Cutie Honey Universe

Episode 4

Cutie Honey Universe is quickly becoming a series at odds with itself. There's a sense of wanting to adhere to its classic cartoonish roots, but it's also been trying to tell an arc-based story within a modern one-cour framework. This week's episode does take a step forward, but then falls not just one step back into its persistent status quo, but another step thanks to some misplaced bad habits.

At least the positive can be highlighted first since it kicks off the episode. The most welcome development is that Honey has already tired of just reacting to the monster-of-the-week formula instigated by Panther Claw and wants to take more direct action. It's a good idea for a series in this position, and given CHU's propensity for lighter elements, it makes me wish Cutie Honey Universe would go even further with the meta-jokes. A classic romp like this one could absolutely support bits with the characters commenting on their archetypal situation. Instead, this just provides an opportunity for Genet to ‘assist’ Honey in an infiltration plan to further her nebulous agenda.

As a result, we get a new Honey transformation in the idol-based Misty Honey, along with a dance number that would have been a great place to insert the classic Cutie Honey theme song, but sadly no dice on that one. At least there are other crowd-pleasing elements to this episode. The idea of Honey infiltrating the enemy's turf, complete with a disguise, is right out of the classic anime's playbook. She even does a variation of her iconic appearance speech, which ups the hype for the big fight scene of this episode. Even as the fights keep making use of the anime's speed-line dimension, they've found ways to continually spice things up, like bringing in masses of land and rocks to affect the fight. In general, this episode just has more to do action-wise, so it looks better than last week's. If nothing else, it seems like Cutie Honey Universe can be counted on to deliver entertaining super-heroine action.

Beyond Honey's initiative, the story development for the villains is another plus. It's a comparatively short scene, but seeing some internal conflict in Panther Claw as Jill's subordinates question the same motives we still don't understand is refreshing. It helps that we seem to finally have a recurring villain character besides Jill in the form of Tarantula (sporting a terrific update of her classic design). It's already established that this show has too many elements to really keep track of (Natsuko isn't even in this episode after her epiphany in the last one), but Tarantula's dynamic with Jill is one the show would do well to keep leaning on. In fact, all the most interesting stuff in the show so far has focused on Jill/Genet's motives. It's no wonder that Honey wanted to take the focus back in her own show.

Unfortunately, that focus comes at the cost of her own dignity this week. Fanservice is of course going to be an integral part of any Gō Nagai production, and things seem par for the course in this episode's first couple acts. The unconscious captured ‘Honey’ actually incurs the first use of the ol' ‘Buy The Blu-Rays’ lights, and demonstrating that Honey's transformation dissolves as she runs out of energy is a perfectly fine use of fanservice as well. This also leads to an appreciably clever moment where Honey uses her transformation device not to access a new form, but to disguise herself as a statue.

But that statue bit leads into the most divisive part of the episode, an agonizingly long segment where Danbee and Junpei unintentionally assault the statue-fied Honey. It's not that there's no place for sex comedy in a show like this, and it's even thrived in some of the earlier episodes, but this scene is simply unfunny, disconnected from the rest of the episode's plot, and goes on far too long. Maybe you'll find more humor in an old man and a little boy dry-humping a statue that's actually a disguised android woman, but personally I was with Honey in just begging them to leave. The fanservice in Cutie Honey works better when it's incidental to the action, like making those cool fights the show excels at and making them sexy in the process. The show doesn't need to bother with these annoying attempts at skeevy sketch comedy.

So that last scene not only derails all the fun and goodwill the episode delivered, it also abruptly stops Honey's whole proactive infiltration scheme to reestablish the status quo. That's a shame, since the first half of the episode, along with parts of earlier ones, showed that this series might work better if it shifted into a proper serial format. As it stands, we've got about two-thirds of a great episode with a not-so-great chunk that really drags it down.

Rating: C+

Cutie Honey Universe is currently streaming on HIDIVE.