Apparently the additional time provided by the delay wasn’t enough to salvage the work. In November 2007 Umezu’s anime studio, Arms, announced that the release of Kite Liberator would be delayed in order to give the staff more time to work on the project. It’s sad to say that despite having a longer running time than either A-Kite or Mezzo, all of the action scenes in Kite Liberator combined aren’t as exciting as singular action set pieces from Umezu’s earlier work. Furthermore, the tense, exciting, and death-defying action that characterized A-Kite and Mezzo Forte is noticably absent in Kite Liberator. And the graphic violence in Kite Liberator feels lessened in both frequency and visual impact. While Kite Liberator isn’t entirely sanitized, the graphic sex of Yellow Star, A-Kite, and Mezzo is gone. I don’t know how much, if any American influence compromised the content of Kite Liberator, but plans for an American release certainly do seem to have affected the production. Unlike Umetsu’s previous action anime projects that were produced primarily for Japanese release, Kite Liberator was co-financed by an American distributor and was released practically simultaneously in Japan and America.

Regrettably, the long awaited Kite Liberator doesn’t match up to the quality of any of these prior titles, including even the very uneven Mezzo television series. Countless anime fans are also familiar with director Yasuomi Umetsu’s other “girls with guns” anime titles Cool Devices operation 7: Yellow Star, A-Kite, Mezzo Forte, and Mezzo. I have encountered consistent and unanimous confused and disappointed responses to the OVA from viewers that have watched it.įans have anxiously waited ten years since the 1998 release of A-Kite to see a sequel. I’d like to be able to definitively explain what went “wrong” with Kite Liberator, but regrettably I haven’t encountered any statements from either creator/director Yasuomi Umetsu or American co-producer/distributor Media Blasters. I’d hate to see it just stop right in the middle of everything like this. What’s going on? Is that it? Are there plans for a second episode, or is one likely at any point soon? After so many years, we finally got a sequel to Kite. Well, maybe even ended isn’t the right word it just stopped in the middle of everything and the credits rolled. I was really, really enjoying it and then it just ended.

I just finished watching the recent OVA Kite Liberator.

Anime kite liberator rape