Despite being a hit in its native Japan, Strait Jacket doesn’t seem to have gone down at all well with western fans which is a pity as this three part OVA series has plenty to commend it. Perhaps those more deeply immersed in anime will find it too familiar but for the more casual viewer it’s a fun hybrid of many of the form’s most enduring tropes – gruesome body horror, young girls with magic powers, powered fighting suits, tentacled monsters from the beyond and so on.

Derived from an immensely popular series of “light novels” (books with anime-style illustrations) by Ichiro Sakaki, Strait Jacket is set in a parallel world where magic is a reality and treated as a science, used by everyone from doctors to the military. Unfortunately, this new power source comes at a price – the curse-like Malediction which often transform the less adept into monsters which are then set-upon by the Tactical Sorcerists, a SWAT-like force that uses Molds – magic enhanced armour suits – to combat the creatures.

strait jacket.jpg

The series follows two characters, the renegade and frankly suicidal Tactical Sorcerist Leiot who travels with a half-demon companion and isn’t above using restricted sorcery if he feels it’s needed; and the rather earnest Magic Administrator Nerin Simmons who runs into him during an opening attack on a children’s hospital. While she tries to get him back on the straight and narrow, they are both caught up in a demon-assisted terrorist plot.

What makes Strait Jacket so compelling isn’t the animation – there’s little here that even the most casual of anime viewers won’t have seen plenty of times before though there are some genuinely arresting images particularly during the frequent battle scenes – but the atmospheric mix of science fiction, fantasy and full-blooded horror. The steampunk milieu is well realised even if some of the attempts to force magic to fit into a manageable pseudo-scientific framework fall a bit short of credible. Visually, Strait Jacket looks fantastic and as ever with these things the devil is in the detail – the anachronistic props for example – and fans of old-school 80s-style anime horror will wax nostalgic about its multi-tentacled nasties, exploding bodies and mutating sorcerists.

The story may be thin – in only three short episodes (also available as a 70 minute feature) you can’t cram in much plot or character development – but it never flags and sets up an interesting set of locations, characters and mythologies which will hopefully be explored in more detail in further instalments. As it stands it’s a worthy introduction to a world one can only hope we’ll be revisiting very soon.