge, heavily armed police, so Tita decides to even the odds by pulling the girl onto her cycle, barely making an escape.

They’re considerably the worse for wear when they get back to Tita’s ship, the ChaCha Maru.² A hot bath is in order, so we get to see the two disrobed girls in a fantasia of an onsen that would put most Japanese hot springs (or American water-slide parks) to shame. As they frolic in the slides and waterfalls, Nichol and Roger try to sneak a peek at them; this little bit of voyeurism is, believe it or not, as close to sex as Plastic Little gets.

More important to the audience is that the scene establishes their ages. In the Confucian-based society of Japan, age sometimes makes all the difference in a relationship. Anyone who’s seen the American broadcasts of the Japanese TV series Iron Chef knows that it’s one of those genre-blasting hybrid entertainments common in Japan: in this case, a mix of haute cuisine and TV wrestling. The challengers are all presented to the audience with filmed biographies establishing their credentials. For some reason, the subtitled American broadcasts never include one detail in the spoken Japanese introduction: the age of the challenger.

It’s important in Japanese society to establish relative age in a relationship in order to establish relative position. Yes, it matters that Tita, at seventeen, is a year older than her companion (whose name is Elysse). This makes Tita a “big sister type.” “The big-sister type,” writes Cherry, “leads and looks after her underlings on the job, at school or anywhere else. . . . She will be kind to those younger or weaker than herself. . . . [O]lder sisters are authority figures in Japan, where age always confers privileges and responsibilities.”³ And, although these two girls may act like equals and call each other by name throughout the anime (instead of Elysse referring to Tita as oneesan, or elder sister), the plot reflects their difference, from Tita’s taking the initiative to rescue Elysse to the fact that Tita, in effect, owns the water-park—in fact, she owns the whole ship.

How does a teenage girl end up as a ship’s captain, and how does any ship rate this kind of pleasure facility? We find out that Captain Tita is the daughter of the original captain of the ChaCha Maru, who was lost at sea six years earlier. Like her father, she’s a Pet Shop Hunter, capturing wild sea-dwelling animals for sale as pets. Of course, when your ship has to sail the seas of the planet Yietta (seas which are made of clouds instead of water!) chasing whales, sharks, eels and other large marine life, it has to be pretty large. The bath was built in a seldom-used holding tank, which could easily have held a whale. Meanwhile, as the girls finally get to know each other, the three adults on board (Mei, Mikhail, and Balboa—Roger, who is black, seems to be an older adolescent, or perhaps a younger adult) read in the local newspaper that Elysse was supposed to have been killed with her father in a laboratory explosion. They realize that they may be caught in a political situation too hot to handle. . . .

For the remainder of the OAV, Tita plays Luke Skywalker to Elysse’s Princess Leia. In the final scene, having dispatched the villain, neutralized the doomsday device (a perversion of the beneficial machine that was the life work of Elysse’s father) and destroyed the entire Yiettan navy (don’t ask, it’s too technical), Tita asks Elysse to stay on board. Elysse declines, saying that she wants to continue her father’s work. Tita understands; after all, she’s continuing her father’s work as a Pet Shop Hunter. She understands something else about Elysse, and admits to why she stopped to help her in the first place: she recognized in Elysse “the look of a girl who’d lost her father and [not] gotten over it.”

This contextualizes the Tita/Elysse friendship not in terms of sex, but in terms of group membership. Even if they belong to a group of two, it’s still a group, and such affiliations are a vital part of living life Japanese. The relationship is neither titillating nor threatening; it’s not even sexual. (Sleeping in the same bed? That’s all it was: sleeping. They established a link even though they’d just met that day, and even if they couldn’t verbalize it as such: that they had both lost their fathers. They slept together not for sex but for skinship.) They’re just doing what their Japanese audience does. Even if they do it on a planet where whales swim through gaseous seas, to be caught for pets by teenage girls. . . .

1. “The Japanese must be the kindest people in the world to thumbing foreigners, and the main difficulty is to avoid taking unfair advantage of them” (Ian McQueen, Japan: A Travel Survival Kit [South Yarra, Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1981], 35).

2. Another indication that Yietta is like Japan: virtually every Japanese boat has a name ending in maru. In 2001 we heard of the Ehime Maru, a fishing boat run by a vocational high school, which sank when it was rammed by a U.S. Navy submarine. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, James Kirk became notorious at Starfleet Academy for solving the insoluble problem of the Kobayashi Maru. Even a rowboat, in an early manga episode of Maison Ikkoku, is named Isoya Maru. (Speaking of Maison Ikkoku, one boarding-house resident is a hostess at a bar that is also called ChaCha Maru. I have no idea of the connection, if any, between that bar and Captain Tita’s ship.)

3. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 16–17.