Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 143

 There are a couple of themed posts on the way - 145 will be part two of the Studio Ghibli roundup, and 144 will be, er, not that - but before we reach those, there's more random stuff to be gotten through.  In a change from recent programming, however, that doesn't just mean desperately obscure VHS-only releases.  We have something that made it all the way to DVD, but also, and much more excitingly, we have a brand new Blu-ray release that's (sort of) never seen the light of day before in the West.  Yes, the good folks at Discotek have been at it again, and altogether that leaves us with Luna Varga, I Dream of Mimi, Digimon Adventure, and Techno Police...

Luna Varga, 1991, dir: Shigenori Kageyama

Luna Varga, a four episode comic fantasy OVA of a flavour that was everywhere in anime at this point, has essentially one idea going for it, and whether that one idea is stupid, awesome, or a bit of a both is surely in the eye of the beholder.  Towards the end of the first episode, our plucky heroine the princess Luna, whose kingdom is under assault from the local warmongers, finds herself in a hidden dungeon beneath her castle and uncovers a secret weapon that her family has squirrelled away for just such an occasion, in the shape of a giant dinosaur-thing by the name of Varga.  The only kink in this good news is that Varga will only function with the addition of a brain, and Luna will need to be said brain.  And while there are no end of ways that might have been represented, this being anime from the beginning of the nineties, there was only one they were likely to go with, and that is of course Luna sitting on Varga's head butt naked.

The butt nakedness has mostly been addressed by midway through episode two, which isn't to say Luna won't be exposed quite regularly, in part because Varga's more portable form is a tail that protrudes from exactly the part of Luna you'd expect a tail to protrude from.  And like I said, you can respond to all of this in one of two ways, or possibly bounce between the two extremes like I did, but at any rate, what we have here is four episodes of a scantily clad woman riding about on a dinosaur that's attached to her nether regions.  Though having said that, I'm reminded of how much of Luna Varga busies itself with other stuff, such as wacky comedy, perhaps because the scenes where Luna and Varga are in full-on kaiju mode are invariably the action set pieces, and Luna Varga is rather thrifty by early nineties OVA standards - though thankfully Kageyama's energetic direction and some nice designs ensure that it never looks offputtingly cheap.

Nevertheless, I can't convince myself the version of Luna Varga we got quite works, and that's frustrating, since it really feels as though it ought to.  It is, after all, effectively being a mech show where the giant robot is replaced by a giant monster and the boring male protagonist is replaced by a feisty princess, and that's surely a solid enough twist to keep a four episode OVA afloat.  In fairness, it's not as if Luna Varga doesn't manage to get itself over the finish line reasonably intact, only that there's the persistent sense that nothing's quite functioning as well as it should be.  The surrounding cast are varied and entertaining, and there are hints of intriguing world building: two of said cast, for example, can turn into animals on a whim, which is apparently a thing some people can do.  But almost everything occurs more as an amusing idea than as meaningful content, and thus ends up feeling slightly like filler on the way to a final encounter with the big bad that's an awfully generic note to end on.

I guess my point is, if you're going to have a central premise as outlandish as "princess has dinosaur attached to her butt" and then pepper it with dark wizards who can only summon pterodactyls and people who turn into flying cats at the drop of a hat, you probably need to accept that you've gone to a weird place and run with it, whereas what we get here somehow ends up making all of that feel rather generic.  As someone who has quite a fondness for generic nineties anime comic fantasies, I wasn't overly put out by that, and goodness knows there are plenty worse examples of the form, but there's no denying that an opportunity for something much more memorable was sitting there in plain sight.

I Dream of Mimi, 1997, dir: Masamitsu Hidaka

OK, yes, I'm afraid I'm breaking the "no hentai" rule yet again, and again it's because some rando on the internet claimed that something was good enough that, with a bit of squinting, you could enjoy it on its non-pornographic merits.  Now, I don't really agree, but I can sort of see how someone might have come to that conclusion about I Dream of Mimi, if only because there's some genuinely nice animation here, and some unusually good character designs, and a general sense that more than the usual thought has gone into the visual side of things, and not just for the sorts of reasons that hentai tends to focus on.  Which is to say that by "good character designs" I don't just mean "well-drawn boobs".  Though that too.

I care a fair bit about nice animation, enough so that I can ignore some pretty hefty failings, so that's a good start, and it's not even as if I Dream of Mimi has nothing else going for it: the humour worked enough of the time to keep me routinely amused, and since this is primarily a comedy when it's not being hentai - and quite often when it is being hentai - that's certainly a win.  And the sexy stuff is all consensual and not especially graphic and relatively well woven into the plot, so in theory it's not as if its being hentai detracts from its other merits, either.

But in practice, by trying to do something awfully familiar but with a mildly pornographic twist, I Dream of Mimi leaves itself with not enough time to tell a decent story or to tell the one it's set itself very coherently.  For what we've got here is one of those "nerdy guy gets magical dream girlfriend" shows that were, and no doubt remain, awfully common in the world of anime.  They always had the potential to be kind of gross, and I've commented before on how miraculously they generally manage to sidestep being the worst version of themselves: heck, Oh My Goddess! is a personal favourite, and I doubt I could explain that to someone without making it sound deeply icky.  Indeed, I remember singling out Video Girl Ai in my review on precisely that point, and being gobsmacked that it somehow wrung something heartfelt and witty from a premise that had every reason to be all sorts of unpleasant.

I won't quite go so far as to say that I Dream of Mimi is the version of Video Girl Ai that I praised Video Girl Ai for not being, but the possibility certainly occurred to me more than once while I was watching.  Out story involves the nerdish Akira, who buys a computer from a dodgy fellow in the street and is surprised when he gets home that said computer is a naked girl, whom he eventually names Mimi.  The show, incidentally, doesn't seem to know the difference between computers and robots, or indeed between computers and sexbots, that being effectively what Mimi is, since she immediately pledges herself to Akira for all eternity and seemingly has no functions that aren't powered by... Well, look, let's just say that if you'd care to hazard a guess at what Akira has to do to expand her RAM, or where her software needs to be inserted, then, unless you have the cleanest of minds imaginable, you're almost certainly right.

Given that we're in the realms of hentai, I guess there are plenty dumber reasons to jam a bunch of sex scenes and an awful lot of nudity into what's primarily a romantic comedy.  But I Dream of Mimi never quite figures out how to balance those elements.  Given that Mimi is a sex-powered machine, and an awfully possessive and demanding one at that, the romance doesn't function well at all, and the comedy keeps getting sidelined for what turns out to be the main plot, some action-heavy business about invading American computers that in turn doesn't gel with the ongoing business of Akira trying to hide from his friends that he's inadvertently married a nymphomaniac PC that looks like a teenage girl, and all in all this feels like a title that needed to pick fewer lanes and stick to them.  If the concept appeals, it's certainly easy to imagine a worse version, and indeed a sleazier and more charmless version, but unless you're absolutely determined to have sporadic sex scenes in your magical girlfriend show, there are much better takes on that over-done setup to be had.

Digimon Adventure, 1999, dir: Mamoru Hosoda

Digimon Adventure is quite a pointless title to be reviewing, but pointless for different reasons to how most of these reviews have been over the last two or three years, given that, thanks to Discotek and their recent Blu-ray, you can actually buy it in normal shops for a relatively reasonable amount of money.  On the other hand, you almost certainly know in advance whether you'd want to - are you a Digimon fan, a Mamoru Hosoda fan, or both? - and given that Discotek's release includes the first three movies and that, at twenty minutes, Digimon Adventure is far and away the shortest, the odds are stacked against anyone splashing out for it in isolation, especially when they're also getting Hosoda's well-regarded follow-up Our War Game.

The logical thing to do, then, would be to review the release rather than the individual film.  But I'm not going to do that because only Digimon Adventure came out during our decade of choice, and even if I do break my own rules here so often that it's become a running joke, I'm in a stubborn mood today.  Yet thankfully, none of that matters, because if you fall into either of the categories mentioned above, then the first Digimon film, in spite of its miniscule running time, is damn near good enough to warrant the price of entry on its own.

Though, I dunno, maybe that's a little truer if you're in the Digimon fan camp?  Hosoda brings an unusually visible amount of directorial presence, far more than you'd expect for a property like this, but I don't know that we can call Digimon Adventure a Hosoda feature in the way that, say, Wolf Children or The Boy and the Beast,  or even his later franchise entry, the One Piece film Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, are.  Yet Digimon Adventure manages to be a perfect approach to what a franchise movie should be, while at the same time feeling as if it's doing quite a bit more than what that would call for.  The story is as simple and slight as can be - some years before the start of the TV series, Tai and his little sister Hikari have their first encounter with a digimon, then there's a big fight - but feels considerably more substantial and nuanced than that suggests.  It starts out light-hearted, gets awfully dark before the end, and has as many delightful character moments as films four or five times its length.  Plus, Hosoda being Hosoda, and having his shtick down apparently from even very early on in his career, the animation is wonderful, and in most of the ways his later work would feature wonderful animation, with tons of charm and subtlety of expression to the scenes that are primarily about two children trying to make sense of the cute but baffling monster that's inserted itself into their lives and a real sense of scale and weight to the climatic battle.

And you know what?  I've changed my mind.  In spite of a rather high price tag - sure it's three movies, Discotek, but they have a combined running time of one quite long movie! - I'd recommend this to any vintage anime fan, and to anyone who's interested in following Hosoda back to his roots.  I know I said I wouldn't review the release, but Our War Game is pretty wonderful, spoiled only by some dated digital animation work and the fact that its director would return to the same well with both Summer Wars and Belle, leaving it feeling like something of a rough draft - albeit the rough draft of a skilled craftsman who already had most of what he needed to do figured out.  And the third film, Hurricane Touchdown!!, is a perfectly serviceable, entirely rote franchise movie, which is okay because it just emphasises how elegantly Hosoda balances an auteur's instincts with the needs of his material, and so makes Digimon Adventure seem all the better for how much more it accomplishes with less than a third of the running time.

Techno Police 21C, 1982, dir's: Nobuo Onuki, Masashi Matsumoto

I try not to repeat what others have said better than I could, so rather than detail the origins of what would come to be known in the West as either Techno Police 21C or plain old Techno Police (I'm assuming, based on no evidence, that it had a different title in Japan), I'll just point you to this review.  But short story even shorter, since it's handy information to know in advance: what we have here was intended to be a TV series that never got off the ground, and in desperation, the extant footage was cobbled together into something that, if you were being very generous in your definitions, could be regarded as a movie.

Though why anyone would be generous towards Techno Police is beyond me, since it isn't very good, and almost certainly wouldn't have been a good TV series, perhaps struggling its way up to "cheap and generic" in its better episodes.  Here, those better episodes get translated into better scenes, of which there are maybe two, though I can only remember one, so perhaps I'm already being too kind.  There simply isn't anything to get excited about, and I do wonder how things ever got so far as they did, since surely not even in 1982 was "futuristic cops are partnered with robots" such a ground-breaking premise that you could hang an entire TV show - or movie - off it without bothering to concoct anything in the way of interesting characters, settings, narrative or themes?  And if I'm wrong and Techno Police had genuinely come up with a notion so radical and ground-breaking that it had to be thrust into the world by some means or other, even then, I refuse to accept that more couldn't have been down with it than ...  well, than nothing, since Techno Police is content to go nowhere with its core idea.  The closest we get to a hook is that the robot partners are essentially new-borns who have to be trained in the basics of police work and social behaviour, which translates to a brief montage of wacky misunderstandings, while also offering a fine example of the level this is operating on, given what an awesomely stupid jumping-off point "robot cops that don't know how to be cops" is.

Still, the robots serve us better than their human counterparts, since they at least get some mildly appealing designs, whereas the homo sapiens of the cast are bland as bland can be, both in appearance and whatever passes for character.  They're not even stereotypes, and the only two traits I can recall about any of them are that the hero, Ken, is introduced to us as having a thing for trashing his police motorcycles that you might imagine would figure somewhere in the subsequent plot but doesn't, and Eleanor, the one who's a girl, gets an hilarious line in which she seems to suggest that getting into tanks is somehow her speciality.  There's a third team member, but even looking at his picture on the cover and having watched this thing yesterday, I can't recall a single detail about him, and there are some recurring villains who I've also largely forgotten, and if there's a lower bar to clear than making your anime villains remotely memorable, I struggle to think what it might be.

Needless to say, the animation is resolutely threadbare, leaving multiple action sequences that feel like they probably ought to be mildly exciting as anything but, and an early score by Miyazaki's go-to guy Joe Hisaishi serves only to illustrate that even geniuses have to learn their craft somewhere.  And with all of that said, and since I always try not to be wholly negative, I'll close by admitting that, in its incredibly modest and inept way, Techno Police did kind of charm me.  It's not hatefully bad; you can sort of feel that somewhere deep beneath its bland and clunky exterior is the heart of something that somebody genuinely cared about - woo, robot cops!! - and however badly that spark got lost along the way, it wasn't altogether extinguished.  Of course any modern child would be repelled by its incompetence and immense datedness, but I can imagine a kid in the late eighties stumbling across Techno Police on TV and kind of digging it for the course of eighty minutes.

-oOo-

I possibly got a bit more excited over Digimon Adventure than is altogether reasonable, but it's been on my want-to-see list for a good long while, and it's nice not to have been disappointed.  However, in terms of recent good news, it's turned out to be a mere taste of what's to come.  In particular, and after I grumbled hard about their past incarnation only recently, I'm feeling awfully positive about the new-look AnimEigo, who just made a bunch of very exciting announcements, including one that would feature high on my top ten of vintage titles that demand a Blu-ray release.  And I don't know why I'm being coy, it's the Black Jack OVA series!  Yay!  So who knows, maybe we might even get another new title or two to look at before we hit the big 150?

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 142

One last post for 2024, which has been a rather dramatic year for Drowning in Nineties Anime if the Blogger stats are to be believed, in that people appear to have been actually reading these things in considerable numbers.  This seems deeply unlikely - why do you never comment, oh phantom readers? - but at least it's been nice to imagine that I'm not rambling into the void.  And of course it would be even nicer to finish the year with something momentously exciting, but that was never going to happen, so we'll have to settle for a very tenuously themed post.  Our four titles this time have one thing in common, and that's that they all clock in at well under an hour.  It's not much, but it's all we've got, so let's take a look at Guyver: Out of Control, Baoh, Shonan Bakusozoku: Bomber Bikers of Shonan, and On a Paper Crane: Tomoko's Adventure...

Guyver: Out of Control, 1986, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe

By this point, it's mostly to be expected that the releases I cover here are lost and forgotten; there was just so much of this stuff coming out, and the law of averages dictates that a lot was bound to fall by the wayside.  But then sometimes I come across something I'd definitely have expected to leave at least some trace, and Guyver: Out of Control falls hard into that category.  That there's an entire entry of the Guyver franchise nobody ever seems to mention?  Well, that took me by surprise, given the extent to which the OVA series was one of the seminal titles from among the first major wave of anime exports.  It's still a fondly remembered show, and though I've never seen it, I know the later TV series has its defenders; heck, there are even people who like the first live-action adaptation, though goodness knows why.*  But try as I might, I can't find one person who has a nice word for Guyver: Out of Control, the first attempt at adapting the property, a mere year into the lifespan of a manga that would go on to run to a whopping 32 volumes.

So let me be that person.  Guyver: Out of Control is a long way from perfect, and it's probably fair to say that it's inferior to the bulk of the later OVA series, and from what I've read, it plays fairly fast and loose with its source material.  But as an attempt at doing the whole Guyver thing in under an hour?  It could have turned out plenty worse.  Out of Control is something of a whistle-stop tour, and it's evident that there were boxes to be ticked.  Gore?  Check.  Gratuitous nudity?  Check.  Every possible combination of humans, guyvers, and zoanoids fighting each other?  Yup, a big check there.  And if words like "guyver" and "zoanoid" mean nothing to you, you're probably not the target audience, but there's certainly enough information here to follow along, and much more would be a flagrant waste of running time.  We learn that zoanoids are humanoids that change into gross monsters and that they're bad; we learn that guyvers are suits of biomechanical armour and that they're icky but awesome.  We learn that when the latter punches the former real hard, they tend to explode in showers of blood.  For me, that's about all you really need.

Okay, I'm joking slightly.  On its dramatic merits alone,  Out of Control is thin stuff, and that's particularly apparent with our hero Sho, whose characterisation is effectively nonexistent, and still more than his love interest Mizuki (who the subtitles insist, distractingly, on calling Mizuky) ever gets, unless you consider "being kidnapped" a personality trait.  The bland, big-eyed character designs do them few favours either; from what I can tell, they don't appear to have been ported over from the manga, and those slightly cartoonish designs are a poor fit for the material.  Thankfully, though, and more importantly, Out of Control does right by its zoanoids, which are satisfyingly gross, and mostly manages not to screw up the guyver itself: it's kind of gangly compared with the later OVA, but it looks cool in motion, and the manner in which it bonds with its hosts goes hard on the body horror in a manner that makes for some interesting visuals.  This is hardly big-budget stuff, but it's more than efficient, and Hiroshi Watanabe - right at the start of what would go on to be a pretty good and impressively lengthy directorial career - injects a measure of personality without going so far as to distract from the crucial business of bloody violence and naked ladies.

Whether you'll find much enjoyment in Guyver: Out of Control, then, probably comes down to a bunch of variables, and obviously having a soft spot, or at least a high tolerance, for the schlockier end of vintage anime is a vital step in the right direction.  But maybe the bigger issue is your relationship with the Guyver franchise.  No idea what I've been on about for the last three paragraphs?  Then there are similar and better OVAs and movies from the period mining similar material, and in such a condensed form, I doubt this one would stand out to the virgin viewer.  An enormous fan of the series, with every panel of the manga burned into your memory?  Then the liberties taken here and the slight but constant shonkiness will likely drive you up the wall.  But if you're somewhere in the middle, with a degree of fondness but no great loyalty to other entries in the franchise, there's something quite appealing about a bite-sized chunk of Guyver that plays the hits and then clears the stage before it can remotely outstay its welcome.

Baoh, 1989, dir: Hiroyuki Yokoyama

I've been thinking a lot lately about publisher AnimeEigo.  I've always had a soft spot for them, and found their slight amateurishness to be charming: with their rightfully beloved liner notes, their small but carefully curated catalogue, and their obvious passion for those few titles they put out, it seemed unfair to begrudge them their flaws.  But there's amateurishness that's appealingly quirky and there's amateurishness that's more annoying, and their recent reliance on Kickstarter campaigns** for titles that surely could have just been released the old-fashioned way had been something I'd been eyeing suspiciously for a while, and which came to a head when I realised - as someone who'd need to import it to the UK - that I'd been priced out of what I was willing to spend for their Dagger of Kamui Blu-ray, which I'd been hoping for for an age.

All of which is a long way of getting around to how Baoh isn't AnimeEigo's finest moment.  I suppose their putting it out at all warrants a thumbs up, though at the time it must have seemed like an obvious choice, for reasons we'll return to.  But, like a small handful of their output, Baoh would go on to become quite astonishingly rare, which is the first annoying thing: something went very wrong somewhere to make a release this ludicrously hard to find.  Still, every publisher ended up with one or two unfathomable rarities, so we can't judge too harshly on that point - and who'd want to, when I could be getting incensed by some of the most astoundingly poor subtitling I've ever seen?  Granted, I used to do this for a living, so I realise I'm touchier than the average viewer, but I also know what I'm talking about when I say that whoever subtitled Baoh somehow managed to break every rule of the trade, not to mention a couple I'd never so much as considered, because why would you break them?  Why, for instance, when you had three whole words to work with, would you ever think to split them across two lines?  It's lunacy, yet a good three quarters of the subtitles here are operating at that level of stupidity.

Oh, and they managed to mistranslate the protagonist's name, so there's that.

And if the fact that I've spent two lengthy paragraphs without once touching on the actual content of Baoh is making you suspect I don't have much to say, then yeah, you got me.  Baoh is, to be clear, pretty great - which is a large part of why I got so wound up over things so arguably trivial - but it's mostly great at doing things that were all sorts of obvious for its time and place.  There's not a single element anywhere in amongst "moody antihero gets bonded with sentient armour and teams up with a psychic girl to take down the evil scientist who's responsible by punching his way through an army of colourful weirdos" that hadn't been touched upon elsewhere in the world of late-eighties anime and wouldn't be done to death in the near future.  It's just that Baoh does a better job of them than nearly all its competitors, in large part because it's less than an hour long and hardly bothers to pretend these are fresh ingredients when it can cannon-blast them into our faces instead.  I love nuance and subtlety as much as the next person, but I also love a villain so enthusiastic about their mad science that they frequently forget about everything else, and that's very much the level Baoh's operating on.

Granted, I'm heavily biased by the fact that the animation is rather splendid from beginning to end, with a slickness and attention to detail that's accentuated by Yokoyama's enthusiastic direction and sense of style.  Granted, too, that most of that slickness and enthusiasm is devoted to such extremely gross sights as people's faces being melted - Baoh sure loves its melting faces! - and, to a marginally lesser extent, to cool action stuff.  If it's not icky bloodshed or cool action, Baoh isn't much interested, and even then there's really only the one standout sequence, though it's a belter, as exposition and backstory get delivered mostly through the medium of horrible violence, that's then neatly cross-cut with a major moment of character development (and yet more horrible violence.)  And I can't really pretend that one terrific sequence and some overly familiar ideas delivered with an unusual degree of craft and ingenuity make for a reason to track down one of the rarest releases in existence, but Baoh's fun enough that I can at least say it deserved better than the treatment it got.

Shonan Bakusozoku: Bomber Bikers of Shonan, 1987, dir's: Nobutaka Nishizawa, Daiki Yamada

Oh, look!  It's AnimeEigo again, and this time, we get to be a bit kinder about them, because Shonan Bakusozoku is the sort of unusual, non-commercial title that a bigger, perhaps more sensible publisher would have steered well clear of.  And while AnimeEigo didn't exactly back it to the hilt, with a VHS release that's awfully hard to find these days and no subsequent return on DVD, it's nice that they took the chance.

Though the subtitling, it has to be said, is still dreadful.

But unusual and non-commercial I said, and the latter follows directly from the former, in that biker gangs, in the specific form they're portrayed here, are just not a thing anywhere else in the world, and it's one of those subcultures so insular and specific that it's awfully hard to convey it in a manner that the non-Japanese viewer can get any sort of a handle on.  Shonan Bakusozoku gets around this a little by giving us a protagonist with one foot outside of that world - he's really into sewing, a detail the show has the good grace never to mock him for - and a viewpoint character who's excluded from it altogether, and thus also manages to duck the issue of how the rest of the cast and their lifestyle of choice aren't terribly sympathetic.  You might argue that this is trying to have your cake and eat it, but the balance is largely right: we're invited to understand why riding around at irresponsible speeds at the dead of night and getting into bloody fights could be awfully appealing to those who indulge in it, without necessarily being asked to ignore that it makes them kind of jerks.

There's a story in all of this, of course, but that's the point where Shonan Bakusozoku comes a little unstuck, with too many similar characters to keep track of and too much hopping between them - that being what you get when you try and cram a big chunk of a 16-volume manga into 50 or so minutes, I guess, and also what you get when a US distributor only brings over the first of 12 OVA episodes.  Were Shonan Bakusozoku more invested in storytelling and less invested in style and action, this all might be quite a problem, but aside from a brief spell in the middle when I got mildly lost amid the tangle of plot threads, it turned out to not matter much at all.  It's the sort of tale that's clearer in retrospect, once we have the entire cast together for the big action climax, and everything comes together nicely enough that it's easy to forget the odd muddle along the way.

Likewise, some fairly rudimentary animation never really gets in the way of matters.  A degree of visual simplicity is the right fit for the cast and the show's punky attitude, and in that sense I was reminded of the more recent (and highly recommended) On-Gaku: Our Sound, which similarly uses visual simplicity to get to the heart of characters with an equally simple approach to life.  Granted, in the case of  Shonan Bakusozoku, I suspect it had more to do with budget, but that's not to say there aren't a few cool sequences, and they're right where they need to be, emphasising the thrills and danger of the biker gang lifestyle.  Still, it's not a title to seek out for its technical virtuosity, and taken purely on its artistic merits, Shonan Bakusozoku is maybe nothing terribly special.  But as a window into a particular subculture in a particular time and place, it's rather neat, and if you're the sort of vintage anime fan who likes diving down odd rabbit holes, there's definitely something of interest to be found here.

On a Paper Crane: Tomoko's Adventure, 1993, dir: Seiji Arikara

I'd had a bit of an emotional few days, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a topic I've put a lot of thought into over the years, and even written about, and I'm generally kind of a wimp, so perhaps you shouldn't read too much into the fact that I blubbered through pretty much the entirety of On a Paper Crane's brief twenty-some minute running time.  Nevertheless, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that it absolutely wrecked me, if only because what we have here is a short film designed expressly to be shown to children, and I honestly can't say whether I'd be willing to put anyone in that target audience through the experience.  Which speaks, I suppose, to our culture and the times in which we live, because even as I find Peace Anime no Kai, the organisation that created this thing all those many years ago, hopelessly naïve in their faith that putting out a short kids' movie about one of the most appalling events in human history would turn the world's youth against nuclear weapons and war in general, I 100% agree with their goal and consider it precisely the sort of thing we ought to be doing as a civilised society, trying to steer the little'uns away from our worst mistakes even if that means traumatising the heck out of them a little.

It's fair to say, then, that, more than almost anything we've covered here, your mileage is going to vary with On a Paper Crane, because if you're not at least somewhat on board with its message and intentions, there's not going to be a lot in an openly propagandist mid-budget film of less than thirty minutes that's likely to hold your interest.  The animation is fairly nice, and obviously the work of professionals - not necessarily a given with a project like this - but the simplistic character designs didn't altogether work for me, and since On a Paper Crane is focused mostly on its two central characters, that was something of an issue.  Reijirô Koroku's score is more successful, hitting the obvious note of lots of weepy strings, but hitting it awfully effectively - a large part, I suspect, of why my tear ducts went into overdrive so hard.

Koroku had the right idea, though: subtlety was nowhere on the agenda when it came to the making of On a Paper Crane and nor should it have been, for what use is a film about the bombing of Hiroshima that makes you feel just a little bit sad?  Still, I was taken aback by how up front the film gets about the topic of what nuclear weapons do to a human body, pushing about as far as you could possibly go and still stay remotely on the side of being watchable by small children.  The moment that first set me off is a sequence where our protagonist, sixth-grader Tomoko, who's taken it upon herself to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum for a school project, is spurred by objects and images in the display to imagine the last moments of those who left them behind.  It's an obvious idea, but that doesn't make it any less effective, or any less distressing, and that's equally the case when Tomoko starts hanging out with the ghost of Sadako Sasaki, who spares nothing in filling her and us in on what it's like to die of radiation poisoning before you've reached your teens.

Which I'm sure is another clue as to whether this is something you'd be remotely interested in, and surely for the majority of people, the answer is going to be a resounding "no" - which I get, I do, because who wants to track down exceedingly rare vintage anime just to be preached at about horrible historic events?  Even if you're on side with what On a Paper Crane has to say, that's not altogether a reason to watch it, and if you've been reading this and thinking, "Man, I really need to get a copy of this for my kids," then I'm kind of worried for you.  Yet I adored it, and it rocked me hard, and I'd like more people to experience it.  That's all the more true because the tape is a lovely artefact in itself, with a case that matches nothing in my collection and an enclosed booklet that's eager to tell you everything you could ever want to know about nuclear war, and then quite a bit more.  But that tape's about as rare as you'd expect it to be, and I can't even find the film on Youtube, and so I find myself yet again in the position of raving about something that's basically lost to the world.

-oOo-

Gosh, that was a good batch, and not all that far from being a great batch, either.  Granted, I suspect I'm overrating everything here, for one reason or another, due to personal bias - and now that I think about it, a much better theme would have been, "titles I was always going to be kindly disposed to and maybe give better write-ups than they entirely deserve."  Nevertheless, I do recommend the lot, and it's nice to be wrapping up 2024 on such a high note.

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

* Now, its sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero, that's pretty great.

** A thing of the past now, apparently, due to a change in management that seems to be bringing some welcome changes, and fingers crossed for a more standard-priced version of Dagger of Kamui arriving somewhere down the line.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 141

After a couple of (for me, anyway) more exciting posts, including the wild highs of the first part of our Studio Ghibli retrospective, we're back now to the usual random, obscure nonsense.  But hey, random, obscure nonsense can be exciting too, can't it?  And if lost gems are too much to expect by this point, there are at least a couple of minor treats in among Megami Paradise 2, Ogre Slayer, Dangaizer 3, and The Abashiri Family...

Megami Paradise 2, 1995, dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima

(Megami Paradise part 1 reviewed here)

It's obvious in retrospect that, in trying to show up ADV for releasing the two half-hour episodes of the Megami Paradise OVA as separate titles by reviewing them that way, I shot myself in the foot more than I scored any points against a long-defunct anime distributor.  For here we are with part two, and what is there to add?  Well, let's start with a spot of good news: my worry at the end of part one was that, for all I knew, this was an unfinished title and that was why not an awful lot happened in part one.  That turns out not to be the case, but the flipside is that there wasn't a lot happening because there wasn't a lot to happen, and while we do get an ending, it's an ending designed primarily to lead into the video game series of the same name, leaving plenty of questions open to be answered there.

Which isn't to say that none of the threads left dangling from the opening chapter come to anything: we do find out what the mysterious villains we met there are up to.  Only, it amounts to, "They're evil and they want to do evil stuff, for evil reasons," and even that still somehow leads to a cliff-hanger, if not a very compelling one.  I'm not convinced I'd have rushed out to buy Megami Paradise the game to find out precisely what those evil reasons were - or, indeed, at all, on the strength of these two episodes.

Because part two is, like part one, perfectly adequate and almost entirely no more than that.  Though it does, at any rate, get to be adequate at somewhat different things in a somewhat different fashion, meaning that we can't dismiss it as more of the same.  The biggest shock is that our main character for part one, the nondescript-apart-from-her-name Lilith, gets taken out of play early and spends most of the running time comatose in her undies, meaning that protagonist duties are split between the remainder of the cast but land mainly on ditzy magic user Rurubell, who I recall considering the best thing about chapter one.  That's not untrue here; I wouldn't want to watch an entire series about Rurubell, but she's fun in small doses, and there's no room for more than that.  Though that would be less true if the structure weren't so weird: there's a chunk of exposition of the "Ha ha, now we will tell you our wicked plot!" variety, a bit where it looks like the baddies are sure to win and largely waste their advantage by inflicting kinky torture on their adversaries, and the inevitable final scrap, which I won't spoil because I have faith in you, reader, to figure out where all this goes.  The weirdness, to be clear, isn't in the structure itself, which couldn't be more obvious, but in the length of time allocated to each element.  Or, to put it another way, if you came for a grand climatic battle, you're likely to be disappointed, whereas if you wanted a scene of two women hung upside down in scanty clothing being whipped, you might well find yourself in (megami) paradise.

Or not, since I assume that even the kinkiest of viewers would appreciate some detail and nuance in their animation, and that sequence, for all that the creators seem to have considered it terribly important from a narrative perspective, doesn't receive anyone's finest work.  Barring the odd lapse, though, the production values are largely identical to what we got last time.  There's no single standout sequence to compare with the one in the first part, but mostly everything is fine and inoffensive to the eye, and the above-par soundtrack continues to keep the energy levels high even when the story is distracting itself with odd digressions.  Which brings us to a conclusion that I'm itching to copy and paste from my part one review, because, again, what else is there to say?  Megami Paradise is resolutely okay, with just enough quirky character to make it ever-so-slightly memorable, but it's hard to imagine anyone would have bothered with it back in the day given ADV's mercenary mean-spiritedness, and it's harder still to imagine why anyone would give it their time now.

Ogre Slayer, 1995, dir: Takao Kato

Let's not make the same mistake again, even if it's a bit hypocritical not to: though Viz Video chose to release Ogre Slayer across two VHS tapes, and though they were sneaky enough to append a two to the second volume, implying that it was a sequel rather than the latter episodes of a four-part OVA, I'm going to cover the lot together and save us all some time.  Though, frustratingly, Ogre Slayer would have been more worthy of two separate reviews, and there was at least some justification in the choice to break it in half beyond, "Woo, twice the money!" - a bit of corporate greed, incidentally, that didn't pay off, given that nobody appears to have paid it the least bit of attention.  Though that may equally well stem from the same cause as my wondering if I shouldn't have treated these two tapes as distinct from each other, which is that Ogre Slayer is essentially an anthology series - and an anthology series of a particularly confusing sort, which probably never stood much hope of setting the mid-nineties anime scene on fire whatever Viz did with it.

I say "confusing", but that's more an acknowledgement of the contemporary reviews, what few there are, than a personal opinion.  Once you get your head around the whole anthology aspect, it's substantially less odd that the person we'd expect to be our protagonist, the titular half-human, half-oni Ogre Slayer - that being both his name and the name of his sword, not to mention his sole occupation - is something of a guest character in his own anime.  And accepting that immediately improves the whole endeavour and gives us something a bit more special than the many violent, sexually exploitative titles that Ogre Slayer resembles at a glance.  I mean, it absolutely is violent and sexually exploitative, and the violence is front and centre throughout, but the anthology format means that it's never just that.

To go into more detail would be to risk spoiling four consistently good, occasionally great stories.  What works reliably is the focus on female protagonists who are used to lives outside of the nightmarish kill-or-be-killed world they each, one way or another, find themselves thrust into.  Probably that choice comes in part from a seedy, exploitative place, yet the result is an emotional depth beyond what we'd get if this were simply about a guy with a cool sword hacking up monsters.  Though paradoxically, keeping the focus away from Ogre Slayer himself does allow him to develop, at least from our point of view, as we learn details that earlier perspectives hid from us, the more so since the first part introduces him as practically an antagonist.  It's all rather neat and surprisingly sophisticated, and firmly the best thing Ogre Slayer has to offer.  Takao Kato's direction is always competent without getting up to anything truly striking, and the same can be said for animation that never impresses with anything besides how much blood and guts it's willing to chuck at the screen, though it does conjure up more atmosphere than many a similarly gruesome title.  Then again, it's Kazuhiko Toyama's score that does most of the heavy lifting on that front, especially when it's leaning hard into traditional Japanese instrumentation.

Ultimately, though, whether or not you're likely to get anything out of Ogre Slayer probably comes down almost entirely to how accepting you are of what it is, and likely that leaves a rather narrow demographic: the short story anthology aspect and the predominantly female cast makes it that bit more thoughtful and emotionally driven than what you might expect from something so eager to hurl gore and nudity at the viewer.  Even then, the theme doesn't leave that much room for manoeuvre; for all that the four tales presented are impressively varied, they all ultimately boil down to ogres and the slaying thereof, putting this comfortably behind its most obvious counterpart, the wonderful Vampire Princess Miyu.  Nevertheless, I for one am always grateful for something a little different, and for all its familiar trappings and uneven success, Ogre Slayer is definitely that.

Dangaizer 3, 1999, dir: Masami Ôbari

I've broken so many of my self-imposed rules by this point that I really have no idea whether or not I out to be covering Dangaizer 3, a four-episode OVA that began in 1999 but ended in 2001, a year even I know wasn't part of the nineties.  But it's awfully exciting to find anything these days I can buy on actual DVDs for vaguely reasonable prices, and more importantly, talking about Dangaizer 3 means we say one last goodbye to director Masami Ôbari, whose work has been a source of ongoing fascination for me almost from the beginning of these articles, to the point where I spent almost the majority of my Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer review discussing him instead.  There I said that, as often intriguing and always individualistic as his projects are, none of them ever reach the dizzy heights of being better than okay.  But is that true here, with his last gift to the world of film-length mainstream anime before a lengthy sojourn in the lands of hentai and serial TV?

I wish I could say yes, and I would have were it not for one factor, which we may as well get out of the way, since I wish I'd known it going in: Dangaizer 3 is unfinished, and not in that acceptable way where it still manages to tell a satisfying and self-contained tale but in that highly frustrating way where it just goddamn stops, with no doubt at least a couple more episodes planned with which to wrap things up.  It's truly galling because, while in many ways Dangaizer 3 is extremely typical fare - our three underdressed heroines co-pilot a giant robot that battles other giant robots belonging to an evil corporation - there are enough wrinkles in the formula to suggest that interesting twists would arrive before all was said and done.  Mostly this comes down to the Dangaizer being an ancient superweapon of last resort designed to sort out social malfunctions in the most drastic way possible, which immediately begs the question of whether the villains are remotely in the wrong, but around that is scattered an unusual degree of world-building and lore that further muddies the moral waters and leaves yet more unanswered questions.*

Aside from that, what sets Dangaizer 3 apart from its contemporaries and from the remainder of Ôbari's nineties work is some superlative animation, which is all the more shocking given how routinely bad animation got in the precise window this was released.  There are signs of computer tinkering here and there, but mostly this has the look and feel of high-quality hand-drawn work, for all that said look probably couldn't have been accomplished without some deft use of computers, OVA budgets being what they were in 1999.  It's a win-win basically, of the sort only a few directors managed to pull off before everyone got their heads around the new technology that was turning their industry upside down, and who'd have thought Ôbari of all people would be the man to get it right?  Yet even that's less shocking than the developments in his character designs, which for once are unmistakeable assets, treading a fine line between distinctive and flat-out bonkers.  And more unbelievable still, while there's the expected amount of nudity and female objectification - really, more than the expected amount, and it's not at all surprising Ôbari would leap into making hentai directly after this - some of the cast have quite realistic proportions and generally look like human beings who might conceivably exist.  You could have told me Ôbari was capable of genuinely good work and I'd have believed you, but that he could draw a woman with breasts smaller than her head?  Now, there I'd have called you a liar.

And if that's faint praise, then so be it.  Dangaizer 3 is good, because it looks terrific and its action is often genuinely exciting and because it complicates its stock plot and cast just enough to add an element of intrigue, but there's reinventing the wheel and there's giving said wheel a bit of a polish and a new coat of paint, and this is definitely the latter.  Nevertheless, it's a nice note to say our goodbyes to Ôbari on, sure proof of what he might have accomplished had he not got so stuck making mediocre fighting game adaptations, and I've not much doubt that it would have got a solid thumbs up if the darned thing had only received a proper ending.

The Abashiri Family, 1991, dir: Takashi Watanabe

My dislike for Go Nagai has cooled over the course of these reviews, in part because anything is going to be an improvement when you start with Violence Jack, but also, let's be fair, because there are a few excellent and quite a lot of pretty good adaptations of his work out there.  So it's a mild disappointment to be parting ways with him on so sour a note as The Abashiri Family, a title that puts most of his worst traits and very few of his better qualities on display, and is a rubbish bit of anime in its own right.

I realise that doesn't leave much space for a nuanced review, but there's so little that's nuanced about The Abashiri Family that the attempt would be a waste of effort.  I'm not nearly familiar enough with Nagai's work to know whether the manga this came from felt like such a rehash of old ideas, but there's nothing here he didn't do better elsewhere and no real hook either, though it seems at first as though there might be.  The first episode offers a setup that could conceivably go to entertaining places, as it introduces us to a future so dystopian that we can just about pretend the titular thieves and murderers are in some strange way heroes, or at least as horribly violent and screwed up as they are because that's how you get by when you live in so nightmarish a world.  Which isn't to say that the script cares terribly about getting us on side with the Abashiris, not when it can impress us with their cool murdering abilities, which range from clothes made out of explosives to flicking bullets up people's butts.

This isn't great, by any means, and it's not helped by animation that fizzles practically the moment it's done with the mildly cool opening sequence that introduces us to how ghastly this particular future is, but it's much better than what's to come.  For the plot, you see, isn't really about the Abashiris and their criminal escapades, but one member in particular.  By the end of that first episode, it's been revealed that sixteen-year-old Kikonosuke is not, in fact, the boy her three brothers took her to be, and that their latest bank robbery was actually some sort of epic, belated gender-reveal party.  But with Kikonosuke's true identity out in the open, her father feels it's time for her to put her life of wanton violence behind her and get an education, a plan she's relatively on side with until it turns out that the particular school she's been sent to is every bit as dangerous as the outside world, what with the teachers being homicidal sadists and everything.

Now, I appreciate that no one comes to Go Nagai for sense, but my goodness does the whole school thing not have a lick of logic to it.  We'll learn in due time that the staff are training their students to be assassins, but also kill the vast majority of them, and nobody ever graduates anyway, and just how exactly has no-one noticed any of this for the presumably numerous years it's been operating?  Heck, we're even led to believe the place has a good reputation, which is patently impossible unless literally not a single parent has ever stopped to wonder why their kids have never come home.  At any rate, the school section, which is effectively the entirety of the remaining running time, is both deeply familiar as far as Nagai's oeuvre goes and a wallowing in most of his worst instincts, with a particular emphasis on sexual violence that's a dreadful fit for the generally glib and cartoonish tone.

That, I think, is the biggest problem.  There's a version of the school material that might have worked, or at least have worked better, but that would have involved treating it more seriously and excising the attempts at humour, since, while Nagai's more successful works managed to wring some gallows humour from similarly dark places, here the results are merely nasty, loud, and tiresome.  Then there's the side business with the Abashiri family - you remember them, the supposed protagonists? - and though that works adequately in the first episode and probably could have sustained a better story had it remained the focus, it gets more and more dysfunctional when put alongside the school subplot.  And while none of this is enough to push The Abashiri Family into the dankest depths of Nagai adaptations, if only because it's all too dumb and insincere for the unpleasantness to have any real effect, the dearth of high points and crummy animation are comfortably enough to make it best forgotten.

 -oOo-

I promised a couple of treats at the top there, didn't I?  And here we are at the bottom and I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking.  Probably that Dangaizer 3 was a bit better than it was, though had it been finished I do think we'd be looking at something kind of special.  But perhaps the only real standout was Ogre Slayer, a title I feel should have a little bit more of a reputation than the one it currently possesses, what with it having being totally forgotten and everything.



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

* Actually, what Dangaizer 3 reminded me most of - and I doubt this was deliberate, because Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to have been far more of a conscious reference point - is late-eighties OVA series Hades Project Zeorymer, reviewed here under its Manga title of Zeoraima.  But it's also awfully reminiscent of the excellent series RahXephon, which would arrive a year after its conclusion.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 140

I've broken practically every rule I set myself to try and keep the scope of these Drowning in Nineties Anime posts at some kind of manageable level, but one I hung on to for quite a while was to steer away from the recognised classics, partly because I was too emotionally attached to most of them to say anything useful and partly because, well, what would be the point?  You don't need me to tell you that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a great movie.  And while that, too, fell to the wayside eventually, there was another line I was less willing to cross.  Because there's classics and there's classics, and some stuff you really don't need me to tell you is good, not when it's reached the level of beloved world classics.

But obsessive completism is obsessive completism, and so here we are, with part one of what will eventually be three posts covering all of Studio Ghibli's pre-2000 output (plus a small cheat, which you'll find immediately below.)  And yes, this is certainly pointless, but it means I get to rattle on about some films that I adore beyond all reason, and then annoy myself by attempting to be remotely critical about them, and what the heck, right?  Let's talk about Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Laputa, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbour Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies...

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

What struck me most, coming back to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Blu-Ray, was how little the passage of four decades has harmed it.  I guess nobody's ever likely to mistake it for a modern film, but if someone were to adapt Hayao Miyazaki's manga today, staying faithful to his distinctive designs and not leaning too visibly on CGI, the results would be awfully similar to what he put out all those many years ago - though I suppose that's ignoring the fact that only a tiny handful of directors could possibly marshal the sorts of resources these days to produce hand-drawn animation of such astonishing quality.

But that, in any case, isn't really what I was getting at; it's as much, if not more, to do with the themes and attitudes and ethos that the film presents.  And obviously that's partly a consequence of its enormous influence, and the enormous influence of everything Miyazaki would go on to do subsequently, but regardless, there's not a lot from 1984, animated or otherwise, that offers such a complex, fully-formed female protagonist, or such nuanced villains, or such intricate, elaborate world-building, or such a sophisticated, persuasive environmentalist message.  And that last has never really been bettered, except perhaps by Miyazaki himself and his career-long collaborator Isao Takahata, for it's easy to say "We have to learn to exist alongside the natural world or terrible things will happen" and difficult indeed to weave that message into the core of your narrative in such a manner that it's both utterly convincing and barely the slightest bit preachy.

Granted, Nausicaä herself gets the odd speech in that direction, but her attitude is more one of desperation than condescension, and mostly it's the imagery that does the brunt of the work: we're given just enough time to get to know the Valley of the Wind as a location of delicate peace and harmony before it comes under threat, and since we know what the world beyond its borders has been reduced to, there's something profoundly wrenching about the sight of, say, a stray fungus spore attached to the root of a tree.  It's easy to forget just what a spectacularly good director of horror imagery Miyazaki can be, but there are moments of real nightmare fuel in Nausicaä, and the nightmare is one of nature made sick and warped and inhospitable.  Though, notably, the film never tries to persuade us that the insect-ruled wastelands that hem in its few last human habitations are in and on themselves a bad thing.  Indeed, they're routinely portrayed as having their own strange beauty and majesty, and that's nowhere truer than in the case of the enormous Ohmu that comprise its main non-human threat.  They're alien and potentially dangerous, but, as we'll learn, also absolutely necessary - and so, Nausicaä argues persuasively, the only rational response is to coexist.

This is all of a heck of a lot for a sort-of-debut to be even attempting, let alone pulling off with such easy grace.  True, Miyazaki had a ton of TV work behind him, including the splendid precursor that was Future Boy Conan, and of course he'd already made one extremely good movie, albeit one that probably nobody would describe as a passion project; but you can see why, for a lot of people, this is the first Miyazaki movie proper.  This is the point from which everything we've come to think of as the elements of a Miyazaki film began, and even if there would be modifications - the villains, for all their interesting shading, are inarguably villains, a storytelling crutch he'd rapidly abandon, and it's hard to imagine the Miyazaki of later years showing off quite so much of his female protagonist's bum - the vast majority of the pieces were firmly in place from the beginning.

For so ambitious a work, its imperfections are awfully trivial.  The pacing is arguably a bit off, somewhat languid in the early going and rather rushed in the last third, to the point where I always have a slight struggle to keep track of where everyone is and what exactly their motivations are in that moment; there are odd shots that a later Miyazaki wouldn't have let slip through, though that's an absurd standard to hold anything to; and while I very much like Joe Hisaishi's score, and while its main theme is one of his finest, it never quite gels into a coherent whole the way his later works with Miyazaki would, and a couple of pieces are the sole element of the movie that feel distinctly of their time.  But stacked against those small, small flaws are such astonishing achievements!  We've had time to get used to Miyazaki's greatness in the intervening years, but what must it have been like to encounter Nausicaä back in 1984, a science-fictional animated film of a scale, lavishness, intelligence, and emotional breadth so wildly beyond what almost anyone had attempted prior to that point?  Pretty mind-blowing, I'm guessing, and forty years really haven't done a whole lot to dull that impact.

Laputa, Castle in the Sky, 1986, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

I couldn't possibly be more biased towards Laputa: it's the first anime movie I ever saw, way back before I knew what anime was, and even though I came in halfway through, and even though I had no idea what I was watching, and even though I wouldn't learn its title until many years later, it blew my young mind.  It's fair to say that the fact I'm writing this post for this blog series at this very moment can be traced back to that day, and planting the seeds of my anime geekdom was only one of many ways in which Miyazaki's third movie has influenced me.

So while I'll try to be objective, let's accept that it's a fool's errand, and also that any criticisms I manage to provide come from a place of deep and implacable love.  Let's start, then, by acknowledging that, compared with what Miyazaki conjured a mere couple of years earlier, and indeed with almost the entirety of his later output, Laputa feels kind of trivial and goofy.  I don't know that it has any themes beyond "weapons of mass destruction are bad, as are the sorts of people who would use them," and even that it never takes especially seriously.  It's not a very serious film on any level, and if seriousness was all we cared about, we might grumble that it was a step back after the epic gravity of Nausicaä.  Certainly it feels more of a piece with what Miyazaki was up to before that, most obviously Future Boy Conan, which it borrows from in ways big and small; but I'd argue that of his preceding two films, it's The Castle of Cagliostro that Laputa shares most DNA with, for all that, in being a science-fictional action adventure with teen protagonists, it's Nausicaä it superficially resembles.

I like Miyazaki when he's in serious mode, but I'm also very happy indeed with a Miyazaki who's content to cut loose with almost non-stop action sequences that aren't terribly committed to things like gravity and physics when the alternative is to be absurd and thrilling.  There's arguably no real story at all: we learn of the existence of a floating island full of treasures and ancient technologies by the name of Laputa, we meet various folks who'd all like to go there for one reason or another, and then go there they do.  Even the animation is a touch slapdash by comparison with Nausicaä, with a notable absence of shading in places and a frequent descent into cartoonishness, though being a Studio Ghibli film - indeed, being the first true Studio Ghibli film - it's still stunning by any reasonable standards, with a fair number of individual sequences that are practically without peer.  Oh, and while I'm nit-picking, having just praised Nausicaä for its timelessness, Laputa feels distinctly like a product of the mid-80s, albeit in almost entirely good ways.

If this was all Laputa had to offer - charming characters hurtling through gloriously animated, thrilling action set piece after set piece in search of one of cinema's greatest McGuffins - I'd still love it.  Obviously I would!  But then we arrive at the third act, set almost entirely on the titular island, and immediately Miyazaki raises his game.  That's no mean feat given how wonderful everything that's come before is, but my goodness, the third act of Laputa is simply breath-taking, paying off perfectly on what's come before and escalating the action whilst also becoming rich and satisfying and emotive in ways even Nausicaä never quite managed, or at any rate not so consistently.  It's the combination of a truly awe-inspiring location brought to life with flawless imagination - no wonder those robot gardeners have become one of the signature Ghibli images! - and a genius director firing on all cylinders, backed up by a genius composer who seems to have finally tuned in to exactly what the material needs.  Laputa as a whole may have been the film that birthed the greatest animation studio of all time, but it's arguably in its third act that Miyazaki the peerless master of his artform was born, along with one of the greatest director / composer collaborations of all time.  Both would go on to do work that was better as a whole - indeed, arguably in the immediate future! - but for forty or so glorious minutes, Laputa stands toe to toe with any masterpiece of animation out there.

My Neighbour Totoro, 1988, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Such an integral part of anime culture has it become in the three and a half decades since its original release that it's hard to get your head around what a drastic swerve My Neighbour Totoro was in Miyazaki's career.  Until that point, his trajectory was certainly interesting and varied, but there were plenty of common elements between his major projects, and particularly between Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa, Castle in the Sky, both of which were grandiose, elaborate fantasies with a heavy element of science-fiction centred around young adult characters and their perspectives without necessarily slanting towards younger viewers, and both were pretty damn long by anime movie standards.  Then in 1988 came a Miyazaki film that was practically none of that: one set primarily in our own world, one with child protagonists, one on a much more intimate scale and with a comparatively brief 86-minute running time.  And accordingly, but shockingly if you're watching these things in order, even the character designs shifted toward a simpler aesthetic - toward something that, arguably, looks kind of like a kids' movie, albeit one that still has some truly lavish animation by any reasonable standards.

Fortunate, then, that My Neighbour Totoro is a stone-cold masterpiece, and pity the poor viewer who can spend more than a few minutes in its presence and still rue the fact that Miyazaki had no intentions of being anything approaching a one-trick pony.  I confess that everything he did up until this point is theoretically more up my alley, but I'd also argue that that's perfectly okay given that Totoro definitely is a film aimed first and foremost at children.  And its miracle - one of its miracles, rather, since it's a fairly miraculous piece of work from top to bottom - is that it manages to be that in a manner that's still completely inclusive to an adult viewer.  Or this adult viewer, anyway; I can't speak for everyone, though I've never met anyone who doesn't love this much-loved film, so I reckon the point holds.

And the thing of it is, Miyazaki gets there by about the hardest route imaginable.  Though there are adult characters too, a small handful of them, we're never really encouraged to treat them as our point of engagement.  I undoubtedly have more in common with Satsuki and Mei's father than I do with either of those young girls, yet never once while watching have I felt the urge to line myself up with his perspective.  No, while I'm watching, it's always little Mei I'm on side with, and to a marginally lesser extent her older, slightly wiser sister.  And that, when you think about it, is a heck of a thing, the more so since Miyazaki doesn't really try and soften the pair to fit in with an adult sensibility.  Mei is absolutely a toddler, with all the wild energy and mercurial moods and mad tangents of thought that entails, and yet somehow - again, I'm inclined to just put it down to magic and leave it at that - we're caught up in her view of the world almost from the off.

This is crucial for making My Neighbour Totoro that rarest of things, a true family film - rather than a children's film with the odd rude joke thrown in to keep the parents from getting too bored - but it's also crucial to how the fantasy works.  I said Totoro was set in what's recognisably our world, albeit quite a few years in the past and in a rural part of Japan I imagine would be unfamiliar to even many native viewers, but it remains a fantasy movie of a different kind.  And something that always strikes me when I watch it is how almost any other director would have encouraged us to doubt the fantastical elements, to chalk them up to childish dreams or imagination, whereas in Totoro, the very notion of suggesting that Mei and Satsuki's strange brushes with the otherworldly are anything but real feels like a cruel betrayal.  That's partly because those otherworldly elements are so absurdly delightful and off-kilter that we want them to be real, and partly because the grown-ups are so willing to accept the possibility of their existence even though it's made clear that adulthood has shut them off from such encounters forever, but ultimately it's down to how determinedly Miyazaki erases the easy distinctions between reality and fantasy, physical presence and metaphor.  Totoro is a force of nature in the most literal sense; he's also so thoroughly tangible that you can practically smell him.  And to Mei, and to Miyazaki, and to you the viewer while you're caught up in Miyazaki's tale, there's no contradiction in that at all.

I could go on and on: for all that it's not even an hour and a half long, My Neighbour Totoro feels bottomless in the way that it always manages to surprise me, however many times I come back to it.  It's awfully shapeless and plotless in the early going, tied up in something that's almost but not quite dream logic, and that makes it hard to piece together in retrospect.  But by way of one last thought, I'll just note the extent to which the film, for all its sweet, kind, good-naturedness, doesn't shy away from darkness.  Its third act is driven by the possibility of death, and by the fact that Mei is just barely old enough to conceive of a world in which death could snatch away her mother, and later, Satsuki is made to reckon with a similar possibility, leading to a scene that's almost heart-stoppingly distressing if you pause to think about it too hard.  (I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so suffice to say it involves a shoe and a pond.)  The fantasy stuff is a little scary too: Totoro is never exactly a safe presence, and the catbus is awfully close to being the stuff of nightmares.  But it's okay, because Miyazaki isn't trying to tell us the world is safe and free of dangers, only that it's full of wonder and goodness if you're willing and able to look.

Grave of the Fireflies, 1988, dir: Isao Takahata

I spent the entirety of my latest watch of Grave of the Fireflies feeling faintly puzzled that it wasn't having more of an emotional impact on me.  Hadn't it hit me like a freight train in the past?  Hadn't I put off this rewatch precisely because I wanted to schedule it for an evening when I felt emotionally sturdy enough to take it on?  But here I was, dry eyed.  And then the final scene arrived - I won't talk about it, except to say that I'm baffled by the comments I've seen suggesting it's in any way a happy ending - and something finally broke, and there I was, sobbing my heart out.  And not good sobbing, not the cathartic kind that leaves you feeling as if you've worked something out of your system; no, this was hopeless, physically painful even.  I didn't feel one iota better by the time I finally got a hold of myself, and how could I?  We live in a world where children die slow, painful deaths, and more, a world in which those deaths can pass practically unnoticed.

Any movie that can provoke that kind of an emotional response isn't one to be approached lightly.  But the flipside of that is, any film that can provoke that kind of an emotional response is one you absolutely need to experience, when so much art makes us feel nothing, and so little is willing to leave us a little scarred and wounded if that's what it takes.  If Isao Takahata was a master of one thing - and obviously, he was a master of a whole heck of a lot of things - but if we really had to strip down his genius to one single element, it would be his ability to treat emotive material with a certain unflinching sentimentality, almost a pragmatism, that makes it connect with us in a manner almost unequalled in cinema.

Grave of the Fireflies never really prods at us to feel sad, and though there are what we might describe as sad scenes, they're arrived at honestly: they present us with necessary details rather than merely sitting there tugging at our heartstrings.  But then, it's a film about two young children trying to survive in Japan in the last days of World War 2, and by extension of two young children failing to survive, a fact made exceedingly clear to us in the opening sequence, and what need could a director of Takahata's calibre have to try and make us feel sad?  Honesty is more than enough.  Heck, Takahata barely even insists on our sympathy.  Throughout, Seita makes his share of questionable decisions in his quest to protect his little sister Setsuko, and a couple of those decisions are actively frustrating to the point where you want to yell at the screen.  But that in turn forces us to acknowledge that we have the advantages of both adult knowledge and the wider context on our side, and so we can recognise, for example, that the odds of Seita and Setsuko's sailor father returning to rescue them are slim indeed.

Then again, wider context isn't something the film is especially interested in.  This explains, I think, one of my few quibbles, which is that at times the animation is lacking in the sort of background detail you might expect, with still images of smoke and flames standing out particularly.  Conceivably it was a cost-cutting measure, but I suspect the intention was rather one of limiting anything that might distract us from the character animation in the foreground, which has to do so much of the emotional heavy lifting and so ably meets the challenge.  Always, Takahata's focus is on his two protagonists, for all that they barely register as characters in the usual sense: beyond some trivial details, we learn little about their past circumstances, their hopes and dreams, their likes and dislikes.  We never really get to know them, yet we feel as if we do, because Takahata keeps us in such inescapable proximity to them for ninety minutes.  And that's not to say Seita and Setsuko are abstracts, stand-ins for every child that suffered a similar fate - though the final scene does go there, somewhat, and that's part of why it left me such a blubbing mess.  But for the vast majority of its running time, the tale Takahata's telling isn't that of Japan's last, tortuous months of being on the losing side of a war, but rather, and with singular intensity, the small, inexcusable, soul-rending tragedy of two children that wouldn't live to see its end.

-oOo-

And there we have it, part one of the Drowning in Nineties Anime Studio Ghibli special  For anyone wondering, part two will be coming with post number 145, and I'm saving up the last entry for the big 150, our probably final post.  Spoiler alert, there are no pre-2000 Ghibli films I don't complete love, so don't expect much in the way of drama and controversy!  More gushing praise, on the other hand, now that there'll likely be a fair bit of...



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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 139.5

Before we get to the big 140 and the beginning of something a bit special that I've been planning for ages, there's just time for a little diversion that I've also mulling over for quite a while now.

Having been at this nonsense for the better part of a decade, I think it's fair to say that I'm not the same vintage anime reviewer I was when I started out.  In particular, I'm much more of an animation nerd these days, and a bit more informed about the craft that goes into these things.  On the flip side, I've also probably got a bit less discerning, or else more forgiving of the sorts of flaws that were endemic to anime way back when.  As such, there are plenty of older reviews I'd like to go back and tweak.  Fortunately for my sanity, since I started providing scores on the summary pages, I sort of can without going all out and writing a fresh review.  But there are certain titles where my opinion has changed not just slightly but radically, and where I simply can't stand by my original reviews.  And that aside, there are anime releases that are available in a variety of forms of less-than-equal value, and I didn't always get to the best version on my first go round.

Therefore, hopefully as a one off, lest this all get even more out of hand than it already is, this time through I'll be revisiting four titles I reviewed in the dawning days of these posts, those being Black Jack: The Movie, X, Armitage III, and Metal Skin Panic Madox-01...

Black Jack: The Movie 1996, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Way back in 2015 - and seriously, have I been at this for nine whole years? - I had very little nice to say about the first motion picture adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's feted manga Black Jack.  Indeed, so unimpressed by it was I that my hostility carried over into a general dislike of everything else I came across by director Osamu Dezaki that stayed with me for the longest time, and only really dissolved in earnest, ironically, when I encountered the Black Jack OVA series from which I take the film to have been a sort of spin-off.  Now my feelings toward Dezaki are a good bit kinder, and that, combined with the fact that distributor Discotek  brought the movie out in a proper, remastered, anamorphic edition*, seemed reason enough to give it another chance.

Of the two factors, maybe that second one is the biggie.  Up until Discotek rescued it, the only edition we had of Black Jack: The Movie was the crummy non-anamorphic one Manga put out way back when, which, like many of their screw-ups, could only be watched in a double-letterboxed window in the middle of your widescreen TV.  And when a film relies on its visuals as heavily as this does, that's ruinous.  Manga couldn't, of course, make it look bad, but they could certainly suck a lot of the impact from it, since even the finest animation doesn't benefit from being squinted at.  But watch it as was intended and the quality is often gob-smacking.  One thing that struck me is the extent to which Dezaki refuses to rely on the traditional cost-cutting measures that make anime commercially viable: extensively reusing backgrounds, looping sequences that are just long enough to hide the repetition, that sort of thing.  There's a crowd scene toward the end, and I'd swear every background figure was individually animated, though it's the kind of detail you'd never notice unless you were really looking.  But look that closely and Dezaki's attention to detail is remarkable.

Which is an odd thing to say given that one of my main criticisms last time around was that the film felt random and slapdash.  What can I say?  I was wrong.  Dezaki makes plenty of weird choices across the movie's ninety minute run time, and I'd struggle to argue that every one is right or sensible, but on a rewatch, it was clear that at the very least a good deal of thought had gone into every scene and edit.  Indeed, the general feeling is that Dezaki was directing as though this were live action, choosing his shots first and figuring out how the medium could keep up afterwards, as a very secondary concern.

And then there's the plot, which I was also pretty mean about, and also for reasons I struggle to figure out in retrospect.  Here, perhaps the decisive factor is having a portion of the OVA under my belt, because Black Jack is a series that largely plays by its own rules, and knowing them going in is a definite advantage.  Still, it's hard to see how I could have been so hostile to the tale presented here: it's deep, smart stuff, asking meaningful ethical questions and finding notes of real, wrenching horror in its answers.  And its lead character is fascinating: that's not rogue surgeon Black Jack as you might expect, incidentally, but another doctor and surgeon, Jo Carol Brane, who drags the film's namesake into her investigation of the supposed superhumans who've begun to appear, only to decay at a startling rate.  Like Black Jack, she's neither hero nor villain, and it only became apparent in this reappraisal the extent to which the plot is a duel between the two, professionally but more so morally.  Certainly the actors come alive when they're paired together, and for the first time I really appreciated just how good Akio Ôtsuka's performance as Black Jack is.  There's a one-word line reading - an outraged "nani" in Japanese, "what?" in English - that he nails so perfectly that it literally sent a shiver up my spine.

All of which is to say, at some length, that I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I first reviewed Black Jack: The Movie, though in fairness I'm sure it had a lot to do with trying to get past the limitations of Manga's subpar release.  At any rate, I'm happy to call myself a convert: this is one of the most unique, stylish, and intelligent anime features to come out of the nineties, and if you can lay your hands on the Discotek release, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

X, 1996, dir: Rintaro

At the risk of letting on just how long I've been cobbling this post together for, it was watching Harmagedon that made me want to revisit X.  I suppose I figured that if I could find enjoyment in that, with all its obvious flaws, then there'd be something more to be had from a release I'd only really criticised on a single point: that for all its obvious virtues, its relentless nihilism rendered it no fun to watch.  My expectations remained low, but I happened upon a copy for fifty pence, at which point the decision rather made itself.

And, I don't know, maybe I just caught it in the right mood that second time around - which was to say, a rather dark one - but I was so much more impressed that it's ridiculous.  Now I'm hovering around calling X a masterpiece, and I suspect that if someone would replace Manga's traditionally crummy non-anamorphic release with a blu-ray edition, I'd go there.  I remember noting the first time through how good it looks, but I hadn't seen anywhere near as much anime at that point and so didn't fully appreciate how consistently gorgeous Rintaro's movie is.  It really is exquisitely animated, and the director's visual imagination, which I've come to appreciate more and more despite his frequent failings as a storyteller, ensures that every scene is hypnotic in its own right.  So even if I were to accept the point of the earlier me that there's nothing going on here except for stunning animation, I'd still have to recommend it, wouldn't I?  Stunning animation isn't something to be sniffy about, no matter how much the story it tells is basically a nose-dive into the depths of hell.

Here's the thing, though: yes, X is unrelentingly dark, and yes it delivers no tension.  We're told the world will end, we're told approximately how, and then we watch those events unfold, with all the subtlety and surprise of an executioner's axe falling.  You can respond to that in one of two ways, I suppose, and I'm not about to say my reaction was altogether wrong the first time; X is thoroughly brutal and that brutality isn't pleasant to experience.  Yet it's also far from straightforward: one thing I apparently failed to note, for example, was how neither side of the conflict that's set to annihilate Tokyo and then the world are categorically wrong, or even categorically bad people.  Oh, perhaps they're a bit too eager to follow absolute ideologies, but then they're not the ones setting the rules.  And from that perspective, X is rather fascinating, and intelligent as well.  It has a lot to say, most of which I apparently missed or ignored.

Heck, I even don't dislike the CLAMP look of big eyes and pointy chins anymore!  In fact, I found the character designs as impressive as the rest of the visuals.  Oh, and how did I not mention the soundtrack?  It's extraordinary, and as Rintaro notes in the interview provided on the disk, it's the beating heart by which he paces every other aspect of his movie.  X is a tough watch by any measure, but what I realised coming back to it is that it's not violent and nihilistic for the mere sake of being so, and it offers a host of compensating pleasures.  The day it gets a proper release it will become indispensable; for the moment, I'm only promoting it to highly watch-worthy.

Armitage III, 1995, dir: Hiroyuki Ochi

I'd very little bad to say about the movie Armitage III: Polymatrix, which I reviewed way, way back in December of 2015.  As cut-down film versions of anime adaptations go, it's startlingly respectful and successful, and the presence of two genuine stars in the lead roles does it little harm.  (In the first draft of this review, I quipped, "even when one of them is Elizabeth Berkley" at this point, but you know what, I genuinely like Berkley's take on Armitage.  And she's great in Showgirls too, so there!)  Nevertheless, I did note back then that "...another half hour, a bit more time for the story and relationships to cook, and we might really be looking at a classic."  And ever since, that prospect nagged at me: I'd returned to Polymatrix a couple of times since, and grown awfully fond of it, but I always ended up with that same sense of being ever-so-slightly short changed.

What do you know?  I was right.  Well, not about everything; I overestimated how much cut material there was, for a start: ignoring the credits, it's probably not even quite that half hour.  But what there is makes a heck of a difference, albeit a subtle one, if that makes any sense.  Put simply, it turns what's very much an action movie into far more of a science-fiction mystery, and an absorbing one at that, even for the viewer who thought they knew the story backwards and forwards.  In its OVA incarnation, Armitage III is notably more plot-driven, and indeed surprisingly action-light; this, by the way, is no bad thing, given that the action's as good as it is.  In fact, the moments of violence are a good deal more impactful for the otherwise slower tone, not to mention the greater investment in characterisation.  And, as someone who'll always prefer a sub over a dub, it's great to hear the original Japanese performances.  Hiroko Kasahara, in particular, is a subtler, less emotive Armitage, and for all that I don't want to knock Berkley's interpretation, that restraint does benefit the character considerably.

Elsewhere, everything is precisely as good as it was in Polymatrix - only, again, with less emphasis on pace and more room in which to absorb the outstanding soundtrack and superlative design work.  I don't know that I'd entirely appreciated how gorgeous the background art in Armitage III is, or how wonderfully realised its futuristic Mars setting; there's a sense that's rare, in anime or elsewhere, of a place that might actually fit together and have been built by human beings for a genuine purpose.  It's a stunning world, a visual treat but also rich in depth and history.  Along with some of my favourite character designs anywhere in anime, and the strong writing, and the excellent performances, it's enough to make a somewhat pulpy science-fiction tale into a work of real heft and heart.

Which is still not to say it's a classic in the way that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a classic: Ochi has an excellent handle on his material, but he's no Oshii, despite having such distractingly similar names that I wish I'd picked a different film to compare with.  It's merely an excellent bit of science-fiction anime, and in the higher echelons of what the decade would produce.  (Oh, and for my money, a vastly better sequel to Blade Runner than the one it actually got, and which is founded on exactly the same conceit that Armitage III covered more authoritatively two decades earlier!)  Nevertheless, I'd urge anyone with the vaguest interest in the genre to track down a copy.  Watch Polymatrix if you have to, since it's infinitely easier to get hold of, but if you can find it, the OVA is comfortably the superior version.

Metal Skin Panic Madox-01, 1987, dir: Shinji Aramaki

To some extent, Madox-01 is here as yet another of that wealth of titles I covered when they were only available in unsatisfactory editions and failed to imagine how good they might be if only their distributors hadn't let them down.  That certainly couldn't be truer here: Madox-01 in its original Japanese and in a high-definition print is a world away from what Manga dropped out long ago as part of their budget Collection range.  But that's not the whole of the truth, because, whatever you do with it, Shinji Aramaki's directorial debut remains something a bit special, and in suggesting the precise opposite on my first go around, I thoroughly missed the mark.

Perhaps, though, you need to be something of a hardened vintage anime fan to really get the best out of a title that feels very much as though it was made both by and for that particular demographic.  It is, to be clear, a perfectly fine short science-fiction film, and that's not nothing: indeed, every time I watch it, I'm a little more impressed by the extreme economy with which Aramaki and co tell a complete tale with a beginning, middle, and end and some moderately developed characters and what feels like about half a dozen big action set pieces and somehow cram the lot into 42 minutes counting credits.  But still, come for the story and you may find yourself feeling mildly let down, as I did on my first encounter: it is, after all, quite a silly one, and if there's one thing you definitely can't accomplish in 42 minutes, it's making the notion of a teenager accidentally trapping himself in a suit of experimental robot armour and using it to track down his girlfriend before she vanishes off to live abroad seem more plausible.

Mind you, I doubt any number of minutes could have truly sold that concept, and I doubt, too, that plausibility was high on anyone's list of priorities.  No, what I suspect was in the forefront of everyone's minds was coming up with a unique, cool-looking mechanical design and chucking it into plentiful battles, and that Madox-01 does with great aplomb.  The narrative machinations needed to get us there may not be terribly believable, but the Madox itself certainly is, as much so as any comparable design that's ever come out of anime.  And if you're of a certain inclination - which is to say, if you're a big old nerd for meticulously thought-through mecha designs - then it's a joy to behold, the more so since Aramaki himself is evidently nerding out as much as any viewer possibly could and wants us to see as much of his cool robot suit as possible, doing as many cool things as possible.

Madox-01, then, is a title that does one thing extremely well - two if you choose to separate out the mechanical designs and the action sequences they're flung about in - and while that wasn't enough for me way back when, especially with Manga's dub working to distract me from those virtues, it more or less is now.  Actually, watching in the original Japanese perhaps did more to change my opinion than the uplift to Blu-ray: Madox-01 got one of Manga's less bad dubs, but its great mistake is to make the comedy the core of the thing, where the Japanese cast are content to play the straight scenes straight and not worry about a spot of tonal whiplash, meaning that, for example, we get a much more compelling villain who actually feels like a meaningful threat.  But what I started to say is that, if you're to enjoy Madox-01, you really do need to be there for the robot action, because everything around that is merely good.  Nonetheless, now that AnimEigo have gifted us with a shiny Blu-ray, I'd certainly err towards saying give it a chance regardless: it's no masterpiece for the ages, but Madox-01 has earned its place in anime history, and there aren't too many movies of a comparable length I'd rank above it.

-oOo-

This was probably a bad idea - in that I'm already wondering what else I desperately need to revisit! - and yet I'm glad I got to set the record straight in more public fashion than my usual sneaky tweaking of the scores page that probably no-one ever looks at.  These reviews have never been meant to be anything but wildly subjective, but still, there's wrong and there's completely, stupidly wrong, and I definitely strayed towards that latter with a couple of the titles here.  Now, let's just hope I got it more or less right this time, eh?  I really don't want to have to do this again in another few years...



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* Which, sadly, is now out of print and pretty rare in its own right.