When father is away, the two kids must play.
What They Say:
With his stepmother dead, and his father transferred to another city, Yuto is living alone with his ample-bosomed step sister Erika. Temptation soon gets the best of them and they start indulging their forbidden passions. They also attend the same university and it’s not long before their equally ample-bosomed music teacher, Sayaka, discovers their taboo relationship. Sayaka begins falling love with Yuto and threatens to reveal his secret if he does not succumb to her needs. This twisted love triangle spells nothing but trouble and is bound for a surprising finale…
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release is pretty good as we get the original Japanese language track and the English language dub in stereo encoded at 192kbps. Kitty Media hired out Tripwire Productions for the dub and that side of the show pretty much mirrors the Japanese side when it comes to the technical presentation. It’s a dialogue driven show with nothing really here outside of the music to give it any life, so the standard stereo mix serves the material well. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback of either language track.
Video:
Originally released in 2005 and 2006, the transfer for this two part OVA series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. These OVAs have a pretty good bit of quality to the animation and the transfer here does it justice with a high bitrate, solid and appealing colors and no real problems overall. A bit of noise shows up in the backgrounds on occasion, but it’s never distracting or problematic. Colors are vibrant and solid throughout and the character animation fluidity doesn’t suffer from any noticeable line noise. These are very appealing looking episodes that come across very well here.
Packaging:
You certainly know what you’re getting with a show title Cleavage, but it doesn’t hurt in the slightest to show some of it either. The cover is made up of the two principal women in the foreground in their underwear with some very vibrant colors to their design. Their chests are obviously in the foreground even more here and they show off their assets well. The background is given over to a pair of shots of the teacher again, this time in either her school outfit or a bathing suit, both of which are set against a fairly indistinct background. It’s a cover that sells itself just as well as the name does. The back cover does the same kind of approach with lots of shots of the women and their chests. The two strips along the sides provide shots from the show while the center has a very up front visual of the two female leads in bathing suits looking upwards. The summary covers the basics but I can’t imagine anyone really bothering to read a plot summary for a show called Cleavage. The remainder of the cover is given over to the production information and a solid technical grid. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The menu design takes the character artwork from the back cover and puts it front and center, zoomed in nicely, along with a very bright blue background. The artwork looks even more vibrant and detailed here than on the cover and it certainly sets the mood for the show. The navigation strip along the center is the basics that you’d expect since there isn’t anything on the disc besides the show and some trailers for other series. Submenus load quickly and it’s easy to navigate but, unfortunately, the release did not read our players’ language presets and defaulted to English with sign/song subtitles.
Extras:
None.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Let’s front-load this review. This show is about cleavage. Boobies. Big ones. Very big ones. Ones that, depending on your point of view, could be considered quite scary and almost inhuman. Cleavage is a two part OVA that features a couple of women with racks of unusual size who know how to use them and who are both interested in the same guy. The guy, to his advantage, has something of a large breast fetish so that works out pretty well. But he has to take on a teacher fetish and a sister fetish as well in order to enjoy all of it.
Cleavage revolves around the brother and sister pair of Yuuto and Erica. The two aren’t blood relatives as Yuuto lost his mother some years ago and his father remarried with Erica’s mother. When she and Erica came to live with Yuuto and his father, Yuuto took to her pretty well since he’d been without a mother so long. Erica joked that it’s an oedipal complex to be sure, but part of it was jealousy because she was instantly attracted to Yuuto upon meeting him. When Erica’s mother passed away a year ago, it’s been quiet and difficult since then as Yuuto hasn’t been handling it well. Everything is changing further now that Yuuto’s father has taken a branch management position in Sapporo and is leaving the two kids at home to mind the place while he’s away for the duration.
Life for the two in this environment isn’t bad to say the least since they’re both fairly responsible people with things to do. Yuuto is frustrated by the fact that Erica is wrapped up in her studies, but he’s understanding of it in addition to the fact that she’s simply no good at household related chores. She ends up offering to help him out in another way by giving him her mouth which he readily accepts. He’s had such a thing for Erica’s mother all this time and the two are very similar in nature, it’s easy for him to shift over to this instead. At the time that they start this, they keep to their existing relationship outside of the house which causes some problems. Others are noticing changes in both, and one of them, a fellow female classmate named Yuhi, is very interested in Erica and wants to pursue her.
Where it becomes complicated is just before the second episode where Yuuto and Erica really decide to go forward with being more than just oral friends. The two have very strong feelings for each other and everything they’re doing is above the board, but the social stigma is strong enough to keep them from being very honest about it. When they cross the boundary from non-blood-related brother and sister to something more, it’s captured on film by their teacher, Sayaka. Sayaka is very interested in Yuuto and she uses this to get him to play with her at a time when he’s in the midst of a fight with Erica. Secrets become the norm and it starts to boil over as the two women make the intentions known of how they want Yuuto for themselves. And there’s Yuuto, stuck between two very big sets of breasts who want him. Rough life, right?
While the story is pretty basic, it is admittedly rather fun. The characters try to take themselves seriously but it’s hard to do so because of the size of the breasts. It doesn’t help that Yuuto often looks at women and sees them without clothes and they look even more amusing in this fashion. If you take out the size of the breasts, which is admittedly a big part of this show, you do get some really appealing character designs and a fun enough story that plays with familiar areas. Smooth character animation, bright and inviting locations and some fun moments where Yuuto is really put through the wringer in terms of choices he has to make. It’s not high art, but it is good trashy fun.
In Summary:
Cleavage makes no bones (well, some bones one would hope) about what it’s all about. With it being apparent from the cover artwork and the title alone, you know what you’re getting into here. It’s got a standard story, it plays up the brother/sister angle in an unsurprising way and it also tosses some fellow classmates and a teacher into the mix. Add in a little oedipal complex as well and it covers quite a few different fetishes. While it may not be a show that really captures your imagination, it’s a fun way to pass about an hour of time and watch as big breasted women fight it out over a relatively dorky guy. Wish fulfillment at its finest for a lot of young men – and old men – to be sure.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: B
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: January 20th, 2009
MSRP: $29.99
Running Time: 60 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p1 MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
“This show is about cleavage. Boobies. Big ones. Very big ones. Ones that, depending on your point of view, could be considered quite scary and almost inhuman.”
Whoa. Stop the presses. “…scary and almost inhuman.” No, just…no. I’ve noticed a long standing discrimination against large breasted anime characters on this site. The truth is out there, the X-Files tell us, and the truth is that there are 1) a lot of women out there with large breasts, and 2) there are many more large breasted women out there than many men realize:
The average bra size in the USA? 34DD
The average bra size in the UK? 36D
In short, the female characters’ bust size as presented here are not abnormal, they are not inhuman. There are many real women with breasts as large and larger than the women portrayed in this anime.
Save for those rare instances when a plot calls for it, there’s no such thing as a minimizer bra in anime. A female anime character’s bust clothed and unclothed are almost always the same size. In the real world, the exact opposite is true. More often than not, a real woman’s clothed bust is different than when she’s naked. Woman with smaller busts have padded bras which provide additional curves. Indeed, padding is standard on many bras, just for a comfort factor. Women with larger busts, however, are usually going to be wearing minimizer bras, which can make you think that a woman has a D or DD cup, but she might have an F, G or even greater cup size when the bra comes off.
All sizes of breasts are wonderful on women of legal age, from the smallest, to the largest, as long as the woman who has them is happy with them. This anime definitely caters to big breast lovers, and certainly a larger number of women have breasts smaller than portrayed here, but large, natural breasts or breasts which are within the natural limitations as portrayed in anime, should not be thought of as inhuman.