Otaku no Video

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Otaku no Video

おたくのビデオ (Otaku's Video: Graffiti of the Otaku Generation)
Genre	Comedy, Parody
OVA
Directed by	Takeshi Mori
Studio	Gainax
No. of episodes	2
Released	1991

Otaku no Video (おたくのビデオ, Otaku no Bideo^?) is a comedy anime spoofing the life and culture of otaku, or Japanese media fans, as well as the history of Gainax, its creators. It is noted for its mix of conventional documentary film styles (with actual film, no less), with a more traditional anime storytelling fashion. It is licensed in the United States by AnimEigo.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The main character is your average Japanese guy, Ken Kubo, living quite happy with his girlfriend Yoshiko and being a member of his college's tennis team, until he met one of his former friends from high school, Tanaka. After Tanaka brings him into his circle of friends (all of them being otaku, too: a female illustrator, an information geek, a martial artist, a weapons collector...), Kubo soon makes the wish to become the Otaking, the King of all the otaku.

He manages to create his own anime, open shops, and even build the equivalent of Disneyland for otaku. Later, he loses it all when one of his rivals (who's also married to Yoshiko, who never fully forgave Kubo for abandoning her) takes control of his enterprise, but after Kubo and Tanaka make amends with each other and he falls in love with the manga author Misuzu, he's back into business and successfully takes over the anime industry with a magical girls show, "Misty May". The video ends with Ken and Tanaka returning to Otakuland in a post apocalyptic submerged Japan and finding a robot being piloted by their old otaku friends. Then they fly off to space in search of the planet of Otakus.

[edit] A Portrait of an Otaku

A particular humorous and controversial part of Otaku no Video was the inclusion of the documentary excerpts, titled "A Portrait of an Otaku". In these segments, the documentary crew would interview an anonymous otaku, typically ashamed at being a fan and whose face are censored with a mosaic and have their voices digitally masked. The mock documentary segments serve as a counterpoint to the anime: while the anime emphasizes the camaradrie, creativity, and dreams of mainstream acceptance of otaku, the mock interviews exaggerate its negative qualities. The subjects run the gamut of the otaku subculture: the interviews cover a cosplayer who now works as a computer programmer and outright denies his cosplay days, even when presented with photographic evidence, but keeps his Char Aznable helmet in his desk drawer, an airsoft otaku, a garage kit otaku, and a shut-in who videorecords television programs for trade, but has not actually watched anything he's recorded. The interviews also contain fans who engage in a range of illict or unsavory activities, such as cel thieves, a pornography fan attempting to manufacture glasses to defeat the mosaic censorship common in Japanese porno videos and who is shown masturbating during the interview, and a computer gamer who is obsessed with a character in a hentai computer game (Noriko from Gunbuster who makes a cameo in Gainax's own hentai game: Cybernetic High School).

It is believed that all the subjects in the Portrait of An Otaku segments were Gainax employees at the time of filming. The first otaku interviewed bore a remarkable resemblance to Toshio Okada, a principal founder in Gainax, in both background and physical appearance. The gaijin otaku, Shon Hernandez, has been confirmed to have been Craig York, who with Shon Howell and Lea Hernandez, whose names were borrowed for the character, were the main staff of General Products USA, an early western branch of Gainax's merchandising in the early 1990s. The interview with "Shon Hernandez" has been a point of contention with Lea Hernandez, who, in an interview with PULP magazine, noted that the interview was unscripted and that Craig York had been fairly sincere in his thoughts and had felt that Gainax insulted their American members. In the interview, the words spoken by Shon Hernandez in the background are noticeably different from what is shown on screen via subtitle (which is based on the Japanese voiceover "translation").

At FanimeCon 2003, Hiroshi Sato, an animator and another Gainax member, mentioned that he had been one of the interviews in Otaku no Video. It is speculated that Sato was the garage kit otaku, who used a simple reversal of his name for the pseudonym "Sato Hiroshi" for the interview.