Chinese Pornographic Cartoon Review: Color of Sky, Color of Water

Believe me, there was a lot of blue in this thing.

If you’re at all familiar with doujins, then you’ve probably heard of Tony Taka. He’s one of the most famous doujin artists around when it comes to drawing 2-D women due to his style having a sort of mysterious yet accessible feel to them rather than the exploitative style that hacks like Takaoka Motofumi uses. In short, he’s basically the Itaru Hinoue of the eroge world right down to the retarded character eyes and hair that make me realize the human race can indeed fall harder. And just like Itaru, any anime that uses Tony Taka’s art tend to go for the melodramatic nakige side of things when it comes to the story. Except whilst Itaru’s character designs tend to get seen by the mainstream audience for massive thrashings, Tony Taka’s get seen by the cult group of watchers like myself who dive into the world of porn where only praise is seen as long as your stuff has a story.

Except from me of course. As much as I like the designs, I’ve never liked anything Tony Taka has had involvement in because the guys who write this shit seem to think “We got Tony Taka doing our illustrations. Somehow, this is going to be good”, which is the Japanese porno equivalent of getting Yoko Kanno or Robin Williams involved and thinking that automatically means quality. Let me do a quick rundown of the Tony Taka stuff I’ve seen. After: The Animation was atrocious. Genmukan was a confusing pile of shit. I actually kind of liked Tony’s Heroine Series, but the ending was about as anticlimactic as a man attempting to commit suicide by jumping off a building only to have his head blown off by the mafia he owes debt to. And Fault and Shining Hearts…the less said about those, the better.

So you can clearly see that I don’t have any real love for what I’ve seen of the guy. And that’s especially true when it comes to the first thing of his that I ever saw, coming from the studio that brought us classics like True Fucking Blue, “Sora No Iru, Mizu No Iru”. Or to put it in non-weeaboo terms, “Color of Sky, Color of Water”. And yes, as the title implies, you see a lot of sky and water in this thing. It’s like watching a poorly animated Makoto Shinkai movie except with the scenery porn sharing screen time with actual porn.

So what’s the story of this thing? Well, the anime is told in a bit of a non-chronological order, but for clarity’s sake I’m just going to streamline it for you guys. A black haired girl with a skirt so short that she’d fit right in with the cast of Aika named Asa Mizushima transfers to a new school and immediately catches the eye of our hero of this anime: Hajime Saisho, who has a very unique way of hitting on girls that even Makoto Itou would be impressed with. What is that method you may ask? Why, take pictures of Asa’s K-On teacup striped panties every chance he gets of course. Despite doing her best to resist his advances, Asa somehow finds this picture-taking extremely charming and strips down without a second thought whilst not giving Hajime any time to take off his own clothes beyond unzipping his pants and using him for pleasure in a manner that Lindsay Lohan would call bullshit on.

But of course, there are no real monogamous relationships in the Taka porno world (or really the animated porno world in general), so we soon get introduced to another girl named Natsume.

No, not that Natsume!

I don’t think I need to explain what her role in the story is other than childhood friend who does not get shafted because polygamy is cool in hentai, so I’ll just say that the two begin to share Hajime for the entire summer and that’s pretty much the crux of the story. Oh wait, there’s something about the fact that Asa has to move away after the summer ends, because it wouldn’t be a Tony Taka anime if there wasn’t melodrama that Seo Kouji himself would call bullshit on. Although come to think of it, this anime feels a lot like a porno version of Kimi No Iru Machi the same way Dream Note feels like a porno version of Death Note. Well that would explain a bloody lot, wouldn’t it? But in all seriousness, a lot of the sex is treated with more seriousness than it should, which makes it hard for me to appreciate it as the exploitative entertainment it is. One of the reasons I was kind to Sweet Home was because the anime knew its place and didn’t try to overstep its boundaries, offering meaningless sex with no shame whatsoever. But Color of Sky and Water seems to think that it’s a goddamn soap opera the same way ef-a tale of melodies thinks a naked girl drawing herself is dramatic. I’m not saying sex scenes shouldn’t have weight behind them when it comes to the porn genre. But when the romance in Vampire Wars has more credibility than you, something has seriously gone wrong somewhere.

This screenshot shows nothing that obscene, so I’ll allow it

It’s also confusing because the guy is in love with two girls and the show itself has a bit of trouble remembering this fact. One moment, the girls are eager to share him. The next moment, they selfishly want him. I’m sure actual three-way relationships start out as fun, but end up growing complicated as time goes on, but the show flip-flops between the two with all the pacing of my own jackhammer experiences and makes it hard for me to buy into either side of the coin. It’s like watching those awful love triangle anime that always alternates between the girls fighting over a guy one minute, eating cake with each other the next, and then getting one-on-one time with the dude for the sole purpose of flat-out stripping in front of him whilst hoping he’ll trip over himself in shock and land his enlarged penis right into one of her holes the same way we ended up with those bath dudes anal penetrating each other in Katte Ni Kaizou (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just watch the show, because I just can’t give justice to that scene).

Oh, and guess how the anime ends? Well, after one last night fling at a festival before Asa has to move away, years pass and Asa reunites with Natsume in order to exchange some banal dialogue about how they miss each other and shit before the two meet up with Hajime in order to share him once again. It’s so schmaltzy and out of place with the actual situation that it made me gag more than any of the actual awful sex scenes that I endured/fast-forwarded through. Yeah, I get the appeal of the sex scenes somewhat because of the different angles, positions, and the fact that the animation isn’t reused that much. But I only found two out of maybe eight or ten that were actually arousing whilst the others gave me less of a boner than watching a woman get pregnant from holding hands. Not helping at all is that the art quality in the first episode is dreadful, especially when compared to the second episode, which was made two years afterwards. Two years to determine how the story concludes? I could have met a real girl and married her in that amount of time. The happiness wouldn’t last considering we rushed things, but it’d still be more worth it than wasting your life waiting to see if the girls realized they possess a thing called a brain and ditch Hajime for the scum of the Earth he is whilst looking prettier than usual.

So in conclusion, fuck you Tony Taka and fuck your anime! Okay, it’s true I shouldn’t be picking on a guy who only did the illustrations as opposed to the actual script, but when the only thing connecting Color of Sky and Water to dreck like After: The Animation is the artist, somebody has to pay the piper. Thus, Tony Taka has officially been put on my shit list along with newest addition, Katsuhiko Takayama, where they can join together and can create a hentai that basically involves a bunch of melancholic-looking girls having sex with a loser whilst saying lines like this:

• “One girl on your dick, one girl in each hand, and one girl in your mouth. You are truly our master.”
• “Shall I drain you of 40%, 60%, or 100% of your body fluids?”
• “You shall cum in me two times, cum in her three times, make me cum four times, and make her cum seven times.”
• “Do you want me to be Hitomi Tanaka or Kailani Lei.”
• “Where did you learn your sex moves? Sex Spa 2? Debbie Does Dallas? Emmanuelle in Space?” “No, I learned it from Ron Jeremy!”
• “I do have boobs you know.” “I can see that.” “Well, now you can see it even more.”

Get Shinbou to direct this shit and you’ve got the greatest Shaft show on Earth.

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Stingers

• Some of my fellow SCCSAV members have given me advice regarding how to spice up these porno reviews. Maybe I’ll implement them in my next review considering I’m doing Junk Boy next.
• I clearly have no life given the research I did to come up with those lines.