Cuticle Detective Inaba: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Cuticle Detective Inaba: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Cuticle, follicle, what's the difference?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 26, 2014

Prayers are answered occasionally—it may just take a little time. Too many years ago for me to count, I was really indoctrinated into how completely bizarre certain brightly lit corners of anime could be when I sat down to binge watch the extremely odd but somehow endearing Hare and Guu. “Surreal” hardly begins to even approach being an adequate description for this utterly off the wall series, and it appealed to my anarchic, contrarian disposition in a way that more traditional anime simply didn’t. Reviewing duties mean I have slogged through a rather incredible amount of anime in the intervening years, but far too infrequently have series with Hare and Guu’s inherent insouciance come down the pike. While Cuticle Detective Inaba may not be quite in the same outrageous league as Hare and Guu, it often comes close, with a completely manic storyline and characters that seem to have sprung from some drooping half shell within Salvador Dali’s fecund imagination. Let’s put it this way: any show which features a lead character who is half human, half wolf (or werewolf), a guy who works as a detective and just happens to have a hair fetish, and who is aided by a cross dressing assistant in an attempt to bring down a crime lord who is—wait for it—a goat, can’t be all bad. Cuticle Detective Inaba is one of those manic anime entries where it’s best to simply check your rational brain at the door (and/or the start up menu), and just go with the sometimes whitewater rapids flow. The series is frenetic, loud, aggressive and totally in your face, without much emphasis on character development or even traditional narrative structure, often zipping or zapping off into wild tangents for a moment or two before returning to whatever is the putative point. It’s almost like watching an anime version of an old vaudeville show, where anything might happen at any given moment in order to keep the audience entranced.

The completely outré quality of Cuticle Detective Inaba is perhaps best summed up by a moment early in the first episode where in the middle of what is already a somewhat convoluted narrative, two chibi suddenly appear to demonstrate the “Cuticle Dance”, which is choreographed to the memorable lyric:

Cuticle, cuticle
Shiny, sleek hair

Aside from the inherent weirdness of all of this, there's the curiously endearing but somewhat mangled pronunciation of the native Japanese speakers singing these lines. While that's unfolding, a hilariously matter of fact narrator sums up the situation with admirable understatement:

My boss, Inaba Hiroshi-san is a former police dog werewolf detective with a hair fetish. His self-appointed volunteer assistant who understands him, Sasaki Yuuta-kun, is a cross-dresser who has hostile feelings towards Ogi-san. Inspector Ogino Kuniharu, Inaba’san’s partner when he was a police dog, is sort of like his owner.

About the only thing missing from this formulation is the bad guy, Don Valentino, and his gunny sacked henchman Lorenzo, who comes off looking like he stumbled in from an anime version of Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

Now it’s absolutely true that in a show like Cuticle Detective Inaba, there is not even passing lip service given to things like traditional plot structure or character development. In fact most of the characters here can be defined almost by one or two peculiarities, like Inaba’s half wolf situation coupled with his hair fetish or Don Valentino’s half goat situation and the fact that he both eats and spits up copious amounts of cash. This is not a show one comes to hoping for deep truths or even light, unassuming comedy. This is completely lunatic, in your face entertainment that skips to and fro like some, well, half human hybrid on copious amounts of adrenaline and/or caffeine. Cuticle Detective Inaba exists, then, as near perfect fodder for the ADD generation, for it surely offers something new virtually every few seconds, throwing different styles, odd characters and completely nonsensical plot developments at the viewer in rapid succession.

And in fact it’s the oddity of it all that may be Cuticle Detective Inaba’s most salient attraction. The show is relentlessly frenetic, so much so that some may tire of its nonstop antics, especially when not all of the comedy consists of brightly burnished jewels with hilarious punchlines. It’s also noisy and visually kaleidoscopic, with characters suddenly just morphing into chibi (without even the typical “triggering” mechanisms like anger or frustration acting as bridge points) and all sorts of graphical information being presented in the frame while various corners of action also play out, so that ultimately it may simply be too much for some to want to devote that much concentration to, especially when the perceived dividends are debatably too few.

But I have to say I had a gas watching Cuticle Detective Inaba. It frequently made little to no sense, but it was all so surreal and just flat out silly that I couldn’t help but kind of giggle in semi-dazed amazement. Not everything ends up working in the show, and by its very nature it’s an extremely chaotic experience, but you’ll probably find no better show with a “police dog werewolf with a hair fetish” this year, anyway.

Cuticle Detective Inaba: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cuticle Detective Inaba is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is an often very bright, colorful and appealing looking series, one which pops quite well in high definition. Part of this can be attributed to the almost stream of consciousness aspect of much of the animation, where styles will kind of melt into each other and various versions of several of the main characters can occupy the frame (albeit in different places) at the same time. Inaba's kind of rust red and brownish hair is one of the series' nicer visual tropes and with the sharp line detail the series generally offers, his tresses are quite memorable. Contrast is excellent throughout the presentation and there is a nice interplay of both bold primaries and cooler pastels in the extremely varied palette on display.

Cuticle Detective Inaba: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cuticle Detective Inaba features only the original Japanese language track delivered via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. As mentioned above in the main body of the review, Cuticle Detective Inaba can be a very noisy show, and a surround track might have helped open up the cacophony somewhat. As it stands, prioritization is sometimes not all that I personally would have liked, with various lines getting buried in the general sonic chaos of busier moments, something that may in fact have been a creative choice. Overall, though, fidelity is excellent and there's no damage of any kind to report. Dynamic range is also extremely wide throughout the episodes on this Blu-ray disc.

Cuticle Detective Inaba: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animation (1080p; 1:33)


• Clean Closing Animation (1080p; 1:33)

Cuticle Detective Inaba: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Is Cuticle Detective Inaba perfect? Nope. Is it even funny 100% of the time? Nope. But you know what it is? It's actually inventive in its nonstop array of techniques and attempts to get the audience to sit up and notice something's going on. Some may see that as a certain form of desperation, one that tries too hard to draw too much attention to itself without really paying enough in dividends, but I have to give the series credit for even trying. Too many anime are content to just toddle along well worn paths without seeming to care much about doing anything new, so even if Cuticle Detective Inaba more or less completely forsakes character development and a well articulated story in order to deliver something, well, just plain bizarre, I can't say I find that an objectionable goal. While there's not much in the supplements department, video and audio are solid on this release and Cuticle Detective Inaba comes Recommended.