Dragon Half has many American fans. © 1993 Ryuusuke Mita/Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd./Victor Entertainment, Inc. Licensed by Victor Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.

Dragon Half.
OAV series (2 episodes), 1993. Director: Shinya Sadamitsu. 50 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $24.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

"THE FUNNIEST ANIME EVER MADE -- Just about everyone, actually"

That is the DVD's back-cover blurb. In this case the blurb is close to the truth, at least in regard to American tastes. Dragon Half was originally released in America on video in August 1995. Most fans have watched it multiple times. I have seen fans at an anime convention break off conversations to go enjoy it again in the video room. And this is despite the fact that the production was never completed! Dragon Half was planned as a four-episode OAV series, but the first two 25-minute videos (released in Japan on March 26 and May 25, 1993) bombed and the final two were never made. Japanese and American tastes certainly differ in this case; the American fans cannot get enough of it.

This zany parody of fantasy role-playing stereotypes (based on a comedy manga serial by Ryuusuke Mita in the Japanese gaming Monthly Dragon Magazine) features Mink, a teenybopper human-dragon halfbreed (her dragon-slaying father eloped with the dragon he was supposed to kill), who develops a crush on Dick Saucer, the handsome blond pop-singer/dragon-slayer media idol. Mink is a cute girl whose dragon wings and tail and flame breath give her secret away. She is also plagued by the minions of the stupid king who keep interrupting her attempts to get close to Saucer to get his autograph and maybe a kiss: Rosario, an inept sorcerer ("Here, little girl, have an apple!" "Do you think I'm stupid? It's probably poisoned!" "Curses; my Snow White strategy has failed!"); Princess Vina, Mink's rival as President of the Dick Saucer Fan Club (she's also an evil sorceress); and Damaramu, a hulking all-brawn, "very compact" brained warrior. Learning that Saucer will give a big concert in ten days in the capital, Mink enters "The Brutal, Killer Martial Arts Tournament" hoping to win enough money to travel there and buy a concert ticket. Mink wins, but the warriors whom she defeats swear revenge and join her enemies. This is where the production ends. The music over the closing credits is a has-to-be-heard-to-be-believed bouncy bubblegum-pop arrangement (by Kohei Tanaka) with nonsense lyrics of the main musical motifs from several of Beethoven's Symphonies. Both the dialogue and the visual gags are snappy and funny. The majority opinion of American fans is that Dragon Half is a must-see even if the story is incomplete. I concur.

Dragon Half is also notable as an early production of Production I.G, known today for its raw imagination and experimental advances in both plotting and animation technology with such productions as Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh, Blood: The Last Vampire and FLCL.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment's The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).