Title: Hen Zemi
Genre: Comedy
Rating: 3.0/10
Summary: Matsutaka Nanako is a normal university student, who happened to enroll in an Abnormal Physiology seminar. She tries to keep her mental state sound, but other abnormal classmates start to influence her personality…
Review: Oh so much regret for telling you guys I would watch this anime no matter what. Why would I make such a promise knowing that so many anime out there have just let me down? And the spring season wasn’t exactly the cream of the crop. Hen Zemi was another oen of those anime that had me wondering where the anime industry is headed. What do people find funny nowadays? I’m hoping that I wasn’t the only one who found this series of short clips a bit too over the top. Crude humor has its place and time. It can be very well done, it can even get me to “laugh out loud”. However, I don’t think watching a bunch of guys eating off a naked girls body, and pulling things from WITHIN her body to eat, very funny. No, instead I just feel like a creeper sitting in my room praying no one walks in to judge me.
The art style can be compared to
Mitsudomoe except instead of little girls and boys, it’s grown up girls and boys. It had the same bubbly features, lack of noses, and strange redness at the joints. The red joints, or basically anywhere with a curve, always got to me. I never understood what artistic value they served. I suppose they were meant to be sexy, or show a curvy woman. It always seemed like the characters needed to put on more sunscreen or watched out for further rug burns. However, for a short I would say that the animation (crude or not) was pretty good. Compared to other short series it may actually be able to hold its own against full length anime series. As I said earlier it is very similar to
Mitsudomoe which was a full length anime, two season at that. However, unlike
Mitsudomoe, this anime’s humor and story were far less entertaining. And a little uncomfortable…
Hen Zemi already lets you know what the anime is about from the get-go. The word “abnormal” doesn’t even begin to describe the kind of things that take place in this anime. It is a strange mixture of attempting to arouse the audience while simultaneously grossing them out. It is one of those anime that make you think to yourself, “Why do I keep watching week after week?”. Well it is possible that you were sucked into the world of abnormality, possibly because you have a secret desire to become one with your abnormal self. Or because you promised your readers you would watch the anime to the very end like me. Either way, there is some weird wiring going on in your attic. My belief is that the anime was trying to bring up answers to questions people never asked, or secretly ask in the dark corners of their psyche. I personally have never wondered about fart bubbles in the bath, or fantasized about a girl peeing in a bag during a long car trip. Oh yeah, if I had to go through it so do you. The entire time I sat there watching episode after episode, there was always a part of me that thought, “Ok they’ll leave it at that. They will leave something to the imagination or assumptions”. Nope. They went the whole nine yards. The consumption of seaweed that has been some how combined with a girl’s bodily fluids was a lot more common than I expected. Whether it be a nice new years dinner where you use a naked girl as a table top, or possibly just the shear curiosity of what it may taste like,
Hen Zemi kept it going. I didn’t think that a girl’s “arousal” face would ever creep me out. That is until one of the characters, Miwako, proved me wrong. I don’t think I’ve seen so much drool, sweat, and steam coming off an anime character at once. Especially not multiple times in one episode. Alas, it wasn’t like she was the only character that gave me the heebie-jeebies. Matched with the shark tooth professor Kenji, mannequin loving Hishiyasu, and pervert expert Komugi,
Hen Zemi brought me into the world of abnormality I never knew existed. Never will I hear the word “power” the same way again. Nanako was the voice of reason in this house of insanity, but you end up just feeling sorry for her as she falls victim to all of Komugi’s traps. There was no real point to this anime, nothing of value or use came out of it. One could argue that it did tap into the unknown realms of human psychology, but we all know that isn’t true. This anime wasn’t some giant scientific experiment, nor was it some deep, meaningful answer to our thoughts on the unknown. A dwindling hope that they would pull some messed up romance together in the end kept me going. I will admit there was some romance in there, even a bit of drama. That is until everything lost all merit because at least one person in the group was turned on by the matter. I will admit that there was the very rare chuckle I got out of the show, usually during one of the “slower” episodes. And I actually found myself pretty interested in the HishiyasuxAnna pairing. If you can call it a pairing. I think I am mentally scarred by the fact that I have become aware that someone somewhere is turned on by me clipping my toe nails. Or possibly by my dead skin cell floating in the air. I know that somehow this review, basically written proof that I watch such an anime, will come back and bite me in the ass.
The soundtrack wasn’t too bad, it was actually quite good. The opening was an instrumental with a pretty cool animation. It mixed in real life images with animated. I actually thought the concept of ripping off a piece of a picture reveals another one underneath that works with the top layer. The ending wasn’t half bad either. It was basically a pretty upbeat song with some fan service thrown into the background.
Final statements: If you are into extremely perverted/gross comedy then this is probably an anime dedicated to you. Or if you’re just into perverted/gross things this is an anime dedicated to you. I found little to no enjoyment while watching Hen Zemi. I would usually watch this anime before any other so I could forget about the events that took place during that episode. It’s an avoid watch guys, you shouldn’t even need to wonder.
