Summary: >

In the future mankind has built an enormous space station. The low gravity environment is known to take its toll on the astronauts, but fortunately a new food supplement has been developed to help them maintain bone mass. One of those astronauts has a daughter on earth named Manoka. Manoka is a good little girl, but at night she likes to occasionally go out an deal vigilante justice by executing sex offenders. So back up in space (didn't think I was just going to drop that topic did you?), Manoka's dad mutates into a big monster with a super exoskeleton, but manages to crash in Japan in an escape pod. With Manoka's reputation, she's been secretly hired to terminate this alien life form. But what if she realizes it's her father?

Thoughts: >

This is a Yasuomi Umetsu anime: declared in huge letters before the show even starts. That struck me as more of a warning than a proclamation. Umetsu is well known for making really impressive artwork with crap stories. The pinnacle of his anime story telling was in Mezzo Forte which only managed to be mostly lame. If the original Kite was anything, it was controversial. Kite Liberator takes all that and throws it out the window. About the only thing they have in common is a chick that kills criminals, and a passing reference to the original. Now you'd think that someone willing to throw out poorly realized concept of the first Kite might actually GET it, but you don't know Umetsu if you're thinking that. Some day this guy will learn to let someone else write the script, but until then we get things like Kite Liberator.

So we start with Manoka, who is this timid little brainy girl who's a klutz and works at a maid cafe. Aside from her vigilante killing hobby, her normal life is uneventful and boring. And then they decide to graft this stuff from Genocyber into it (old school monster anime that wasn't very good if you don't know). It feels like there was a botched attempt to sandwich two bad anime concepts together. Well, Manoka shooting bad guys isn't a bad concept it's just shallow and doesn't go anywhere. And on top of this we stick in a bad ending.

Now traditionally in any Umetsu anime you might be willing to overlook this because of great designs and great action. To give credit where it's due, Umetsu has come up with some of the most creative violent action scenes I've ever seen in anime, and they're amazing to watch but nothing here approaches that. The animation was nice, but nothing stood out. After Manoka deals out justice, she likes to leave these feathers behind as her trademark, but it looks horribly cheesy. The rest of the animation was decent, but I can't say I recall a single scene that stood out.

This is a title I'd say it's safe to ignore. It's not all bad, I mean the animation and character designs were decent. I also did like the manager of the maid cafe because he was so weird and creepy it's a bit hard for me not to like his originality. Story wise Kite Liberator bombed big time.