Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan

a.k.a. Club-To-Death Angel Dokuro-chan

a.k.a. Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan

Genre: Comedy
Company: Hal Film Maker
Format: 8 episodes
Dates: 3/12/2005 to 9/10/2005

Dokuro-chan is an angel who ventures into the past to prevent a fellow angel, Sabato-chan, from assassinating a young boy named Sakura-kun. The reason that Sakura is marked for death is that, in the future, one of his inventions will make all females de-age to 12-years-old and become immortal. Interestingly enough, a death threat is one of the least of Sakura’s problems as Dokuro is constantly clubbing him to death and reviving him. She also turns the class president into a monkey, and Sakura-chan gets the entire student body to think he’s a pedophile.

summary by Mugs

 

Reviewed: 07/11/2006 by
Grade: 77% 

Highs: Some good running gags; short and sweet episodes prevent jokes from getting old

Lows: Di Gi Charat-level plots; no in-depth characters

In somewhat of the same vein as Ebichu the Housekeeping Hamster, Dokuro-chan takes a preposterous concept and runs with it for a short, eight-episode run of equally short, 13-minute episodes. Much like the aforementioned Ebichu, this anime’s episode length works out for the best as the plotlines do not have nearly enough meat to flesh out a standard length episode. The brevity helps keep the general lack of a plot and character development from being a distraction and allows the viewer to focus on the show’s endless assault of jokes.

The characters are more caricatures than anything approaching fleshed-out and believable. The protagonist, Sabato-chan, could be almost any number of shounen anime heroes, wandering around haplessly confounded by the sheer insanity around him, yet always marching on cheerfully. Dokuro-chan exists merely to “accidentally” show some skin to Sakura and then proceed to violently murder and revive, ad infinitum. Most of the other characters on the show don’t even warrant remembering their name besides Sabato-chan; her frequent attempts to kill Sakura induce the audience to remember her through sheer repetition, though in truth she’s probably even more one-dimensional than Dokuro-chan.

The tone of the show is decidedly lowbrow, ranging from juvenile (angels get explosive diarrhea if you remove their halos) to comedic violence (mostly dished out through the liberal use of Dokuro’s bat, Excaliborg) to pedophilia jokes and students randomly transformed into live-action monkey heads. Interspersed within the sequence of random events, there occasionally crops up a moment of attempted sincerity between the characters that is almost always immediately followed by an accidental ecchi moment and capped off with a violent death.

This show invokes the feeling of Excel Saga, and fans of that show will probably find themselves enjoying this one at least on some level. Overall, if you can laugh at the nonsensical, the absurd and over-the-top violence, you should find enough to keep you chuckling during its short run.

 

Club-To-Death Angel Dokuro-chan can be downloaded legally in the United States HERE.