Twelve Moments 2009 Day 3: A Calm Moment After “Wild” Action

Third of 12 entries for this year’s “Twelve Moments in Anime” Project.

I first came across the two-episode OVA Wild Cardz in an unfavorable magazine review – I think it was in Animerica but I’m not sure. [Update 12/22: I found that issue - Animerica Feb. 2000 - while looking through some boxes and the review's tone was positive. Maybe it was another magazine & anime I was thinking of...] Anyway, I rented the CPM DVD through the mail in October and thought it was okay but limited by its length. Enjoyable if all you’re expecting is action.

The Crown Knights, protectors of the Card Kingdom, consist of four girls with special powers, each named after a suit in a deck of cards: Jo Diamonds, Casa Clubs, Coco Hearts, and Sunday Spades. We see the girls catching a cat burglar named Red Lobster and soon after, a giant white pawn emerges from the river and begins floating toward the city. Then a black knight piece appears, heightening the situation for our heroines.

The action is fast & well-animated and there are peppered bits of humor, particularly the angered exchanges between Jo and the stereotypically Chinese-accented Chee Chuu Kai. One thing I found interesting was that each Crown Knight has either “17th” or “18th” suffixed onto their name, hinting at them being the latest in a long line of Kingdom defenders.

Those suffixes play into how I interpreted a particular sequence at the end: after the battle, we hear the Knights’ voices talking in a white space about what Jo, who had failed to entirely outrun an explosion, wanting to be a bird in her next life. (“She would make the fastest ostrich ever” sounds hilarious the way it’s said in the English dub.) We see her floating with two holes nearby, one red and one black. Not knowing which to choose, she does the same odd-or-even card flip seen earlier in the OVA and at the end of the cast credits, we see it’s neither and that she’s near the same tree where she’d thrown the first card with her legs starting to move.

The slower tempo of the scene, following a whole lot of action, took me by surprise and stuck in it in my mind. I thought of the white space as Jo’s inner consciousness and depending on which hole she chose, she could either resign to being reborn or she could strive forward to continue living her current life. The Joker coming up implies to me that she was leaning toward continuing on as well as perhaps the universe telling her, through chance, to stop deferring decisions onto the tossing of cards. (Maybe I’ve analyzed this scene more than I should but it feels like it’s there for a reason!)