casey.breitenberg - 2013-10-26 13:57:58

Birdy the Mighty is a mid-nineties four-part OVA about a boy trapped inside an alien girl's body. Or an alien girl trapped inside a boy's body? Sometimes you don't even know.

The plot is rather simple - there's a group of villains who want to make us Earthlings espers. Why? Nobody knows. Anyway, it's up to our titular space cop Birdy to save the day. But what's that? She accidentally killed your average high school boy while fighting a supervillain? Not a problem for them aliens - Birdy can just share her body with that boy Tsutomu. And so our reluctant hero gets dragged along in the crazy adventures of Birdy.
It is obvious that the 4 OVAs were meant to be longer, perhaps a whole 1 cour season because at the end it feels like it's been cut off at the first checkpoint. Perhaps that's fixed in the more modern Birdy the Mighty Decode anime? I do not know.

Characters are very typical - a hot-headed ass-kicking supergirl, an everyman high school student, the secondary love interest and the evil sneaky smarmy genius. Their designs are equally typical with no one really standing out except for Birdy. The animation on the other hand is surprisingly good for 1996 - it's consistent and fluent, yes, a bit outdated, but in this case it gives a little style to it.

I actually enjoyed this little four-pack of OVAs. It is not a must-watch of any scale, it does not subvert or deconstruct the genre, it also does not make me rush and watch the 2008 Decode. It's a very typical anime as I stated, but it won't makeyou cringe and scream 'this has been done before!!!'