Honey, I’m home! The gig at PiQ magazine didn’t end up working out, so it’s time to come back to the gig I love - dissecting the sprouting and burning of the anime/game/manga world.

This week’s topic is one that bridges the burning and sprouting worlds. As Gainax co-founder and master of bounce Yamaga Hiroyuki told a Fanime panel introducing a fresh Guren Lagann, “Boys love drills.”

It’s true, too - going all the way back to Getter 2 with Drill Missile and up to Guren Lagann on the burning side. Some time in the last few decades of anime, drills became a staple of the sprouting side of anime, too - attached not to robots, but to hair. It’s a fascinating crossover phenomenon that appeals to both sides of a growing young Japanese boy.

Drills on robots are relatively easy to explain - they were easy to animate in the old days. Draw a few frames of a drill spinning, and you’re set for the next 26 episodes. It’s also very dramatic to see a drill kicking up a storm of sparks against the armor of an enemy robot. Plus, it’s a surrogate penis, and boys love those things.

Drills on girls, on the other hand, take a bit more explaining. For example, take a look at a couple of girls with different forms of iconic drill hair: Houjou Reika from Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun (whose hair isn’t nearly as drill-heavy as that of others, but is important for the sake of discussion later), Karin from Street Fighter Alpha, and the Archer from Disgaea (who is so identified with her drill hair that in Disgaea 3, she actually says “Doriru!” as one of her combat noises).

Aside from being visually interesting and physically impossible short of wigs wrapped around foam, drill hair has three major features that lends itself to frequent use in character designs. First, it implies that the character spends a hell of a lot of time working on her hair in the morning, implying certain levels of leisure time combined with vanity. Second, the pointed nature of a drill and its resemblance to colonial European wigs adds to a general look of sharpness and nobility to a character design. Third, the standard drill is an upgraded cousin of the Twin Tail hairstyle, which has long been associated with tsundere. Add these three together and you have an easy route to the ojou-sama character archetype, the haughty character who looks and acts like a queen.

Pretty much every drill-haired girl will fall into this character type, from the above-mentioned Reika and Karin to Yurika from Project Justice and Char from Shuraki. Drill hair is character design shorthand at this point, giving you a bunch of character information in just a character’s hair and a little flag for ojou-sama or tsundere fans just like glasses are a giant flag for the tastefully named Richard Kim.

As a random note, Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun also included a highly amusing bit about how anime drill hair is made - Reika wakes up late one morning, and has to manually drill up her hair by sticking her finger in her tails and spinning it at about the speed of an egg whisk. It’s more than a little silly, and wholly hilarious.

Are you a fan of the drills? Do you wish I’d talked about something else? Didja miss me (or not miss me?) Let me know in the comments!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under moe, Sprouting, Burning, geek love, anime. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.