Mezzo DSA – Episode 1

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re diving into another property by Yasuomi Umetsu, the distinctive director of Kite, Mezzo Forte, and Wizard Barristers, alongside an eclectic scattering of OVA contributions and other projects across the last few decades. Umetsu’s unique aesthetic style and dedication to kinetic action drama mean that although his works are few in number, they’re all extremely reflective of his art design preferences and narrative interests; he composes action with the playful mastery of John Woo or Shinichiro Watanabe, imbuing his worlds with a weighted sense of physical conflict and a vast assembly of character-rich background details.

Having already screened the two-part OVA Mezzo Forte, we’re now diving into the franchise’s followup television drama, Mezzo DSA (short for Danger Squad Agency, the optimistic title of our main trio’s operation). The OVA era was likely a perfect fit for Umetsu’s mixture of perfectionism and incidental erotica – a fifteen year stretch where you could fund an intricately animated passion project, just so long as there was a sex scene to promote on the cover. With that era now ceding to the late-night TV paradigm of the post-Evangelion market, I’m intrigued to see how Umetsu adapts his style to the more limiting confines of weekly episodes, as well as simply happy to check back in with this charming trio of mercenary miscreants. Let’s get to it!

Episode 1

We open with a man named Asano handing off cash to a cybernetically enhanced giant known as “Black Scissors.” I assume this is the illicit trade our heroes will soon be crashing

The world of Mezzo Forte seems pretty close to that of Cyberpunk, with designer bodies and synths at the high end, and endless ranks of disenfranchised unfortunates at the bottom. But we haven’t actually learned much about how society works here, and I frankly appreciate that. Even if you’re proud of your worldbuilding, holding it in reserve, letting the characters in your world take the circumstances of it for granted, and only gesturing towards most aspects of your society all make your story feel that much more solid, more genuinely lived-in. Authentic characters aren’t constantly explaining the circumstances of their own lives – plus, worldbuilding that only expresses itself incidentally, through the unquestioned differences between our society and the one on-screen, always feels more convincing and alluring than ideas which are presented right to the audience’s face

That handoff is contrasted against another, as two young girls bully a third into giving them her money

The girl being bullied is Asami

“You could make the money immediately if you went to some dating website and picked up a pedophilic old man!” No sex scenes for a TV release, but Umetsu’s crass take on hard-boiled urban drama remains. His works tonally hew towards a sort of late-adolescent fascination with the scandalous, much in the way Tarantino movies revel in grindhouse shock. It’s not necessarily realistic, but it is authentic to a certain dramatic sensibility, which is frankly more important; I don’t exactly share their tonal preferences and dramatic preoccupations, but I respect their dedication to their aesthetic

Incidentally, you could sum up a great deal of online criticism with “I don’t share the artist’s preferences and preoccupations.” Though of course, this itself is banal commentary; obviously critics are going to incorporate their preferences into their critiques, with the true trick being to find critics whose preferences are complimentary or at least interesting to you

Handoffs converge as one of the Black Scissors is flung through a brick wall, Mikura swiftly following behind. Seems she’s kept that pigtail look from the end of Forte

This action scene is excellent, and still largely maintains Umetsu’s style in spite of his limited resources – heavy shading for the character art, a great sense of weight and careful physical choreography, and restless, active camera movement keeping the audience attuned to the action. Also impressed by the consequence of every blow here, the careful animation of each wall and pillar being smashed into rubble

Even a neat little circular panning cut as Mikura readies her gun. Those are ridiculously tough in animation, since shifting perspective relative to the shot’s subject necessitates redrawing that subject in each frame for every new angle

Mikura saves Asami, but is not particularly gentle about it – she actually flings Asami out the window before rappelling down and catching her at the bottom. An excellent introduction to our heroine’s particular brand of quasi-justice

Once again, an exploding robot woman is the DSA’s calling card. Umetsu is clearly praying to one day be murdered by a beautiful woman

The OP is energetic and playful, with a song that verges on Riot Grrl energy, an excellent choice

Love Mikura’s martial arts poses. You can tell she was choreographed and animated by people with a real love for the kung fu classics

We return to Kurokawa getting a haircut at the barbershop below their HQ. Turns out the barber was actually invested in the handoff they blew up

This world is so full of details, from all the faded posters adorning their walls to this absurd bounty of snacks Mikura apparently bought with their winnings. Even in this TV format, it feels like Umetsu came up with almost too many visual ideas to fit in the frame

They are leaning more into broad comic exaggeration with Mikura’s expressions relative to the OVA, which makes sense. Realistic facial character acting requires a ridiculous level of nuance and precision in animation; broad, goofy faces are inherently appealing, but one of the big reasons they’re so widely adopted for animated expression is that they’re a lot easier to embrace and duplicate than the thousand nuances of muscle and bone movement that convey an actual human smile or scowl

Ooh, love the color design and lighting as they meet with their client, who tells them the drug they stole was actually a fake

Their client is Ms. Kisami. She tells them that the drug is with Mr. Asano, who plans to kill a man named Takizawa

They might have been adopted for pragmatic reasons, but these pouty Mikura faces are still excellent

Fifteen years ago, Asano was a fellow medical intern of Takizawa, a relentless womanizer. Takizawa ended up dating Misaki, Asano’s crush, and Misaki was weeks later found dead, with Takizawa’s fingerprints on the murder weapon

Oh, this is fun. Asano wishes to get Takizawa convicted before the statute of limitations is reached, but Takizawa is afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and thus Asano needs a drug to help Takizawa remember his own crimes

The shadows of these railings beside the party do an excellent job of evoking prison bars, emphasizing how time is running out for the DSA and Takizawa alike

Kisami doesn’t want Asano to become a murderer, so Mikura helpfully volunteers to kill Takizawa herself. “The cute girl is the belligerent heavy” is one of Mezzo Forte’s most reliably charming contrasts

Beyond the focus on synthetic bodies, the particular neon grime of their world also reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077, which is a good sign; I know the game had a rough release, but I entirely fell in love with its world on my recent playthrough, and now feel an enduring fondness for Night City

Oh no, Mikura’s got a shotgun, what will she do

They catch Asano in the lobby of his apartment, and Mikura immediately starts complaining about how it’s annoying she can’t just shoot him

God, so much luxurious smoke and rubble in these fights! There’s no separation between the animated objects and their backgrounds; the constant deterioration of the world around them demonstrates how everything is in play, making the conflict feel that much more tangible and consequential. Basically the opposite of the weightless, entirely divorced-from-background sort of digital effect spam you see in some modern productions, where it looks like the characters are fighting in front of a scrolling fabric of unrelated scenery

They chase Asano to a condemned building, where he’s already brought Takizawa for the confession

“It’s my job, so I tried to stop you. If you want to shoot him, then shoot that loser.” Mikura has mixed feelings about this job. I feel like this series is actually giving her more chances to express her personality; the OVA was too plot-driven to ever really slow down for bickering between the crew, and also generally prioritized horny framing over characterization whenever it had a spare minute

Apparently Takizawa was embezzling funds from their facility, and convinced Misaki to steal the autopsied brain of “Paul Lennon,” clearly the unholy merger of Paul McCartney and John Lennon

“This asshole’s an enemy of women!” Mikura almost shoots Takizawa herself halfway through the story. With less of a high-stakes battle to deal with than in Mezzo Forte, Mikura is free to be a lot more useless and belligerent. I’m happy for her

Asano is stopped by Misaki herself, their benefactor “Ms. Kisami,” who asks him to seek his own happiness

The vision of Misaki fades with the morning light

Of course, then Takizawa starts blasting and the building collapses. We can’t end on a somber note, this is Umetsu!

Oh my god, what a move. With Asano and herself in freefall, Mikura shoots an explosive barrel to propel both of them sideways through a window and into a different building. A sequence that embodies the power of Umetsu’s approach to action boarding and choreography: because everything is so consistently grounded, an embellishment on reality like this feels genuinely spectacular, offering a reflection of the same marvelous “wow, they actually did that” thrill you might get from a classic Jackie Chan feature. The more weighted your drama and staging, the more impactful your embellishments; a sequence like this feels more dazzling than one of superheroes in active flight, because flight is not something we’ve learned to take for granted

It’s a shame that showcase animation in general seems to be moving away from this sort of massaged realism; hell, you can even see the evolution in the works of individual animators, like Yutaka Nakamura’s shift from the strong fundamental choreography of Sword of the Stranger and the Cowboy Bebop movie towards the floaty, exaggerated highlights of My Hero Academia. And a lot of young animators are basically raised on those sorts of highlights, leaving them without the strong choreography fundamentals of something like this

Of course, that’s not to say I’m against expressive exaggeration – on the contrary, I think that tends to more generally embody animation’s strengths as a medium. But nonetheless, I do wish there was more space for bravura realistic acting like this or Magnetic Rose

Our stinger offers the first hint of this season’s apparent main plot – someone means to assassinate Kurokawa

And Done

That was delightful! I was frankly expecting more of an aesthetic downgrade from the polish of an OVA to the rigorous scheduling of a TV production, but at least for this first episode, Mezzo remains an absolute feast of beautiful urban design and sumptuous action choreography. Umetsu’s action highlights are both conceived and executed with a nearly unparalleled understanding of action drama fundamentals, drawing on the cinematic language of live action film to create sequences that feel just slightly beyond reality – enough that Mikura’s theatrics feel dazzling and larger-than-life, but never so much that you stop believing this is a genuine physical environment, where bullets hurt, explosions burn, and falls from great heights are quite likely to kill you. Frankly, without the secondary priority of offering some random incidental pornography, Mezzo actually seems more fully realized and cohesive in this format, even without the OVA’s preposterously intricate character acting. I’m eager for more!

This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.

Related