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AKA: Paradise of Innocence, 無邪気の楽園 (Japanese)
Genre: Ecchi "comedy" pretending not to be pornography
Length: OAV, 3 episodes, 26 minutes each
Distributor: Currently unlicensed in North America.
Content Rating: Inappropriate for any age (Sexualization and fetishization of minors, pedophilia, sexual harassment, intense sexuality)
Related Series: N/A
Also Recommended: Nothing. And if there is something similar you think I should see, I promise you, I don't want to hear about it.
Notes: Based on the manga by Uran (a pen name), which ran from 2010 to 2017 in Hakusensha's seinen magazine Young Animal Arashi. A spinoff series, Paradise of Innocence Parallel, ran in the same magazine from 2017 to 2018.

Three OAVs were bundled with specific manga volumes; this review only covers the first one that came with volume 6.
Rating:

Mujaki no Rakuen

Synopsis

Shouta, a borderline hikkomori, comes back to a high school reunion, and gets depressed at how successful everyone else is. He then falls into a pool and mysteriously gets taken back to when he was a fifth grader, except that he still has a 25-year-old's memories. The audience is then "treated" to perverted antics that should not be legal to draw, animate, or even mention in any universe, ever.


Review

I'll get right to it: although nowhere is there anything in Mujaki No Rakuen that would legally cause it to be categorized as an adult title, it is indeed porn. And in spite of the fact that the voice actors for this production are all adults, there is no way to deny that it is porn centered around fifth graders.

Yes, I am not joking...fifth graders.

Please, take a moment and let that sink in.

I'll admit it, Mujaki No Rakuen...you've got me. I've watched a fair number of heinous things, most of them for the purpose of reviewing them, but you've managed to outdo each and every one of them. So Eiken had a yogurt waterslide that amounted to a bukkake deathrace? Well, you said, "I can do better than that!" Yes, you had fifth grade boys attack fifth grade girls with squirt guns full of spoiled milk, all at once. Yes, you've done the impossible...you've managed to make a scene from Eiken look tasteful in comparison. And did I say that Recorder and Randsell's having a kid in the body of an adult man was creepy? Well, apparently you said "we can outcreep even Recorder and Randsell!" and set off to do so. And so you conceived a perverted 25-year-old man in a fifth grader's body, still having the memories of said perverted 25-year-old man and having the same sexual fantasies about his classmates who, unlike him, are actual fifth graders. It wasn't enough that Atsushi in Recorder and Randsell was mistaken for a sexual predator: you invented the very best possible disguise for a sexual predator and let him get away with it.

And yes, Shouta is a predator. We are meant to think he is a "nice guy" but he is as shameless a pedophile as he is stupid, sexist, and pathetic. I'm not convinced in the slightest that he's "hapless" and that such things as being "coerced" into massaging a girl's bug bite, which, I might add, looks mysteriously like a nipple, are not his fault. Admittedly, the show does frame him, in one case, for being part of a plot to lift up his classmates' skirts concocted by his male classmates, but this is just as odious: it's the dynamic of "we boys" having to take revenge on the "scary and dangerous girls" by sexually humiliating them, and it lets our resident predator victimize himself. Heck, I hardly believe that he didn't "want" to be blamed and (later) captured: this show's masochistic fantasy of being bound and gagged while your fifth-grade classmates undress themselves makes the kind of peeping-tom humor in your average onsen episode look like something from My Neighbor Totoro.

No, if you haven't realized already, I'm not buying this show's crap. Shouta, in the brief reunion scene at the beginning, acts as if his various former female classmates, who now all have successful careers, are looking down on him simply because he's a hikkomori. Sexism much? Oh no, there's nothing sexist about our poor, helpless little loser being upset that these big and scary women are so successful! It's just his male pride is being wounded. Or something. It's also not super sexist and demeaning that it's obvious to everybody but our resident idiot that each and every want of these women wants to throw everything away just so that she can have sex with him! No, that's not a messed up male fantasy in the slightest!

The point is this: I would rewatch Eiken, Photo Kano, or Recorder and Randsell an infinite number of times if it was the only thing that made it so that I didn't ever have to go near this again. While I could complain more about the crappy art and animation or the stupidity of the concept, that would ultimately give it too much credit. It is twenty-six minutes of watching fifth graders get aroused while being around a pedophile, and that is all you need to know.

If we were to adopt a rating of "zero stars", this would be first in line for it. I beg you not to go near this if you value your time or sanity...I beg you.[Redacted]

Recommended Audience: The things depicted in this OAV are not appropriate for anyone, as far as I'm concerned.



Version(s) Viewed: Digital source (Japanese with English subtitles)
Review Status: Partial (1/3)
Mujaki no Rakuen © 2014 Uran
 
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