Yasuomi Umetsu's Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl packs 35 minutes tight with exquisite, artisanal violence

Legendary animator Yasuomi Umetsu (Kite, Mezzo Forte) dreams of girl assassins blasting their way through massive, bloody action movie set-pieces. A craftsman and a perfectionist, he looks to create the platonic ideal of a popcorn form, flawless in every detail from the fluttering of a jacket, to the precise shape of a gun, to the exact organ locations in which characters are shot.

Seeing his latest, the dense and beautiful 30-minute pilot movie Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl, in its extremely limited US theatrical run served largely as a demonstration of just how difficult it is to make a film at Umetsu’s exacting standard of quality. Indeed, a lengthy documentary on the film’s production dives deep, and in so doing it strongly implies that getting a second episode of this made would be an absolute god damn miracle.

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The heroine this time is a young engineer named Ubu, who in her orphaned teenage youth had the great misfortune of catching the eye of the monstrous creep Mr. Elegance, who runs the bounty hunting operation Archimedeath. In the present (dystopian cyberpunk) day, the grown Ubu works as a bounty hunter herself: “What’s the problem? I’m cleaning up the streets!” she spits at a cop who disapproves of her flashy methods.

But Mr. Elegance doesn’t like people moving in on his business, and he wants Ubu, so— sick fuck that he is— he solves his problems by killing Ubu in her home and putting her brain into a mechanical body that looks exactly like he did the first time he met her… back at the orphanage. Elegance holds the keys to this 14-year-old body, forcing Ubu into slavery as this monster’s literal murder-doll. Ubu has to kill contracts alongside her new co-workers, while she quietly plots Elegance’s well-deserved death. Once this setup is firmly established— but not without several legitimately astonishing action scenes— we cut to credits.

Despite its brevity, Clockwork Girl bursts with life; not just in its flashy action scenes or hyper-real digital effects (the water! My god!), but the kind of visual detail that tells a story by itself. The character designs (courtesy director Umetsu, of course) are loaded with these kinds of details: even if I hadn’t just described Mr. Elegance’s monstrous acts, you’d know he’s a weird asshole as soon as you saw that he’s got his dandy-man moustache tattooed over his lips. The world is built on visual details: the movie barely has the running time to explain it in words, and it doesn't try.

That Mr. Elegance— a man whose goal in life is to collect, imprison, own and ogle cute girls while commanding them to do his bidding— is the most unflattering possible representative of the otaku culture should slap you repeatedly in the face during this movie. (Sure didn’t over on Letterboxd.) I’m fond of the scene where Ubu opens her new wardrobe and finds it’s been curated by Elegance with a selection of little-girl dresses, sailor uniforms and other perv-pleasers. She practically spits in disgust before leaving to find something in her own style; not one that Elegance or indeed the audience would want to dress her up in.

On the other end of the culture, I love that Ubu packs the “tools” of her trade in her prized rolling backpack; visit Ikebukuro or a Comiket and you’ll see that the roller is the standard equipment for nerdy girls all over Japan, just with doujinshi and costuming stuff rather than guns and a decapitation boomerang.

Yeah, decapitation boomerang. Calling back to the OVA era, Clockwork Girl delivers above and beyond on elaborately rendered anime exploitation violence. The setting conveniently demands that only the decapitated head of a criminal need be delivered, and Ubu’s got a tool for that. The criminals she hunts are universally loathsome (surprise Norio Wakamoto appearance as a guy who gleefully blows up old people and little kids with grenades), and the chases in which she captures them are major property-damage events. I knew what I was getting into when I bought my ticket for this movie, and even in a half-hour film these scenes got me more than my money’s worth.

But most of the people in the theater had no idea, because this showing was misleadingly marketed as being 90 minutes long. This was technically true— that extra time was filled out with making-of documentaries— but nowhere in the film’s marketing does it say that the feature was this short. My friends and I knew that Virgin Punk had been in the works for years, and that there was only one half-hour episode. Aniplex shot high marketing Clockwork Girl, putting ads featuring the movie’s insane action animation before major Shonen Jump movies like Chainsaw Man, selling out the sole one-night Japanese-language showing of the movie here in New York and bringing anime’s most mainstream crowds to the theater.

If you haven’t been to see anime in a theater lately, it’s pretty normal now. It’s not just twenty obsessive nerds like me and my friends showing up ten minutes early and exercising the utmost respect to film, it’s a sold-out show where half the crowd shows up 30 minutes late. And you can imagine how that went over when the movie ended about 40 minutes after the start time.

As the credits rolled, nervous laughter started to rise up in the theater, then worried mumbling. The crowd began to convince itself that this was like one of those anime episodes where the credits were placed in the middle, and the movie would continue afterwards. Then it didn’t. Then the lights went up. Then the making-of documentaries started, and the crowd sat silently, shocked, in the realization that the movie was in fact over.

One couple showed up fully loaded with two large popcorn-and-soda combos 45 minutes in, so late that the movie had long ended and we were already into the making-of footage. They left about 15 minutes later. I wonder what they made of the show they had just spent $100 on.

The making-of documentary tells its own story: this was a long-discussed side project at the very busy Shaft studio (Monogatari and Madoka series), it is Umetsu’s totally uncompromising vision, and as such it took at least a few years to whip up just this one episode. Though Virgin Punk was conceived of as a series, nobody involved in the production has any idea if a second episode could ever happen.

Probably over-long for a first viewing, the documentary is clearly extra material intended for a home video release. You get the general idea— it takes a lot of time and piles of corrections for animators (and the sound team!) to reach Umetsu’s exacting standards, and that’s exactly why Clockwork Girl looks so damn good— but you watch that story play out over every imaginable detail, in many of the different departments.

The staff realizes that the back end of a gun is not drawn in exactly the shape of its real-life inspiration in a certain cut, so Umetsu supervises as the gun is digitally redrawn in every frame. Umetsu singles out the effects animator responsible for the movie’s stunning water effects. Umetsu in the recording studio lets the sound guys know that he wants a little more emphasis on the “severing” when a bad guy’s head gets sliced off. You get an hour of that, and as much as it greatly deepened my appreciation for the artistry, what it really made me want to do was watch Clockwork Girl again, and then take all this making-of material in. In the theater, the doc actually begins to feel like a force-feeding as the creatives repeat themselves and we revisit the same scenes.

Funny thing; the documentary actually closes with the creatives begging you to see the movie over and over again (Japanese anime otaku are the last people on earth who still do this) so that maybe that second episode might one day come to be. It’s a dense piece of work, and like I said, I really did want to see it again. But unfortunately for me, there were only two American showings (one subbed and one dubbed); I probably won’t be able to see it again until Aniplex puts it out on Blu-Ray for $100. Bummer thought.

You can’t see this movie as of this writing, but also, see it as soon as you can. In the absence of Virgin Punk, check out Umetsu's old OVAs Kite or Mezzo Forte. (Long story short, you'll actually want the edited/censored versions of those.)