As a successor to Kite, the later OVA also features a killer girl, and one that looks somewhat similar to Sawa of the original. Excerpt from Kite Liberator animation by Keita Matsumotoīut most of times it’s not the animation that the sequel fails at. On the other hand, there are some definitely weird cuts that feel like they came from a completely different decade compared to the incredible CG. The character designs are clearly aimed at being as moe as possible and it was also more or less a success. 2D stuff also most of times worked well, action scenes were done at least competently, though for instance two guys shooting at each other dozens of bullets while being completely unshielded and not even grazing one another is a bit annoying. Even a Hollywood production might get away using something of this caliber. Some CG space stuff was so incredibly animated that it can easily best many anime projects that use CG even now, almost 10 years later. Going on a little tangent, the animation actually might be the best part of the OVA. You won’t be the first to question whether space and assassin girls really complement each other that well, but apparently at the time nobody objected. The director Yasuomi Umetsu probably wanted to make the sequel more diverse to capture more audiences, and in the true 80s and 90s fashion he chose to add some space adventures as well as some cute girls because that’s what people like now. Well, I might end up only reciting all the weird plot elements, but as there’s little to talk about characters or themes and I don’t recommend watching it in the first place, I guess it’ll be fine. Kite Liberator is another OVA, also about an hour-long, but its essence is completely different from its predecessor. Why a girl that can shred her opponents to pieces would do nothing and keep getting used in all sorts of ways for some years only to rebel at a random moment? It might have been an interesting character study, but Kite doesn’t bother to offer the slightest idea what really happens in Sawa’s head.Īnd then, 10 years later, there comes a sequel of sorts. Certainly the OVA doesn’t just state the fact “the protagonist Sawa is a killer” and illustrate it with buckets of blood – there’s some stuff to make you think, but in the very end I don’t find it that satisfactory. The idea of having an assassin girl stuck with some pretty bad people might have been developed into something meaningful, but Kite rather spends time for the content that got deleted in the shorter version. And Kite in all these respects feels very much a child of its time, especially knowing that certainly not all old OVAs were good. The animation itself with its roughness gives a nostalgic feeling, something distinct form that lighter computer-enhanced art nowadays. There’s a certain charm that 80s and 90s OVAs have – that of dark settings, lots of violence, and, in this case, girls with guns. It’s plain to see why Kite managed to earn some fan-following.

Well, it depends on your view towards hentai, but that’s not the aspect I want to discuss now. Just for the record, as far as I know from little research, plotwise (not “plot”-wise) the shorter version is as good, and might even be better without mostly unnecessary 15 additional minutes. The shorter version somehow ended up being on Crunchyroll, and there’s where I watched it, so don’t expect me to talk anything about hentai stuff. Technically, it’s a hentai, but there exists a shorter version (approximately 45 min long compared to 60 min) that has all that risky stuff cut out. Western audiences seem to enjoy an OVA from 1998 called Kite.

Kite liberator gif