nyone who saw Brad Bird's terrific animated superhero movie The Incredibles will find the Daichi family's dynamic familiar: overweight, morose, ineffectual dad; overachieving, forceful mother; angsty, hesitant, anxious teenage daughter;
bitter problem-child speed-freak prepubescent son. And to add to the similarity, the Daichis are
super-powered heroes who regularly have to save the world while keeping their identities hidden from the world, lest they face prosecution and persecution alike.
But much of the similarity ends there. Unlike the heroes of The Incredibles, the protagonists of 2001's 13-episode TV series The Daichis: Earth's Defense Family have been granted their abilities by aliens who want Earth to fend off its constant violent invasions. The Daichis even get a bounty for their work: 9.8 million yen every time they save their planet.
It isn't enough to stop the arguing. Shrill, abusive mom Seiko Daichi has already filed for divorce from her fat, meek, sensitive husband, Mamoru. While offering their children the choice of whom to live with after the split, she simultaneously gives them their marching orders: She wants her put-upon daughter, Nozomi, to stay with her and cook and clean for her, while she hopes to push off bratty Dai on Mamoru. When the family is suddenly contacted by aliens, given high-tech communication cards that grant them powerfully high-tech battle gear and an array of voice-activated weaponry, and sent into battle against a malevolent, immense space octopus, Seiko is loudly furious and disbelieving about the whole thing, while Mamoru is slow to respond and Nozomi rebels, refusing to do more people's dirty work. Only Dai actively embraces the coolness of being an action hero.
Still, when Mamoru (and circumstance) gets the family to activate their suits, they inadvertently accept an alien contract, assigning them to serve as Earth's Defense Family for six months or face stiff legal penalties. And the revelation that many of their powers and combat actions cost money—they're losing more than they're making, and they quickly end up in
debt—further means they have to keep fighting or end up in an interstellar labor camp.
A not-so-incredible super-family
The Daichis is a comedy, but with a brutal edge: Seiko's cruelty toward her family is unflagging. Some of her marital bitterness is understandable—Mamoru has a good heart but is terrible at expressing it—but Seiko's contempt for Dai and derisive exploitation of Nozomi are discomfiting. The opening episode of The Daichis in particular seems slow in spite of the frantic activity, simply because listening to Seiko scream, hurl invective and deny the obvious gets unpleasant early and often. And when the show isn't being mean or dark, it's being gross, with body-function jokes and potty humor. (Episode three opens with a sequence revolving around a huge, toilet-clogging bowel movement, which so impresses Dai that he makes up songs about it and tries to provoke his family into feces-related chatter. Oddly, the subtitled translation of all this is R-rated, while the dub is PG.)
But that aside, The Daichis is interesting for the way it humanizes its manifestly flawed heroes while still avoiding any lapses into sentimentality. Even when Nozomi loosens up and cooperates, or Mamoru begins to take charge, the family dynamic doesn't immediately change, and there are no sappy "awwww" moments to lighten up the nastiness.
Instead, there's a generally appealing diverse score, with rock and other genres competing for attention. And there's a lot of frenetic, bright animation, centering on simple but unusual character designs (Dai in particular has an unusually mobile mop of shaggy hippie-hair, while Mamoru doesn't just have pudge, he has layered cellulite rolls) and on the family's vivid, highly detailed retro power suits. The periodic alien attackers, meanwhile, are astoundingly well executed, intimidating and destructive, as though they'd sprung fully formed from a more serious science-fiction series.
With its weird sense of humor, increasingly outlandish plotlines and casual viciousness, The Daichis is a very different kind of comedy series—in fact, it's often more fun for what it does different than for what it does right. Incredibles fans may not find it to their tastes, but it's worth checking out just for novelty's sake.
There are more than a few unnerving things about this series—one of the biggest being Dai's frank and graphic fascination with his mother's "big boobies," which he gets his hands on as often as possible. The raunchy humor isn't a constant, so it's always a bit of a surprise when it suddenly bobs to the surface.
— Tasha
Back to the top.
