sutomu Senkawa's luck is pretty unimpressive even before the day he dies a nasty death. His father doesn't believe he'll ever amount to anything, his mother is an ineffectual nag, and his sister is a sarcastic, abusive brat. Tsutomu has no self-confidence, and he doesn't seem terribly bright--sunk in the middle of exam hell, he wanders around reciting mathematical formulas and expecting to fail. To top it all off, he just happens to be a squirrely little whiner with all the personality of a damp dishrag.
So when a highly personal battle between two energy-slinging aliens results in Tsutomu's messy death, he doesn't seem in any hurry to get back to the land of the living. In fact, he thoroughly enjoys being dead, which says far too much about his life. Unfortunately for him, he's promptly resurrected and informed that his body was done for, so it had to be merged with the body of his killer: Space Federation Officer Birdy.
Birdy's actually the good guy (well, girl) in this particular fight, which is being staged between the Federation and a series of violent, creepy alien fugitives straight out of Men in Black. The aliens' leader is a mysterious woman who figures prominently in Birdy's past, as Tsutomu discovers when he shares her nightmarish memories. So naturally it's up to Birdy and Tsutomu to team up and start saving Earth. They just have to stop arguing about who should control their shared body first.
Illegitimate son of Ninja Scroll
These first two installments of Birdy never explain the mechanics of the shared-body arrangement between Birdy and Tsutomu, which leaves a lot of leeway for fudging the rules of the deal in whatever way is convenient at any given moment. In half the scenes, Birdy's begging Tsutomu to let her take over the body, which she can't do without his permission; in the other half, she's marching him around like a marionette. But these inconsistencies are less a problem than the lackluster pacing.
There are some real visual gems in this piece, though--particularly Birdy's stark, ghastly memories, and some of the sizzling fight scenes. (If nothing else, it's worth sitting through the entire 70 minutes simply to see the fluid, graceful, and utterly eerie alien creature that's half slime and half semi-incorporated dog corpses.) But while Birdy is proudly advertised as "from the director of Ninja Scroll," that worthy lineage only shows in the battle sequences.
Between fights, the story just putters along, low-key and redundant, propelled mostly by small-scale confrontations between Tsutomu and his parents, Tsutomu and his peers, and Tsutomu and Birdy. It doesn't help that Tsutomu's a blisteringly annoying brat whose high-pitched, incessant whining at times makes him sound like Mickey Mouse on helium. And Birdy herself doesn't develop much of a personality. Despite the double-souled star, the whole venture seems a bit half-hearted so far.
