![]() Nataru would come to live on Alta and became good friends with Birdy, and the two often engaged in adventures around the planet as children. He was saved by a member of East Alta, Dusk, rescuing him and taking him in as his own child. Nataru was an Ixuran experiment who was kidnapped as a baby from Cephon Labs by the terrorist organization East Alta, only for his execution to be recommended by the rest of the group for his apparent uselessness (as the group was unaware that he was in fact able to bend the space-time continuum to his will). In the Japanese version, he was voiced by Masaya Matsuzake as an adult and Sayaka Ohara as a child, while in the English version, he was voiced by Eric Vale as an adult and Kate Oxley as a child. Despite beginning as a well-meaning and selfless individual, after the Ryunka killed countless innocent people, including his best friend, he became consumed by rage and became a merciless serial killer, hunting down everyone responsible for the Ryunka experiment who brought it to Earth. Nataru Shinmyou is a childhood friend of Birdy Cephon Altera, the main protagonist of Birdy The Mighty Decode, and had been in love with her for many years. I'm sure the Japanese track would be easier on the ears, but it wouldn't solve the problems with the shallow script, tame direction, or lackluster concept behind it all.Spare you? Why should I? I'm sure the people who died here wanted to be spared! But they didn't even get a chance to beg for their lives, did they? They died because of you, and now YOU'RE going to join them Faroi! The actor who does the voice of Tsutomu speaks in a grating high-pitched whine that kills off any sympathy we might have mustered for the character. To make matters worse, the English dubbing is some of the worst I've ever heard. When I learned that no comments had been posted to IMDb about it, I watched the series again in its entirety to see if it had improved any. I never liked it enough to want to upgrade to the bilingual DVD edition that came out in 2004 and which is now out of print. I remember taking a long time to see the whole thing back then, if I ever did. I have this series on a two-tape VHS edition in its English-dubbed version, which I purchased in 1999. My guess is that these two had a contract to fulfill and a short deadline and dashed this off without a great deal of thought or effort. Nor would you imagine that this was written by Chiaki Konaka, the man who gave us the scripts for "Serial Experiments Lain," "Armitage III," "Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040" and any number of highly imaginative sci-fi series he is connected with. There are absolutely none of the graphic stylistic touches one would associate with the director of WICKED CITY, NINJA SCROLL or VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST. (Didn't "Ranma ½" mine similar territory successfully for 161 episodes?) It's hard to believe that Yoshiaki Kawajiri is credited with directing something this bland and undistinguished. But even then, it's not staged to be funny. And there is one scene where Tsutomu's father barges into the bathroom as the boy is supposedly bathing only to encounter a nude Birdy. Yes, there's a scene or two where he switches genders in front of his high school girlfriend, but it's never played for laughs. Besides, the comic potential of a high school boy coping with the presence in his body of a beautiful, voluptuous intergalactic space warrior is never adequately explored. ![]() There's never any suspense as Birdy fights one android or cyborg per episode in the first three episodes, none of which represent any significant threat to her. ![]() It's slow going and lacking in any of the excitement that we usually find in anime sci-fi action. Nor is it ever clear why some space federation is involved in all of this. Her motive is never spelled out and the implications of Japan's involvement in research like this is never dealt with. Eventually-and way too late in the narrative for anyone to care anymore-we learn that it all has something to do with secret experiments in creating super-soldiers that were begun by the Japanese during the war and are now being revived by a high-powered villainess, Christella Revi, who comports herself like a fashionable corporate head and directs her team to poison Tokyo's water supply with a serum derived from those experiments. In the first three episodes she fights various cyborg and android creatures, for reasons that are never terribly clear. "Birdy the Mighty" is a four-part anime OAV (made-for-video) series about a super-powered intergalactic policewoman, Birdy Cephon Altera, who takes over the body of a hapless Tokyo high school boy named Tsutomu and has to switch back and forth with him when danger approaches. ![]()
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