Key the Metal Idol

It may not be the loudest, most violent, or most sensuous anime, but Key the Metal Idol is that very rare animal: a meta-anime, animation about (among other things) animation.

The 1994 OAV series Key the Metal Idol was created to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Pony Canyon animation studio, a fact that takes on a greater significance once the film is understood in all its layers. It’s a fifteen-part science-fiction picaresque quite unlike anything else in anime—a tour-de-force for director and writer Hiroaki Sato (the episodes are of varying lengths but have a total running time of almost nine and a half hours).

The main word in that description, however, is “picaresque.” A literary form with a long and important history, the picaresque is characterized by a satirical tone, improbable coincidences, characters popping into and out of the plot for no apparent reason, dizzying changes of (preferably exotic) scenery, and an altogether fantastic journey for the protagonist, either a naïve youth or a lovably sly rogue. In Western high culture, the best example of the picaresque form is probably Voltaire’s satiric novel Candide. Yet, as can be imagined, many of these elements can be found (to one degree or another) in many anime. Key just happens to have more of them than most, and is in its own way one of the best examples of the picaresque form created in the twentieth century.

Unlocking Key

The story opens in present-day rural Japan. A young girl named Tokiko Mima, usually called Key, may actually be a robot, as she claims. Her grandfather is, after all, a noted if eccentric inventor. Or she may be a pubescent human being with a psychosis that makes her think that she’s a robot. In any case, the people of the village, including Key’s schoolmates, accept that she is what she says she is. One day she is sent home from school because her grandfather has died. The grandfather leaves an audio tape telling Key that, even though she’s a robot, she can become human—if she receives the love and friendship of thirty thousand people. Without a second thought, she sets off for Tokyo, where she hopes to emulate the career of the top idol singer of the day, Miho Utsuse. (As far as we know, Key has no experience as an entertainer, but that doesn’t seem to matter.)

On her first night in Tokyo, just as she is about to run afoul of a porno movie producer, Key happens to bump into an old friend from the village, a girl roughly her own age named Sakura. This girl is everything that Key is not: loud where Key is quiet, active where Key is sedentary, confrontational where Key is passive. You’d think there’s no reason why Sakura should hover over Key so solicitously, even taking it upon herself to try to launch Key’s career as a singer. As we find out much later, there’s a perfectly good reason: Sakura and Tokiko may have the same father. As for Key’s mother, that’s where the story really begins . . .

Where the story will end is back home, at least figuratively. Once again, conservative values assert themselves in providing a context for an otherwise outrageous plot.

It Takes A Village

Key was born in the kind of pastoral Japanese countryside that seemingly hardly exists going into the twenty-first century, a village of about a hundred people in a secluded valley. She has psychic abilities, a legacy she shares with her mother and grandmother and generations of Mima family women before her.¹

These women were miko, priestesses at the village’s Shinto shrine. Tokiko’s mother Toyoko and grandmother Tomiko were subjected to Grandfather Mima’s experiments trying to harness their psychic energy; after she was born, Tokiko was hidden in plain sight by the suggestion that she was a robot. The point of all this was to shield her and her powers from the boss of Ajo Heavy Industries, who first approached Professor Mima about building mechanical self-propelled bombs during World War II.

All in the Family

The professor who saw Tomiko Mima dance in Key the Metal Idol proposed marriage to her and changed his last name to his wife’s. Gendo Rokubungi proposed to Yui Ikari in Evangelion, and changed his name to Gendo Ikari. The custom of a man marrying into his wife’s family and taking her surname as his own does not exist in the United States, but is allowed for in Japanese culture.

The Japanese call this practice and the person involved mukoyoshi, a word made up of the Chinese characters for “son-in-law” and “adopted child.” As in the West, the norm in contemporary Japan has come to be the nuclear family, in which the wife takes the husband’s family name and they set themselves apart from their parents as a new family. But Japan has an ancient and powerful tradition of marriage-as-clan-membership, and a man may become a mukoyoshi if there is no male heir in the wife’s family to carry on the family name. By adopting his wife’s family name, he becomes the successor to his father-in-law as the legal head of the household. Men who become mukoyoshi are typically second or third sons who do not jeopardize the continuity of their own family name in the process (since the first son is regarded as the inheritor and continuer of the lineage). This practice of adult adoption is still the most prevalent form of adoption in Japan.

The family of miko, the inventor, and the industrialist came together first when Key’s grandfather came to the village and saw Tomiko dancing. This was not the wild ecstatic dance of a miko entering a trance state, but was purely for entertainment. As she went through traditional stylized moves onstage, a wooden marionette without strings copied her every move, thanks to her psychic abilities. The professor proposed marriage almost immediately, but did so in order to study and try to harness Tomiko’s powers.

These powers were found to have two wellsprings. One was the continued line of miko in the Mima clan, continuing from one female temple performer to the next. The other was the villagers themselves, whose love and devotion empowered the performers. This is the most blatant parallel between Key’s calling as a miko and her decision to be an idol singer.

But another connection is even more important. The particular shrine served by generations of Mima women is specifically dedicated to the goddess Uzume. Remember the Kojiki and the story of the cave? Uzume was the dancer whose antics caused the audience to react in such a way that Amaterasu was tempted to look out of the cave, thus restoring the sun and saving the world. Just to make it all blatantly clear, the president of the Miho Utsuse Fan Club refers to Uzume as “the goddess of show business.”

“Welcome my friends, to the show that never ends. . . .”

Uzume can certainly be called a goddess of the popular culture, and in doing so we come full circle. In spite of a cult leader’s dire warnings that Key must become a shamaness for his cult instead of a pop singer, Key’s career path is basically the same whether she becomes a miko or a singer. Each exists because of the need of the audience. They need to see a certain kind of theater take place, theater which may be novel but which is also built on a traditional foundation. Of course the idol singer tradition may not be as old as Shinto, but the emotional investment by the audience is just as great. They both came to see more than just theater; whether at the shrine or at the concert hall, the audience wants a kind of miracle.

And this is just as true of those who draw manga and produce anime, as well as those who enjoy them. Whether the artist and the audience see robots who act like people (Astro Boy), or people who act like robots (Key), or children who pilot robots (Giant Robo), or pigs who pilot airplanes (Porco Rosso), or even something as real and as prosaic as a schoolgirl drawing a picture of a horse (Chibi Maruko-chan) or putting new words to an old song (Mimi o Sumaseba)—all of these and more are miraculous, in their own way. Maybe they exist in our place and time, maybe they used to exist, maybe they never did exist and never will. Like all art, though, these images have their own degree of power, as long as there is an audience.

And now we can see Key the Metal Idol as more than just an elaborate sci-fi tale of idol singers and warrior robots. It can also be seen as a meta-anime: an animated film about animated films. This isn’t as direct as Takeshi Mori’s infamous Otaku no Video, a pair of mockumentaries from the ’80s about the life and trials of an anime fan; instead, it sets up an elaborate metaphor of the power of art—even popular culture—to be capable of simple entertainment, or magic bordering on the miraculous—or both.

Ajo tried to harness the power of the Mima priestesses during World War II to create a self-propelled bomb. This came to nothing, but it inspired his later attempts at using the psychic power of the miko to create warrior-robots. This is another way the power of an audience works in the popular culture. The images do not always convey examples of gentle hearts and noble deeds; sometimes they can be twisted to promote sinister ends, or to pander to bad taste and worse instincts.

The good news is that the worst side of the popular culture seldom seems to last for long. Sometimes racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and other inhumane messages pop up in the culture. Fortunately, bad messages seldom result in good art. They may have a brief vogue, but they eventually go their way when the majority of the culture would rather hear a different message.

A message that even an outsider can understand, if that outsider knows what to look for, and how it may be seen.

1. “Most anime miko are young girls, and in most cases their powers are more related to heredity than training. Moreover, that heredity is almost always along the female line. This idea is most clearly found in the manga Mai: The Psychic Girl” (Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation [Chicago: Open Court, 1996], 127). See also the sisters Kikyo and Kaede in InuYasha and the Devil Hunter Yoko series.