tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-98193074663944062024-03-18T20:26:21.808+00:00Writing on the MoonThe Blog of author David TallermanDavid Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.comBlogger655125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-116382199122344432024-03-04T18:34:00.001+00:002024-03-04T18:34:49.057+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 135<p>I'm emphatically not going to make a habit of reviewing series here, but I <i>am </i>very bad at saying no to people, and especially when those people have done considerably more to bring readers to this blog that I practically go out of my way not to promote than I ever have. So when Winston Jackson asked me nicely to cover the first two seasons of the <i>Slayers </i>TV show, I foolishly committed to twenty hours of watching, something I justified to myself on the grounds that I still had the two OVA sets to cover, and I'm a sucker for a theme post. And so here we are with <b>Slayers: Book of Spells</b>, <b>Slayers: Excellent</b>, <b>The Slayers</b>, and <b>Slayers: Next</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitpHUwXm-h2MrV8ayEuo2Ga8t98_if6RkyH7GS7ngI3EbzfFBDkS0mDSfR-O6D8MYO4xhRGS8upHvhXwGBZViST-Ixs7FqJtkPvei8pa_Wyv6DeizvfUjFTesfA2OyaSW6KS-K8shdIPhZzjTol8_9ErVPvuIUGqF2_meBNa2qa1VE3gnMDpKervk=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitpHUwXm-h2MrV8ayEuo2Ga8t98_if6RkyH7GS7ngI3EbzfFBDkS0mDSfR-O6D8MYO4xhRGS8upHvhXwGBZViST-Ixs7FqJtkPvei8pa_Wyv6DeizvfUjFTesfA2OyaSW6KS-K8shdIPhZzjTol8_9ErVPvuIUGqF2_meBNa2qa1VE3gnMDpKervk=s320" width="227" /></a></div><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0161980/" target="_blank">Slayers: Book of Spells</a>, 1996 - 1997, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe</p><p></p><p>It's early days, of course, but if there's better <i>Slayers </i>out there than the three OVA episodes contained here, I'm going to be very surprised indeed, because it's an absolutely stonking collection. And already I'm struggling to pin down quite why that is and wondering if I've maybe just been away from the franchise for too long and nostalgia's kicking in, because, after all, there's nothing terribly new here. In the first episode, a mad sorcerer tries to persuade Lina to be part of the monstrous chimera he has his heart set on and along the way creates a battalion of Naga the Serpent clones; in the second, the pair are tasked with training up a weedy young lord by his exceedingly overprotective mother; and in the third, they set out to retrieve a magic mirror with the power of creating a physically identical but temperamentally opposite duplicate of whoever appears in it, and guess which pair of magic-flinging heroines are going to be its first victims?</p><p>Set out like that, there's even a bit of crossover between the first and third episodes, and those two are definitely the strongest; the middle one gets a little bogged down reprising the same gag, though it's a perfectly fine gag. But you'd think that, with a bunch of Naga clones in one episode and a magical duplicate not an hour later, a certain sense of repetition might creep in, and that the similarity barely registers while you're watching is a testament to how much these ninety minutes of <i>Slayers </i>goodness are firing on all cylinders. I had a lot of time for the films, even the films that weren't altogether great, but most of them felt a touch stretched. Thirty minutes, on the other hand, turns out to be the perfect delivery mechanism for this stuff, with the extra room over TV episode length letting the stories develop in slightly weirder, twistier ways and jokes to be built up with more loving care. And what jokes! Even when they're obvious - pity the viewer who doesn't hear about that magical mirror and immediately guess where things are heading - the way they play out is downright flawless.</p><p>There are a bunch of reasons for that, and I don't want to downplay what excellent work series regular Watanabe is up to on the direction front or how extremely solid the writing is, but <b>Slayers: Book of Spells</b> is a heck of an example of how top-quality animation can sell a gag for maximum effect. These OVAs look remarkably good for what they are, with a level of complexity and detail that feels like overkill for some goofy fantasy comedy, except that there are times when having the budget to do a joke real justice is completely game-changing. Take the first episode and the mob of Naga the Serpents: the extra budget lets Watanabe push the absurdity levels up as far as they'll go, and there's a particularly splendid sequence that goes on for quite some time, one that feels like showing off at the same time as it gets funnier purely by virtue of refusing to end. Plus, even when it's not benefiting the humour, the artistry makes <b>Slayers: Book of Spells</b> a joy to be around, meaning that the jokes aren't stuck doing all the heavy lifting. The same goes for a fine soundtrack, and the last episode actually puts itself on hold a couple of times just to let tracks play out, which would be annoying if they weren't such catchy tracks. Really, there's nothing to complain about here, and a high point for <i>Slayers </i>is a high point for comedy fantasy in general; I'd be hard pressed to think of anywhere I've seen that subgenre done better.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067925/" target="_blank"></a></p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067925/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjaDqwig8f107oKioZFPPKL7Bonab_4yTkapDZIC2s_SpixCOUIOqriYVvF4Ubzew7895RZelj51HyxMyXGCbe6fspyetcNPJVQvKB051Zj6cG5jh4CMlZ1zt5ANEglEzn9lFtb8ZfEBev-Ml4egXYz6ytkUw3hpJ7JSbr7xLj42iKf_RD9JTUlJFU=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjaDqwig8f107oKioZFPPKL7Bonab_4yTkapDZIC2s_SpixCOUIOqriYVvF4Ubzew7895RZelj51HyxMyXGCbe6fspyetcNPJVQvKB051Zj6cG5jh4CMlZ1zt5ANEglEzn9lFtb8ZfEBev-Ml4egXYz6ytkUw3hpJ7JSbr7xLj42iKf_RD9JTUlJFU=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067925/" target="_blank">Slayers: Excellent</a>, 1998, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe<div><p>The worst thing I have to say about <b>Slayers: Excellent</b> is that it's not quite so across-the-board strong as <b>Slayers: Book of Spells</b>, and I think that comes down more or less entirely to production values. <b>Book of Spells</b> felt like an OVA, in that indefinable way that suggests everyone was shooting a mite higher than they could reasonably have done for even a top-tier TV episode, whereas <b>Excellent </b>never quite hits that same level. I mean, it obviously <i>is </i>an OVA, because the episodes run to thirty minutes and the animation is undoubtedly a notch above what the average TV show would have been capable of in 1998. Though even that's ever-so-slightly damning praise; it's fair to propose that 1998 wasn't so good a year for anime budgets as 1996 was, and the whole project just feels that little bit cheaper.</p><p>But that's a trivial concern when all's said and done, and the more so if you're not the kind of person who fusses over lavish animation, in that the batting average for good <i>Slayers </i>stories here is comfortably on a par with and perhaps a fraction above what <b>Book of Spells</b> had to offer. And in one way at least, it has more of an OVA vibe: whereas <b>BoS </b>was content to offer up a trio of standalone tales that could, with a spot of trimming, have fit comfortably into a TV show, <b>Excellent </b>presents something more significant, in the shape of the very first meeting of bickering frenemy sorceresses Lina Inverse and Naga the Serpent, and in so doing provides a thread to tie its three episodes loosely together.</p><p>Granted, that seems like more of a big deal than it ends up amounting to, since Lina and Naga's first meeting, entertaining as it undoubtedly is, merely serves as a jumping-off point for an adventure that could as easily have been set later in the befuddling <i>Slayers </i>continuity. The benefit is more that we get a slightly new slant on a relationship that by this point had already been explored extensively and perhaps had few places left to go: seeing Lina getting exasperated with Naga's eccentricities for the first time has a definite charm, and meeting Naga - one of my favourite characters across all of anime - afresh is definitely a delight. Indeed, the focus is generally skewed toward Naga this time around, and that's no bad thing, whichever character you happen to prefer, in that not even the most devoted fan could argue there's a lack of Lina Inverse across a franchise where she's the one consistent element.</p><p>Ultimately, all a three episode <i>Slayers </i>OVA has to do is offer up three really good <i>Slayers </i>episodes, and <b>Excellent </b>pulls that off comfortably. The first, which flings the pair together and then sets them both up against a vampire, and the second, which sees Lina serving as bodyguard for a wealthy merchant's daughter who's constantly reminding her of Naga, are definitely the strongest, with the third falling back on the by this point rather too tried-and-tested trope of placing the two on opposite sides of a conflict, though "battling seamstresses" is at least a novel angle. Regardless, what all three get right is what <i>Slayers</i> is best at, taking a relatively straightforward-seeming fantasy concept and then cranking it up and swerving it askew until what you're left with is something hilariously unpredictable, and that's enough for <b>Excellent </b>to largely live up to its name.</p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3_S2dAfr47b2L8lltrXQU7Z3dn06PWJ3p3C0ry_boY7u-tAx5UHGUoLzsBbeSzoNpFvzQ6-zCOFUhRj7U7N2Rdkcak4NPoW7SyMlRZooDIjFlwTwhggzj6G9TOBZQCTaNQSlR-YYzuFeLzvClGgKrltlkTPm1G-GyMsn8-g9MLvQV_zcI05mYD4/s1130/The%20Slayers.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3_S2dAfr47b2L8lltrXQU7Z3dn06PWJ3p3C0ry_boY7u-tAx5UHGUoLzsBbeSzoNpFvzQ6-zCOFUhRj7U7N2Rdkcak4NPoW7SyMlRZooDIjFlwTwhggzj6G9TOBZQCTaNQSlR-YYzuFeLzvClGgKrltlkTPm1G-GyMsn8-g9MLvQV_zcI05mYD4/s320/The%20Slayers.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112166/" target="_blank">The Slayers</a>, 1995, dir: Takashi Watanabe<p></p><p></p><p>With the films and OVAs behind me, two things about this first season of the <i>Slayers </i>TV series took me by surprise, and neither in a good way.</p><p>The first really oughtn't to have: obviously a TV show wasn't going to have a film or OVA budget and so, equally obviously, it was going to look cheap by comparison. But quite <i>this </i>cheap? <b>The Slayers</b> does pick up to a degree as it goes along, but its early episodes are rather shabby even by the standards of televised anime in 1995, with no end of obvious cost-cutting and a general feeling of being rushed and small-scale. It's not the biggest of deals, and there are some compensations, in the shape of a nice, watercolour-esque aesthetic and some expectedly appealing character designs. Yet, all things being equal, this isn't a show where the visuals are much of an asset.</p><p>The second surprise was a nastier one: <b>The Slayers </b>has a plot. Obviously, it's not altogether true to suggest that the films and OVAs didn't have plots, but they certainly didn't have ones that dragged on for 26 episodes, and even when they ran to, say, the length of a feature film, they were made up more of silly digressions than what we traditionally think of as story. Truth be told, it simply hadn't occurred to me that a <i>Slayers </i>property would think to do otherwise. I'd assumed the TV series would consist of one-and-done adventures or, at most, short arcs that allowed for plenty of diversions along the way. So that <b>The Slayers</b>, for the most part, settles down to the telling of a single tale that occupies some nine or so hours of screen time was something I was wholly unprepared for.</p><p>I suspect that would always have been a problem, given that finding the balance between committing to a core narrative and dabbling around the edges was almost always something anime struggled with throughout the nineties. However, there are ways it could have gone much better than this, and the reason is entirely straightforward: the story is neither interesting nor well told. It's the most boilerplate swords and sorcery fare imaginable, and even <i>that </i>would be fine if <b>The Slayers </b>was more than casually interested in pointing out how silly the clichés it trades in are. There's a bit of that - this <i>is </i>still <i>Slayers</i>, after all - but what we see far more of is the plot and comedy standing at odds to each other with very little interconnection. There are whole episodes that pass with barely a joke, and what we get instead is a lot of deeply average fantasy fare revolving around a hackneyed big bad with predictable villain goals, and a good deal of action, this being where the limits of the animation make themselves most distressingly evident.</p><p>If that were all there was to <b>The Slayers</b>, this would certainly have ended up being the negative review it's surely looked like until now. Thank goodness, then, for a middle section that does manage to largely bin the main plot in favour of goofing off and making dumb jokes and generally being comedy-fantasy rather than a fantasy show that occasionally jams the brakes on for a quip or reaction shot. And that aside, the main reason those better episodes work is that they focus on <b>The Slayers</b>' core strength: even when it's being somewhat dull, it's doing so with better-than-average characters. Not as much as I'd have hoped, I admit: the supporting cast largely merge into a blob of similar roles and abilities and comic functions and only rarely get the chance to shine. But Lina Inverse is one of anime's finest protagonists, and the dumb-as-pencil-shavings Gourry, our other main lead, makes for a satisfying foil. With the pair of them at its heart, <b>The Slayers </b>manages to stay mostly fun and always likeable, and that in turn saves some of its more humourless patches from becoming a chore. I'd hoped for much better, but if you're happy with a <i>Slayers </i>entry that puts its fantasy ahead of its comedy - and I know many people even prefer it that way - then there's a tolerable diversion to be had here.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6-tosWzbD-7vwKuVYSCTarm61Fa3AyteiDu-3CUcEM7VFMaCAbgXJPHBgk6E8yrCkpc4Zrgqzp07iFGHETW0gViHNcKlE50u_HZSLPWagqNN-rb1wNwFc6kSxfm_FfejgnJRoa4P69v66Bfuq9SuVsIhk81NzV-4pBDql5ZjKoVWsnmRsiZrc6DXoNg/s1130/Slayers%20Next.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6-tosWzbD-7vwKuVYSCTarm61Fa3AyteiDu-3CUcEM7VFMaCAbgXJPHBgk6E8yrCkpc4Zrgqzp07iFGHETW0gViHNcKlE50u_HZSLPWagqNN-rb1wNwFc6kSxfm_FfejgnJRoa4P69v66Bfuq9SuVsIhk81NzV-4pBDql5ZjKoVWsnmRsiZrc6DXoNg/s320/Slayers%20Next.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112166/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1" target="_blank">Slayers NEXT</a>, 1996, dir: Takashi Watanabe<p></p><p>I can't prove that the makers of <b>Slayers NEXT</b> travelled in time, read my review of the first season, and went out of their way to fix all their previous mistakes this second time around, but it surely does seem like quite the coincidence given how precisely this evolves in all the ways I'd have hoped it would. Although, thinking about it, you'd imagine they'd have gone back a little further and sorted the issues with the first season too, or possibly bought a bunch of shares in Facebook and become billionaires, or something, and okay, maybe it's actually a coincidence given that my complaints were fairly obvious ones, but nevertheless, it's always nice to feel your grumbling has been taken on board.</p><p>Most obviously, this is a matter of animation that, while nothing stellar in the grand scheme of things, is a considerable step up and thus finally working in service of the show rather than against it. Partly that means being generally easy on the eyes, and partly it's about action and spectacle that are genuinely exciting, but most important is that the show's visuals are front and centre in selling the humour. This is a huge boon for something that relies so heavily on character-driven gags and reaction shots - though, regarding the latter, never so heavy-handedly as in the first season, where they frequently felt as though the creators had realised minutes had gone by without a joke and they really ought to throw the audience <i>something</i>.</p><p>Granted, the humour is still mostly grounded in playing the fantasy setting relatively straight and then pulling the rug out with an acknowledgement of how basically silly this all is, but there's more going on this time around, and the balance is infinitely better. Though again the general drift is away from light-heartedness in the last few episodes, before that point there's much more out-and-out comedy, and even after the plot has shifted to the forefront, there never comes a point where what we get is effectively a straight fantasy show with the occasional wink to camera. Plus, that plot, while still far from ground-breaking, feels considerably more thought through, with some satisfying twists and turns and enough shorter arcs with their own focus that it never seems as though we're slogging towards an inevitable end.</p><p>It's also a narrative that does far better by its characters, making everyone distinct and giving us clear reasons to care about them. In theory, I'm unsold on the idea of a developing romance between our two leads, acid-tongued sorceress Lina Inverse and thinking-impaired swordsman Gourry, but the show makes it work, just about, and that's really the weakest element on the story side, while the biggest win is probably Martina's advancement from uninteresting villain to lead comic relief. If everyone besides those three gets slightly shorter shrift, that's not altogether a bad thing: where the first season felt as though it was perpetually expanding its cast to no real purpose, here the tighter focus gives everyone a degree of individuality even when they're not doing anything terribly meaningful.</p><p>For all that <b>Slayers NEXT </b>is reliably good, though, and gets better as it goes along, I'd have to concede that there are only a handful of standout episodes or truly memorable moments. But that aside, my only real frustration - barring my doubts over that dubious romantic pairing! - is the extent to which knowledge of the first season is a prerequisite at points, not the wisest move when you've done such a fine job of showing up everything that didn't work in said first season. Yet stacked against those modest failings is the reliable pleasure of hanging out with a bunch of thoroughly likeable characters as they goof around and have ludicrous but still fairly thrilling adventures, and given that that's precisely what I'd ask of a <i>Slayers </i>TV series, I really can't complain too hard.</p><p>-oOo-</p><div><p>It saddens me that the one thing here I haven't much nice to say about is the original TV show, which no doubt many people are extremely fond of. And I really was wondering if I hadn't been overly harsh until the second season came along and proved itself to be so obviously better in every meaningful way. Then again, it's worth pointing out before we go that, from what I've seen, there's really no such thing as bad <i>Slayers</i>, and that's a nice note to end on, isn't it?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></div></div></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-82662773546716450072024-01-29T18:52:00.005+00:002024-03-01T21:35:04.097+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 134<p>What was that I said last time about trying to avoid exclusively covering obscure VHS-only releases? But while I've failed miserably, we do have a title of note this time around, one of those that frequently comes up in "How the heck did this never get a DVD release?" conversations, so at least we're likely to get one hit from among <b>Explorer Woman Ray</b>, <b>Grey: Digital Target</b>, <b>DNA Sights 999.9</b>, and <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizHheIyIA6WKj4Hqcy-cLM1BIF2llLabKigsnVV4QohfDcn9x96Z02bQjhFfYFdibyyJsDUW6I8KeMzPGAorQfCoUD0IErSJHzwE1OVIG7ve4Oh1QNtE6fqvsLRW-lEU0NtLgjDhiGNIUTFVYih8AheQucOUzEuI9rTd7I4drvS_BD4Ji7DSIVhdwFLQ/s1130/Explorer%20Woman%20Ray.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizHheIyIA6WKj4Hqcy-cLM1BIF2llLabKigsnVV4QohfDcn9x96Z02bQjhFfYFdibyyJsDUW6I8KeMzPGAorQfCoUD0IErSJHzwE1OVIG7ve4Oh1QNtE6fqvsLRW-lEU0NtLgjDhiGNIUTFVYih8AheQucOUzEuI9rTd7I4drvS_BD4Ji7DSIVhdwFLQ/s320/Explorer%20Woman%20Ray.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097315/" target="_blank">Explorer Woman Ray</a>, 1989, dir: Hiroki Hayashi<p></p><p>Everything that works in <b>Explorer Woman Ray</b>, and everything that doesn't - which is considerably more - is present from its opening prologue. Before we're introduced to our titular explorer woman, we meet two teenaged girls, Mai and Mami Tachibana, out on what looks to be a pleasant train journey through some vaguely South American country. But, shock! Barely have we had time to get our bearings before the seeming peasants in a passing truck are whipping out automatic weapons, leaving the twins to fight for their lives in an action sequence that's fun and ingenious, but so much less so than it ought to be because the animation is horribly wonky, and which makes little sense in retrospect given that there'll be endless scenes later where the baddies are careful not to shoot at the pair because their goal is to steal the artefact they're carrying.</p><p>So lots of action, then, and most of it perfectly fine on paper, and almost all of it undermined by animation so frequently bad that it feels genuinely unfinished, along with a plot that's full of nagging inconsistencies and gaping plot holes. Where do we go with all that? I could outline a bit more of the story, but <b>Explorer Woman Ray </b>doesn't care about it, so there's no reason we should. It's connective tissue for the action scenes, which isn't a problem in itself, except that we really do need <i>something </i>to hang onto, and the only cast members with anything close to a clear motivation are Mai and Mami, who want to get rich and then grudgingly decide to side with nominal hero Ray.</p><p>I say "nominal" because the twins get more screen time and because I'm honestly unsure what Ray is out to accomplish or whether she's in the right. The show gets a couple of relatively sympathetic bad guys, who aren't above killing people to meet their goals but would rather avoid doing so if they can, and all we see of what drives Ray is that she wants to stop them, but it's difficult to tell from the onscreen evidence whether the villainous Rig Veda's villainous plan is actually all that villainous. He wants to reawaken the technologies of an ancient race, but who knows, maybe that's a good thing? The first temple that gets destroyed (like all fictional archaeologists, Ray is dire at keeping ancient structures from being destroyed) makes it rain, and, annoying as it can sometimes be, rain isn't inherently evil.</p><p>All of which is to say that the plot is dumb and broken; but I could spend half a day reeling off good vintage anime titles with dumb, broken plots, and the thing that unifies almost all of them is how they aren't actively annoying to look at. There are moments in <b>Explorer Woman Ray </b>that work visually - someone clearly put their heart into some of the water shots - but they never last for more than a few frames, then things fall apart again. Sometimes that means an absence of shading, and routinely it means a lack of inbetweening, but most often it's that the characters drift so off-model that you start wondering if there <i>were </i>models or if the animators were getting instructions like, "Remember the woman with the dark hair? Draw her." Weirdly, the villains fare slightly better, whereas Ray hardly looks the same in two consecutive scenes and the twins are nearly as bad. And of course none of those problems are mutually exclusive, so we get a ton of scenes where everything goes wrong all at once.</p><p>I don't know that all this makes <b>Explorer Woman Ray </b>bad, exactly. Or, no, I do know that, but it's relatively easy to discern a version of this material that could have worked better, and we get enough glimpses that it's hard to hate what we ended up with. Whatever its failings, it's bursting with energy and its intentions are noble enough: an hour's worth of over-the-top, <i>Indiana Jones</i>-aping action is a fine idea in theory and one that's hard to botch entirely. <b>Explorer Woman Ray </b>isn't the worst conceivable version of itself, and it's evident it was made by people who cared for the material and had some sound ideas: director Hiroki Hayashi would go on to make the wonderful <b>Sol Bianca</b> straight after this, so the man wasn't without talent. But something clearly went very wrong here, and while it's certainly appropriate that watching <b>Explorer Woman Ray </b>feels like digging through the wreckage of an ancient disaster hunting for a little treasure, there's nowhere near enough there to warrant the effort.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093118/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-qqB8A0wBKbY_4NYwJYCe3MtDWUSasEPCqZS8ldytu7EO82He_inbvrfjDHaH4hSwcoPe_-KL38jkcuVSuy-b4GQvnBqVQWqxMXW7ygIcVSe6SIhavltlmCTXA5fpLbUVVRvV1vH0bqao2RxtJOQA8_oDC39PjnLSVidE_PC-1jmIlwhVgSxuXAWOXg/s1130/Grey%20Digital%20Target.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-qqB8A0wBKbY_4NYwJYCe3MtDWUSasEPCqZS8ldytu7EO82He_inbvrfjDHaH4hSwcoPe_-KL38jkcuVSuy-b4GQvnBqVQWqxMXW7ygIcVSe6SIhavltlmCTXA5fpLbUVVRvV1vH0bqao2RxtJOQA8_oDC39PjnLSVidE_PC-1jmIlwhVgSxuXAWOXg/s320/Grey%20Digital%20Target.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093118/" target="_blank">Grey: Digital Target</a>, 1986, dir: Satoshi Dezaki<div><p>All credit to <b>Grey: Digital Target</b>, it has a story to tell and has put considerable thought into how to tell it, and it's a story worthy of the investment, one that feels, especially in the early going, as though it might be something really special. <b>Grey </b>doesn't quite get there, mainly because the more answers we get, the more familiar its sci-fi tropes start to become, but it does enough that even once we can see the proper shape of where everything's heading, it's hard to feel too disappointed.</p><p>That's mostly because the world-building is terrific all the way through, achieving the thing that science fiction rarely pulls off or even seems to realise it ought to be aiming for of presenting us with a reality that feels fundamentally not our own and so keeping us always a little off-kilter, as though we're tourists in a foreign country frantically trying to catch up enough to not embarrass ourselves. <b>Grey </b>gets to this in a couple of ways, and one of them is admittedly terrible in theory. There are a lot of unfamiliar nouns flung about, for places, things, and concepts, and while most of them can be figured out with a bit of thought, we're never really specifically told their meaning, or anyway not until we really ought to have got there by ourselves. It's perhaps the laziest route to getting that sense of alienation, but here it's used as well as can be, in so much as it never feels as though the writers are bombarding us with all of this terminology; rather, it's coming from the characters themselves, for whom mutual understanding is generally a low priority. And that gets us to the second, much better way in which <b>Grey </b>keeps us at arm's length from its setting, the one that's genuinely impressive: from the beginning, we're thrown in with these characters and given only what information they share among themselves, which isn't much.</p><p>The reason all of this matters enough that I've devoted a full paragraph to it is partly that <b>Grey: Digital Target</b> is, more than anything, a mystery, in that the principle goal of its narrative is to keep us guessing as to what's really going on for most of the running time, but partly - and more excitingly - because all of this stuff is essential to how and why it works. As we're introduced to our antihero, Grey, he's walking away from a skirmish that's cost the rest of his squad their lives, and we soon learn that this is a regular enough occurrence that Grey has earned himself a reputation as a grim reaper. He's a consummate killer but a lousy team player, as becomes extremely evident once he's sent back into action with a new squad. But by then, we're already coming up against some bigger questions, like who is he actually fighting, and why does nobody seem terribly concerned about objectives beyond how much killing gets done and how many vehicles get destroyed, and what's all this talk of classes and citizenship, and why does no one appear to care about anything besides that last one when surely the others are way more important?</p><p>It's unfortunate that, three and a half decades after its release, the average viewer with more than passing experience of science-fiction will get out in front of <b>Grey </b>well before its end, because the story, the mystery, the steady unravelling of this strange and exceedingly dystopian future, is nearly all the film has going for it. The animation is entirely so-so, the designs are pretty goofy and all over the place (though I suspect that was at least partly intentional, and it does kind of pay off from a narrative perspective) and the action, of which there's a lot, is rarely very exciting, though its extremely blunt approach to violence still packs a punch. <b>Grey: Digital Target</b> is a title I'd love to be able to declare a lost classic, because its goals are admirably lofty, and it's a heck of a shame both that time hasn't been kind to it and that the budget wasn't there to give us the best take on this material. Still, science-fiction films that make a real stab both at telling a fresh tale and doing so in an unfamiliar fashion are rare enough that, if you've any fondness for the genre, it comes awfully close.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3nD8Ksh7ddIA9gre1F2QMXXgt9I-Yb2Vz-5mPDaBaD4g-c5DEYMoI8XSqysxsX6aMz9CmbqOLJZSql3c8JKiHWEbKjS7TCXcF231ZSJosnqKaLcgbGxyuTP026LsvvKvLh0wQ6O0XgMgCSvyiEXUZcFauhFpyRV6IjbM3GYpubWZO8osImPuvRrjeVw/s1130/DNA%20Sights%20999.9.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3nD8Ksh7ddIA9gre1F2QMXXgt9I-Yb2Vz-5mPDaBaD4g-c5DEYMoI8XSqysxsX6aMz9CmbqOLJZSql3c8JKiHWEbKjS7TCXcF231ZSJosnqKaLcgbGxyuTP026LsvvKvLh0wQ6O0XgMgCSvyiEXUZcFauhFpyRV6IjbM3GYpubWZO8osImPuvRrjeVw/s320/DNA%20Sights%20999.9.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185396/" target="_blank">DNA Sights 999.9</a>, 1998, dir: Masayuki Kojima<p></p><p><b>DNA Sights 999.9 </b>feels very much as though it starts and ends in the midst of a much bigger story, with major events that might well have been as or more interesting than what we've watched off there to either side. And the tale it does manage to tell is one that our protagonist Tetsuro stumbles through without much agency or thought, being batted around by allies and enemies and his own unearned and unasked for abilities, until everything wraps up with an outrageous deux ex machina and some vague promises of how much excitement lies ahead.</p><p>But you know what? I've had a similar reaction to just about every Leiji Matsumoto adaptation I've seen, to the point where I've come to view it as almost more of a feature than a bug. Well, the whole "bigger story" thing anyway; that's definitely a chief characteristic of much of Matsumoto's genre work, and surely a part of why it's so loved, given how excited folks have been known to get about shared universes and suchlike. I'm absolutely not one of those people and I'd much rather my 45-minute OVAs have the decency to provide a beginning, middle, and end, and yet - perhaps because I've got so conditioned to Matsumoto - I couldn't really hold it against <b>DNA Sights 999.9</b>.</p><p>In part that's because, whatever's happening from moment to moment, for all that it frequently feels random and unmotivated and needs to be hurriedly followed by a burst of explanation for us to follow along at all, it's generally entertaining and frequently outlandish, as for instance when a bunch of amorphous beings from beneath the Earth's crust abruptly because a major plot element despite us having been given not the slightest indication until then that they existed. But they're a cool concept and - this being the other crucial point - they look pretty great, since the animation is mostly very good indeed, and director Kojima, who'd go on to get some tremendous work on his CV, understands how to make Matsumoto's shtick work in motion. Along with ensuring the spectacle is properly spectacular, he makes the wise choice of letting Matsumoto's goofier character designs hang around in the background while keeping Tetsuro and most of the other core cast members that bit more realistic, enough to anchor the show in some sort of concrete reality without losing any of the innate charm.</p><p>Normally, then, this would be an easy recommendation, barring the usual caveats about the difficulties of hunting down a lost, forgotten title that never got as far as a DVD release. And yet I do think - and I'm a little sad to say it about something I thoroughly enjoyed - that <b>DNA Sights 999.9 </b>is for existing Matsumoto fans only, if only because the ending relies so utterly on tangential knowledge of his wider works, and probably even then solely for Matsumoto completists. And if that's you, you've probably, by definition, already seen it; but if you haven't, hey, here's a likeable little slice of Matsumoto fiction wrapped up in cracking production values to round out your not-quite-complete collection.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322990/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAN6J9ltaCOvyhj1cl4DS9rS4u4sTtL2inqKK30TQRKgVvAZxmYqaaHxFuhD8YjO5tRtRStZNvGZKQDHVKNAwjykr04HFPjiX_ATiUS3p1llKL4mV2MeNB2RJUo2W_RUPwRubT5dmkfceqlABTcWBwEx5dm6OkX5zLhm3eGE-uy66hXuWt5GGPnIytQA/s1130/The%20Adventures%20of%20Kotetsu.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAN6J9ltaCOvyhj1cl4DS9rS4u4sTtL2inqKK30TQRKgVvAZxmYqaaHxFuhD8YjO5tRtRStZNvGZKQDHVKNAwjykr04HFPjiX_ATiUS3p1llKL4mV2MeNB2RJUo2W_RUPwRubT5dmkfceqlABTcWBwEx5dm6OkX5zLhm3eGE-uy66hXuWt5GGPnIytQA/s320/The%20Adventures%20of%20Kotetsu.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322990/" target="_blank">The Adventures of Kotetsu</a>, 1996, dir: Yûji Moriyama<p></p><p></p><p>When you've watched absurd quantities of vintage anime, it's easy to get a bit overly cynical and to come to a title like <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu </b>feeling you've seen it all before, when, in truth, it's not doing anything drastically wrong. Well, it <i>is </i>doing one thing drastically wrong, and that's incessantly showing its 14-year-old female protagonist in various states of undress, and for that matter it's true that there's nothing here that the average viewer well versed in nineties anime won't have come across somewhere else, so maybe I was being just the right amount of cynical, but... Look, let's start over, shall we?</p><p>The point I think I was trying to make is that <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu </b>is fine for what it is, accepting that what it is is pretty sleazy and inconsequential and quite obviously a taster of a longer manga. We get, within its two episodes, a sort-of-complete story, in that all of the major conflicts have been resolved and its cast are in meaningfully different places from where they started. Predictably, this is most true of Kotetsu herself, whose actual name is Linn Suzuki and whose nickname comes from the brother, Tetsu, that she arrives in Tokyo from Kyoto in search of and then forgets about for the remainder of the running time. She's also on the run from the ancient witch who's been teaching her the proper use of the demonic sword she's somehow in possession of, and rapidly finds herself roped into the affairs of Tetsu's former employer, detective Miho Kuon, who's got herself into some supernatural bother thanks to the case she's working on, and my goodness does <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu </b>have a lot of flailing plot threads once you stop to think about it.</p><p>The Kuon plotline gets wrapped up somewhat, though largely off-screen, and the business with Linn's master / mentor is a major element of the second episode and allows for the semblance of a proper ending, and I guess we can write the whole Tetsu thing off as a way in to the actual narrative, though it feels as if it must have been considerably more important in the manga. But whichever way you shake it, <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu </b>has a lot of plates spinning for what's essentially an excuse for a bunch of fights and bare boobs - the two of which, by the way, are in no way mutually exclusive.</p><p>Most of the nudity, as I mentioned, is exceedingly creepy given that Linn is portrayed as a particularly immature 14-year-old. That portrayal fits with the logic of the character, since we're led to believe she's grown up in isolation from the modern world - the show seems to think Kyoto is some sort of time tunnel to ancient Japan - and provides for some laughs, many of which arrive in the dub via Kay Hest's decision to play Linn with a posh English accent that's somehow funny in and of itself; but none of that makes up for how uncomfortable it makes the incessant gawking. Thankfully, the action side of things fares better: Yûji Moriyama, who handled all the first run of <i>Project A-Ko</i> sequels and peaked with <b>Macross Plus</b>, knows his way around this kind of material and injects plenty of energy into what could easily have felt inconsequential and too familiar.</p><p>And those, really, are the two poles of <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu</b>: on the one hand, Moriyama has the sense to keep the pace fast and those energy levels high, and the animation, while never actually impressive, is good enough not to hamstring his efforts. But on the other, while it's easy to imagine this developing its own personality with a couple more episodes, especially given how the second makes small strides in that direction, what we actually got brings nothing new to the table and distinguishes itself only by how exceedingly eager it is to show off a mostly naked 14-year-old girl at every opportunity. And ending on a statement like that doesn't leave much room for a recommendation, so I won't try, except to note that if you're in the mood for 45 minutes of hectic, pervy supernatural action comedy, <b>The Adventures of Kotetsu </b>does a satisfactory job of ticking all those boxes.</p><p>-oOo-</p><div><p>As you've probably realised by now, or else new all along, <b>Grey: Digital Target </b>was our ringer here, and I can definitely see why there's still a lot of fondness out there for what in many ways would have been a fairly minor science-fiction title at the time: it may not stick its landing or fully nail its execution, but there are some splendid, resonant ideas in there, along with a distinctive vibe that really lodges itself in the memory. And as predicted, it was the only proper recommendation this time around, though I did at least enjoy everything, which is always a win.</p><p><br /></p><div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></div></div></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-49520186587329346812023-12-31T17:01:00.005+00:002023-12-31T17:01:49.068+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 133<p> I'm still trying hard to keep these posts from degenerating into nothing except deeply obscure VHS-only releases, but that's obviously proving a bit difficult given that deeply obscure VHS-only releases are about all I have left to cover. Nevertheless, we do have one exception this time around, in the shape of the OVA of the 80's sci-fi adventure series <i>Zillion</i>, and it's a bit of a corker, too. But does the fact that it's been deemed worthy of a shiny Blu-ray release mean it's better than three other titles that will probably never get anywhere near such a prestigious treatment? Let's take a look at <b>Zillion: Burning Night</b>, <b>Rail of the Star</b>, <b>Dragon Slayer</b>, and <b>Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxDG8-IsEiDX7WwwGiT0VPiDWn8lptFtLIMggHsXBW1SqWyUD1VHZC2AR-YZ9qyksU-69rmBbYoKQCUTva01IQYx2y9WRDkE2Q_Gc3EbPqUgxvrdDPJ0QCAU1Ah1tc0TeezRy2EHDSEcdHYEDsdFZz_8szcg-SZq5VDDknvifdKt7qEshq-U8AxBlGCQ/s1130/Zillion.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxDG8-IsEiDX7WwwGiT0VPiDWn8lptFtLIMggHsXBW1SqWyUD1VHZC2AR-YZ9qyksU-69rmBbYoKQCUTva01IQYx2y9WRDkE2Q_Gc3EbPqUgxvrdDPJ0QCAU1Ah1tc0TeezRy2EHDSEcdHYEDsdFZz_8szcg-SZq5VDDknvifdKt7qEshq-U8AxBlGCQ/s320/Zillion.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4814660/" target="_blank">Zillion: Burning Night</a>, 1988, dir: Mizuho Nishikubo<p></p><p>There's an essay to be written about the outsided influence of director Walter Hill's bewildering '50's-styled, cyberpunk-presaging, neo-noir action movie <b>Streets of Fire</b> on the anime scene. Heck, it probably <i>has </i>been written, but I can't be bothered to find out and I'm not about to dig too deep and reveal my ignorance. For our purposes, though, suffice to say that <b>Bubblegum Crisis</b>, which in itself would go on to be enormously influential, homaged its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arxD3Ro9mAk" target="_blank">opening scene</a> and much of its style about as enthusiastically as it's possible to homage anything. Or so you'd think had you never seen <b>Zillion: Burning Night</b>, which came out a year later and goes even further in riffing on that wonderful opening sequence, then continues to lift the entire rest of the plot as well, albeit dropped into a setting that's just as weird a mishmash in its way as anything <b>Streets of Fire </b>managed.</p><p>All of which might come as quite the surprise to the viewer who'd made their way through <b>Zillion </b>the TV show's 31 episodes and came to this 45-minute OVA expecting more of the same. For <b>Zillion </b>was a fairly standard teen-oriented sci-fi action affair whose main distinction would have been its close association with laser tag guns and <i>Sega </i>video games had it not had the good fortune of being made by the team that was just about to become the mighty <i>Production I.G. </i>Though, actually, that's a little unfair: <b>Zillion </b>certainly looks far better than a late eighties anime TV show has any right to, but it's actually pretty delightful on all fronts and an unusually great example of something that could easily have been not remotely great, with some ingenious plotting, exciting action, and charming character dynamics.</p><p><b>Zillion: Burning Night </b>sort of has all of the above. The animation is perhaps a slight step down, which seems counterintuitive for an OVA from a time when that really meant something, but then, you could step down pretty far from <b>Zillion </b>and still look plenty good, and <b>Burning Night </b>certainly does nothing to embarrass itself. On every other front, however, it feels very much like an attempt to carry over something of the vibe of the show but as little as possible of the actual content, which is why the heroic White Nuts who we last saw saving their home planet from aliens are now band members trapped in a bizarre steampunk <b>Streets of Fire </b>pastiche. And even beyond that obvious strangeness, there's something awfully tongue in cheek and subversive going on, as though everyone's secret goal was to see how far they could bend the format and still keep it just about recognisable, up to and including taking five minutes to stop the action dead and sit two characters down to delve into the show's gender politics.</p><p>This was always going to work for me, since one of my very favourite things about anime is that willingness to mess around with existing properties in silly and probably hopelessly uncommercial ways, and <b>Zillion: Burning Night </b>is one of the more outrageous examples of that tendency I've come across. Obviously, if you're the sort of viewer that would prefer to be offered more of what you've enjoyed, its likelier to be hugely annoying, both in how fundamentally different it is from <b>Zillion </b>the TV series and how amused it seems with itself over that fact. So thank goodness <b>Burning Night </b>is fun and goofy and thrilling enough that you can, if you want, simply watch it as just another late-eighties OVA that stands pretty much on its own two feet. And if you're yet to come across either the show or the OVA - which, surely, most people haven't, since they're hardly well-known in the West - then <i>Funimation</i>'s complete and sensibly priced Blu-ray set is absolutely worth taking a chance on.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiobkxbYz9z5urXJIrDb3vxcKq0Gk8Vr5Zjl7v-V1zlsyBDUfzfKCqeBGzqgKI7_DxWAocXpL5Sz5cCqF11TNOG2m8xYPi8g8mgHwFtBa-uI8DW_0O4YFvpYldSA_Q_K9ZjAMAhDPFgUjywccSwNYWjlOVhD-lcBBOSYWr_xnBoz0ymOIB41Yay-xzvKQ/s1130/Rail%20of%20the%20Star.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiobkxbYz9z5urXJIrDb3vxcKq0Gk8Vr5Zjl7v-V1zlsyBDUfzfKCqeBGzqgKI7_DxWAocXpL5Sz5cCqF11TNOG2m8xYPi8g8mgHwFtBa-uI8DW_0O4YFvpYldSA_Q_K9ZjAMAhDPFgUjywccSwNYWjlOVhD-lcBBOSYWr_xnBoz0ymOIB41Yay-xzvKQ/s320/Rail%20of%20the%20Star.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1991145/" target="_blank">Rail of the Star</a>, 1993, dir: Toshio Hirata<p></p><p>Pretty much everything that works in <b>Rail of the Star</b> is down to the narrative, and that's going to be all the truer for the viewer who's at least reasonably interested in the historical events it narrates and in the slant it takes to those events. Based upon an autobiographical novel of the same name by Chitose Kobayashi, it covers her childhood as the daughter of well-off parents living in Japanese-occupied Korea, from a little before the opening of World War II to the aftermath of the war's end, by which point the Kobayashi family are impoverished, grieving, and desperate to escape from a country that has good reason to hate them and no interest in making their lives anything but horribly difficult.</p><p>This places <b>Rail of the Star </b>both squarely in that subgenre practically unique to Japan, the tale of civilians suffering through the losing of a war told through the eyes of children, and somewhat off to one side, in that Chitose sees little of the actual military conflict and is touched by it only indirectly until after its end, as, for example, by her father going off to serve. Mostly, though, Chitose's story runs in parallel to the war, as her life gets increasingly bent out of shape by the global events happening just out of her, and so our, view. And arguably even that isn't the core of the thing; though some reviews would have you believe otherwise, the thread uniting most of <b>Rail of the Star</b>'s scattered and episodic narrative is Chitose's slow awakening to the fact of Japan's oppression of the Korean people and her own culpability in that simply by being part of a family that's done pretty well out of the arrangement until recently.</p><p>Admittedly, this is sometimes frustrating. Since we're mostly bound to Chitose's perspective, the Kobayashis are nearly always front and centre and the Koreans who enter their lives hover on the periphery, helping or hindering and rarely coming into focus. And though Chitose lived through some incredibly dramatic and heartrending events, there's nothing particularly unique about her or her family, and as protagonists they're not the most inherently interesting of people. We'd like to learn more about those around her, and that's truest of the maidservant who, in one particularly gut-wrenching scene involving a misplaced clothes pin, she indirectly brings harm to. That's surely part of the point, though, and I don't know that being blunter in its themes or more overt in introducing information that Chitose couldn't have known or comprehended would help things any - yet it leaves us with a narrative that's unsatisfying and shapeless in all the ways lived experiences are, albeit with a brief framing narrative that goes a good way to tying everything up in a manner the central story can't.</p><p>Still, a mixed bag for the average Western viewer, I'd think, and all the more so for the Western viewer uninterested in or actively hostile to the tale it's telling and its very particular context. And as I said at the start, that's really the best that <b>Rail of the Star </b>has going for it: the animation is awfully barebones for a feature film, reminding me of nothing more than the <b>Animated Classics of Japanese Literature </b>series, and though Koichi Sakata's score has its strong moments, it also has a tendency to be cloying and manipulative. Likewise, the cast are fine without anyone leaving too much of an impression and Harata, as a director, seems quite happy making sure that everything gets from A to B without necessarily trying to play scenes for all they're worth. Whichever way you shake it, then, <b>Rail of the Star </b>isn't on a par with classics like <b>Grave of the Fireflies </b>and <b>Barefoot Gen</b>, or even the similar but more recent <b>Giovanni's Island</b>; but come to it with realistic expectations and there's an often moving, often fascinating account to be found of events that I, for one, knew almost nothing about going in.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnLY6s-7GpHqllRHYX0BKW-hpq4BZ5hqLKII_vlJ_En8rsCGa1qcAeHvR_UVA33EVR43Ynl54ap6KmKh_iF-nGgjLp_rdNwXGjWxIsRFh_fn7e0Yl2w4IojxhLmh-_XoMlC54cCBxjGHt6b9HeSrlBcbCSrHhmCb8pHARtWoLdLUV96hDvvl0DmZOgmg/s1130/Dragon%20Slayer.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnLY6s-7GpHqllRHYX0BKW-hpq4BZ5hqLKII_vlJ_En8rsCGa1qcAeHvR_UVA33EVR43Ynl54ap6KmKh_iF-nGgjLp_rdNwXGjWxIsRFh_fn7e0Yl2w4IojxhLmh-_XoMlC54cCBxjGHt6b9HeSrlBcbCSrHhmCb8pHARtWoLdLUV96hDvvl0DmZOgmg/s320/Dragon%20Slayer.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3710404/" target="_blank">Dragon Slayer</a>, 1992, dir: Noriyuki Nakamura<p></p><p>In a way, what I found most frustrating about <b>Dragon Slayer</b> isn't that it wasn't better, but that it was as good as it is. Because, after all, there's a definite quality ceiling on something like this - that being a prequel to a JRPG video game that couldn't possibly be drawing upon more hackneyed elements if it tried, and, moreover, a prequel that's doomed to drag itself toward a non-conclusion that is, in fact, the beginning of the proper story everyone felt was worth telling. You could gin that up with the most glorious animation ever drawn by human hands, you could hire the finest of voice casts, you could bring in the most skilled writer and director, and what you ended up with could almost certainly never rise above "not too bad, considering."</p><p>The <b>Dragon Slayer </b>we got does not contain the most glorious animation, nor the finest voice cast, nor the most skilled writer or director, but you can tell, at least, that everyone was making a proper go of it. Certainly the thing looks pretty respectable, especially around the character work, and <i>Urban Vision</i>'s dub is that rarity of the form that's something of an asset, with generally commendable actors finding just the right blend of tones for the material, which veers between leadenly serious fantasy cliché and mildly silly light-heartedness that's invariably more entertaining. Indeed, we could have done with more of that: the balance as it stands is fine for the tale everyone was stuck with telling, but nudging that in a goofier direction could have paid dividends. Alternatively, a shift further towards horror might have paid off: <b>Dragon Slayer </b>flirts with the genre, with the stock monster enemies being closer to demons than to, well, stock monsters, and one gloriously creepy moment near the start leaves you with hopes the remainder has no intention of meeting.</p><p>What's worse is that there's one element amid the rote "young hero sets out to avenge his dad and rescue his mum from the all-conquering big bad with the aid of his plucky chums" tripe that verges upon being novel and interesting, and wouldn't you know it but it's introduced bare minutes from the end and not remotely explored? I won't give it away - <b>Dragon Slayer</b> does deserve better than that - but suffice to say that there are the makings of a properly unusual romantic entanglement here, and I'd much rather have watched that story play out.</p><p>Ultimately, I feel bad for a creative team who were handed something of a poisoned chalice and had the decency to make what they could of it, and likely the drifts into humour and horror and relationship weirdness were their way of acknowledging that they had to do <i>something </i>to enliven what would otherwise be stunningly over-familiar. And yet I can't help wondering why they didn't go further. Maybe the answer is merely the limitations of a 40-minute run time, since even the most unoriginal of stories still needs to be kept on track, and that doesn't leave much room for doodling in the margins. But if there's a moral to be had here, it's that when your margin-doodling is the only memorable ingredient of your otherwise utterly cookie-cutter product, you might as well go for broke, because the alternatively is making reviewers three decades later grumpy, and nobody wants that.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097217/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA2gFlIcl0IY5Tj0WMVbeoXyvNUv0eaemv0ZNlq6NBudM_oLqz20C1HBlXlx31fhL32bLddBZDwguvNiKBSoB8k65qkvlSSBXC0CAn_YyYI6loyGTPjhOhX4rVOkjewJUPKx5YDA_B52krbB1YLI44DV5885kijFSacbNJvRaB_PPKFAjNMpp5HA91Bw/s1130/Dog%20Soldier.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA2gFlIcl0IY5Tj0WMVbeoXyvNUv0eaemv0ZNlq6NBudM_oLqz20C1HBlXlx31fhL32bLddBZDwguvNiKBSoB8k65qkvlSSBXC0CAn_YyYI6loyGTPjhOhX4rVOkjewJUPKx5YDA_B52krbB1YLI44DV5885kijFSacbNJvRaB_PPKFAjNMpp5HA91Bw/s320/Dog%20Soldier.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097217/" target="_blank">Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past</a>, 1989, dir: Hiroyuki Ebata<p></p><p>My hope for <b>Dog Soldier</b> wasn't that it would be good, since that seemed an awfully long stretch based on the cover art and back-of-box description, but that an anime <i>Rambo </i>knock-off from the tail end of the eighties couldn't fail to be kind of fun-bad. And in this I was to be badly frustrated, since <b>Dog Soldier</b> isn't really that committed to ripping off <b>First Blood</b> and its sequel at all - though it does so enough to make clear that the similarities aren't accidental - and isn't very much fun, bad or otherwise. Like so many OVAs from the period, it's just kind of there, though it manages to shoot itself in the foot harder than most.</p><p>The story takes a while to coalesce, and this is actually a plus point, since the chaotic opening is as good as <b>Dog Soldier </b>will ever get. A frenzy of middlingly well animated action eventually gets around to introducing us to our hero, Japanese-American former Green Beret John Kyosuke Hiba, now a construction worker, who finds himself dragged by ludicrous coincidence into the attempted kidnapping of a beautiful female scientist carrying an experimental cure for the HIV virus. Events rapidly grow more convoluted, as said scientist apparently assists in her own capture, and who can the American authorities recruit to bring her back - along with the cure, which they want more because an enemy power could use the immunity it would grant to weaponise AIDS than through any humanitarian instinct - other than our hero? I mean, anyone else, obviously, but Hiba hates and distrusts the authorities and from their point of view is thoroughly disposable, regardless of his impeccable service record, and wouldn't you know it but he has a personal connection both with the scientist and the head of the organisation that's abducted her, so he's the one who gets dropped onto an island of unfriendlies to get the job done.</p><p>That's already a lot of setup for what really feels like it ought to be an action title, but we're not done yet: we still need to have the central love triangle explained to is in copious detail, or at least by copious flashbacks to the same snatch of footage, and we've already learned why Hiba lost faith with the US military, along with some muddled stuff about his general backstory that strongly suggests the filmmakers viewed America in the same way the average American of the time would have viewed, say, Libya. And that's the big problem: there's too much story and none of it's particularly fresh or special, and even if it was, it's never developed enough to be interesting in and of itself or to complement the present-day narrative. Or to put that another way, it wastes a lot of time that could be devoted to what surely any viewer would be here for, that being the action that, once we get out of that enjoyable opening, is barely a feature.</p><p>It helps not at all that we never get a sense that Hiba is especially good at soldiering, since the plot needs him to fail so we can have our full 45 minutes of running time. We're told he's exceptionally competent, but we barely see it, and Ebata further muddies the waters by turning him and his buddy (who serves no purpose beyond an early spot of exposition) into out-and-out cartoons at certain points, amid an otherwise fairly realistic cast, so that he spends probably more time being a buffoon than he does being the badass we're assured we're meant to be watching. Humour's a weird thing to even try for in such a title, and its brief presence is the clearest sign that nobody thought to sit down and figure out what this was meant to be, leaving us with an action title with barely any action, far too much narrative busywork, and a routine lack of anything for a viewer to latch onto, let alone enjoy.</p><p>-oOo-</p><div><p>I'd say that <b>Rail of the Star</b>'s been done a little dirty, first by not getting much of a positive reception back in the day - and falling foul of the "How dare the Japanese talk about their own wartime experiences in a way that doesn't make them look like total monsters" crowd, who've even managed to get their hands on its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_of_the_Star" target="_blank">shockingly off-topic Wikipedia entry</a> - and then, subsequently, by being denied a more modern release that it warrants at the very least for the uniqueness of its material. Although, since it's awfully easy to imagine a better take on that material, I guess the injustice isn't all that, especially when there are a handful of similar movies that are flat-out masterpieces. At any rate, <b>Zillion: Burning Night </b>is terrific fun, and well-deserving of its rather baffling presence on Blu-ray, so there's that.</p><p><br /></p><div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></div></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-20400293638633528232023-11-25T20:46:00.000+00:002023-11-25T20:46:09.499+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 132<p>Having a couple of posts with stuff that's readily available was obviously too good to be true, and so here we are, breaking with that trend about as hard as we can with another bunch of VHS-only titles, most of which are pretty obscure even by that already pretty high bar. But wait! There's a twist! My perhaps-unfair criteria for judging these releases that never made it past the humble medium of video tape has been whether or not they actually deserved to do so, or whether languishing on an extinct medium was an appropriate fate. But that's all out of the window this time, because I'm happy - or, I guess, sad - to declare that everything here comfortably clears that requirement. This is all good anime, and the question is more of how good and why the fates chose to bury these treasures in the mists of time and defunct media.</p><p>So, with thumbs pointed firmly upward, let's have a look at <b>Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko</b>, <b>Kabuto</b>, <b>Blue Sonnet</b>, and <b>Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424114/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8e3xHXUTdkyIi7F-X3Fm0nGz_Ov6U-UpWu8dAeL9-jW3fQPJs0C5sZ7sONR8psbl0xFOJO0cakvvQ8Ak8vva1tXp1Rz7HSO3mEy00SUUneX5g3KDx9VVRq6ZzmEnl8h-KphBN4SUVatgOpL8OXxxtX3FtyrQnVxDY_-6RXYlZJlBzB2u3tNLvbP0eVQ/s1130/Leda_The%20Fantastic%20Adventure%20of%20Yohko.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8e3xHXUTdkyIi7F-X3Fm0nGz_Ov6U-UpWu8dAeL9-jW3fQPJs0C5sZ7sONR8psbl0xFOJO0cakvvQ8Ak8vva1tXp1Rz7HSO3mEy00SUUneX5g3KDx9VVRq6ZzmEnl8h-KphBN4SUVatgOpL8OXxxtX3FtyrQnVxDY_-6RXYlZJlBzB2u3tNLvbP0eVQ/s320/Leda_The%20Fantastic%20Adventure%20of%20Yohko.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424114/" target="_blank">Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko</a>, 1985, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama<div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko </b>is at once as unoriginal as a piece of fantasy could hope to be and a complete delight, and I think the explanation for that apparent contradiction comes down to one thing. It's possible to imagine a live-action version of this same material that might just about work, if only because the designs for the cast, locations, and particularly for the technology are one of the few elements that bring something distinctive to the table; but being animated, and being mostly very well-animated, is what makes <b>The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko </b>shine.</div><div><p>Kunihiko Yuyama went on to have a weird old career that involves a quite horrifying number of <i>Pokémon</i> movies, but there's the odd bit of great work on his CV prior to that, and one of the common elements to his best efforts is a real understanding of how to play to the strengths of his medium. Here, Yuyama constantly switches up techniques to pull out what's best for a given scene, or even a given handful of frames, and is happy to sacrifice a bit of visual consistency if that means an action beat is more exciting or the introduction of a new setting is more giddily fantastical. This is perhaps most noticeable in the opening sequence, possibly the most visually lovely <b>The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko </b>will be throughout its perfectly paced seventy minute runtime, and during which you might easily jump to the conclusion that you were in for an artsy romance rather than a sci-fantasy adventure full of transforming giant robots and boob armour and talking dogs.</p><p>Because, oh yes, one of the relatively tiny number of main characters is a talking dog, and that proves yet another illustration of what Yuyama is up to on the animation front, because said verbose canine, Lingam, gets an altogether different art style from our teenage heroine Yohko, who in turns looks not much like the villainous Zell. That approach can easily go wrong, and I've grumbled before now about works where it very much looked like all the designers were in different rooms and never spoke to each other, but in <b>The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko </b>it simply feels right in a way that trying to hammer a single aesthetic onto those three very different characters couldn't.</p><p>Still, there's no getting around the fact that chucking a talking dog into your sci-fi swords and sorcery movie is kind of goofy - which is probably all for the good. As I started off saying way back when, <b>The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko</b>, stripped to its bare bones, couldn't be much more cliched if it tried, with Yohko getting transported to another world whose head villain has designs on conquering her own and quickly discovering her chosen one status while buddying up with a team of allies to set things right. And even within that, it's not like there are many twists on the formula, though there are individual details - like how the central McGuffin isn't a sword or somesuch but a piece of music Yohko's written to woo the guy she's crushing on - that add a nice bit of texture.</p><p>Don't come to <b>The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko </b>for strikingly original fantasy storytelling, then, but also don't let that lack of originality be a reason not to seek it out. And the same, surprisingly, goes for the aforementioned boob armour, which turns out to be about as sexualised as Yohko ever gets in a story that actually winds up feeling slightly progressive by the standards of 1985. Even if a big part of her motivation is the attentions of a boy who possibly doesn't know she exists, she still gets to be tough and brave and decisive, and there's a terrific scene towards the end where all those elements come together and we get to see how much she's grown across the relatively brief running time. It's characteristic of a film that's wonderfully well thought out in its every detail, and even if that's in service of a plot you can predict every beat of, that still adds up to something utterly charming.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104583/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmp4CtkGX6Ba6SXmEZj7j7QiCvcS1kKMlXJehTVRHK2c0-3naQZvx_Hd-_BzMfuo3EG0qFaPMvBSuoYGv2SvdyRZuxe6kbcrLZiv8xbFGoAZGY3Gs7eVKJLZAwvzHvfBK8Z3YvLro_wZgWR6BvLidpbeKOK7Gy-JPuG_6X5pJKBX-kyQwr8eYCajYJfQ/s1130/Kabuto.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmp4CtkGX6Ba6SXmEZj7j7QiCvcS1kKMlXJehTVRHK2c0-3naQZvx_Hd-_BzMfuo3EG0qFaPMvBSuoYGv2SvdyRZuxe6kbcrLZiv8xbFGoAZGY3Gs7eVKJLZAwvzHvfBK8Z3YvLro_wZgWR6BvLidpbeKOK7Gy-JPuG_6X5pJKBX-kyQwr8eYCajYJfQ/s320/Kabuto.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104583/" target="_blank">Kabuto</a>, 1992, dir: Buichi Terasawa<p></p><p>Not for the first time, I find myself baffled as to why UK distributor <b>Manga </b>put out some absolute dross in their budget <i>Collection </i>range and yet failed to relicense some of their better VHS titles for DVD. Because <b>Kabuto </b>- or <b>Raven Tengu Kabuto</b> in the US, or <b>Raven Tengu Kabuto: The Golden-Eyed Beast </b>in its original title - feels like the very epitome of what <i>The Collection</i> was about, except for the part where it's pretty good.</p><p>And, OK, "pretty good" is hardly gushing praise, but it's a hell of a lot further than I'd go for the likes of <b>Vampire Wars</b>, and <b>Kabuto</b>, to its credit, gets there by exceeding its inherent limitations in a few unexpected and satisfying ways. We could grumble about the animation, for example, but I never feel good about doing that when a title is obviously pushing its budget to the limits in the hands of a director who's going out of their way to make interesting visual decisions. <b>Kabuto </b>has its fair share of style, and roughly half the time it looks great thanks to some detailed, realistic designs; so long as nobody moves too much, it's actually quite splendid in places. The flipside is that the action suffers the most, and the action could have done with some flashy animation since it's the aspect Terasawa has the least grasp on, with every sequence boiling down to variations of one character swinging their sword or otherwise doing something violent and another character dying unpleasantly, with not much in the actual way of fighting.</p><p>This is frustrating, since good action would have really elevated a title that has quite a lot of the stuff. Fortunately, <b>Kabuto </b>is such a busy genre hybrid that it's allowed to let a few aspects slide, even ones that theoretically ought to make or break it. It's nominally a samurai drama, but very much at the end of that spectrum that wouldn't be at all upset if you mistook if for a Spaghetti Western, though that's not as easy as it might be when it also chucks in a fair bit of science-fiction and tops the whole weird confection off with a heavy dose of horror. Those last two are where <b>Kabuto </b>really threatens to excel, though the brief running time never quite allows it to get there. Still, there's some absolutely terrific imagery scattered around, getting great mileage from the incongruity of muddling genre material into what, for most of its running time, would function quite happily as historical drama.</p><p>That's all for the good, because strip out the genre shenanigans and you have the most basic of tales left behind, one enormously familiar to any viewer who's seen more than the slightest bit of classic Japanese cinema: our hero, Kabuto, returns to the village of his youth to find it taken over by bad folks and sets out to rescue his childhood sweetheart from her captors. But the familiarity is easy to ignore when the head villain is actually a perpetually naked villainess of the most cackling and self-amused sort and her hench-weirdos are a guy who seems to have wandered in from a samurai-themed version of <b>The Terminator</b> and a genius inventor smart enough to have harnessed advanced robotics while everyone around him thinks horses are pretty high-tech. Oh, and Kabuto himself can sprout wings and fly, because apparently there's a martial arts school that lets you do that, and heck, even <i>Manga</i>'s dub is quite respectable for a change, and all in all, trivial and flawed though it is, <b>Kabuto </b>is about as thoroughly and delightfully nineties anime as you could hope to get.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099159/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4ciK_zxs_v2XdXigVvCQ_AYvLjQNuqStRkWZlwvD_5ZG42t4GwnkkV--E78J54TPpCUyvNveRNFgCJQy9YQ0fY2BJGZzkyrx-sgYo2uzYxGvcMO86K5msMRBMw8fyss15oY_G6W8fIUkldfwzuXL8vBB-9Qg-gqRj429eUJKmLLdWqfN8CQ2JcMWYig/s1130/Blue%20Sonnet.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4ciK_zxs_v2XdXigVvCQ_AYvLjQNuqStRkWZlwvD_5ZG42t4GwnkkV--E78J54TPpCUyvNveRNFgCJQy9YQ0fY2BJGZzkyrx-sgYo2uzYxGvcMO86K5msMRBMw8fyss15oY_G6W8fIUkldfwzuXL8vBB-9Qg-gqRj429eUJKmLLdWqfN8CQ2JcMWYig/s320/Blue%20Sonnet.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099159/" target="_blank">Blue Sonnet</a>, 1989 - 1990, dir: Takeyuki Kanda<p></p><p>It's not like I need to be reminded of why I love vintage anime, but still, every so often it's nice to be, and usually what does it isn't the really mind-blowingly terrific stuff but a title that absolutely nails the nuts and bolts. So it was with <b>Blue Sonnet</b>, a five-part OVA that, from its plot synopsis, couldn't sound more generic if it tried and probably wasn't a good deal fresher back in 1989. The 16-year-old Sonnet Barge is both a psychic and a cyborg, and she's in the employ of an organisation called Talon, working under the transparently evil Dr. Josef Merekes, but poor Sonnet, who's never known anything except misery and abuse, isn't well equipped on the moral compass front. So when she finds herself sent to Japan to stalk innocent-seeming high school girl Lan Komatsuzaki, who may or may not be another powerful psychic, she finds nothing about the situation especially suspicious, except for how posing as a normal teenager means that people are suddenly showing her the sort of kindness and decency she's been so deprived of until now.</p><p>Actually, I seem to have unintentionally made that summary a bit less cliched than I intended, and in doing so touched upon one of the things that makes <b>Blue Sonnet </b>special in the face of so many apparently commonplace ingredients. Though it has all the graphic violence and nudity you'd expect from a 1989 OVA about battling psychic warriors, the source material in this case was actually a Shōjo manga, and perhaps that's why it goes down the unusual route of treating its twin heroines like actual human beings and letting in some genuine notes of emotion and tragedy. By the mid point, I was quite shocked to realise how caught up I was in the fates of Sonnet and Lan, and by the end I was fairly stunned to look back and see how much ground had been covered in the space of two and a half hours. <b>Blue Sonnet </b>uses its running time exceedingly well, and does as good a job as any title I can recall of making each episode self-contained and meaningful whilst also gradually building the wider conflicts and setting up what's to come. Though it's hard to notice in the early running, when the show is largely aping a typical high-school drama, there's no real flab anywhere, and though there are a couple of hefty diversions - part three is a neat retelling of some of the best bits of <b>Ringu</b>, except for how it got there first by a couple of years - everything ends up pointing in the same direction, even if it's only to make some of the later character choices feel believable and impactful.</p><p>All of this is wrapped up in animation that's never a great deal better than it needs to be, and Kanda is hardly show-offy in his direction, but he does a fine job of ensuring that the budget goes where it needs to and that the art is always working in service of the storytelling. It's hard to say whether the same is true of character designs that look as if they've wandered in from a good decade prior, and no doubt there'll be viewers who feel they overly date the material. For me, they worked just fine, sometimes by injecting an air of innocence to the proceedings and sometimes by seeming thoroughly incongruous as limbs are torn off and heads explode. <b>Blue Sonnet</b>, incidentally, has some exceptionally well-used gore, especially by the none-too-subtle standards of 1989, doling it out just enough that it feels shocking and consequential and selling us on how powerful its protagonists are rather than conjuring up a world where stubbing your toe is enough to make you explode in a shower of blood.</p><p>It's fair to say that <b>Blue Sonnet </b>caught me in precisely the right mood, which is to say, when I was absolutely ready for something pulpy but not dumb, and it's also fair to say that nothing here is what I'd call objectively great, barring a shockingly catchy opening theme and a generally splendid and well-used score. There are aspects, such as the sequence that runs under that terrific opener, wordlessly depicting some of Sonnet's overwise barely touched upon childhood traumas, that might be bold and heartfelt or tacky and exploitative depending upon the eye of the beholder, and perhaps, there and elsewhere, the truth lies somewhere between those two poles. Or maybe it's truer to suggest that <b>Blue Sonnet </b>is quite capable of being bold, heartfelt, tacky, and exploitative by turns, and sometimes all those things at once, and that's probably even a big part of why it works so damn well.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0cz686FPILSfLBMjiDtB3XcfELw2pEfCizh27Gw2SZG9qlDka3iV0cc29s1AcSuNAueeu-1tL-Qn0t4109OFYVZKyu7AyOdzxHmXqGHeTnGBrxl4LpEm_4zBZdZ-4S5vauOYlRitt9iYnMzZff0GaBG0gFUGRptTFO0RHMENseb_jCl5BMvj33opeQ/s1130/Final%20Fantasy%20Legend%20of%20the%20Crystals.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0cz686FPILSfLBMjiDtB3XcfELw2pEfCizh27Gw2SZG9qlDka3iV0cc29s1AcSuNAueeu-1tL-Qn0t4109OFYVZKyu7AyOdzxHmXqGHeTnGBrxl4LpEm_4zBZdZ-4S5vauOYlRitt9iYnMzZff0GaBG0gFUGRptTFO0RHMENseb_jCl5BMvj33opeQ/s320/Final%20Fantasy%20Legend%20of%20the%20Crystals.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="Legend of the Crystals" target="_blank">Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals</a>, 1994, dir: Rintaro<p></p><p>We've covered any number of titles whose absence from any medium more modern than VHS tapes is strange and frustrating, but here at last we come to one where it's downright inexplicable. The very fact that <b>Legend of the Crystals </b>is the first attempt to adapt the enormously long-running and popular <i>Final Fantasy</i> JRPG series to the screen would, you'd think, be enough in itself; but add in the fact that this was directed by Rintaro, of <b>Galaxy Express 999 </b>and <b>The Dagger of Kamui </b>and <b>Metropolis </b>fame, among much else, and cap that off with animation by the famed studio <i>Madhouse</i>, and you're into the realms of the truly baffling.</p><p>Or rather, there's one obvious explanation, and that would be that everybody involved was so embarrassed by what they'd come up with that they decided to disappear it from the world as well as they could. I can't say for sure that wasn't what happened, but if it was, they were enormously bad at judging their own work, because <b>Legend of the Crystals </b>is a strong effort by everyone's standards. Rintaro had and would go on to produce things that were more creatively interesting and visually spectacular, but there's not much on his CV so consistently good, especially when this bucks his usual trend of getting so caught up in the imagery that he lets the story get away from him. By his and <i>Madhouse</i>'s standards, there's not much here that's terribly showy, but the animation is reliably impressive, the framerate is high even for an early nineties OVA, and the integration of the marvellously designed characters with some simply coloured but especially detailed backgrounds is really standout stuff. And as for the <i>Final Fantasy</i> series, well, the next time <i>Square </i>took a stab at this would be with uncanny-valley-fest <b>The Spirits Within</b>, and enough said about that.</p><p>Though, no, let's say one more thing. Among the more obvious ways in which <b>The Spirits Within </b>missed the mark was by doing nothing with the <i>Final Fantasy</i> license besides throwing in a few arbitrary references and emulating its busy, over-cooked approach to narrative lore, something ill-suited to the limitations of a feature film, while later attempt <b>Advent Children </b>would learn from that mistake but arguably go too far in the other direction by hewing so closely to its source material as to be incomprehensible to anyone but the existing fanbase. And that's all the more embarrassing when <b>Legend of the Crystals </b>got it right first time, acting as a sequel to <b>Final Fantasy 5</b> but with a mostly new cast, allowing it to tell its tale without getting too bogged down in worldbuilding or exposition.</p><p>It helps, in fairness, that it's as boilerplate a tale as can be, but it helps considerably more that the cast are pretty wonderful, with the definite highlights being Rouge the kinkily underdressed sky pirate with a passion for stealing anything not nailed down and her opposite number, the brash and bulky Valkus, whose better judgement quickly falls foul of his developing a massive crush on her. The leads are slightly less fun, though they do better than their counterparts in many an actual <i>Final Fantasy</i> game, and speaking of which, I'm baffled at how any series fan could fail to love this when the female lead is a summoner who can only summon Chocobos! Admittedly, that's a sure sign that <b>Legend of the Crystals </b>isn't taking its <i>Final Fantasy</i>-ing as seriously as it might, and if you prefer the games at their more angsty, this probably isn't for you. For everyone else, though, it's a delightfully light-hearted gem brought to life with splendid animation by a director with talent and vision to spare, and I'm genuinely bewildered as to why it's been allowed to muster away in the VHS dungeons the way it has.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>Man, what happened there, huh? Did nineties anime companies not want to make money? Did they really prefer to put out junk and leave splendid titles to gather dust? Or is it just that I don't have the faintest idea how anime licensing works and there were actually vast and complicated factors that consigned these gems to the trashcan of history? Who knows? Given that I'm not willing to go the extra mile and do some actual research, not me!</p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-88465906826366038602023-10-20T21:08:00.004+01:002023-11-25T20:30:21.367+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 131<p>Unlikely as it seems, we have another post of stuff that's readily available - nay, readily available on blu-ray, no less! - and I'll be amazed if that ever happens again, but for now, let's wallow in the joyous fact that lots of great (and, OK, some not so great) anime is still being put out on shiny disks and take a look at <b>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Afterglow of Zeon</b>, <b>Project A-Ko 4: Final</b>, <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX</b>, and <b>All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH!</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159508/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlW1VSrkWLM4M18oEb6oRmbP5XjXlcozrmEDAMpYykJEeTE0cECKs9impbUDdWKB0X3oHTlD5lnuTjdT66HRMCqhw-ur3MdztMEyJxkDSRvfk1J6yQ8HoWn7dyldRJp67zs_tETgXxiXm4qp8Geo_LexbbSR9160hdQl34J67hYfh3Ra1U_39CEGp-PQ/s1130/Mobile%20Suit%20Gundam%200083%20Afterglow%20of%20Zeon.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlW1VSrkWLM4M18oEb6oRmbP5XjXlcozrmEDAMpYykJEeTE0cECKs9impbUDdWKB0X3oHTlD5lnuTjdT66HRMCqhw-ur3MdztMEyJxkDSRvfk1J6yQ8HoWn7dyldRJp67zs_tETgXxiXm4qp8Geo_LexbbSR9160hdQl34J67hYfh3Ra1U_39CEGp-PQ/s320/Mobile%20Suit%20Gundam%200083%20Afterglow%20of%20Zeon.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159508/" target="_blank">Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Afterglow of Zeon</a>, 1992, dir: Takashi Imanishi<p></p><p>I'm not convinced there was ever a possibility of cutting a two hour movie from the thirteen episodes of <b>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory </b>that was remotely as successful as that seminal OVA series. <b>Stardust Memory </b>wasn't always the paciest or the most concise show, but then, that willingness to slow down and build its world and characters, or just pause for a stunner of an action sequence, was the source of many of its virtues, and I've never been a fan of the breakneck storytelling that characterises much of the <i>Gundam </i>franchise, especially when it comes to these compilation films. However, there are definitely ways in that could have worked, and it's evident that the creators of <b>The Afterglow of Zeon </b>put some thought into the question rather than simply stripping out everything remotely unessential and lashing whatever was left together as best they could.</p><p>I mean, that <i>is </i>a thing they did, it's just not the only thing. And therein lies the problem: any one approach might have succeeded, but <b>The Afterglow of Zeon </b>tries its hand at three that I counted, if we include the aforementioned path of least resistance. Which, actually, isn't quite what's happening anyway, given that the film does do away with quite a bit that was, if not crucial to the plot, then at least pretty useful in regards to making it followable: it's fair to say that Imanishi's take heavily favours the material he himself directed, which means an emphasis on the second (and, for me, the slightly weaker) half and an opening that hits the ground running way too hard.</p><p>So that's one angle. But initially it looks as though <b>Afterglow of Zeon </b>might be up to something considerably more interesting, as we're greeted with narration from Nina Purpleton and by far the clearest explanation of the one-year war and the <i>Gundam</i>-verse I've encountered. And that got my hopes up for a version of <i>Gundam 0083 </i>told through Nina's eyes, since the ill-use of her character was perhaps my biggest bugbear with the OVA's telling. Saddled with the thankless dual role of love interest and exposition-deliver, Nina was probably doomed from the off, but the directions she's taken in the last few episodes are frustratingly nonsensical and ripe for a revision that clues us in to what the heck she was thinking beyond <b>Stardust Memory</b>'s "Boy, women sure are emotional to the point of being downright crazy, huh?" Which makes it all the more annoying that Nina's narration ends up as nothing more than a lazy way to plaster over some of the wider story gaps, leaving the sense that she was picked more because everyone agreed that Rei Sakuma had a nice voice.</p><p>That leaves us with one last approach, and perhaps the most potentially exciting, and this one<b> Afterglow of Zeon</b> does follow through on somewhat, though I came to suspect that again it was more from necessity than creative choice. A take from the antagonists' perspective is sitting right there, and it's not as though <i>Gundam </i>hasn't dabbled plenty in that sort of thing, but here it could really have paid dividends since they do have some legitimately good points: given that the tale begins with the revelation that the Federation have been developing atomic superweapons in secret, their moral high ground is severely lacking. But though <b>Afterglow of Zeon </b>feels more balanced than <b>Stardust Memory</b> did, that never particularly leads anywhere, presumably because to really delve into the motivations and morality of the Delaz Fleet would have required the production of new footage.</p><p>Which, in a review that so far has been a bit unduly harsh, leaves us with the one thing <b>Afterglow of Zeon </b>couldn't hope to screw up even slightly. It may not be the best possible two-hour version of <i>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083</i>, but it's still <i>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083</i>, and that's some pretty great bones to have. The animation hasn't got any less glorious, the character and mecha designs remain some of my favourites anywhere in <i>Gundam</i>, and in general the visuals outshine almost everything else from the time, looking remarkably fresh and current even some three decades later. The same goes for Mitsuo Hagita's thrilling score, the strong cast, and the largely excellent work of both directors: this could only ever have gone so far wrong, and while it takes a fairly good stab at times, that leaves a somewhat mangled, not always easily followed version of two hours of fundamentally excellent <i>Gundam</i>.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIhMI5UK_BkN2grNsNhodskopvDuIN8vzb29rvkIQhOoOI2T3tnHT1XhmG_ZvqJVWTIG4lmmS-6b6tIhcbyahE3bBIBibhezhTiCVnb38rYuXxZZBvKrhPlU2tnpPNl-r4pB8I6BLpgimFO2YfYOe0FnpIwEWfqrpY_1rfPRmmqdI9h9e_T2BA0G7ilg/s1130/Project%20A-Ko%204%20Final.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIhMI5UK_BkN2grNsNhodskopvDuIN8vzb29rvkIQhOoOI2T3tnHT1XhmG_ZvqJVWTIG4lmmS-6b6tIhcbyahE3bBIBibhezhTiCVnb38rYuXxZZBvKrhPlU2tnpPNl-r4pB8I6BLpgimFO2YfYOe0FnpIwEWfqrpY_1rfPRmmqdI9h9e_T2BA0G7ilg/s320/Project%20A-Ko%204%20Final.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159677/" target="_blank">Project A-Ko 4: Final</a>, 1989, dir: Yûji Moriyama<div><p>I can't be sure whether these <b>Project A-Ko</b> sequels have improved with each entry or whether they've just worn me down, but <b>Project A-Ko 4</b> was comfortably the one I enjoyed the most. And again, I don't know if that's the same as being the best; <b>Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group </b>had an infinitely clearer story and <b>Cinderella Rhapsody</b> played around much harder with what it meant to be a follow-up to the original <b>A-Ko</b>. Indeed, narratively <b>Final </b>is quite the mess, and it's difficult to judge how much of that is a deliberate harnessing of the first entry's chaotic energy and how much is simply that nobody was quite sure what story they were telling or how to keep it in line with the demands of wrapping up threads from the preceding two. Which is something <b>Final </b>concerns itself with more than I'd have expected, meaning that borderline-mute love interest Kei is back from <b>Cinderella Rhapsody</b> and this time romancing A-Ko and B-Ko's teacher Miss Ayumi, much to their mutual chagrin, which in turn is enough to wind up the eternally annoying C-Ko, who had good reason to suppose she was back to being the centre of everyone's attentions.</p><p>Oh, and also there's a massive alien fleet approaching Earth for reasons unknown, though they'd be more obvious were it not for the various red herrings that writer Tomoko Kawasaki throws in to obfuscate things. Really, the plot is far from a strength in and of itself, but since it's merely a vessel for delivering gags and amusing nods to other media, more so even than <b>Project A-Ko</b>'s was, it proves to be just what's needed. Really, it's that return to being anarchic for its own sake that makes this such a joy, and the sense of fun that was never 100% there in the last two is back in full force. This feels like the work of people who at once have huge affection for the property they've created and no qualms whatsoever about blowing it all to pieces if the result is the tiniest bit funnier. So we get perhaps the most random smorgasbord of references yet, from an hilarious mockery of <b>Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day </b>to classics of Japanese cinema to <b>The Graduate</b>, and on and on, with no end of cameos to be spotted if you're quick enough with the pause button.</p><p>Arguably, none of that makes <b>Final </b>a necessary watch, and for all the efforts to provide a true and definite conclusion, this takes us nowhere <b>Project A-Ko </b>hadn't already and indeed doesn't really do much to slam the door on further sequels. If there's any real finality here besides the title, it's in the pervasive sense that the creative team knew they'd drained all the mileage from the franchise they could and were ready to bring the roof crashing down, which is admittedly just the right sort of note for the series<b> </b>to go out on. That faint air of wheel-spinning is enough to make it that bit less satisfying than the original was, as is the inconsistent animation, and yet I struggle to imagine the viewer who enjoyed <b>Project A-Ko </b>and didn't also get a kick from this - which is weird given that, <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2017/03/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime.html" target="_blank">way back in March 2017</a>, I <i>was </i>that selfsame viewer. But here in 2023, and even with the somewhat weak start of <b>Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</b>, I definitely can't stand by my earlier dismissal of these sequels, the more so given how loving and lavish <i>Discotek</i>'s Blu-ray releases have been, so I guess that leaves us with an across-the-board thumbs up for all things <i>A-Ko</i>-related.</p><p></p><p><a href="https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27587277/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ7Zl29oTVP-p7b_ryukhUiHWz1cN6SKJLacMzsQlHYjrW4WRJ5Tv-2MLfM_YE0lJwg35ZEkJnWIwZim5HyZX-FGLUbZwCdfrKq2auF25ZKF-rqS1PZHlZXn7kvtv6Vv0aI93vFUzLU07H3gWT116FXYFTIo6jj9L0IQdZduCpfmLXmZJ4v92xqVQ3NQ/s1130/NG%20Knight%20Lamune%20&%2040%20DX.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ7Zl29oTVP-p7b_ryukhUiHWz1cN6SKJLacMzsQlHYjrW4WRJ5Tv-2MLfM_YE0lJwg35ZEkJnWIwZim5HyZX-FGLUbZwCdfrKq2auF25ZKF-rqS1PZHlZXn7kvtv6Vv0aI93vFUzLU07H3gWT116FXYFTIo6jj9L0IQdZduCpfmLXmZJ4v92xqVQ3NQ/s320/NG%20Knight%20Lamune%20&%2040%20DX.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27587277/" target="_blank">NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX</a>, 1993, dir: Naori Hiraki<p></p><p></p><p><b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX </b>is at least better than <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</b>. It has more of a story than "new villain appears, heroes defeat new villain", and thus rises above the laziest possible level of plotting. It also has the decency to ignore basically everything that happened in the previous OVA, which has the advantage that the romantic developments between our protagonist Lamune and Princess Milk have been forgotten and we don't have to endure another ninety minutes of them angry-flirting with each other. Not that the alternative, whereby Lamune and his pun-loving pal Da Cider's sole motivation is to cheat on their respective girlfriends with a pair of random women, is better in any meaningful sense, but it does have the advantage that this time everyone's bickering for a vaguely sensible reason.</p><p>Oh, but we're already deep into the realms of faint praise! Well, faint praise is all that <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX </b>is going to earn itself, I'm afraid, but I was genuinely glad that the plot was up to something, even when that something didn't work in much of a meaningful fashion. The alluring ladies that Lamune and Da Cider have their sights set on are named Gold Mountain and Silver Mountain, because why wouldn't they be, and they're obviously up to no good, though not so obviously that the show doesn't hang onto that revelation as a half-hearted third act twist. And because that setup wouldn't fill a single episode, let alone three, we also get some business involving a <b>Wacky Races</b>-off with some other prospective suitors, Milk and her sisters chasing their deceitful beaus disguised as Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts - well, Sacred Scouts if you believe the lawyer-proofed subtitles - and a bit of time jumping through past episodes that would probably have meant more if I'd seen the TV series, though it's not as if the writers do much with the concept besides raising questions about the ready availability of time-travel-inducing rocks that they haven't the faintest interest in addressing.</p><p>What they <i>are </i>interested in is providing a brief and bouncy slice of silly, slightly lecherous fun, and with a bar set that low, it's almost impressive that <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX </b>can't flop over it a little higher. The character designs don't help - Ramune and Da Cider, in particular, seem to look markedly worse than they did a mere two years ago - but the animation quality is the main culprit. Mostly it's just doing the show no favours, but there are points where its cheapness and lack of ambition cause actual damage; once you notice that almost every shot with Gold Mountain and Silver Mountain is actually just one lot of character animation mirrored, it's annoyingly hard to ignore, and the last episode spends so long set against a featureless, abstract void that I forgot where the climatic battle was meant to be happening.</p><p>Nevertheless, there are laughs to be had, and since that's the bare minimum we can ask of what's primarily concerned with being funny, <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX </b>manages to hobble its way past the finish line. Then again, it's hard to say if anyone else would laugh at those gags, the more so since they're never developed beyond the point of being gags: the <i>Sailor Moon</i> stuff always made me chuckle, but objectively it's just there, without ever, say, delving into the differences between the <i>NG Knight Lamune & 40 </i>and <i>Sailor Moon</i> franchises for comedic effect - the exception being serpentine mascot character Heavy Meta-Ko's impersonation of feline mascot character Luna, because a snake dressed up as a cat is inarguably hilarious. If you agree, you might find some enjoyment here, and it should at any rate provide a bit of fun for fans of the series, which is further than I'd have gone for <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</b>.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388700/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi04dLPKjNn2vKhcXRIgnlMWQEtZLupbuyqf_n8nH8xOLSOxpDHqak-a3ykpUtKXqEnPKNv2s0LnjoKvMrtdKmuAqQG4Lod9V2TRxnTFcbVIUpli1eH5ayyLsLgWpQbaBk2kuCqhzHLnAPGV-DFiMQ_uJCSY9M1BTKPwCGQcQGh8CWKWu2yIltZV46AA/s1130/All%20Purpose%20Cultural%20Cat-Girl%20Nuku%20Nuku%20DASH!.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi04dLPKjNn2vKhcXRIgnlMWQEtZLupbuyqf_n8nH8xOLSOxpDHqak-a3ykpUtKXqEnPKNv2s0LnjoKvMrtdKmuAqQG4Lod9V2TRxnTFcbVIUpli1eH5ayyLsLgWpQbaBk2kuCqhzHLnAPGV-DFiMQ_uJCSY9M1BTKPwCGQcQGh8CWKWu2yIltZV46AA/s320/All%20Purpose%20Cultural%20Cat-Girl%20Nuku%20Nuku%20DASH!.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388700/" target="_blank">All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH!</a>, 1998, dir: Yoshitaka Fujimoto<p></p><p>It's honestly kind of impressive how badly the makers of <b>All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH! </b>screw up what you'd think would be a largely unscrewupable premise. The original <b>Nuku Nuku </b>OVA isn't any kind of classic, but it's fun, likeable, and fairly ingenious, while having the decency not to lean too heavily on its central concept-stroke-gag, that our heroine is an android with the brain of a cat. The TV series that would follow five years later and air a few months before <b>DASH! </b>doesn't get things quite so right, if only because it sands off a lot of the sharper edges, but it's a pleasant enough diversion, and if nothing else it feels as though everyone understood what an audience might want to get out of a show about an all-purpose cultural cat girl.</p><p><b>DASH!</b>, which is strictly speaking some sort of alternate-universe retelling, since there's no way to square its particulars with either of the previous iterations, has its own ideas about what the property ought to be, and every last one of them is terrible. I assume it began somewhere around, "But what if we made it darker and edgier," as so many entertainment industry meetings did in the late nineties, and went from there, digging ever deeper holes for the show to stumble into. What if Ryunosuke Natsume, previously the pre-teen son of Nuku Nuku's inventor Kyusaku Natsume, was aged up to the point where there could be some sort of love interest between him and Nuku Nuku? And what if Nuku Nuku herself was, like, really hot, in the very specific sense of that phrase meaning "has whopping breasts"? And what if, when she wasn't jiggling about doing superhero antics, she was quiet and subservient and mostly devoid of personality, acting as an unpaid maid for the Natsume family? And, oh, yeah, what if the whole thing with Ryunosuke's parents being divorced went out the window, but mum Akiko still worked for the evil Mishima corporation, though no longer as their CEO, and what if that was no longer any source of contention and indeed was accepted by basically everyone, even though Mishima were still the villains of the piece?</p><p>If the downgrading of Akiko Natsume is the most galling change from the OVA, what with Akiko being the best thing about it, the changes to Ryunosuke are the most annoying. That's because this new version of Ryunosuke is utterly dreadful, from his screamingly late-nineties design to, well, his entire personality. In a win for realism and nothing else, Ryunosuke reacts to the arrival of an attractive girl in his household more or less exactly as you'd expect a teenage boy to, lusting after her, getting increasingly jealous and possessive on the basis of a relationship that exists almost entirely in his own head, and failing to pay any actual attention to Nuku Nuku as a person to such an extent that he never for a moment suspects that she might, in fact, be both a robot and a cat or that she's the same person who keeps saving him from various Mishima-related shenanigans, only minus the wraparound sunglasses and spray-on leotard.</p><p>That broken core relationship is what pushes <b>DASH! </b>towards unwatchability, but it's not as though any of the stuff around it is picking up the slack. Kyusaku is as irrelevant to this telling as Akiko is declawed, the humour is largely absent and almost never funny, and the plot that we get in its place is generic sci-fi junk of the sort that didn't feel altogether fresh when <b>Bubblegum Crisis</b> did it so much better a decade earlier. And it probably won't surprise anyone at this point that the music is unmemorable, the designs are ugly, and the animation is barely functional and only gets that far by reusing every drop of footage it can get away with. I try to always find at least one positive, so I ought to mention that the manner in which everyone simply accepts how Mishima use the city as their personal weapons testing ground is kind of amusing, but that's how far I'm having to reach to find anything nice to say about a title that had the answers handed to it on a plate and chose instead to scribble rude pictures all over the test sheet.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>Whew, not much of an argument for buying vintage anime blu-rays, huh? Except that three out of the four releases here come packaged with other, better titles (I'm assuming in the case of <b>VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fire</b>, but surely something on there must be some good) and both <b>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 </b>and the <b>All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku </b>collection remain well worth your time, even if not for these particular entries. And the one thing that gets a disk all to itself was pretty great, so I guess the survival of physical media is justified after all. Phew!</p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-20791891952006218102023-09-30T21:06:00.002+01:002023-09-30T21:08:26.091+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 130<p><b>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor</b>! It's a classic and much-loved nineties anime show, and up until now it hasn't seen any real mention on this blog because I don't cover TV shows, except for the one or two times when I have because I got confused or someone asked me nicely. At any rate, that's not an excuse for not getting to the subsequent OVA series, and if I have one at all, it's that its reputation isn't especially great and the box set has been sitting unattended on my shelf for rather a long time. But what kind of review series would <i>Drowning in Nineties Anime </i>be if we cared about reputations? So it's finally time to work through the four volumes of the DVD release, those being <b>An Exceptional Episode</b>, <b>The Rules of Being 16 / The Samurai's Narrow Escape / The High-Tech Opposition / White Christmas</b>, <b>If Only The Skies Would Clear</b>, and <b>From Here to Eternity</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwhuMi6pxzyyFeuwZT630Rc5ggjxeA2T8quNzOGARs6KUyfkFbpGvTZ_9Ha_tE9AbV6PO93gGRpGIERUqHbp8cNXhq9mrGQ7Ag_juYHc0GqrGfmpeBNNv-d9huiz6dBxx_0GEsrd71CMe4cFYaWNd1uJIi92bngErLqrJJZ6WH668eYXa2Vy4i-KU/s1130/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwhuMi6pxzyyFeuwZT630Rc5ggjxeA2T8quNzOGARs6KUyfkFbpGvTZ_9Ha_tE9AbV6PO93gGRpGIERUqHbp8cNXhq9mrGQ7Ag_juYHc0GqrGfmpeBNNv-d9huiz6dBxx_0GEsrd71CMe4cFYaWNd1uJIi92bngErLqrJJZ6WH668eYXa2Vy4i-KU/s320/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1330612/" target="_blank">The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: An Exceptional Episode</a>, 1994, dir: Kōichi Mashimo<div><br /></div><div>It wasn't my original plan to review the ten OVA episodes of <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor</i> in chunks, but having watched the first two, it's already obvious that treating them as a single entity would be a useless exercise. For those first two episodes, jointly known as either <b>An Exceptional Episode </b>(which is what we're going with) or <b>Tylor's War </b>are, to all intents and purposes - and especially when presented the way <i>Nozomi </i>did on the release I have, with the intermediate credits snipped out - a follow-up movie to the <i>Irresponsible Captain Tylor </i>TV series, and I'd be very surprised if the remaining eight continue on from it in any direct way.</div><div><p>Now, this is as good a place as any to admit that I've never been the world's biggest <i>Irresponsible Captain Tylor </i>fan. It's one of those shows that I have a ton of respect for, that I'd unhesitatingly recommend, but that I never quite clicked with. So it was quite the shock to settle down with <b>An Exceptional Episode </b>and almost immediately be hit by a flood of nostalgia and warm affection for its sizeable cast. That cast was always the heart of the show, of course, but in retrospect I wonder if part of my issue was that having so many people to keep track of and care about left it feeling a touch unfocused, just as the likeable hanging out that was its baseline made the shifts into actual drama sometimes seem more annoying than rewarding.</p><p>So it's to <b>An Exceptional Episode</b>'s credit that it sidesteps both those failings, setting up a crisis that's suitably major but broad enough in its particulars that we can still spend most of the running time watching the cast bounce off each other, which is all the more fun here since characters who never got to interact before are thrust together in new and interesting combinations. The film - and I know it's not <i>quite </i>that, but it seems dumb to consider it anything else - also pulls off the neat trick of both capitalising on the growth that occurred over the course of the show and sneakily resetting crucial aspects, since we can hardly have ninety minutes of story about an irresponsible captain who doesn't behave irresponsibly and is unreservedly trusted by his crew of loveable eccentrics. Really, the heart of the tale is a mystery, one kept both from us and the cast and focused on why Tylor is back to being a shady goofball who seemingly puts everyone's lives in danger, and though the outlines are obvious from early on, the details are intriguing and significant enough to provide a solid narrative spine.</p><p>What's not on offer is much in the way of action, which is fine because that's hardly <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor</i>'s forte, but it does mean the animation never really gets to impress. If there was extra money here, as you'd expect from an OVA from 1994, it seems mostly have gone into making the character animation sing, which is arguably just as it should be. But the caveat is that there's nothing to distract the viewer who wasn't coming directly from the show, not when so little effort is made to reintroduce the cast and setting or to recap recent events, which from the perspective of someone who tends to blunder into OVAs without the requisite foreknowledge would normally be a turn-off. However, since I did the groundwork for once, I can confidently say that if you <i>are </i>familiar with the show, this is up there with the very best episodes, and perhaps even a touch better than any of them.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tjeS2_YJ7u-St_H8oSg13Zu6RXFt008JP_3rpyX485W4YllF5HGX4LJZtRDdCrCMKi9GKGMdDxR_PoOsZQ9XbFH5CxWke6zBXkQrP2N0XIOworC2_eKxG-gBhHaHbOwi4PC5NUSskMelrlBB7pEVQDn3ZmyydillKMgQ_yg7h-3lATUIVsnjhEkc2A/s1130/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tjeS2_YJ7u-St_H8oSg13Zu6RXFt008JP_3rpyX485W4YllF5HGX4LJZtRDdCrCMKi9GKGMdDxR_PoOsZQ9XbFH5CxWke6zBXkQrP2N0XIOworC2_eKxG-gBhHaHbOwi4PC5NUSskMelrlBB7pEVQDn3ZmyydillKMgQ_yg7h-3lATUIVsnjhEkc2A/s320/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1330612/" target="_blank">The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: The Rules of Being 16 / The Samurai's Narrow Escape<b> / </b>The High-Tech Opposition / White Christmas</a>, 1995, dir: Naoyuki Yoshinaga<p></p><p>I said in regards to the last episodes that they were a pleasant reminder of how enjoyable the group dynamics in <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor </i>could be. The four standalone episodes that followed, produced by a different studio and a different creative team, were a reminder of the curious flipside of that, which is that I don't have much time for most of the characters when they're on their own. The thing is, and bear with me as I try and expand upon a really obvious point, but the core of the show is Justy Tylor, the man whose irresponsible attitude to nearly everything throws the overwise standard sci-fi milieu he resides in into chaos. So it follows that the purpose of everyone around him, to a greater or lesser extent, is either to react to Tylor or to create situations for him to resolve in his inimical fashion. That's truer of some of them than others, for sure, and the series got some good mileage from digging below the surfaces of its cast, but still, is separating them off for solo adventures really the way to go? I'd argue not, and lo and behold, director Yoshinaga and the team at <i>Studio Deen</i> gave me ample evidence.</p><p><b>The Rules of Being 16</b> is the most substantial of these four episodes, with a bit of dramatic weight to it and a bearing on the wider <i>Tylor </i>narrative. But for all that, the story of how teenaged emperor Azalyn finds herself meeting up with an old friend who's been left traumatised by events that her father and the Raalgon empire in general were directly responsible for strays a bit too close to rehashing ideas and incidents we've already seen quite often by this point, and as recently as the previous OVA episodes. I can't imagine the viewer who, having got this far, won't be able to predict exactly how Azalyn behaves - like a sixteen-year-old girl who couldn't really care less about emperoring, basically - and the true mystery is how she keeps pulling this stuff and not getting violently deposed.</p><p>On the plus side, it's the second-nicest-looking of the four, with some detailed, sensitive character animation across gorgeous backgrounds, both of which take something of a dip as we move into <b>The Samurai's Narrow Escape</b> and <b>The High-Tech Opposition</b>, which get up to more ambitious stuff and so end up showing the cracks in the budget more. It seems reasonable to treat these two as a pair because they both do exactly the same thing: take minor characters that have had minimal development until now and chuck them into a thirty minute action movie. The first focuses on fighter pilot Kojiro, and tries to cook up a <b>Top Gun</b>-style conflict which doesn't succeed since Kojiro's only remotely interesting trait, his phobic aversion to women, is wholly absent, and without that he's just your stereotypical hot-headed pilot type. Whereas <b>The High-Tech Opposition</b> has even thinner characters, in the shape of the Soyokaze's marines, but gets to have more fun with them, humour being something that's been extremely lacking up until this point. It also has a stronger concept - albeit one <i>Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex</i> would go on to do vastly better - and better action, and generally feels more in tune with what makes <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor </i>tick.</p><p>But ultimately, what made <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor </i>tick was the irresponsible Captain Tylor, and it's no surprise that his return makes for the best episode. <b>White Christmas</b> feels like the sort of thing the TV show did on a regular basis, with Tylor being thrust into a situation and making everything much weirder by responding in ways no-one would expect: in this case, it's an attempted Christmas Eve date with Yuriko, which has the added benefit that we get some nice development for her and the long-suffering Yamamoto. Essentially, though, it's our titular protagonist who's the star, and in a low-key, uneventful fashion that's perhaps a better fit for the character than the more extreme scenarios the TV series tended to traffic in. It also helps that <b>White Christmas </b>is a pleasure to look at, with some terrific backgrounds conjuring up a night-time city that's at once tangible and dreamy, familiar and alien, and a perfect setting for the woozy, bittersweet tale being spun.</p><p>One genuinely satisfying episode out of four isn't much of a success rate, especially when that one isn't up to anything especially fresh, and all in all this feels like a distinct step back from the superb start that was <b>An Exceptional Episode</b>. I respect the intent of splitting up the cast and then using them to glimpse at what the strained peace between humanity and the Raalgon Empire looks like from a variety of angles much more than I enjoyed the actual results, in part because none of these four stories are very illuminating on that front and three of them aren't that strong on their own merits. It's a decent idea not delivered as well as it might have been, and yet the results are perfectly fine and end on their strongest notes, so this middle stretch is at least worth sticking with, and I'm curious to see whether all its setting up pays off as we hit the final stretch.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd9D1baCxOPxADSxQ4hlJ_1xOjTOh1Tur_AAlYkw4-3DhzUNvq5VOkCPusAopSLNxjsn7Nx5cDmiLxvuUwPTKvW2vUWG5TPpSoeVmBmGOL2tonrmDbdhGLsEbgPI4fa2A9U1V2rFgeOOp8MnFF5aA2FR7g02R5236QZtciuiEx68WGkIO7Em8bKYcFAQ/s1130/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd9D1baCxOPxADSxQ4hlJ_1xOjTOh1Tur_AAlYkw4-3DhzUNvq5VOkCPusAopSLNxjsn7Nx5cDmiLxvuUwPTKvW2vUWG5TPpSoeVmBmGOL2tonrmDbdhGLsEbgPI4fa2A9U1V2rFgeOOp8MnFF5aA2FR7g02R5236QZtciuiEx68WGkIO7Em8bKYcFAQ/s320/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1330612/" target="_blank">The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: If Only The Skies Would Clear</a>, 1996, dir: Naoyuki Yoshinaga <p></p><p>I'd got my hopes up for another two-parter, given how excellent the last one we had was - and also how much the one-and-done episodes weren't working for me - and so it was quite the disappointment to discover that the two episodes of <b>If Only The Skies Would Clear </b>are practically as standalone as the preceding four had been. By this point, in fairness, there's finally a proper shape starting to form that implies all of these apparently separate incidents are building towards something, and this time around there are some definite links and continuity, and yet we're still essentially looking at two more independent tales, each with a different focus, and if the wider narrative's gaining momentum, that's not to say it's doing so with any haste.</p><p>All of this is truest of part one, which focuses on Yuriko, who finds herself the target of enemy agents whose motives are kept purposefully unclear - though given that the introductory text has been hinting heavy-handedly that there are factions on both sides eager to restart the war and they basically admit that's what they're up to, perhaps the intrigue isn't so intriguing as all that. Nevertheless, it's a better-than-average episode and another visual winner: someone on the animation team evidently knew a thing or two about drawing gorgeous cityscapes! And it's another step forward in developing Yamamoto as more than comic relief, which is handy for the even stronger second part, which sees him gaining and losing his first command in rapid succession. Logically, I'm not convinced it holds together - even in a world as unreasonable as <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor</i>'s, what happens is transparently not his fault - but it still packs an emotional punch on behalf of poor Yamamoto and conjures some modest thrills, and in general the character work finally pays off on some of what the preceding episodes have been striving to set up.</p><p>So arguably <b>If Only The Skies Would Clear </b>is more of the same of what these OVAs have been delivering post <b>An Exceptional Episode</b>, except more effective, in part since the emphasis on character over action or comedy is coming to seem more natural and in part because, if the wider plot direction is still nebulous, at least it feels as though there <i>is </i>a direction. Problems remain though, and it was with these two episodes that I realised what had been bothering me on the animation front, which I've felt I was reacting harshly to given that in many ways they look more than respectable. The issue, though, is the low frame rate, and specifically its combination with designs that lean so heavily into realism. It's not that the slightly jerky animation is egregious by the standards of mid-90s anime, and with less detailed designs it would pass mostly unnoticed; but these latter episodes are trying to look classy, as befits the more serious and grown-up storytelling, and it's hard to do that when your characters are jolting awkwardly around the screen.</p><p>As we get near the end, I continue to find that I like what these Yoshinaga-directed OVAs are gunning for in theory more than I'm enjoying the execution, though the gap has definitely narrowed with this so-called two-parter. And arguably the bits that do work prove that we only need a little of Tylor for that to be enough; we're three for three now on episodes where he's appeared without being the main focus and all have worked better than the preceding three that sidelined him altogether. If the goal was to prove that <i>The Irresponsible Captain Tylor </i>can function without its irresponsible captain, I'm afraid that didn't succeed at all, but at this point I'm ready to accept that the supporting cast and wider universe have enough depth to carry some solid storytelling.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1330612/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjg6Pm2MKoKBE-jrPfIJHQvE2uAWEb1oZ3bI-53x40bxTsrJa7REWlCT3mdrVgrCqYZRGii615K0XpyNGFVgqy_-EepvKuGuKGSpf4YkuksrW9ly84nX3YTcdRxkW2iqK6-4bQjm5GYUULiW9hLPOuGh3Lcjv4DpNqbfWSIP5TWWb1SXfjZol2VFMLJQ/s1130/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjg6Pm2MKoKBE-jrPfIJHQvE2uAWEb1oZ3bI-53x40bxTsrJa7REWlCT3mdrVgrCqYZRGii615K0XpyNGFVgqy_-EepvKuGuKGSpf4YkuksrW9ly84nX3YTcdRxkW2iqK6-4bQjm5GYUULiW9hLPOuGh3Lcjv4DpNqbfWSIP5TWWb1SXfjZol2VFMLJQ/s320/Irresponsible%20Captain%20Tylor%20OVA.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1330612/" target="_blank">The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: From Here to Eternity</a>, 1996, dir: Naoyuki Yoshinaga<p></p><p>If you're going to spend six episodes sloooowly building up to your epic conclusion, you'd better make damn certain that your epic conclusion is actually epic, and not, say, tedious, repetitive, and inconclusive. I've certainly had my issues with the preceding parts of Naoyuki Yoshinaga's set of OVAs, but I was willing to forgive all if that setting up had paid off, even as I'd come to suspect it probably wouldn't. There's no satisfaction in being right on that front: <b>From Here to Eternity </b>is a truly dispiriting affair, acting as though things we've already figured out for ourselves are fascinating and mysterious, laboriously retreading ground to make sure we get how the preceding parts fit together, and substituting scenes of people talking at each other for practically everything that's fun and appealing about the <i>Irresponsible Captain Tylor</i> franchise.</p><p>The reason for all this, so far as I can tell, is that there was content to be bridged in the novel series and somebody somewhere was both determined that it must be bridged and, presumably, convinced this would all pay off in more <i>Irresponsible Captain Tylor</i> stuff down the line, which is why we have eight - eight! - episodes establishing a new threat we learn barely anything about. That's the really disastrous part, and there really is no getting around it, the more so since it's basically all that was going on in the previous two episodes, which worked in large part because they felt as though they were raising questions that were about to be paid off. And the rest, which is the reignition of the conflict between the United Planets Space Force and the Raalgon Empire, is better more or less by default, but that's not to say it's much good. We've been told at length said conflict was inevitable, then spent far too long watching pieces being nudged into place and conspirators conspiring and everyone wearily acknowledging that there was never much future in this peace business, and by this point it feels more like characters being pushed into doing what they have to for the plot to advance.</p><p>I won't say that this material couldn't have worked, though I will say that it couldn't possibly have sustained this sort of running time - trim the lot down to a couple of hours and you'd immediately solve half its problems - but at any rate, Yoshinaga wasn't the right director to do it justice. It takes a special talent to make scenes of people plotting, or talking about other people plotting, or just plain old expositioning, interesting, and Yoshinaga hasn't the knack at all. I found myself thinking often about Mamoru Oshii, a director who followed up a lively, comedic, action-packed show with a slow-burn political drama that ditched most of what seemed essential about the franchise in question (that would be <i>Patlabor</i>) and ended up with a stone-cold masterpiece. Yoshinaga isn't Oshii, or anywhere close, and he frequently has no idea how to keep talky scenes visually interesting or to differentiate them from each other, so that large stretches of <b>From Here to Eternity </b>become a sludge of indistinguishable material delivered in indistinguishable fashion.</p><p>At least the animation and designs remain pretty nice, even if you could count the scenes in which they're used to their best advantage on two hands. There are moments when <b>From Here to Eternity </b>jolts into life, and they're a pretty clear indication of one of the things that went most wrong here, in that whenever Tylor and crew are the focus, these episodes improve considerably and even nudge up against being pretty good. Strip out everything else and you'd have maybe ten minutes of footage - it's truly astonishing how little this second set of OVAs care about Tylor and often seem actively embarrassed to have him around - but you'd have a decent little mini-movie that pays off on some of what the TV series left hanging. Ultimately, though, it seems that the goal here was to set up a bright future for the <i>Tylor </i>franchise regardless of whether that meant sacrificing much of what had drawn viewers in the first place, and while I respect the willingness to take risks on something different, I dearly wish someone had figured out how to make the alternative interesting or satisfying.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>So it turns out the reputation was deserved, or even a little overgenerous, since while I'd heard that these OVAs were too serious and plot-heavy, nobody bothered to mention that they squander any good will they might have otherwise accumulated on a non-ending that makes all the build-up seem downright absurd. Ah well, at least <b>An Exceptional Episode</b> lived up to its title, though that does mean that I have to recommend the set as a whole despite not having much good to say about quite a lot of it. </p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-67782388630568554822023-08-22T18:47:00.002+01:002023-08-22T18:47:36.399+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 129<p>It's been a while since we looked at a stone-cold classic around these parts, but with the last of the rebuild films, <b>Evangelion: 3.0+1.0</b>,<b> </b>finally about to get a UK release and so bring the whole saga to its long-delayed conclusion for those of us on this benighted isle - well, until Anno decides to start over again, anyway! - it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at the last film that promised to wrap up <i>Evangelion</i>, a mere two and a half decades ago.</p><p>And now that I think, that's not even the only exciting ending to a classic series that would go on to be heavily rebooted we have this time around, and there was probably a great themed post to be had here, but the other two titles have completely blown it, so I guess we're stuck with the hotchpotch that is <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion</b>, <b>Hermes: Winds of Love</b>, <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</b>, and <b>Birdy the Mighty: Final Force</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169858/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAVan4L0auunkoGy1DlscKaP9tgUWxVo3t6FbCSoNNU1ah4Cx88I6wXmEbf0UqY_Zibh2EvTlQEftzaRismMfiYvNrKPk3O9cPwRpi1q1uTzk5LQJ-_7g4SuaHMwL8B8VJ4NeYmMJBKEirJwjKbenhyeQN0BW0hsawfIJyGoQXDJJ5NdQZdJl7edLOOg/s1130/Neon%20Genesis%20Evangelion%20The%20End%20of%20Evangelion.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAVan4L0auunkoGy1DlscKaP9tgUWxVo3t6FbCSoNNU1ah4Cx88I6wXmEbf0UqY_Zibh2EvTlQEftzaRismMfiYvNrKPk3O9cPwRpi1q1uTzk5LQJ-_7g4SuaHMwL8B8VJ4NeYmMJBKEirJwjKbenhyeQN0BW0hsawfIJyGoQXDJJ5NdQZdJl7edLOOg/s320/Neon%20Genesis%20Evangelion%20The%20End%20of%20Evangelion.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169858/" target="_blank">Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion</a>, 1997, dir's: Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki<p></p><p>It's hard to think of anything more pointless to review that <b>The End of Evangelion</b>. Not only are there the usual caveats that come with a film adapting a hugely popular series - if you like the show you'll probably like the movie, if you haven't seen it you'll have no idea what's going on, and all that - but <b>End of Evangelion </b>goes a step further, in that, true to its title, this is literally the culmination of 26 episodes of television. Or rather, of 24, for, as we discussed back when we looked at <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2023/03/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-124.html" target="_blank">Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)²</a>, there were those who objected to the original ending so vociferously that Hideaki Anno would eventually opt for a do-over that effectively supplants what came before. Except, this time around, there'd be no question of muddling through with a limited budget: this would be a true cinematic release, and just in case anyone doubted it, studio <i>Gainax </i>consolidated their own considerable expertise with support from the mighty<i> Production I.G</i>.</p><p>As is well known, <b>The End of Evangelion </b>would not turn out to be the fix that many of the fanbase were craving, and really, what would that even have meant? In all its incarnations, <i>Evangelion </i>is a work born of many, varied, and fundamentally contradictory influences. Probably what audiences of the time essentially wanted was an ending that would do justice to the giant robot show they'd had every reason to believe they were watching for at least the first half of the show, and though it was abundantly apparent by 1997 that Anno had been more interested in interrogating and deconstructing the genre, that remains the sort of project that could be brought to some sort of coherent ending. Indeed, there's quite a large chunk of running time where it looks as though this is precisely what <b>The End of Evangelion </b>is offering, and there are good reasons that its climatic action sequence is legendary both for its thrillingly visceral action and its exemplary animation.</p><p>Only, that action climax comes not even halfway through the film, and once it's done, so are any pretensions of being a story about giant robots, deconstructionist or otherwise. Well, OK, that was probably too much to ask for, but at least we might get some explanation of the series' vast and bewildering cosmology, right? And sure, that's another thing <b>The End of Evangelion </b>does, sometimes with startling bluntness, as though Anno was a little annoyed with fans for having failed to follow along, or perhaps for having failed to realise that the precise details were never terribly important. At any rate, there are answers to be found, but they're not of the satisfying kind, and again, how could they be?</p><p>But you know what stood absolutely no hope of wrapping up in a satisfying manner? That would be Anno's study of mental illness, and specifically of depression, and more specifically of that particular brand of depression so crushing and numbing that it makes you want to erase yourself from existence just so you don't have to endure another moment. This is where we meet young Shinji Ikari, and this is where he spends pretty much the whole of the film, so terrified of being hurt or of hurting others that he's almost entirely immobilised. And any illusions that Anno was somehow trying to make amends with the fanbase evaporate entirely in the final third, which is very much the last episode of the TV show, a deep dive into Shinji's fractured mind and tormented heart, but more so and pushed to the limits of what late nineties anime was capable of being. Which brings us, I think, to why it's inconceivable that a version of <b>The End of Evangelion </b>should wrap up neatly: how do you tie a bow on soul-killing depression? Yet it's here, paradoxically, that Anno comes closest to being candid with us the viewer, and here that there are answers to be found, however rough, painful, and ultimately inconclusive.</p><p>There are, I'm sure, many who'd consider <b>The End of Evangelion</b>'s contradictory aims and arguable inability to offer a satisfying take on any of them as a fault and even a fundamental failing. I'm not one of those people. I find its wild swinging for the fences, its inscrutability, its seeming hostility towards the audience and itself, its mix of the grand and the grubby, the sublime and the pathetic, to be utterly hypnotic. As I said when we covered <b>Death (True)²</b>, I can't pretend to be at all objective about <i>Neon Genesis Evangelion</i>, a work that affected me profoundly and that I love more or less unconditionally, despite fully recognising its flaws, and so there was never any likelihood of my not loving <b>The End of Evangelion</b>. Yet, with all that bias acknowledged, I'd still argue, as impartially I can, that it's a masterpiece anyone with the faintest interest in anime owes it to themselves to experience.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1538294/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_1e2hRkcntWVaHWOb4VksIqZAfyPR_c9xSSgLYr5qaOTUJSDX2jmkGs81paSVZTYpOSG2HIUSMUmGK4BL4IgD0-RNKDCyJc1O90Wd701P81InBL4wln0MZMG-M4Vlx4sxgkOTvGrsjDWxGoo2yGPXywxJlQ_UCROe_aURGCJda7vcC64pjaaAvRA/s1130/Hermes%20Winds%20of%20Love.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_1e2hRkcntWVaHWOb4VksIqZAfyPR_c9xSSgLYr5qaOTUJSDX2jmkGs81paSVZTYpOSG2HIUSMUmGK4BL4IgD0-RNKDCyJc1O90Wd701P81InBL4wln0MZMG-M4Vlx4sxgkOTvGrsjDWxGoo2yGPXywxJlQ_UCROe_aURGCJda7vcC64pjaaAvRA/s320/Hermes%20Winds%20of%20Love.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1538294/" target="_blank">Hermes: Winds of Love</a>, 1997, dir: Tetsuo Imazawa<div><br /></div><div>Generally, I find that anything that's described as "So bad it's good" is just plain old bad, and yet every so often you hear about something that, at the very least, sounds as though it might be bad in such thoroughly weird and unlikely ways that it's hard to look away from. And it was with that in mind that I got a bit disproportionately excited when I discovered the existence of <b>Hermes: Winds of Love</b>. I mean, it's rare enough at this stage that I stumble upon a vintage anime title that I've never so much as heard of, but one that was made by an honest-to-goodness cult to promote their religion by inserting their deity of choice into a tale of Greek mythology and, presumably, hoping everyone would fail to notice? That's not something you happen upon every day.</div><div><p>Said cult is, according to my half-hearted Wikipedia research, named Happy Science, and has quite the track record of inserting their god into places where he / she / it doesn't belong, so from their point of view, mythical ancient Greece was perhaps as good a fit as any. But for the viewer who has to watch this nonsense? Not so much so. Because, while there was never going to be a great or even an especially good version of <b>Hermes: Winds of Love</b>, it's the necessity to serve as a medium for a set of beliefs that, however much they're explained to us in ponderous detail, don't make a lick of sense, that really shoves it down into the depths of wretchedness. When it's merely called upon to be a somewhat over-earnest tale of Greek heroes contextualised with a surprising amount of realpolitik, it trundles along quite happily, with the odd sequence - as, for example, Theseus's confrontation with the minotaur - rising to the level of genuinely exciting.</p><p>And throughout its first half, this is all <b>Hermes: Winds of Love </b>is up to, with only occasional clues - such as the opening shot of a golden feather composed with shockingly poorly integrated CGI - to hint at what awaits. But here we get to the other enormous problem, which is the animation. Find stills of it and you might imagine that said animation is rather decent and even above par for the time, but you'd be deceived. It's evident there were talented people working here, presumably among the key animators since solitary images often impress, but the inbetweening is dreadful and sometimes barely there and gestures as simple as people waving are routinely mucked up, with anything more complex - horses, say, of which there are a predictably large number - going wildly off the rails.* And even that's not really the heart of the problem; anime, after all, has been finding ways around such issues since it began. No, the problem is that rather than adopt the usual shortcuts where we'll barely notice them, in dialogue, crowd scenes, and the like, the makers throw their limited resources uniformly at everything, meaning that the badness is evenly spread and consistently ruinous.</p><p>The goal, I think, based on the character designs and the historical action adventure / musical format (yes, it's also a musical, and precisely one song is some good) was to ape what Western animation was up to at the time, except with a fraction of the budget, and thus we get a film that manages to be actively painful to watch rather than one that mostly looks okay and shines when it needs to. That gets us back to the core of the thing, which is that it was presumably intended to appeal to as many potential converts as possible, drawing in both Western and Japanese audiences with a tale and approach to animated film-making drawn from the former culture while still being essentially Japanese enough to play in the home market. And you know what? A version of <b>Hermes: Winds of Love </b>that didn't need to be religious propaganda - that didn't stop dead to sermonise dully at us, that didn't devote what feels like roughly three hours to developing its cosmology at precisely the point when it was already running low on steam - might have pulled that off in a modest fashion.** But of course such a version could never have existed, and what we actually got is pretty much rubbish and way less trashy fun than it ought to be.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0476223/?ref_=tt_cl_t_1" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhesOmnjdZEsRY31HvqRvKdC_SpASLmRTjSKuCkIUtjCz0zC3rOnXSVhDY4NpAmepyofhyN-dWWE3ctHDihJwu0sJrbjtrKq1wClCWdvKuSdEY6qNGq2LBp1HcYzHYoXErRHP_Nu4a2ps2QMCDuqn8u3GDFho5z8eQ7og6r3GZl4Xm7CbT1C7wW4I5PvA/s1130/NG%20Knight%20Lamune%20&%2040%20EX.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhesOmnjdZEsRY31HvqRvKdC_SpASLmRTjSKuCkIUtjCz0zC3rOnXSVhDY4NpAmepyofhyN-dWWE3ctHDihJwu0sJrbjtrKq1wClCWdvKuSdEY6qNGq2LBp1HcYzHYoXErRHP_Nu4a2ps2QMCDuqn8u3GDFho5z8eQ7og6r3GZl4Xm7CbT1C7wW4I5PvA/s320/NG%20Knight%20Lamune%20&%2040%20EX.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27587277/" target="_blank">NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</a>, 1991, dir: <span style="white-space: normal;">Koji Masunari</span><p></p><p>It's not for me to tell <i>Discotek </i>their business, but if it was, I might wonder why, having decided to release the TV series <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40</b> and its follow-up <b>VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire</b>, they would make <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 </b>one release and lump its two OVA sequels in with <b>VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire</b>. Then again, I'd probably also want to ask why they'd consider releasing either in the first place, given that, as far as I know, only the OVA to <b>VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire </b>ever saw the light of day in the West, existing as a rather disreputable oddity under the title of <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2017/11/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_17.html" target="_blank">Knights of Ramune</a>.</p><p>The answer to the second question is beyond my guessing, but the answer to the first, I imagine, was that <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 </b>was the much longer show, meaning that bunching all the OVAs in with <b>VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire </b>leaves two releases of identical episode count. Great for lovers of symmetry, not so great for people who were after the entirety of the first show without buying two Blu-ray sets, and mildly annoying for those of us who might want to review <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX </b>with some context and aren't remotely wealthy enough to splash out on both disks. Although, let's be honest, it's not as if I've ever been shy about reviewing OVAs without much knowledge of their accompanying series, and only occasionally has it caused problems, what with nineties anime having a tendency to be pretty formulaic and all that.</p><p>And wouldn't you know it but <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</b> is formulaic as all get-out. Indeed, its main failing as an OVA sequel is a thoroughly familiar one, in that it spends far too long re-establishing a status quo for characters whose arcs have all ended and who, in this case, have no real reason to be interacting with each other. Our hero, Baba Lamune, was whisked off to the magical land of Hara-Hara World to save it from the evil Don Harumage, and presumably he got the job done, since when we eventually join him, after the emergence of a new crisis in Hara-Hara World, he's back to being a normal high-school kid; so normal, in fact, that he's apparently forgotten all about his adventures, much to the chagrin of his former flame Princess Milk.</p><p>The pair's subsequent bickering will go on to take up about ninety percent of <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</b>, or so it felt, but the exact ratio hardly matters given that my tolerance for the whole business had been exhausted by the end of the first scene. It's not as if everything surrounding Lamune and Milk and their I-guess-we-have-to-call-it-a-romance is especially wonderful, but everything else is certainly better: they're the dullest members of the cast, Milk especially since she does effectively nothing, and when her sister Cocoa can build giant monster truck tank things out of scrap and brainwashed antagonist Da Cider has a talking snake living in his shoulder pad, you do have to wonder if the focus is really in the right place. All told, the Lamune and Milk stuff feels a lot like filler in a plot that already consists almost entirely of filler.</p><p>The main compensation for the thin story and the annoying central pairing - not to mention some cheap animation and the odd rather ugly design, especially when it comes to the various robots that occupy a big chunk of the third and final episode - is a measure of goofy charm and a healthy dose of random weirdness, like whatever the heck was going on with that snake. It's not a lot, nor enough to make <b>NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX</b> worth recommending, but it keeps most of the running time on the side of mildly amusing, so that's something.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160979/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs4LjwdRW0e9ugyv33UxloFTLtB2lAmmMicSYZZZmqImu9xJEvn2BDnEj7cmalyvqEWke4C8yPC8FLNCTilhqvYu94G3oJ4ppEZDRzMxcw-o_CK7V42v8wDANvDY0uF0cPVhyScJGjaHhEziAuqyeZmDBbQH6tpFOCANak6X7xr8wF23t-MMcE_hnMqg/s1130/Birdy%20the%20Mighty_Final%20Force.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs4LjwdRW0e9ugyv33UxloFTLtB2lAmmMicSYZZZmqImu9xJEvn2BDnEj7cmalyvqEWke4C8yPC8FLNCTilhqvYu94G3oJ4ppEZDRzMxcw-o_CK7V42v8wDANvDY0uF0cPVhyScJGjaHhEziAuqyeZmDBbQH6tpFOCANak6X7xr8wF23t-MMcE_hnMqg/s320/Birdy%20the%20Mighty_Final%20Force.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160979/" target="_blank">Birdy the Mighty: Final Force</a>, 1996 - 1997, dir: Yoshiaki Kawajiri<p></p><p>Back when I covered <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2021/10/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-111.html" target="_blank">the first half</a> of <i>U.S. Manga Corp</i>'s two volume set of the <b>Birdy the Mighty</b> OVA, I proposed that all this second half had to do was stick the landing and maintain the high quality level that had been established. And it does both of those things, so it's probably unfair that it left me feeling a tiny bit dissatisfied. But let's come back to that and focus on the positives, because they're considerable. Everything that worked in volume one, <b>Double Trouble</b>, works equally well here: the animation remains terrific, especially during the imaginative, well-staged action sequences, and the concept - regular human Tsutomu is stuck sharing a body with badass space cop Birdy Cephon Altirra and together they have comic mishaps and try and foil an alien plot - is obviously just as good as it ever was. What dragged down <b>Double Trouble </b>a touch, the annoying end theme and generally lacklustre score, along with some weak comedy that did little but put the brakes on the show's momentum, is no worse here, and in the latter case probably better, since there's less room for distractions as we move into the climax.</p><p>But it's there, insomuch as there's a problem, that the problem lies. <b>Birdy the Mighty</b> sets a lot of plates spinning and by the start of the fourth and final episode, I was already getting concerned that it wasn't going to wrap up even slightly. That turned out not to be the case, thank goodness, and the ending is probably the best compromise that could have been come to under the circumstances, satisfactorily resolving the central crisis and dealing with a major villain while leaving some hefty loose threads flapping as to the who, what, and why of the bigger conspiracy we kept getting glimpses of. What we're given is a self-contained story, it's just that there's no attempt made at hiding that there are plenty more adventures in store for our protagonists.</p><p>Well, there were and there weren't, but as far as nineties anime went, this was all we'd ever get, and it's hellaciously frustrating, even as it's clear things could have been an awful lot worse. But for once the blame doesn't lie with poor sales, creative differences, behind-the-scenes crises, or anything like that, and director Kawajiri and writers Chiaki J. Konaka and Yoshiaki Kawajiri were arguably making the most of the hand they'd been dealt. Because Masami Yuki's manga, upon which the OVA was based, had come to a close nearly a decade earlier, having lasted a mere three years. I don't know how far it got plot-wise, but given that it ran to all of a single volume, I doubt there was much more material to adapt had anyone wanted to. So while you might argue that it wasn't terribly fair to incorporate so much that would lead nowhere, it was at least true to the source.</p><p>But here's the kicker, and what leaves me with distinctly muddled feelings when it comes to <b>Birdy the Mighty</b>: fifteen or so years later, Yuki would decide to take another crack at his irresistible concept, and he got an awful lot further that time, which presumably is why the year that second run concluded saw the release of the series <b>Birdy the Mighty: Decode</b>. And <b>Birdy the Mighty: Decode </b>is not only a fine bit of TV anime in its own right, it would recover much of the ground of the OVA with largely the same cast of characters, meaning that all those outstanding questions do sort of wrap up, just not where they ought to. For while I like <b>Decode </b>plenty, I do slightly prefer Kawajiri's take, which is more fun and upbeat and content to imply a lot of what <b>Decode </b>would expand to slightly unnecessary lengths. And that leaves us with a largely top-tier OVA that ends on a somewhat frustrating note that's almost more unsatisfying for the knowledge that any answers you might want are out there in a great but not quite as great TV series. The obvious answer, of course, is to watch both and appreciate each on its own merits, and yet it sure would have been lovely to have a few more episodes of something this delightful.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>I suspect that most people who read these posts don't even know that I keep scores for the titles I review, since those scores are hidden away on the summary pages, so I may as well point out here that <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion </b>is only the fourth ten out of ten rating I've given in 130 posts and somewhere around 520 reviews. I don't know if that's a controversial conclusion; I guess it will be with quite a few people, given how often I've seen <i>Neon Genesis Evangelion </i>declared to be hugely overrated. But hey, they're wrong, it's a masterpiece if ever there was one, so there!</p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p>* Granted, a little of the blame ought to go to the reliably awful <i>Image Entertainment </i>and a ghastly non-anamorphic print that's so ugly I hardly know how to describe it, though "very green" gets us some of the way there.</p><p>** But probably not, given what a rough ride the superficially similar and infinitely better <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2021/09/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-107.html" target="_blank">Arion</a><b> </b>received.</p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-76056553547177965582023-07-28T21:55:00.001+01:002023-08-21T19:16:29.074+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 128<p>As I've noted before, the flipside of reviewing stuff that's as thoroughly out of print as, say, a title that was only ever released on VHS entire decades ago is that it barely feels immoral to suggest that perhaps hunting down a maybe-not-strictly-legal copy on YouTube would be a bad idea. So it sucks that I've managed to find something that's not even available there and that's it's actually pretty decent. Yup, probably ought to have put some more thought into this whole availability issue before we got quite this far down the rabbit hole! Still, it's much too late now, so why not have a guess at what you'll potentially never be able to watch out of <b>Samurai Spirits 2: Asura Zanmaden</b>, <b>God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen</b>, <b>The Girl From Phantasia</b>, and <b>Akai Hayate</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234650/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMyptL6s_jh7oBW6LeTnsqlhChb0O2rLY-PslDstA5is1imCIvwK2yYCnC_991_qxP-paFa6gFz6tUrUS2KJvjKiE7cu5J7cWa_h54zqCjbMXvtd3XN5TNmncXqYujrn1aqVWsN-CzDPVpnKoT-oNrT8H9Ow-Xizzzrj1wfc3H0XF8nmz0dz-PPCU/s1130/Samurai%20Spirits%20OVA.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMyptL6s_jh7oBW6LeTnsqlhChb0O2rLY-PslDstA5is1imCIvwK2yYCnC_991_qxP-paFa6gFz6tUrUS2KJvjKiE7cu5J7cWa_h54zqCjbMXvtd3XN5TNmncXqYujrn1aqVWsN-CzDPVpnKoT-oNrT8H9Ow-Xizzzrj1wfc3H0XF8nmz0dz-PPCU/s320/Samurai%20Spirits%20OVA.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234650/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Samurai Spirits 2: Asura Zanmaden</a>, 1999, dir: Kazuhiro Sasaki<p></p><p>The OVA <b>Samurai Spirits 2 i</b>s the follow-up to what was unleashed in the US as <b>Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture</b>, one of the most irredeemably awful releases we've covered here, and is thus the second anime adaptation of the beat-em-up video game series known alternately as <b>Samurai Shodown</b> and <b>Samurai Spirits</b>. Unlike the film - or, if we're being more honest than <i>ADV</i> were, the TV special - <b>Samurai Spirits 2 </b>has no pretensions to telling a standalone story, and instead slots in between a couple of the games: Wikipedia suggests that it serves primarily as setup for <b>Samurai Shodown 64: Warriors Rage</b>, which is puzzling given that <b>Samurai Shodown 64 </b>came out a year earlier than the date provided by IMDB for the OVA. Frankly, it's hard to be terribly sure on the details given that this second title was never picked up outside of Japan, and the DVD that did eventually turn up in the US appears to hail from Hong Kong judging by the subtitles' alternately loose and over-literal approach to the English language.</p><p>With all of that, there's no reason to suppose <b>Samurai Spirits 2 </b>would be anything other than dreadful, and it's frankly ridiculous how much that isn't the case. Really, its obligation to both sequelling a story that it feels almost no need to fill us in on and prologueing a second story that, presumably, was regarded as much more important to series continuity than this one should be quite enough to sink it. And yes, <b>Samurai Spirits 2 </b>is confusing in its broader details, but its script - written by who I don't know because there really isn't a lot of information out there about this one - does an admirable job of filling in the necessary broad strokes and giving each of its cast members sufficient introduction that we understand their essential personality, skills, and motivations. And all of this is greatly assisted by designs that immediately fill in most of the remaining gaps: I may never have understood what precisely the main antagonist was up to, for instance, but I was never in any doubt about how evil, dangerous, and yet flat-out cool he was.</p><p>Still, any fighting game should be capable of having instantly readable character designs and building a simple narrative around them: especially by the end of the nineties, that sort of thing was the bread and butter of the genre. That <b>Samurai Spirits 2 </b>has actual themes, though, ones that are emotionally absorbing and resonant, that's a more unlikely bar for it to somehow dive over. Yet as much as it was obvious there was plenty I was missing out on, at its core was a clear and heartfelt fable about one young woman trying to live with kindness in a violent, pitiless world. Nakoruru, the closest we have to a protagonist among a busy cast, finds the former-and-possibly-still villain Shiki and insists on giving her the benefit of the doubt, despite everyone's protestations that death is both the best she deserves and the only way to keep her from further horribleness - and that, really, is our plot for just under an hour.</p><p>Arguably, it's not much, but it's enough, and it's delivered with admirable seriousness and restraint, though not so much so that there isn't space for some surprisingly satisfying moments of light-heartedness along the way. And it's also delivered with some genuinely excellent animation, not exactly lavish but full of the sort of thoughtful details that suggest a team who were fully invested in their work, and set against backgrounds that do a marvellous job of portraying an historical Japan that feels distant and threatening and indefinably other. Even the opening and closing themes are a delight, and I really have no complaints beyond the inscrutable references to series lore, which makes it all the more frustrating that I'm singing the praises of something that's all but unavailable to an English-speaking audience. Uh, sorry, I guess, but the alternative would be to not heap praise on of one of the finest video game adaptations I've encountered, one so good that it barely matters that it's based on a video game at all, and that would be a crying shame.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6943240/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDi9anq4TYGFaaVZmFGOc03iSYELT4dUciLOl-eZcPj4KSBei-nV0aVbsJceZ8x1lRTsZP2gnsEQp8kzpcUF_RnPQVXE2VXXsRwOU_tKcCfH_MbLmwBS1MKr3xah2tyKEO7yazkOQXnUCpVKd1eeBrWK4XjLKp08IzOQ5IqZe19-Xh4jeShWBlkgA/s1130/God%20Mars.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDi9anq4TYGFaaVZmFGOc03iSYELT4dUciLOl-eZcPj4KSBei-nV0aVbsJceZ8x1lRTsZP2gnsEQp8kzpcUF_RnPQVXE2VXXsRwOU_tKcCfH_MbLmwBS1MKr3xah2tyKEO7yazkOQXnUCpVKd1eeBrWK4XjLKp08IzOQ5IqZe19-Xh4jeShWBlkgA/s320/God%20Mars.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6943240/" target="_blank">God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen</a>, 1988, dir: Masakatsu Iijima<p></p><p>My heart sank as I watched <b>God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen</b>, and not because it wasn't good - no, quite the opposite! What got to me was that Masakatsu Iijima was knocking it out of the park through scene after scene, and yet his name didn't ring any bells. Was this yet another anime director who got to prove himself a master of the form precisely once before vanishing into the long grass of TV work or simply disappearing from the industry altogether?</p><p>Yes and no, as it turned out: Iijima did get one other stab at directing a feature-length work, and lo and behold, it was <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: Poltergeist Report</b>, which I also praised for being strikingly well-directed. There, what leaped out at me was Iijima's unusual grasp of using 2D animation to represent three-dimensional spaces, and that's certainly a virtue of <b>Untold Legend of Seventeen</b>, though this time around it was far from being all that impressed me. Indeed, Iijima kept coming up with new ways to do that: here a wildly original way of introducing a giant robot, there a sequence of silhouetted figures against firelight establishing a moment of human connection that we know is about to be violently torn apart, and on and on throughout the just-under-an-hour's running time. Moreover, never does the direction veer into style for style's sake. Rather, it genuinely feels as though Iijima has agonised over every shot, figuring out how best to let the visuals support the story and how to stretch the animation accordingly.</p><p>Without that, I don't know that there'd be half so much here. Certainly, it's easy to imagine a take on this basic content that didn't distinguish itself at all. Released six years on from the TV series, <b>God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen</b> is a curious creature, part reboot, part retelling, and part prologue. Throughout the first half, I assumed it was simply that last, since the focus here is on protagonist Takeru's brother Marg, who was so ill-served by <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2023/06/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-127.html" target="_blank">God Mars: The Movie</a>, and particularly on his life as part of the local resistance that's battling, with obvious futility, against the evil Emperor Zul. Perhaps simply by virtue of being new material, or as new as that old chestnut a resistance drama can be, this first half proves to be <b>Untold Legend </b>at its best, leaving the last twenty minutes with nothing to do besides retell crucial moments we've already seen before.</p><p>Even there, though, Iijima proves triumphant, since his take on what should be overly familiar scenes is so much better than what we've previously had. And while that's partly due to the visuals and partly to the somewhat modernised designs and greatly to do with the grittier, harsher atmosphere, it's the character psychology that benefits most. I'd struggle to explain how that's the case, since all the cast are still essentially cyphers on paper, yet everyone benefits - bar Zul, I guess, since there's less place here for him and his cackling lunacy. But Marg, unsurprisingly, feels a thousand times more fleshed out, Roze gets more of a satisfying arc despite appearing for maybe a total of five minutes and hardly speaking, and Mars / Takeru, with even less screen time, benefits perhaps the most, getting to be believably heroic and confused and grief-stricken in what's little more than a cameo.</p><p>There's simply nothing here that's not an improvement: Reijirō Koroku's lush orchestral score takes on much of the emotional heavy lifting while being gorgeous in its own right, and Keisuke Fujikawa's script is admirably light-handed given the material, rarely spelling out what we can be left to figure out and feel our way into ourselves. The closest I have to a grumble is a strikingly abrupt ending, and even that turns out to be purposeful, as the film briefly, tragically, flicks back to an earlier moment, adding in one last layer of grief and humanity to Marg's short, cruel life. So the only real problem is that to get the most from <b>Untold Legend </b>you'll have to at least watch <b>God Mars: The Movie</b>, and while much inferior, that's still pretty decent, so things could be worse.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107013/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7I5jvpqkDEle8x_9AMMc0PgHRJvCNWpLjxaOQyNeLdiiKviDcQ4APEpdskrpR9m5Uq3A5-HdXzIBaGxLfsTe8kmMlLuL0N4Nm2nfxKoWwJInMn7HjDsqe13pdhbHoevQ2ioE9yGu_mOpl4xyZoLGsBMpHCvrgGiY9uADrwGS_6scYACITKt1OO6M/s1130/The%20Girl%20From%20Phantasia.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7I5jvpqkDEle8x_9AMMc0PgHRJvCNWpLjxaOQyNeLdiiKviDcQ4APEpdskrpR9m5Uq3A5-HdXzIBaGxLfsTe8kmMlLuL0N4Nm2nfxKoWwJInMn7HjDsqe13pdhbHoevQ2ioE9yGu_mOpl4xyZoLGsBMpHCvrgGiY9uADrwGS_6scYACITKt1OO6M/s320/The%20Girl%20From%20Phantasia.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107013/" target="_blank">The Girl From Phantasia</a>, 1993, dir: Jun Kamiya<p></p><p>I'll say this in the favour of <b>The Girl From Phantasia</b>, the ever-inconsistent <i>ADV </i>put in some genuinely impressive efforts. That's most noticeable in the picture quality, which is positively mind-blowing for what was only ever a VHS release - and yeah, I know the image there says DVD, and no, I don't know why, but if you'd sat me in front of this and <i>told</i> me it was a DVD, I wouldn't have questioned you. Then there are the subtitles, which are actually applied with some ingenuity in a fashion I can't say I've come across elsewhere, and while the translation was too loose for my tastes, it was readily apparent that some thought had gone into figuring out how to make jokes work in a different language. Heck, even the box design is quite nice, and that was something <i>ADV</i> got wrong as often as not. And perhaps most astonishingly, there are extras at the end, and they include the entire storyboard, a bonus that must have been practically unique at the time and yet goes oddly unmentioned on the back of the box.</p><p>And if all of this seems like a weird angle to focus on, then it's because I have nothing much to say about <b>The Girl From Phantasia</b> and suspect that no one else would either, because it's all of a standard TV episode in length and as boilerplate as boilerplate can be. If there's one aspect that distinguishes it from a hundred similar titles, it's some nice animation from the company that would go on to become <i>Production IG</i> and not long after this would produce some of the finest work in that field the world has ever seen, and while we're roughly a million miles from that point here, their fingerprints are evident in the unusual care and relative realism that went into the character animation, the standout feature of an OVA that generally looks that bit better than you might expect.</p><p>But a show about a dorky guy whose life is invaded by a cute but annoyingly supernatural girl that's he alternately bickers with and lusts after is, let's face it, something that's going to need rather more than good animation and nice presentation to make it stand out from the crowd, and <b>The Girl From Phantasia </b>has more or less nothing. There are hints of interesting world-building, but inevitably they never get to be more than hints, because how much can you really set out in 25 minutes? And in fairness, Kamiya and his team cram in a fair old bit, enough that there's actually a story here with a beginning, middle, and end, some mildly engaging conflict, a dash of characterisation and even a character arc of sorts, and a brief but action-packed climax: this surely must have been intended as the setup for further adventures, but it's not obnoxiously obvious about the fact. Other than the extreme familiarity, and the brief length - and, care of <i>ADV</i>, an added dash of misogyny that was the main thing that put me off the subtitles - there's nothing here that's actively bad, and while it's happening, it's all quite charming. It's just that there isn't a single reason to seek out <b>The Girl From Phantasia </b>thirty later when there are so many titles that did the same but more so and better.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103637/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBOKFTwcmAzJcwnvhYHl43s-qu1oTx4xyRneROHQXrh-_uMr-yOxUDd1jPUIdL7CnDu6TnOLtHNPF9D8dXQg7eAihcmrGM4s_Vi1NZVUxMpTZ_kC94ImMk830LcU0GTvZUmO1uLbmAp9Kr-qENnpvOfSFA1iFuQm4rITzk2yLKTitMTV_RLwxPXWc/s1130/Akai%20Hayate.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBOKFTwcmAzJcwnvhYHl43s-qu1oTx4xyRneROHQXrh-_uMr-yOxUDd1jPUIdL7CnDu6TnOLtHNPF9D8dXQg7eAihcmrGM4s_Vi1NZVUxMpTZ_kC94ImMk830LcU0GTvZUmO1uLbmAp9Kr-qENnpvOfSFA1iFuQm4rITzk2yLKTitMTV_RLwxPXWc/s320/Akai%20Hayate.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103637/" target="_blank">Akai Hayate</a>, 1992, dir: Osamu Tsuruyama<p></p><p><b>Akai Hayate</b> starts with a pretty neat setup, and I only wish I'd known going in that it would dump that setup after one episode to chase off in other directions for two of its four episodes, because perhaps then I wouldn't have found those two episodes quite so frustrating. Still, for the first thirty minutes, things run smoothly and intriguingly enough, as we're introduced to the titular Hayate and his sister Shiori, who are on the run due to Hayate having just murdered their father for reasons we won't learn until much later. And while patricide is generally frowned on, it's an even bigger deal when you happen to be the scion of Shinogara, a secret organisation of ninjas who've been running Japan from behind the scenes for hundreds of years. As we join Hayate and Shiori, they and the two companions who've decided to go on the lam with them have just been caught up with by those assassins in creepy masks that seem to crop up in most anime that features ninjas, and in the subsequent ruckus, Hayate is mortally injured saving his sister's life. Possibly figuring she owes him one, he decides that the only solution is to use his powers to transfer his soul into her body, so that he can possess her if she's ever in trouble, which inevitably she is before the first episode's done.</p><p>Needless to say, all of this seems like it's going to be important, or heck, even the actual story <b>Akai Hayate </b>intends to tell. It's as jarring as you might expect, then, when the second episode drops Hayate and Shiori more or less entirely, to focus on another of the Shinogara escapees and what we'll soon discover is a much wider conflict for control of the nation, which by episode three will have drawn in yet another secret organisation and moved on to a third protagonist. All the while, Hayate and Shiori drift around, barely in the background, lost amid a too-large cast and a plot that imagines that watching characters we've barely been introduced to, let alone grown attached to, backstab and manipulate each other is somehow intrinsically interesting.</p><p>Perhaps it even might be if you went in expecting that rather than a tale of body-sharing ninja siblings; "secret organisations vie for power in the shadows" is less of a fresh setup, but it's hardly been done to death. But while I suspect a rewatch will be more satisfying, the execution is still lacking, even putting aside how muddled the storytelling frequently gets. Tsuruyama, who has a fascinating CV but apparently no other directorial experience, brings little to the material, with his most distinguishing characteristic being a tendency to overuse close-ups and mid shots, making everything feel cramped, even the frequent action scenes. And even when the action isn't let down by poor choices or the never much more than decent animation, it still has a tendency to devolve into what I've dubbed special move tennis. For reasons that are never explained and probably don't stretch much past "What does our target audience expect to see?", all of the main cast have a super-powered shadow form they can adopt, seemingly whenever they like, and of course those shadow forms come with flashy powers that they can blast at each other and so end fights without any of that messy business of actually fighting. </p><p>In that sense and others, <b>Akai </b><b>Hayate </b>reminded me of another largely forgotten OVA, <b>Hades Project Zeorymer*</b>, in that it feels caught between two stools, on the one hand looking back to a goofier and more carefree era of anime when characters in cool suits or giant robots firing off special moves at each other was enough and on the other pre-empting the relatively greater complexity, the darker tone, and the increasing brutality and cynicism that came to dominate a lot of genre anime throughout the late eighties and nineties. Like <b>Hades Project Zeorymer</b>, it routinely gets the wrong end of both sticks, while working just well enough to feel like an intriguing failure; at any rate, it definitely lands amid that handful of titles whose absence from DVD feels really puzzling, and the parts that succeeded were strong enough that its lack is mildly annoying.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>That one threw up a couple of the nicest surprises I've had here in a while, in that there was basically no reason to be hopeful for either <b>Samurai Spirits 2 </b>or <b>God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen</b>, let alone to imagine they'd be such a pair of mostly-forgotten gems. Whereas <b>The Girl From Phantasia </b>I did have some vague expectations of - I can't remember why! - and falls into that most frustrating category of things that aren't even interestingly bad. And that only leaves <b>Akai </b><b>Hayate</b>, which happens to be the title that doesn't appear to be anywhere on YouTube with English subtitles, and which was certainly novel and decent enough to deserve at least that slender cultural legacy.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p>* Reviewed <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2015/06/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime.html" target="_blank">on this site</a> as Zeoraima, because nobody seems to agree what the thing is called.</p>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-33369951820565177782023-06-08T20:59:00.001+01:002023-07-04T18:35:05.864+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 127<p>We definitely seem to be settling into a pattern here, with one or two somewhat mainstream titles - inevitably care of the good folks at <i>Discotek </i>- accompanied by whatever long-lost oddities I happen to have stumbled upon lately. But this time around, the thing you might have actually heard of is of a particularly interesting nature, since it's at once from a major franchise and being released for the first time in the US. Many eons ago, I noted wistfully that I'd run out of <i>City Hunter</i> to cover unless the day should come when <i>Discotek </i>released the one OVA that for whatever reason never made it across back in the day, and lo and behold, here we are, with <b>City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba - accompanied by Capricorn</b>, <b>Samurai Gold</b>, and <b>God Mars: The Movie</b>...</p><p><b></b></p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211310/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvQTC2I74Z8yfuTHvmvtNxtxa1iaMjvP3C9R2ng4ITXSBRgEb-k3XF1fKd5-FjC5ys-qSrMKwOLKTCxNseVa3fMCqE86GR4vOz367ZZgBZLmfZlZoC0QEpBfx0Yz9IhsWSu2p3b8Mfpx4XWbzMyhzDk7u8dnZrtIl1vJslBk6WqLXPadzeRQN-2r4/s1130/City%20Hunter%20Death%20of%20the%20Vicious%20Criminal%20Ryo%20Saeba.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvQTC2I74Z8yfuTHvmvtNxtxa1iaMjvP3C9R2ng4ITXSBRgEb-k3XF1fKd5-FjC5ys-qSrMKwOLKTCxNseVa3fMCqE86GR4vOz367ZZgBZLmfZlZoC0QEpBfx0Yz9IhsWSu2p3b8Mfpx4XWbzMyhzDk7u8dnZrtIl1vJslBk6WqLXPadzeRQN-2r4/s320/City%20Hunter%20Death%20of%20the%20Vicious%20Criminal%20Ryo%20Saeba.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211310/" target="_blank">City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba</a>, 1999, dir: Masaharu Okuwaki<div><p>It would take a lot for this, the last of the <i>City Hunter</i> movies to be released in the twentieth century, to live up to its marvellous title. And to be clear, it's not the "death" part I'm referring to, which by itself would feel like cheap misdirection given that we know Ryo Saeba is unlikely indeed to be killed off here or anywhere. No, it's "vicious criminal" that makes it sing, since for all his manifest failings as a human being, Ryo isn't that, (though arguably only because the franchise exists in a world where neither sexual harassment nor mass murder are criminal offences,) meaning that right off the bat we have us an enticing mystery hook.</p><p>Here's a pleasant surprise, then: for the first half of its running time, <b>Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba</b> does about justify its flamboyant nomenclature, and in so doing gets awfully near to knocking <b>Goodbye My Sweetheart </b>- aka <b>City Hunter: The Movie</b> - from its well-deserved top spot. Indeed, it arguably has something neither <b>Goodbye My Sweetheart </b>nor either of the other meaningful contenders for the position possesses, in the shape of what's, to the best of my knowledge, an original premise, one that's not <b>Speed </b>but on a train or <b>Die Hard</b> but in a hotel. Moreover, it's a strikingly current-feeling setup that finds Ryo on the run with a news anchor (female and attractive, naturally) who's come to him in a bid to get free of the evil media empire she works for. The point where this all gets rather special and modern is in how said media empire have the ability to modify video footage in real time, meaning that setting Ryo up as a kidnapper rather than a rescuer is as easy as slapping a knife in his hand and a mean expression on his face.</p><p>A fanciful notion for 1999, and kudos to writers Tsukasa Hôjô and Nobuaki Kishima for coming up with it and then milking it in fun and satisfying ways. Though perhaps I oughtn't to be crediting both of them, for <b>Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba </b>is as much a work of two halves as anything I've come across, and those halves are so unequal that I could readily believe they each writer came up with 45 minutes of script without speaking to each other. Somewhere around the midpoint, there's a major twist, and it's a stupid twist that the film never quite recovers from, though it does regain some ground once it's had time to figure out the new direction. Actually, part two might have been a decent enough movie in its own right, for all that its ideas are much less fresh; what it can't get away with is being crudely grafted onto something that's inherently more interesting.</p><p>That's the only really big problem with <b>Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba</b> but not the only problem, and the other one is arguably more annoying, since a <i>City Hunter </i>movie can comfortably stand to have a messy narrative, whereas boring action sequences tend to be more disastrous. They're not here, mainly because the animation is good enough to make even dull action moderately engaging, but it definitely sucks the wind from the film's sails at multiple points when it could dearly do with some excitement to keep us distracted. If only Kazuo Yamazaki had stuck around to provide the odd set-piece on a par with those in <b>Goodbye My Sweetheart</b>: that, I think, would have pushed <b>Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba </b>into the realms of greatness, rather than it being a pretty good <i>City Hunter</i> entry that constantly gets beaten out by its own title.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2302563/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXzXAWix7neEVVK7EyVenbqNHl04J4wmkJCQiXh3wrcDYzPMx2SSm4Q0uPzhSAhUTw6dj2XvBakqyEBSXqcwVgXsRA7ljy7DJIY7A1Ck98xKYoPfdWvJreZIihQtfzqQLMGCZYiGYXn3lzUP9IiKn27JYaN-GXCAzly3qBzaoE5XrwiIis08PcUFY/s1130/Capricorn.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXzXAWix7neEVVK7EyVenbqNHl04J4wmkJCQiXh3wrcDYzPMx2SSm4Q0uPzhSAhUTw6dj2XvBakqyEBSXqcwVgXsRA7ljy7DJIY7A1Ck98xKYoPfdWvJreZIihQtfzqQLMGCZYiGYXn3lzUP9IiKn27JYaN-GXCAzly3qBzaoE5XrwiIis08PcUFY/s320/Capricorn.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2302563/" target="_blank">Capricorn</a>, 1991, dir: Takashi Imanishi</div><div><p><i>ADV</i>'s box cover proudly declares this to be "Johji Manabe's Capricorn", which, with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, seems rather an odd choice. I don't know about Manabe's popularity within Japan, but in the West his influence was limited indeed: there was this, there was the adaptation of <b>Outlanders</b>, <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2021/03/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-97.html" target="_blank">covered here</a> a couple of years back - my conclusion seems to essentially have been, "boy is <b>Outlanders </b>horny" - and his manga <b>Caravan Kidd </b>appears to have made it over to the US in full. In America, at least, Manabe's was hardly a name to conjure with.</p><p>I'm not convinced that was altogether his fault though, in the same way that I'm not sure it was his fault he never got a really outstanding anime adaptation that made it as far as the West. Judging solely by <b>Outlanders </b>and <b>Capricorn</b>, Manabe's schtick was pretty neat: fairly straightforward genre tales gussied up with a racy edge, elaborate settings, and, for some reason, lots and lots of animal people. That was definitely a thing in <b>Outlanders</b>, and it's more so here, not to mention how our heroine Mona is a sexy dragon lady, a detail that unfortunately meant I spent most of the running time being reminded of <b>Dragon Half</b> and struggling to take anything remotely seriously.</p><p>Mind you, perhaps taking itself less seriously would have done <b>Capricorn</b> some favours, though that's part and parcel of its one big problem, which is that it's determined to barrel through far more plot than it remotely has the space to deal with. That's true of many of these shorter OVA movies, of course, but I can't off the top of my head think of a more egregious example: <b>Capricorn</b> wants to be an epic tale, and epic, by and large, demands more than 45 minutes. It gets there, but the cost is any characterisation whatsoever, and even more damagingly, the worldbuilding that I can imagine being a big part of the manga's appeal, since it very much feels as though there's an interesting world to be seen here if we weren't being flung through it almost too fast for the details to register.</p><p>This sparsity of detail is most an issue, though, with our protagonist Taku, who we meet at the exact moment he materialises in the fantastical, delightfully named alternate world of Slaphrase. In short order, Taku will perv on Mona taking a bath - presumably because there was literally no other way to introduce female characters in nineties anime - and then find himself drawn into the resistance against the villainous Zolba, who's plotting to invade the mysterious orb hanging in Slaphrase's sky, which somehow seems to be connected with Taku. Oh, look, it's Earth, all right? It's obvious and even the box blurb gives it away. Anyway, Taku too will turn out to be more than he appears, and that leads us to a plot twist that ought to have at least some impact, but the thing is that we never got to know Taku before he was thrust into this particular story, and he might be the mayor of Denver or a dozen unusually smart ferrets hiding in a cunningly crafted flesh suit for all we know. His character, essentially, is, "guy who's in another world that he can't make much sense of," until the plot calls on him to be something more.</p><p>That may be <b>Capricorn</b>'s biggest weakness, but it's not actually a disastrous one; nor, surprisingly, is some noticeably cheap animation, which is salvaged largely by the fact that Manabe's designs are so pleasant to be around. Indeed, that goes for all of <b>Capricorn</b>: the source material is just about strong enough that all the adaptation needs to do is not get in its way too much, and Imanishi was absolutely a good enough director to pull that off, even with such obviously limited resources. Those 45 minutes fly by quite satisfyingly, and it's simply a shame that there wasn't the room to let the material breath even slightly: add another quarter of an hour in which to contextualise Taku and in general to give the characters some actual character and so the plot some meaningful stakes, polish up the animation a touch, and you'd have something that would stick in the memory once the credits were done in the way the <b>Capricorn </b>we actually got unfortunately fails to manage.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5542944/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVLO6t2P72609oP2lnHnzU1GBfkJ5L9V_WQcvT2dRbtFrFgx3qvK6jx9TQPpNlFEwSXyde3fJofSak4fhhNdIPJdFlYOPWETuJjuaztPrwUyQBPvKW0nAPWDzLAuL_uOtwa0hEZr7uzDNN3WwIGKsuu4tcdmUDB0PgT7teFi7jYc7u_ZxVdJC8IdU/s1130/Samurai%20Gold.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVLO6t2P72609oP2lnHnzU1GBfkJ5L9V_WQcvT2dRbtFrFgx3qvK6jx9TQPpNlFEwSXyde3fJofSak4fhhNdIPJdFlYOPWETuJjuaztPrwUyQBPvKW0nAPWDzLAuL_uOtwa0hEZr7uzDNN3WwIGKsuu4tcdmUDB0PgT7teFi7jYc7u_ZxVdJC8IdU/s320/Samurai%20Gold.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5542944/" target="_blank">Samurai Gold</a>, 1988, dir: Atsutoshi Umezawa</div><div><p>If you have to set your expectations extra low for anime titles that were never reissued from their VHS releases, that goes doubly for distributor <i>Western Connection</i>, who are known these days, where they're remembered at all, for being especially shonky and lacking in any measure of quality control and killing off more or less every license they touched.</p><p>So it comes as all the more surprise that <b>Samurai Gold</b> should turn out to be good. No more than good, mind you: no real flashes of excellence here, and not much in the way of distinctiveness either, though you might expect some on learning that its one-hour story is a take on the life of semi-legendary historical hero Tōyama no Kin-san, immortalised in kabuki theatre and subsequently in no end of films and TV shows, and here thrust into a sci-fi future that at the same time bears a striking resemblance to the Edo period in which he lived. All of which is undoubtedly to <b>Samurai Gold</b>'s benefit, except that the science-fiction never gets much past, "But what if <i>Gundam</i>?" and if you new nothing of Tōyama no Kin-san, as I didn't, you could easily make your way through the story without guessing its roots, though some of its later developments would feel that bit stranger.</p><p>The conceit of combining Edo architecture and motifs with the stock sci-fi designs of the time, though, does turn up some fairly fresh and appealing imagery - take, for instance, a highway overarched by torii gates - and while I'm far from an expert, I'm pretty sure I detected nods to period art in the character designs as well. Those designs benefit, too, from some above-average animation, even if director Umezawa isn't always the best at hiding his cost-cutting measures, as with shots of immobile crowds that stretch on long enough to be noticeable. For the most part, however, <b>Samurai Gold </b>offers some respectable visuals, and that and the 16:9 aspect ratio almost left me wondering if the thing might have had a cinematic release, for all that most everything else about it screams typical late-eighties OVA.</p><p>Not that that would be such a bad thing, either, mind; the late eighties was a fine time for OVAs, after all, a brief window in which they got to be more experimental and risk-taking than would be allowed even a few years later. And so we have a tale that not only gets to reimagine historical events through a futuristic lens but drags in a whole bunch of other genres while it's at it, functioning at any one time as an action comedy, a romance, a political thriller, and a courtroom drama, and most often as some combination of the lot. If this makes <b>Samurai Gold </b>feel rather haphazard, it also makes it impossible to predict or grow too bored with - unless, presumably, you're already familiar with the material from other tellings - and engagingly busy, with a startling amount of twists and turns and even some meaningful character development and high drama all squeezed into an hour.</p><p>And here I am feeling like, having insisted that <b>Samurai Gold </b>never pushes past being good, I've made it sound quite great, possibly because it's already beginning to look that way when I think back to it. So let me try and remember that, for all its minor eccentricities, on a scene-by-scene basis it was a lot like a lot of other titles from the late eighties and early nineties, with the overriding instinct being to imitate rather than playing up the uniqueness of the material. Whether or not that's a bad thing is debatable; there's certainly an argument that, with so many balls already in the air and so little time to barrel through so much narrative, more ambition would have been a distraction rather than a plus. Given its inherent limitations, I suspect the <b>Samurai Gold </b>we got might be close to the best possible version, and sometimes consistently good is perfectly fine.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0250406/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxVGvomMVy9MyggDN76942v6E6T1R1unTTFXVt0pqxSURzBESDsAMi4reawW1-CT3837tpmuwHS3tTnHfOj-gy64n0DwhnhEfKP2Bo0_H_rVqI1Juw6wSe035XmMVGYrA85FxoAOoevIisQRDzsMzZ7jpy72vyNXw7mrhHbMCX8fiaYcbAe0ES0bE/s1130/God%20Mars.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxVGvomMVy9MyggDN76942v6E6T1R1unTTFXVt0pqxSURzBESDsAMi4reawW1-CT3837tpmuwHS3tTnHfOj-gy64n0DwhnhEfKP2Bo0_H_rVqI1Juw6wSe035XmMVGYrA85FxoAOoevIisQRDzsMzZ7jpy72vyNXw7mrhHbMCX8fiaYcbAe0ES0bE/s320/God%20Mars.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0250406/" target="_blank">God Mars: The Movie</a>, 1982, dir: Tetsuo Imazawa</div><div><p>The first time through, I fell asleep watching <b>God Mars: The Movie</b>, and while I'm not about to claim that's the film's fault - I was really tired! - I'm also not, having watched it through again properly, willing to take the whole of the blame, because there were a couple of points where I found my eyes growing heavy on that second go round too.</p><p>Granted, I don't quite have the affinity for early eighties anime that I do for nineties anime, and especially not for the seemingly endless string of giant robot shows that seem to have been aimed squarely at older kids and younger teens, with not much thought given to the possibility that an adult viewer might want to get something from them as well. That's firmly where we're at here, and as such, <b>God Mars: The Movie </b>- a retelling of the 64-episode show <b>Six God Combination God Mars </b>- is full of remarkably dumb details and nonsense plotting, all of it more or less precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to run across in a giant robot anime from the front end of the eighties. Humanity has become a space-faring civilisation on the brink of breaking out of our solar system by the far-flung year of 1999; Earth's elite combat squad are all too young to get their driving licenses; and the villainous Emperor Zul, who's decided that the people of Earth have already seen quite enough of the galaxy, is such an idiot that you have to assume everyone else took one glance at the job of Galactic Emperor and decided it looked too much like work. His plans go off the rails almost immediately, when the alien being he planted on Earth - now known as Takeru and the old man of the aforementioned Crusher Squad at the crusty age of 17 - decides he'd rather defend the planet he's lived his entire life on than turn against it because some creepy space guy tells him he should.</p><p>Zul was pretty much my favourite part of <b>God Mars: The Movie</b>,<b> </b>partly because his design is rather awesome but mostly because he's such a force of absurdism and chaos, concocting ever-more-nonsensical schemes, contradicting himself constantly, and apparently being evil more for the fun of it than through any hope of gain, given that all the problems he encounters are of his own making and could have been resolved with minimal effort at almost any point in the film's 90-minute running time. And <b>God Mars: The Movie </b>surely needs a good villain, or at any rate a bad but entertaining villain, because its heroes are thoroughly dull, with almost everyone but the achingly tedious Takeru and his brother Marg getting pushed firmly to the sidelines.</p><p>Thankfully, and acknowledging that early-eighties giant robot anime is rarely the place to look for intricate characterisation or rich plotting, it's a good job that, as a work of animation, <b>God Mars: The Movie </b>fares better. It's precisely as dated as you'd expect, but it does look somewhat like a cinematic feature, and a lot of that's down to director Imazawa. The animation is reliably fine without doing much to impress, but Imazawa has a definite gift for the sort of epic sci-fi that the film's aiming to deliver - perhaps honed during his time helming the TV show - and his greatest virtue is a sense for how to use scale to really wow. It's not something he calls on much, but there are a handful of shots that are a little breathtaking, in the way a film containing massive spaceships and robots ought to be and so few are.</p><p>The odd awesome sequence that makes impressive use of scale and a delightfully daft villain aren't enough to push <b>God Mars: The Movie</b> anywhere near greatness, but they save it from being merely serviceable, and the whole business gets steadily better the more it goes on, meaning that most of its best moments are backloaded. Given those virtues, it's no surprise that the ultimate showdown against Zul is a highpoint, and it occupies an unreasonably large portion of the running time, which goes a long way toward making up for the slightly dull opening and convoluted, momentum-less middle. That obviously still leaves this firmly in the "worth a look if you like this sort of thing" camp, though given my basic lack of enthusiasm, I guess my mild enjoyment is sort of a recommendation in itself.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>Since I tend to review individual titles rather than releases, let me take this opportunity to plug <i>Discotek</i>'s fantastic <i>City Hunter</i> collection, which includes all six of the vintage OVAs and TV specials. Granted, two of them are fairly dreadful, but that leaves four that are somewhere between good and great, with <b>Goodbye My Sweetheart </b>- aka <b>City Hunter: The Movie</b> - standing out as one of the finest franchise films to come out of the nineties. And since I've grumbled a bit about how overly costly the <i>Project A-ko </i>sequel blu-rays have been, let me say for the sake of balance that <i>Discotek </i>have gone completely the other way here, bundling what easily could have been split into two sets together at a thoroughly reasonable price.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-28102906692217213582023-05-20T19:18:00.000+01:002023-05-20T19:18:04.265+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 126<p>I may have the odd grumble about distributor <i>Eastern Star</i> / <i>Discotek</i>, if only because I'm never quite sure what to call them, but still, thank goodness they're out there and keeping up a steady flow of rereleases and remasters of classic anime, not to mention the occasional new release, which is ridiculously exciting if you're anything like me and have long ago exhausted most of the era's classics. And while the <i>Project A-ko</i> blu-rays aren't quite that, it's still a thrill to get them when, in the UK at least, the only alternative until now was shoddy dub-only versions.</p><p>And for the purposes of this here post, <i>Discotek </i>and <i>A-ko </i>are all that's saving us from the deepest depths of obscurity, as we dig into some truly bizarre and long-buried corners. Up this time: <b>Roots Search</b>, <b>Project A-Ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody</b>, <b>Wild 7: Biker Knights</b>, and <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon</b>...</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzyLyEqrppM-NPCFtfsynNsxsL44SMG3Jfwj_uQF94mGKkR_y905xN_VGMCF9F1LRdUjmvon7vyvNdGVYiVBUxEXkvT4xQ56PK5Le0-AfDoH2qhojd0Ms-BfOVWbeXODdJKj6P_YpFQM2AC3x1sND-VRc73doIx_ni9Dm-xtKIk_J_M52NKpSduL0/s1130/Roots%20Search.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzyLyEqrppM-NPCFtfsynNsxsL44SMG3Jfwj_uQF94mGKkR_y905xN_VGMCF9F1LRdUjmvon7vyvNdGVYiVBUxEXkvT4xQ56PK5Le0-AfDoH2qhojd0Ms-BfOVWbeXODdJKj6P_YpFQM2AC3x1sND-VRc73doIx_ni9Dm-xtKIk_J_M52NKpSduL0/s320/Roots%20Search.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160784/" target="_blank">Roots Search</a>, 1986, dir: Hisashi Sugai</p><p></p><p>I'm not about to suggest that seminal nineties sci-fi horror movie <b>Event Horizon </b>ripped off a mediocre anime OVA, but if I was, <b>Roots Search</b> is the mediocre anime OVA I'd point to. It did, at least, land on some of the same ideas and imagery a decade earlier, and if it deserves credit for anything, it's that: there's the seed of something here, and ten years later, a similar seed would grow into a minor classic rather than a stunted weed of a tale that barely has time to wave its saggy leaves at the sun before it's starting to wilt.</p><p>But I was trying to praise <b>Roots Search </b>for what little it does right, rather than condemn it for all the stuff it gets wrong! Because the core is decent, and could have worked, and intermittently does, especially in the first half. Our setting is the Tolmeckius Research Institute and our lead is said institute's apparently sole test subject, Moira, whose psychic powers are enough to get everyone terribly excited. But that convenient plot thread gets quickly sidelined until it becomes useful again much later, as the scientific fun and games are interrupted by the arrival and near-impact of a much larger vessel, one that happens to look like something H R Giger might have dreamed about after scoffing too much brie before bed. And wouldn't you know it but all the crew bar one are mysteriously dead, and also there's an apparently comatose alien aboard, which the Tolmeckius gang almost immediately decide to dump into space, having come to the sensible conclusion that dead crew plus unidentified alien is unlikely to bode well.</p><p>It's a good call, but not quite good enough, for it turns out the alien is... Well, I'm not certain the makers of <b>Roots Search </b>quite knew what was going on with their alien, and if they did, they weren't prepared to let us in on all their secrets, but we can comfortably say that it somehow survives being jettisoned and promptly sets about tormenting the crew with visions of their guiltiest secrets before disposing of them in exceedingly gory ways - this being the part that feels awfully like <b>Event Horizon</b>, even down to a particular death scene<b> </b>involving an airlock and the manner in which human bodies don't cope terribly well with the vacuum of space.</p><p>Had this been the sum of <b>Roots Search</b>, I think I'd feel more kindly towards it, since the horror is mildly ingenious and the "death by dark secrets" stuff quite entertaining. So it's a disappointment when, past the midpoint, the psychological aspect gets largely binned in favour of more traditional tentacle monster shenanigans. But even that isn't really what hobbles <b>Roots Search</b>. While I hate to criticise something for having too many ideas, that's part of the problem, though even then I'd be more forgiving if any of those ideas went somewhere, say to a satisfying climax that made a shred of sense. In particular, the fact that the alien declares itself to be acting in the name of God definitely seems like the sort of notion you might want to develop rather than trotting out only to leave hanging, and while I kind of liked the conclusion for its brazen "What the hell?" gambit, I'd still have preferred a bit of clarity.</p><p>Perhaps needless to say of a totally forgotten OVA from three and a half decades ago that its less-than-choosy US distributor never felt the need to give a DVD release, none of this is salvaged by its technical aspects. The end theme is quite nice in a dopily inappropriate fashion, and the animation has its moments, most of them in the intermittently effective horror sequences, but it goes wrong as often as it goes right and the character designs are particularly disastrous: there's the strong impression that a different artist was responsible for every one, none of whom did a good job or spoke to each other. More effort went into the mechanical designs and the alien, which is actually quite interesting to look at, until it turns into a bunch of writhing genitals made of spam, anyway. Oh, but that cover art is nice, isn't it? And it appears beneath the end credits, which feels like a thank you for putting up with <b>Roots Search</b>'s bad choices for three quarters of an hour.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095914/" target="_blank"></a></p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv156XMF8wU8qXLRw0LUV-a0S3zRlJdd3LKGnp5wgx_ZJD9PBcVyi9QtJ3BK_cl0C3B1vx4Y9RBGwVyk4WnTAy-5WvKyiQqFuQTWDwueQtDw_O9bSUSiO_pqJhYhG09HpxIeUQJgve69YoCMjCkmJ-6OLR1fO0fJ96044QoJ627oisS1XYbhywiPc/s1130/Project%20A-Ko%203%20Cinderella%20Rhapsody.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv156XMF8wU8qXLRw0LUV-a0S3zRlJdd3LKGnp5wgx_ZJD9PBcVyi9QtJ3BK_cl0C3B1vx4Y9RBGwVyk4WnTAy-5WvKyiQqFuQTWDwueQtDw_O9bSUSiO_pqJhYhG09HpxIeUQJgve69YoCMjCkmJ-6OLR1fO0fJ96044QoJ627oisS1XYbhywiPc/s320/Project%20A-Ko%203%20Cinderella%20Rhapsody.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095914/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Project A-Ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody</a>, 1988, dir: Yuji Moriyama<p></p><p></p><p>I was beginning to worry that reviewing these <i>Project A-ko</i> sequel OVAs separately was a wasted effort, having responded to the first entry, <b>Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</b>, much as I did back in the day when I covered them under their original release as one collection. So I was pleased to discover that my main objection to <b>Cinderella Rhapsody</b>, on a rewatch, barely bothered me at all.</p><p>I know I wasn't alone - if only because <i>Discotek</i>'s excellent liner notes touch upon the subject - in being put off by a story that relied on two characters who thus far had been strongly implied to be gay suddenly lusting after a guy rather than delightfully awful moppet C-Ko, and it seemed to me another example of the dearth of ideas that happens when creators sequel something that really ought to have been left alone. What I perhaps failed to notice is that <b>Cinderella Rhapsody</b> takes its straight romance even less seriously than it did its gay romance, and indeed seems to be actively mocking the conventions of the genre - particularly as they're relayed through anime and manga - and possibly even the distressing tendency in Japanese culture of the time toward presenting intimate female relationships as a fad to be grown out of. The object of A-Ko's affections, who inevitably becomes the object of her rival B-Ko's affections, would fail the sexy lamp test and then some, barely says two words throughout the forty-some minute running time, and is ultimately shown to be even less of a catch than C-Ko, who somehow winds up both more humanised and precisely as dreadful as ever.</p><p>You might still argue that a romance pastiche was hardly the way to take a property so anarchic as <i>Project A-ko</i>, and I wouldn't suggest there weren't better alternatives out there, but it certainly feels fresher than <b>Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</b>'s attempt to extend a narrative that had nowhere useful to go. Indeed, if there had ever been a model by which <i>Project A-ko </i>might have kept going longer than it did, this feels like a step in that direction, larking about with a genre that's a fairly rubbish fit until it becomes funnier to hurl all that out the window for a ridiculous action climax that sees half the city dragged into the fight.</p><p>One thing's for sure, director Moriyama seems considerably more enthused than he did last time around, bringing some genuine ingenuity to the table and an eye for imaginative shots that I noticed barely anywhere in <b>Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</b>. Then again, it may simply be that there was more time and money floating about, for this is a much more polished effort, not so far off the level of the original <b>Project A-Ko </b>and on occasions - as in the baffling dream-sequence opening that adopts an entirely different art style - maybe a little bolder and better. Hiromoto Tobisawa's note-perfect parody score is a step up, too, from Mariya Takeuchi's perfectly adequate efforts, and feels like a worthwhile stand-in for the irreplaceable work Carbone and Zito did to give <b>A-Ko </b>its singular vibe.</p><p>All in all, then, I liked <b>Cinderella Rhapsody </b>quite a bit, and if that's partly a case of coming to the material with a more forgiving attitude, I think this one also gained from <i>Discotek</i>'s slightly mercenary approach of putting out these short OVA sequels one by one: as a standalone sequel, it fares better than it did crammed in the middle of a trilogy, and the superior animation gains considerably from the move to HD and Blu-ray. Having previously only seen the dub, I wonder, too, if that somehow managed to miss the joke with the mock-romance, because it's hard to imagine coming away from the original Japanese version with the impression that it was meant to be taken remotely seriously. Whatever the case, <b>Cinderella Rhapsody</b>'s enough of a success that I'm now a little sad that there's only one more "proper" <b>A-Ko</b> sequel left to go.</p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUqSNXWxgqk9oeAjIVbHT3ENFP4mbzAOJ98AfQKPn-GRl8Avu3xz6MYC9E1UxvWBr3X1pyg2DkxOLNqxDrgXl-1aOixDm0lVDsEUbgTyhXISxakFESB9mLkiRaDHPdg4hkuUpe6NrNSfYGX3G4gb8Od2hN_Oc_w5dgDy2z63WkMs2l5MS2FNPp1vU/s1130/Wild%207%20Biker%20Knights.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUqSNXWxgqk9oeAjIVbHT3ENFP4mbzAOJ98AfQKPn-GRl8Avu3xz6MYC9E1UxvWBr3X1pyg2DkxOLNqxDrgXl-1aOixDm0lVDsEUbgTyhXISxakFESB9mLkiRaDHPdg4hkuUpe6NrNSfYGX3G4gb8Od2hN_Oc_w5dgDy2z63WkMs2l5MS2FNPp1vU/s320/Wild%207%20Biker%20Knights.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3638066/" target="_blank">Wild 7: Biker Knights</a>, 1995, dir: Kiyoshi Egami<p></p><p></p><p>It was obviously a lot to hope that this second <i>Wild 7 </i>OVA would be as good as the first when the first largely felt as if it fluked its way to success. Still, the specific ways in which<b> </b><b>Biker Knights</b> fails to reach the same modest heights are irritating in their own right, since it really only needed to be more of the same to get itself a modest pass.</p><p>Granted, somebody in the production possibly came to a similar conclusion, given that, in one crucial fashion, <b>Biker Knights</b> is absolutely that, picking up as it does almost directly from the end of the original. Unfortunately, that ending left little in the way of interesting loose threads, and so this turns out to be merely the first of a bunch of bad decisions, though it's one that could have easily been recovered from, since <b>Biker Knights</b> almost immediately resets itself anyway, introducing new villains with a new dastardly plot. At least, I think it was meant to be dastardly; it's so convoluted and self-evidently dumb that it was hard to be certain. And by then we're into the realm of bad decisions that <i>weren't </i>recoverable, because if you're telling a tale in which your bad guys are trying to take over Japan via the medium of a TV show that makes popular idols battle each other, you'd better be damned sure to keep tongue firmly in cheek. Yet somehow, despite an obviously more absurd plot, <b>Biker Knights </b>takes itself very seriously indeed and thus manages to make the most bonkers of criminal conspiracies seem dull and workmanlike.</p><p>Speaking of taking things seriously, the one thing that categorically couldn't survive that treatment, as I pointed out at probably too much length in my review of the original <b>Wild 7</b>, is the core concept of our heroes being criminals made cops who can get the job done where the regular police can't because they're not bound by all those dumb rules about proving people guilty with actual evidence and are free to shoot and explode and generally molest whoever they please. <b>Wild 7 </b>got away with it by largely ignoring it; <b>Biker Knights </b>has its characters sit down for a scene that kills any momentum the show has gathered to lengthily debate the relative merits of summary execution versus due process.</p><p>That scene's symptomatic of a title that's generally come to the conclusion that what <b>Wild 7 </b>needed was more talking and less action. There is, indeed, barely any of the latter until the third act, and none of what we get until that point is any good at all. Really, neither is the main setpiece, which suffers partly from not being the climax of the film that it seems like it ought to be, but more so for how the animation is markedly worse this time around, with all the flaws of the first OVA and none of the virtues. And that's the one failure that's truly unsurvivable, since some imaginative action brought to live with ambitious animation would have stood a chance of making the other flaws fade from memory, whereas wading through scene after scene of tedious plotting only to be rewarded with sequences that should be awesome and aren't is quite the slap in the face.</p><p>It's not as if <b>Biker Knights </b>is terrible; if I was never especially absorbed, I was never bored either. But in a way, that was actually worse, since I'd much rather have had a <b>Wild 7 </b>sequel that self-destructed in outrageous fashion than one that flopped about limply the way this does, imagining we'd prefer to watch ridiculous villains setting out incoherent schemes than crooks-turned-cops firing missiles from their souped-up motorbikes. As it is, if it has any value at all, it's to make the original seem better than it was by illustrating just how badly wrong a setup like this can go if everyone involved fails to realise how essentially dumb and trashy it is.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwszFhv6cGvGwuVLgW_PT1zmlvqCJNUQBZQ2Lp-Nt7LYVDTMLI9hZVveTQWCfvdtySVsWUBSUTBq9Z0e3m0-RxwFJLSfV0AIc7Ui8Ol_TDSc1QQiw_2XYNJIgDCwdjzo3iQmg9NAD35U6QtGttapP9sS2O7iW9wyUJN5xGvHWQBx-Kop6QgwCZAb4/s1130/Mystery%20of%20the%20Necronomicon.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwszFhv6cGvGwuVLgW_PT1zmlvqCJNUQBZQ2Lp-Nt7LYVDTMLI9hZVveTQWCfvdtySVsWUBSUTBq9Z0e3m0-RxwFJLSfV0AIc7Ui8Ol_TDSc1QQiw_2XYNJIgDCwdjzo3iQmg9NAD35U6QtGttapP9sS2O7iW9wyUJN5xGvHWQBx-Kop6QgwCZAb4/s320/Mystery%20of%20the%20Necronomicon.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422790/" target="_blank">Mystery of the Necronomicon</a>, 1999, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Yoshitaka Makino<p></p><p>I'll spare us the usual excuses for when I review hentai here: the truth is, I went into <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon </b>with my eyes open and a measure of genuine curiosity. The influence of weird fiction writer H P Lovecraft is all over nineties anime, yet I can't think of a single other title off the top of my head that actually adapts his work or does more than obliquely acknowledge the connection with the odd sly reference. So when I discovered that there was an actual Lovecraft-adapting nineties anime out there, my interest was sparked, hentai or no.</p><p>As it turns out, however, <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon </b>isn't precisely that. There are enough familiar names and figures that it's certainly a lot more open about the connection than is usually the case, and there's one work in particular that it draws from heavily in its latter portion, though saying which would constitute a massive spoiler. The plot, though, is its own thing, and given that the majority of Lovecraft's boil down to variations of "man encounters something horrible and inexplicable, goes mad," that's probably for the best. Which isn't to say that <i>isn't</i> what <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon </b>is up to, just that there are a lot more wheels spinning along the way to keep its two-and-a-bit hour running time occupied.</p><p>Our hero, for want of a more suitable word, is private detective Satoshi Suzuhara, who's differentiated from your usual cynical private detective in a supernatural mystery who comes to realise the case he's investigating is connected with his own shadowy past mainly by how he has way more sex - this being hentai, let's not forget! - and by how his attractive assistant is also his adopted daughter, a detail that will end up feeling awfully gross before the credits roll for reasons I probably don't need to spell out - hint, still hentai! The first two of four episodes find Suzuhara at a remote ski lodge hotel in which the tiny handful of guests are being bumped off at a rate of knots in ritualist fashion, a thread that largely plays out by the midpoint, though oddly the third episode then opts for more or less the same setup but in a hotel in the north-eastern US. It's the sort of narrative that feels quite complicated until you learn where it was heading, at which point it seems awfully straightforward in retrospect, but there are enough bumps in the road, along with a couple of neat twists, that it manages to stay largely satisfying.</p><p>Certainly there's a whole lot more story here than I would have expected from a hentai title, and if, like me, you're cool on that particular subgenre, it definitely helps that the various sex scenes feel of a piece with that story rather than being crowbarred in wherever they can possibly fit. That's not to say they're not both frequently nasty and surprisingly graphic - there's stuff here I was confident you couldn't show, in animation or elsewhere, in Japan at the time - but while it's often unpleasant, it's at least unpleasant in a way that fits with the wider horrors. Then again, when <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon </b>is actually doing horror, it trips over itself as often as not, and proves an excellent exemplar of the rule that simply showing gross stuff is rarely scary and even stops being alarming quite quickly: in particular, you can only see so many skinned faces before the shock wears off.</p><p>Or rather, maybe the issue is more that you can only see so many skinned faces that look quite rubbish - for <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon </b>has the grave misfortune of hailing from 1999, the year where anime went to die, and thus is ugly and shoddy in all manner of ways it can't afford to be. Objectively, the animation is probably relatively competent, and Takayama does enough to instil a bit of much-needed mood and tension into the proceedings, but nothing can do away with that painful impression of computer-aided animation made by people who are far from figuring out how the "aided" part works. It's a shame, really, because on the whole I quite liked <b>Mystery of the Necronomicon</b>, which sets itself some unenviable challenges and manages, on the whole, to make the results work, by the very specific definition of working that Lovecraftian hentai could hope to accomplish.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>That... could have gone worse? Perhaps not a lot worse, granted, but there was nothing here I didn't snatch at least a dash of enjoyment from, though <b>Wild 7: Biker Knights</b> came perilously close. It has to be said that only <b>Cinderella Rhapsody </b>could be called a nice surprise rather than a disappointment, but realistically that's on me for having any expectations whatsoever for Lovecraft hentai, a <b>Wild 7 </b>sequel, and a long-since-vanished, VHS-only OVA that I bought entirely because I thought the cover art was cool.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-9800695184435003882023-04-09T18:58:00.002+01:002023-04-09T18:58:41.737+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 125<p>125 posts! That's totally something to celebrate, or possibly to commiserate if you consider reviewing extravagant amounts of mostly impossible-to-find media from decades ago a life-wasting exercise in futility. But surely nobody anywhere would think that, so let's go with the celebrating! And what better way to mark a major <i>Drowning in Nineties Anime</i> landmark than with some eighties anime? OK, I know, but this way we get to cover some pretty good titles, including a couple that you can even buy on those shiny, new-fangled Blu-ray thingamajigs the kids won't shut up about, and I don't have to ramble on about VHS titles that probably about three people on the planet would be interested in watching. So here for the big 125 - and review number 500! - are <b>Tomorrow's Joe 2</b>,<b> Fair Then Partly Piggy</b>,<b> Prefectural Earth Defense Force</b>, and <b>Final Yamato</b>...</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilHhkjlYM_b3UEn-Igs_IR-gCNg4aeOutUzGbaxSmXlk-clU41p5hPPFlljbCK1aZ4AjX2hFiktAc1DX4vFIDX1xfbQO2SfIvedPFux5hD_GXslPMytnQkQMetuRjlJtgFeiHrLsBBsOfAr9u5e-VV4blezd49YXJzWmL2lM28v1wVcRo1Ga004-A/s1130/Tomorrow's%20Joe%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilHhkjlYM_b3UEn-Igs_IR-gCNg4aeOutUzGbaxSmXlk-clU41p5hPPFlljbCK1aZ4AjX2hFiktAc1DX4vFIDX1xfbQO2SfIvedPFux5hD_GXslPMytnQkQMetuRjlJtgFeiHrLsBBsOfAr9u5e-VV4blezd49YXJzWmL2lM28v1wVcRo1Ga004-A/s320/Tomorrow's%20Joe%202.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5765272/" target="_blank">Tomorrow's Joe 2</a>, 1981, dir: Osamu Dezaki<p></p><p>On the one hand, to expect the second <i>Tomorrow's Joe </i>movie to go as miraculously right as the first did feels optimistic. After all, the original seemed as though it could easily have been not half so good as it was, and only by some fluke of editing genius was a coherent two-and-a-half hour-long movie dragged together from the dozens of hours of footage that comprised the original TV series. Yet if you were the optimistic sort, you might equally ask, why shouldn't it happen again? After all, the elements and process were essentially identical, and <b>Tomorrow's Joe 2</b> has a few obvious advantages: a mere 47 episodes to compile rather than the 79 of the first series and so a less intimidating run time of under two hours, some noticeably more polished animation, and perhaps most importantly, all the groundwork already in place, so we don't need half a movie just to get us into the boxing stuff.</p><p>Maybe, then, it's my personal preferences that made <b>Tomorrow's Joe 2</b> a relative disappointment. I wouldn't choose to sit down and watch a boxing movie, but the original <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>largely tricked me into it, in that by the time its protagonist Joe Yabuki finally stepped inside a ring, I was already totally absorbed by the character drama. More than that, though, I'd argue <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>had one virtue <b>Tomorrow's Joe 2 </b>couldn't hope to replicate, and that was belonging to the perfect genre for something so vast and shaggy. Because far more than it was about boxing, it was a coming-of-age story, and who expects those to be structurally neat and tidy? The only necessities for such a narrative to work are that it leaves its protagonist somewhere close to being an adult and that it gives a sense of that progress in an interesting, arresting fashion, and this <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>pulled off as well as any example I can name.</p><p><b>Tomorrow's Joe 2 </b>actually has more of a definite shape to it, but it's one that's barely apparent through an episodic first half that has to reset itself a couple of times and only really becomes absolutely clear in the last minutes. To go into details would be spoiler-y, and while I didn't wholly get on with the film, I certainly wouldn't want to do that: it's absolutely up to some intriguing things, and though I'm comfortable calling it a boxing movie, that's not to suggest its ambitions and themes are limited to the action within the ring. Far more so than the first feature, it's interested in what it means to be a career fighter, what it says of a society that it would allow such a profession, and where, for a man like Joe Yabuki who knows nothing else and perhaps is good for nothing else, that all leads.</p><p>I respect that, but respect isn't the same as enjoyment, and <b>Tomorrow's Joe 2 </b>is tough to enjoy. Partly that's because its answers are grim and fatalistic, with not a lot of light amid the darkness, and partly it's because, while the animation is better, it's still not so good that it's actively pleasurable to look at - though <i>Discotek</i>'s inclusion of an option to watch in what I take to be the correct aspect ratio this time around is a huge boon. Perhaps hypocritically, having grumbled that the film is too much about boxing for my tastes, one of the more frustrating issues is that the fight scenes aren't especially good; even the lengthy climatic bout doesn't get near to the heights of the first film's yet lengthier climatic bout. But for all that, I don't regret my time with <b>Tomorrow's Joe 2</b>.<b> </b> I have a feeling, too, that it's one that will stick with me, since the parts that work best get to some undeniably powerful places. I'd only say that if you enjoyed <b>Tomorrow's Joe</b>, this is a very different experience: a tougher, harsher, more frustrating, and somewhat lesser one that nevertheless flirts with greatness on a reasonably regular basis.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxtUmsux3gi_qnEmoGFO4n1A0j_WvNkVUrGfBpRptTzcGeCHSzDNLnrkGPwygYG6TVtUUOLN3YrLhXjw9JKWL9voGnBq38Brsiara78nk6xA-nnB-a-iJcS7fMg9NVNViCwJ7kdar_9QRTxNfTAGNEnY9viYnr2m7aci4kQJ5tIT0oXVobr56kUiM/s1130/Fair%20Then%20Partly%20Piggy.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxtUmsux3gi_qnEmoGFO4n1A0j_WvNkVUrGfBpRptTzcGeCHSzDNLnrkGPwygYG6TVtUUOLN3YrLhXjw9JKWL9voGnBq38Brsiara78nk6xA-nnB-a-iJcS7fMg9NVNViCwJ7kdar_9QRTxNfTAGNEnY9viYnr2m7aci4kQJ5tIT0oXVobr56kUiM/s320/Fair%20Then%20Partly%20Piggy.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128402/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Fair, Then Partly Piggy</a>, 1988, dir: Toshio Hirata<div><p><b>Fair, Then Partly Piggy </b>is an adaptation of the first two volumes of a series of beloved children's books written and illustrated by author Shiro Yadama*, and I think it's fair to say that everything about it that works and everything that doesn't revolves around these facts. For, judging by the limited available evidence, which is to say a brief extract from the book provided on <i>Discotek</i>'s otherwise spartan Blu-ray release, Toshio Hirata's directorial take is less an interpretation and more a slavish recreation. And while the word "slavish" doesn't exactly have the best connotations, it's not as though it's automatically the wrong route by which to transfer a book into a movie, especially when said book is so abundantly, obviously charming as this one.</p><p>The story, as I'm sure I'm not the first to observe, is <b>Death Note</b> for preadolescents. Young Noriyasu happens upon his mother reading the journal he's been keeping religiously ever since he began it for a class project and, in a bid to mess with her head, decides to write the next day's events in advance and to make them as absurd as his eight year old's imagination will allow, which extends as far as a snake appearing in the family's bathroom. When, the next day, there actually is a snake in the bathroom, he assumes it's just his parents pranking him in return, and even a further experiment that could easily have proved fatal for all involved doesn't convince him otherwise, leading inevitably to ever-more-absurd abuses of his reality-bending powers - though, this being a Japanese children's movie and not an American one, not much in the way of lesson-learning or character development. Then, having run out of book at around the midway mark, <b>Fair, Then Partly Piggy </b>reboots itself as a tale of journalistic integrity, or the lack thereof, and finds a whole new bunch of weird places to go to.</p><p>There's problem number one: this is two films jammed together without any effort to hide the seams, which shows most noticeably in the fact that you'd kind of expect Noriyasu to be quicker on the uptake when his fake newspaper articles start coming true after the exact same thing just happened with a demonically possessed journal, or whatever was going on. Indeed, generally, <b>Fair, Then Partly Piggy</b> relies heavily on Noriyasu being dumb as bricks even by the standards of his age demographic, which, combined with a grating laugh that gets trotted out awfully often, makes him a touch difficult to stay on side with. (That he never tries to use his unearned deific powers for anything besides wacky, slightly cruel mischief and has no real personality beyond "rubbish at sports" doesn't help either.)</p><p>Problem number two is probably more personal and maybe - no, definitely - not a problem in a fair number of ways. Hirata makes the choice to stay faithful to the books' illustrations, which are typically picture-bookish at the level of Noriyasu's reality and reduced to childish doodles for things like when Noriyasu's own illustrations come to life. The reason I don't want to criticise too hard is that it's wonderful to see a kids' movie that does something, <i>anything</i>,<i> </i>interesting with its animation, and there's no question that it gives the film a unique flavour, with the closest comparison I can come up with being Takahata's <b>My Neighbours the Yamadas</b>. Only, what's interesting for a few minutes is less so for an hour and a quarter, and it's a one-note approach for a film that would have benefited enormously from having more thought put into why we should be watching instead of reading. It flattens the mundane and the bizarre to a single uniform level and so doesn't leave anywhere to go in terms of visuals: no matter how crazy things get, they're always presented in basically the same fashion.</p><p>If that sounds like nit-picking, particularly when aimed at something with no pretensions beyond being a wacky little movie for younger children that their parents can also find moderately amusing, then, yes, it absolutely is, and <b>Fair, Then Partly Piggy </b>nails the modest goals it sets itself with aplomb. On a scene-by-scene basis, it's often pretty wonderful, and much of the humour is surprisingly surreal and deadpan rather than being loud and silly as you might expect; more than once I found myself thinking that if David Lynch had ever tried his hand at making an animated feature for the young'uns, it might have turned out rather like this. The problem is merely that it's good enough that I wished it were better: a dash more imagination, more advantage taken of the change in mediums, and the slightest effort made in figuring out how to combine multiple books, and this could have been awfully special.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2439250/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsubSE9rKOQe7911-5Khc0L2Yau-1ATTXSMnY39eskhJM3OQ10WZDMDfj14JBGqN-Bvtmk_AU_JfFsc9SjQMTXRhoKo1ETVU6iiHN-s9_HrSJdQ_aCHQ1gSNcT20u89CpIErL52RTZcXU-jkwxbfkUqXjMuN9hwmwUBzWAFKemuYg5fStms7U546Q/s1130/Prefectural%20Earth%20Defense%20Force.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsubSE9rKOQe7911-5Khc0L2Yau-1ATTXSMnY39eskhJM3OQ10WZDMDfj14JBGqN-Bvtmk_AU_JfFsc9SjQMTXRhoKo1ETVU6iiHN-s9_HrSJdQ_aCHQ1gSNcT20u89CpIErL52RTZcXU-jkwxbfkUqXjMuN9hwmwUBzWAFKemuYg5fStms7U546Q/s320/Prefectural%20Earth%20Defense%20Force.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2439250/" target="_blank">Prefectural Earth Defense Force</a>, 1986, dir's: Tsukasa Abe, Keiji Hayakawa, Takaya Mizutani</div><div><p><b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force</b> came out in the same year as the hugely influential <b>Project A-ko</b> and is up to some remarkably similar things, while being, for my money, better in nearly every way. And I realise I'm almost certainly alone in thinking this, though I'd argue part of the reason for that is that nobody's seen <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force</b>, and part of the reason for <i>that </i>is surely that, not for the first nor the last time, <i>ADV </i>did a bewilderingly bad job of selling it. I mean, what's with those slogans on the cover? I think the goal is to make it look like a <i>Star Wars</i> pastiche, but I couldn't guess why, and in the meantime we're left with not one but two pieces of text that have no relation to the title on offer or anything else. And the back is worse, with some aggressively dreadful design choices, too-small text, and the only marginally less strange claim that "Before there was <b>Excel Saga</b>... There was <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force</b>!"</p><p>I mean, chronologically that would be hard to argue, but presumably the implication is that <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force </b>was in some way influential on or meaningfully similar to <b>Excel Saga</b>, and barring a few essentials - they're both science-fictional comedies that feature one or more female characters working in service of a male character bent on world domination - they're not much alike at all. And okay, writing it out like that, I do see where they were going, but <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force </b>offers a very different experience, and it was definitely <b>A-ko </b>I found myself thinking of frequently and <b>Excel Saga</b><i> </i>not at all. It's the difference, I think, between fond satire in the former case and satire that's a little vicious about and derisive of its targets in the latter: <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force</b>, like <b>A-ko</b>, finds the clichés of eighties Japanese genre fiction hilariously silly, but it wants to revel in that silliness and ramp it up to the nth degree, not critique it in any meaningful fashion.</p><p>The central concept is more a jumping-off point, but since it's pretty neat, it's worth getting out there. Somewhere in the boondocks of Japan, the nefarious Telephone Pole Group have set their sights on world domination in an unusually pragmatic fashion: accepting that conquering Tokyo would probably go as badly for them as it has for all the other potential world dominators, they've settled on taking over one prefecture instead and working out from there. This of course means there are no proper heroes around to stop them, so the job falls to three random teenagers with no powers or qualifications, which would be more of a big deal if - and here you'll see why a full plot synopsis would be a waste of everyone's time! - it weren't for the fact that Santin, a tourist from India, has recently been transformed into a missile-spewing cyborg and is hellbent on revenging himself upon those responsible, which he believes to be the villains of the Telephone Pole Group.</p><p>All of this, anyway, is mostly just a centre around which <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force</b>, over the course of three episodes and some fifty minutes, rushes off down whatever screwy comic rabbit holes take its fancy. And if I had to point to a reason this received a cool reception in the US and couldn't fall back on "<i>ADV</i> sucked at marketing comedy OVAs," I'd have to confess that much of the humour, from the central gag on upwards, requires a degree of knowledge of Japanese culture and so doesn't have the universality of something like <b>Project A-ko</b>. On the other hand, that humour is also much more dense, meaning that if you're on its wavelength, the laughs are crammed in awfully tight. Plus, while there's never a moment where it could be accused of taking itself seriously, there's just enough of a grounding in reality that the characters register as characters rather than comic props, and - something I didn't remotely expect by the midway point - it even wraps up in kind of a proper conclusion.</p><p>Ultimately, I think what reminded me most of <b>A-ko</b>, though, was that elusive labour-of-love quality that comes along so rarely, and here's the point where, for me, <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force </b>nudges into the lead. You likely haven't heard of <i>Studio Gallop</i>, and I certainly hadn't, but in 1986 they had effectively no work to their names, and by heck does this feel like the product of fresh young animators desperate to show off what they can do. Because those fifty minutes consist of almost nothing but showing off, starting with an eye-popping and wholly unnecessary red herring of an opening and carrying on from there. It's marvellous stuff, but more than that, it's infectiously fun: you can almost feel the creative team encouraging each other to greater and greater excesses, and the visual over-the-topness is almost always in the service of pushing jokes to ever more ridiculous heights. <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force </b>is funny enough that it's hard to imagine a bad version of the material, but what <i>Gallop </i>delivered all those many years ago was closer to the best possible take, and it's a crying shame the results should have been so forgotten to anime history.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140648/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDw1WSbb5rgJSniEXiHtfILmswKOjCsZzHjtuyVC4328d-jcvYmoaMCy2pwwLNC4a34EJ8itvgnufcSVJfNiopvIlzBaYMYUDyhPvpp5VI6_BOCNR0qyXGRNWd7LPd0RCYIfEATreSvp08madBkm7N-OonQ7cGzEz_e7Ju_TLXEbDDDwjOA5HHurs/s1130/Final%20Yamato.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDw1WSbb5rgJSniEXiHtfILmswKOjCsZzHjtuyVC4328d-jcvYmoaMCy2pwwLNC4a34EJ8itvgnufcSVJfNiopvIlzBaYMYUDyhPvpp5VI6_BOCNR0qyXGRNWd7LPd0RCYIfEATreSvp08madBkm7N-OonQ7cGzEz_e7Ju_TLXEbDDDwjOA5HHurs/s320/Final%20Yamato.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140648/" target="_blank">Final Yamato</a>, 1983, dir's: Takeshi Shirato, Tomoharu Katsumata, Yoshinobu Nishizaki, Takeshi Shirato<p></p><p><b>Final Yamato</b> is a masterpiece of animation, and it's a good thing too, because it's profoundly useless when it comes to practically everything else. Narrative had never been a strong point of the film series - initially because it was obliged to compile an enormous amount of TV into something that could pass as a feature film and then later because that TV series hadn't really left anywhere to go besides "more of the same but bigger" - and yet <b>Final Yamato </b>manages, somehow, to have at once the least story and the longest running time. Upon release, indeed, it was the longest animated film ever, and it still more or less is, depending on how much you're willing to count director's cuts and additional footage, since <b>Final Yamato </b>originally aired with a post-credits epilogue that added another ten minutes to its already far from breezy two and a half hours. Yet if I were to tell you that the plot amounts to "The Yamato and its crew try to stop evil aliens from drowning the Earth using a passing water planet" I'd be exaggerating only slightly, and then by purposefully leaving out some of the dumber details.</p><p><b>Final Yamato </b>has lots of dumb details, and some of them are pretty fundamental, such as bringing back a long-dead character with some absurdly hand-wavy logic in a scene that manages to strike the perfect worst balance between briskly jumping the shark and piling on enough of an explanation to actually make some sense, or telling us another character who hasn't appeared in the film at any point is dead only to have them pop up a couple of hours later to save the day. And I could go on and on, and probably fill the rest of the review without much trouble, because there's practically nothing in the screenplay - muddled together by too many writers to list - that could definitely be said to work. Even the character drama, which ought to be easy enough this many films in, is fluffed at every turn, despite setting itself such low goals as "character who messes up in the first act slowly regains his confidence" and "couple who we know will end up together do in fact end up together." And given that the characters are dull and one-note at their best, this doesn't leave the cast much to work with, so it's hardly surprising that nobody makes much of an impression.</p><p>This, then, leaves a staggering amount of heavy lifting to be done by the animation, and to a somewhat lesser degree the designs, and to a slightly lesser degree still Hiroshi Miyagawa and Kentarō Haneda's score, and it's saying an awful lot that everything's up to the task. As I said at the start, that's truest of the animation, which is routinely so wildly impressive that it almost doesn't matter what nonsense it's portraying, the more so since the one thing the script does manage not to fluff is chucking out plenty of action that's bound to look cool when presented in the best manner money could buy and skilled craftsmen could draw in the year 1983. I wasn't exactly keeping count, but it's likely that more than half of <b>Final Yamato </b>consists of spectacle, and all of that spectacle is terrific, enough that, if you're willing, it's not terribly hard to ignore the whys and wherefores.</p><p>In all of this, I suspect <b>Final Yamato </b>is precisely what its makers intended and probably in large part what its rabid contemporary fanbase wanted, and as with many an enormous blockbuster, it's arguably better to view the result less as a film and more as some cultural artefact that defies the usual rules of criticism. <b>Final Yamato </b>had to be epic and huge and crazily expensive, and it didn't really have to tell a good story or even to tell a bad story well, and while it would obviously be nice if it <i>had </i>done those things, there's perhaps no point in worrying too much over what might have been when the result is as thrillingly lavish and outrageously over-the-top as this.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>So admittedly not the finest selection we've had, but it's always nice when everything's pretty good, and <b>Prefectural Earth Defense Force </b>is a modest treasure. But let's move on from all that so that I can make some vague predictions about the future of this series! I mean, very vague, but here goes: I almost certainly won't be going past post number 150, if only because it's deeply unlikely there'll be anything left to cover, and by the opposite measure, I would quite like to reach that next big landmark. I suspect the wells will run dry long before that point - we'd be talking another hundred reviews, and I'm deeply unconvinced there are that many titles left that come anywhere near fitting the rules of what I cover - but what's life without stupid, meaningless targets that you'll almost certainly miss? Bring it on, world! Magic number 150 here we come!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p>* I think. Getting accurate information out of Google on a series of Japanese picture books turns out to be surprisingly difficult!</p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-78923089859682333022023-03-17T20:33:00.000+00:002023-03-17T20:33:26.931+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 124<p>One great thing about this blog having a readership of basically nobody is that if you <i>are </i>reading it, and there's something you'd like me to cover, and I can get my hands on it, the odds are it will end up here sooner or later - and so it is with <b>Wild 7</b>, another one of those titles that never made it beyond VHS and which was suggested in the comments a few months back. Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have a classic of sorts (or maybe half a classic?) that got put off until I could rewatch it on Blu-ray, along with a couple of the usual random finds, which leaves us with <b>Wild 7</b>,<b> Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)²</b>,<b> </b><b>K. O. Beast</b>, and <b>Catnapped</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2oeYr5Zc4RAqrZXGbTaa7gT-kDGNml8h37y2PRmUFsDptqPeo2S7_2N3e8dwQWHAE2uDFibr6SadYc64woFifx-fKOKvHa68sF8ZSkrMAkO7PX7A8qbMv87wECvgup0xPp-AuHYs58giWtZY4uOih_hMHVOXUXgBbrjJnTanxqbVN8oIlHNIW-eY/s1130/Wild%207.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2oeYr5Zc4RAqrZXGbTaa7gT-kDGNml8h37y2PRmUFsDptqPeo2S7_2N3e8dwQWHAE2uDFibr6SadYc64woFifx-fKOKvHa68sF8ZSkrMAkO7PX7A8qbMv87wECvgup0xPp-AuHYs58giWtZY4uOih_hMHVOXUXgBbrjJnTanxqbVN8oIlHNIW-eY/s320/Wild%207.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3638066/" target="_blank">Wild 7</a>, 1994, dir: Kiyoshi Egami<p></p><p>The best summary I can come up with for <b>Wild 7</b> is "<b>Dirty Harry</b> remade as a Saturday morning cartoon," which won't be much use to anyone who doesn't remember either <b>Dirty Harry</b> or Saturday morning cartoons, but it's hardly my fault I was born in a different century. From the former we have the whole "when the criminals are so despicable and everything's awful and corrupt and beyond saving, wouldn't it be better if the cops just shot all the bad guys on sight" right-wing fantasy that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever but admittedly makes for cool action scenes. And from the latter we have an air of extreme goofiness that manifests most obviously in how our protagonists - they're a bunch of former crooks handed police badges and turned into effectively a law-enforcement biker gang - have motorcycles that can fly and fire missiles and generally look as if they've wandered in from <b>M.A.S.K</b> or the sillier episodes of <b>G.I. Joe</b>.</p><p>This is, of course, a stupid combination that has no right to work. And by any reasonable rules of storytelling, <b>Wild 7 </b>is a fiery train wreck, unable to settle on a tone for more than two adjacent scenes and constantly undermining its feeble attempts to be political or satirical or whatever the heck it imagines it's up to. This is most evident in the third-act climax, when the bulk of the team - who've been largely sidelined until now in favour of a focus on a single character, making even the title somewhat absurd - have to choose between rescuing one of their own and carrying out their assigned mission. So far, so hackneyed, except we've been led to believe that the whole justification for this nonsense is that the Wild 7 can protect innocents where the regular, non-murdering police can't, and said mission is all about stopping a bunch of innocents being slaughtered, whereas it's been established that no one else is in harm's way in the other scenario. Guess which they go with? And if we were to take <b>Wild 7 </b>seriously, this would all be quite shocking and unpleasant and whatnot - but if we were to take <b>Wild 7 </b>seriously, we'd also have to turn a blind eye to flying motorbikes.</p><p>Technically the OVA has the feel of work by talented but inexperienced animators who are regularly running into their own limitations. I have no idea whether that was the case or not - the inexperienced bit, I mean - but the ambition is unmistakeable: <b>Wild 7 </b>is constantly throwing up daring, elaborate shots without any sign of a guiding ethos beyond, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" And often it <i>is </i>cool, if you're down with the whole air of hyperviolent silliness, but sometimes it's quite shonky, and that manifests most with the character work, which is so all over the place that I'd have struggled to describe most of the cast right after the closing credits. Still, I'd always rather have ambitious animation that routinely gets a bit screwy than bland animation that's reliably OK, and at least Kazushi Umezo's high-energy score is there to level out the uneven tone and remind us that all <b>Wild 7 </b>really wants is for us to have dumb fun.</p><p>Now, where most things that claim to offer dumb fun fall down is in failing to deliver the second part, something <b>Wild 7 </b>is careful not to do, with its puppyish determination to ensure boredom never sets in for the barest fraction of a second. Thankfully, this also makes it easier to not take the violence and general nastiness seriously, compared with something as grimy as, say, <b>Angel Cop</b>, and also to feel OK about not taking it seriously, since <b>Wild 7 </b>is quite capable of undermining its own ridiculous central thesis: give the police heavy weapons, it merrily informs us, and they'd likely cause utter havoc while failing to protect much of anything or anyone. As such, I have no qualms about recommending it and being faintly annoyed about its failure to ever get a DVD release: this very much feels like the sort of thing that ought to have more of a cult following.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169880/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTXJNp9kf8LAT_m9X6sdYg9IQXt-PU1efPT_QGMEAUjrQblrlHVjqLvcucW0J4TFH8A_CazfhGh1gTRK4iwWl-smAEy218qZ3z44uuGd5CJJYJdqBn_57M6qUpwsjgyvDGRcgAFOBtIp5OEWtUzR4PQ_GEdMKN0sihnY6GalJ8P9mNfNimY2GKAcw/s1130/Neon%20Genesis%20Evangelion%20Death%20and%20Rebirth.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTXJNp9kf8LAT_m9X6sdYg9IQXt-PU1efPT_QGMEAUjrQblrlHVjqLvcucW0J4TFH8A_CazfhGh1gTRK4iwWl-smAEy218qZ3z44uuGd5CJJYJdqBn_57M6qUpwsjgyvDGRcgAFOBtIp5OEWtUzR4PQ_GEdMKN0sihnY6GalJ8P9mNfNimY2GKAcw/s320/Neon%20Genesis%20Evangelion%20Death%20and%20Rebirth.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169880/" target="_blank">Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)²</a>, 1997, dir's: Hideaki Anno, Masayuki <p></p><p>I can claim no lack of bias when it comes to <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion</b>, a show I'd count among the seminal works of the twentieth century and consider to be essentially perfect. Even knowing its reputation, it hit me like a juggernaut and dug deep into my head in a way that may not have been altogether pleasant at the time but certainly stayed with me. Is it <i>actually </i>perfect? Heck no! But as with all great art, its imperfections are so inextricably a part of what makes it work that fixing them would jeopardise everything else.</p><p>That brings us to our actual topic, which isn't exactly <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion </b>the series and was the beginning of an attempt to grapple with the most troublesome aspect of the show, to whit the fact that most viewers had been left with barely a clue as to what had gone on and a significant percentage were deeply, even angrily frustrated by its ending. For that was the point - if received wisdom is to be believed - at which the budget issues that had been a growing concern throughout the production became so unignorable that director Hideaki Anno's ambitious plans had to be scaled back and replaced with... Well, look, I personally like that ending plenty, but it absolutely isn't what anyone would have expected from the culmination of what they'd been naively imagining was essentially a giant robot show, that's for sure.</p><p>How much of what did and didn't go into the final two episodes of <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion </b>was down to budgetary constraints is apparently up for debate, and we can say the same for what happened the following year: was Anno really trying to set things right with the fans or just grateful for the opportunity to return to a property he'd poured his heart and soul into, but with a guaranteed audience and some serious cash at his disposal? Whatever the precise reasons, a new feature film was conceived to replace the original ending, and by way of reminding everyone why they'd loved <b>Evangelion </b>(or most of it, anyway) as much as they had, it was ushered into cinemas with a retelling of the first 24 episodes, the chunk that remained canon, followed by the first half hour of the new ending, all under the title <b>Death and Rebirth</b>. That version, however, would be superseded not once but twice, as Anno continued to tinker and as the notion of previewing a film that was separately available started to look increasingly silly, and thus, finally, we arrive at <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)²</b>, that being the current widely available incarnation.</p><p>If that's a lot of setting up, it's because it's both difficult and pointless to talk about <b>Death (True)² </b>without that context. It was, after all, created for a singular purpose, more so than even the usual compilation movie: it seems extremely unlikely that anyone intended it to supplant the series, and the aim was rather for a refresher with just enough new footage and extra information that hardcore fans would feel rewarded for laying down their yen. Granted, that new footage is nice, as is the structuring device that's used to provide some sort of shape to a film edited by what feels more like dream logic than cause and effect, whereby we see core cast members gathering one by one to perform the classical piece that plays over the closing credits, Johann Pachelbel's exceedingly lovely <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Af372EQLck" target="_blank">Canon in D</a>. But even with all that, what's the most you can hope for from a seventy minute retelling of 24 episodes of TV?</p><p>The thing of it is, though, for all its supposedly modest ambitions, <b>Death (True)² </b>works. It comes damnedly close to pulling off something it has no right to even be attempting, namely functioning as a self-contained movie, and all that really stymies that is how the ending was destined to take place, four months later, in an <i>actual </i>movie. It even mostly looks the part, with obvious care taken to make sure the animation was polished enough to be acceptable on a big screen, and it has a head start given that <b>Evangelion </b>was nearly always a gorgeous, stunningly designed show, budgetary issues be damned. It may be a mere retelling, but it's a fine retelling of one of the seminal stories of recent decades, using its nonlinearity and some exceedingly sharp editing to clarify relationships and plot points and treating the impossibility of cramming in everything as an opportunity rather than a constraint. It's a sturdy enough recap that watching it together with <b>The End of Evangelion </b>would be a worthwhile experience even for someone unfamiliar with the series - particularly if they had the new <i>Rebuild of Evangelion</i> films under their belt - and for existing fans, it's a satisfying reminder of what makes <i>Evangelion </i>so profoundly wonderful that oughtn't to be skipped just because they've been there before.</p><div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1NYL2ji0cuajK-rhNVVgYWWYqi5CsoEEZBxdGhSg6JtInWnBGrSEtGyL_R9cThdaL19HZnxW-MDLVLr4_Q9mQBhZzUeYgUsEFsHtPWMClsQJHXOi71lk4dxuhMypzSqZugwje1bfVLkP35G0Jt0PXjoqdjXVD6KdVhgcnQrGHzT4Sa961V-6qtY/s1130/KO%20Beast.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY1NYL2ji0cuajK-rhNVVgYWWYqi5CsoEEZBxdGhSg6JtInWnBGrSEtGyL_R9cThdaL19HZnxW-MDLVLr4_Q9mQBhZzUeYgUsEFsHtPWMClsQJHXOi71lk4dxuhMypzSqZugwje1bfVLkP35G0Jt0PXjoqdjXVD6KdVhgcnQrGHzT4Sa961V-6qtY/s320/KO%20Beast.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104582/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">K. O. Beast</a>, 1992 - 1993, dir: Hiroshi Negishi</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know that greatness was ever on the cards for <b>K. O. Beast</b>: it tries to do too much and none of it's terribly original or necessarily all that compatible. Its sci-fi tale of a divided Earth being warred over by hostile humans and shape-shifting beast people is a variation on themes that were all over anime at this point, the more so once you roll in giant robots and a race to possess ancient technologies from a bygone era that are the key to things that will be awfully vague for most of the running time, though thank goodness <b>K. O. Beast </b>has the decency not to throw out mysteries it isn't willing to eventually answer. Still, it's much of a much, and while a heavy emphasis on goofy comedy isn't the usual approach, that goofy comedy is, in itself, nothing fresh; plus, in the early going, it's not so much incorporated into the sci-fi plot and mecha action as plonked awkwardly alongside it.</div><div><p>But what pushes <b>K. O. Beast</b> up to the level of at least comfortably good is that it was clearly made with a ton of enthusiasm. In ways big and small, it feels cared about, and if that can't quite edge it past those intrinsic flaws, it certainly makes the virtues a lot more noticeable. That's truest of the animation and design work: the former shows its budget but constantly pushes against it, especially when it comes to delivering action scenes that go well past what was strictly necessary for so light-hearted a title, while the latter provides a depth of setting and intricacy of world-building that isn't remotely there in the script. The mecha designs and locations are particularly special, even if that still doesn't add up to much originality - though only now do I realise that the title it most reminded me of, <b>Magic Knight Rayearth</b>, came out a couple of years afterwards, so perhaps I'm not being altogether fair. At any rate, it's not the bad kind of familiarity, more the "this cool design looks a bit like that cool design" sort that's practically a bonus when it comes to anime.</p><p>None of this extends to the characters, who really are types more than individuals and fairly one-note types at that: I genuinely couldn't tell you what bird person Bud's personality is beyond "American, likes girls," and the American part makes no sense at all, while another of the core cast members, Tuttle, gets so little definition that I kept forgetting he was there. Still, once again, appealing designs and obvious enthusiasm make a difference, and I was surprised when I returned to the second half of the story - this was actually two OVAs, one of three episodes and another of four - that I was glad to be reunited with the gang. Actually, the back end is better in every way, using its extra breathing space to let the comedy play more and bleed into the action and sci-fi elements, so that the show largely stops feeling as though it's jolting awkwardly from one to another. And if the plot never fully gets around to being innovative, it does play out satisfyingly, so that everything ends on a positive note.</p><p>And I appreciate that "better than the sum of its parts" isn't the most glowing praise, but here it does mean quite a bit, the more so when none of those parts are bad unless some mild derivativeness makes you especially angry. Really, the only thing that actively counts against <b>K. O. Beast</b> for the person who quite likes the sound of a goofy sci-fi show with unexpectedly good production values and not quite enough to distinguish it is <i>The Right Stuf International</i>'s mercenary decision to spread it across three DVDs, making it that bit harder and more expensive to track down than it ought to be. The good news is that you can still find copies kicking about: I got the lot new from <a href="https://www.animecornerstore.com/" target="_blank">Robert's Anime Corner</a>, who I'm happy to use this opportunity to plug, since finding pristine copies of a long-out-of-print title and getting them delivered just in time for my birthday was one of the year's nicer surprises.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114689/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG5yUih--f1x22p5TUKrPQ6u0rgSUkWADmeSk0Yw-gSzEyRohePiRmro6ZlQ1_I50t6g7iSywpHVge9Ry24V1ejbbxP_ujQxmtAjh7IfR5gFnM1xUNL-haeJZqus4yJzZxdhXCtr_8rVo1FFvqTbPGVRcGKH2hCZsV3bbxLYh1sABcks1yO2Umf90/s1130/Catnapped.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG5yUih--f1x22p5TUKrPQ6u0rgSUkWADmeSk0Yw-gSzEyRohePiRmro6ZlQ1_I50t6g7iSywpHVge9Ry24V1ejbbxP_ujQxmtAjh7IfR5gFnM1xUNL-haeJZqus4yJzZxdhXCtr_8rVo1FFvqTbPGVRcGKH2hCZsV3bbxLYh1sABcks1yO2Umf90/s320/Catnapped.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114689/" target="_blank">Catnapped!</a>, 1995, dir: Takashi Nakamura<p></p><p>I'd never suggest that <i>Studio Ghibli</i>'s outsized influence on the medium of Japanese animated family films is a bad thing, but I do strongly suspect it's the case that it's led to the favouring of certain types of stories and subgenres over others. And one such casualty has been - well, I don't even quite know how to define it, really, but it seems to me that there's a proud history in Japan of animated kids' movies that are first and foremost about chucking as much barely connected stuff at the screen as they possibly can, with preferably those wild flights of fancy extending to the level of the animation itself, so that worries like realism and consistency are infinitely less important than doing neat stuff that simply wouldn't be possible in live action.</p><p>I could offer up specific examples, but I think that anyone who's seen more than a couple of children's anime films from prior to the nineties will have an idea of what I'm on about; indeed, go back far enough and it was probably more the rule than the exception. But even by 1995, they were a dying breed, and I've struggled to think of any examples at all beyond that year: ironically, the only one I can come up with is <i>Ghibli</i>'s own delightful and underrated <b>The Cat Returns</b> from 2002, which might almost be seen as a homage to our present subject and even shares the precise same running time of 75 minutes.</p><p>That's an important detail when it comes to <b>Catnapped! </b>- yes, we got there eventually! - because any more of what it has to offer would run the risk of leaving the average viewer with their brains dribbling out of their ears. <b>The Cat Returns </b>is random and frenetic, and so are classic works in this same mode such as <b>Animal Treasure Island</b>, but they have nothing whatsoever on <b>Catnapped!</b>,<b> </b>which spends all of about five minutes pretending to be relatively normal before it leaps onto the highest diving board and hurls itself into a deep, deep swimming pool full of crazy.</p><p>As such, any attempt to sum up the plot beyond "two kids get whisked into a world of humanoid cats" would start to sound like nonsense. <b>Catnapped! </b>actually has a bunch of plot - really, quite a staggering amount for that slim running time, including at least a couple of lengthy flashbacks to fill us in on major details and to flesh out important characters - but it's never really <i>about </i>that plot, which is perhaps why it defies summary so thoroughly. The story is mostly just a medium for whatever ideas and imagery the filmmakers felt the need to throw in at any given moment, and most of it seems to have been geared toward the end goal of delivering the most delirious climax they could concoct. And if you're at all like me, this is kind of a lot at first, and even slightly off-putting, until the moment a few minutes in when you realise you really are best off just enjoying the ride.</p><p>What's perhaps strangest about a film in which more or less everything is strange is that, somehow, it does carve out for itself quite a satisfying narrative, or at least an emotional core and enough character development that it's not <i>just </i>a nonstop stream of outlandish imagery. Still, there's rarely an instance when that's not what <b>Catnapped! </b>is primarily up to, and how much you'll get on with it definitely depends on how appealing that sounds. This is all the truer because the character designs seem to be purposefully skewed toward the odd and faintly discomforting, and the animation, while consistently good, is rarely quite up to the level of what it's striving to convey, so that the joy comes more from what's being shown than how. <b>Catnapped! </b>is absolutely the sort of film you have to meet halfway and on its own terms, even the sort that feels like its creators didn't care all that much whether everyone liked it so long as a handful of people were on its peculiar wavelength, but for that select audience, it's sure to be quite the delight.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>It's a big ask this late in the game that everything I cover in a post should turn out to be any good, so I for one am cherishing this batch and four titles I genuinely enjoyed, with both <b>Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)² </b>and <b>Catnapped </b>brushing up against greatness and <b>Wild 7 </b>and <b>K. O. Beast </b>both being enjoyable in spite of some hard-to-miss flaws. And only now does it occur to me that I should have saved this one for next time, what with post number 125 being something of an anniversary and all. Oh well! I'm sure I'll come up with something...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-13313533328298325582023-02-08T18:46:00.001+00:002023-02-08T18:46:26.023+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 123<p>Wait, there's more <i>Gundam</i>? I mean, I know there's more <i>Gundam</i>, if there's one thing you can say with certainly about possibly the most expansive science-fiction franchise in existence, it's that there'll always be more, but until not so long ago I was labouring under the misapprehension that I'd covered all of what fell under this series' purview, that being the films and OVAs released prior to 2000.</p><p>Admittedly, I wasn't that far wrong, except for <b>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083</b>, which I'd had my eye on for a while. But then along came <i>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam</i>, or more specifically the film adaptations that were released in 2005 and 2006. Now, obviously both of those years are a good bit later than 2000, but the original <b>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam </b>TV series they were drawing upon wasn't, and that leaves us with a definite grey area - one I've gone and ignored by reviewing them anyway. Which means that up this time we have <b>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars</b>, <b>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Love is the Pulse of the Stars, </b>and<b> Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory...</b></p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435202/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48LyGII1xDdQse5RocNO_0V26OW724hTY_zmoDERWjHNrOpBGC6_IVHLKLjNgCpnZxlgI8L7sJtKJ8G0MyBLni8kqY6WGofRWcXd1m6By80kA5tN93iMVYmJNBrd6iyidnWvT3wgh6nJMFGcroY3un1lzEJHnVrrUwfCWpx9ssRZHmQoPkj0Tgwk/s500/Mobile%20Suit%20Zeta%20Gundam%20Heirs%20to%20the%20Stars.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="354" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48LyGII1xDdQse5RocNO_0V26OW724hTY_zmoDERWjHNrOpBGC6_IVHLKLjNgCpnZxlgI8L7sJtKJ8G0MyBLni8kqY6WGofRWcXd1m6By80kA5tN93iMVYmJNBrd6iyidnWvT3wgh6nJMFGcroY3un1lzEJHnVrrUwfCWpx9ssRZHmQoPkj0Tgwk/s320/Mobile%20Suit%20Zeta%20Gundam%20Heirs%20to%20the%20Stars.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435202/" target="_blank">Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars</a>, 2005, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino<p></p><p>I can barely imagine the thinking that went into <i>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation</i>. Oh, not the notion of producing a trilogy of compilation movies of what, by the start of the twenty-first century, was already established as being among the highlights of the vast edifice that is <i>Gundam</i>; given that we've already covered the compilation movies of the original series and rated them pretty highly, that bit's perfectly understandable. And reanimating them, well, that's not quite so easy to get your head around, since you'd suppose part of the point would be that you didn't have to make three new movies from scratch, but <i>Zeta Gundam</i> was heading rapidly toward the big 2-0, and as good as it may have looked by eighties TV standards, there was a gulf between that and what you could chuck into a cinema. No, the unfathomable part is how the solution settled on was to reanimate only some of the films, with percentages ranging from a third to four fifths.</p><p>Compilation movies have become almost standard practice in the years since: it's almost rarer for a popular anime show not to get cut down, retouched, and thrust into theatres. But what Tomino and co attempted was very much not retouching or anything close. A heck of a lot had changed since <i>Zeta Gundam </i>first aired and apparently it never occurred to anyone to disguise the fact, because it would be hard indeed to mistake the old footage for the new. The TV stuff looks decidedly ropey, the more so for being blown up to fit a cinematic aspect ratio, and the 2000s stuff is nicer but also very of its time, meaning plenty of shots with that awkward glossiness of animation made by people still fighting the contributions of computers as much as they were aided by them. But what really sucks is the transitions between the two, or rather, the lack thereof: while things settle down somewhat toward the end, where the bulk of the new material is, lengthy stretches chop from one to the other with no rhyme or reason or logic as to why, say, two people having a fairly uneventful conversation needed reanimating at all.</p><p>On that last count, the answer is surely that <i>A New Translation</i>, as its name tells us up front, isn't quite the <i>Zeta Gundam </i>of old. Having never encountered the show before, I'm not well placed to comment, but the internet tells me that there were changes made both big and small, and that's presumably why we get shiny 2000s animation for scenes that don't obviously warrant it. Then again, keeping track of what matters on a minute-by-minute basis is such a task that it's possible I was just underestimating the significance of certain conversations: this is, after all, a conflation of one third of 50 episodes of TV, and it's not even an especially long film.</p><p>To say the results are confusing is an understatement: <b>Heirs to the Stars</b> does most of its storytelling at the most breakneck pace. Nobody relays details they wouldn't have good reason to, which often means vital information arrives long after you'd expect, and rare are the moments when you entirely feel you grasp anyone's motivations, the more so since we have good reason to suspect numerous cast members. There <i>is </i>a pattern that emerges whereby every few minutes events slow down enough for your brain to catch up on the essentials, and that combines with a sort of osmosis that lets the bigger picture gradually soak in, as the repetition of names and faces and concepts counteracts the general chaos. It's mostly frustrating but sometimes exciting, since the effect - and from my experience of Tomino's work, I doubt this was accidental - is less like watching an anime show about a space war and more like learning the essentials of said space war by skipping news channels.</p><p>To some extent, that's all well and good for the tale being told. However, while we can make excuses for <b>Heirs to the Stars </b>and even propose that its flaws are more like features, that doesn't do a lot to improve the experience of actually watching the thing. It's draining and bewildering, and who wants to be drained and bewildered by their entertainment, especially when there isn't enough to compensate? Much of the action borders on incoherence, and the better sequences are backloaded, meaning a lot of damage has been done by the time they arrive. The politicking is more interesting in theory, except that, while it's fairly simple once you get your head around it, it's delivered in the most headache-inducing manner possible. As with all of <b>Heirs to the Stars</b>,<b> </b>the<b> </b>good stuff is definitely good and the spine is pretty great, but that delivery turns it into work, and I'd be hard pressed to suggest it's worth the bother.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBrLUyKoh-gahEydWREvBW37Lc0zKqoFCzFc-SuV0fUC0zitV-645WK02TPA7w_8voPpO59M5ivrr6lgozQkq0PmDtF3PTjozVM06A3tDmiWEdjgHQvWDclZodCqLEXTz_poFglGtJFS3tM5NJI7esZxDhxCclflicgrixVL35x1ghaTC4kNHeqII/s1130/Mobile%20Suit%20Zeta%20Gundam%20Lovers.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBrLUyKoh-gahEydWREvBW37Lc0zKqoFCzFc-SuV0fUC0zitV-645WK02TPA7w_8voPpO59M5ivrr6lgozQkq0PmDtF3PTjozVM06A3tDmiWEdjgHQvWDclZodCqLEXTz_poFglGtJFS3tM5NJI7esZxDhxCclflicgrixVL35x1ghaTC4kNHeqII/s320/Mobile%20Suit%20Zeta%20Gundam%20Lovers.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468812/" target="_blank">Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers</a>, 2005, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino<p></p><p>What struck me most about <b>Lovers </b>is how consistently it manages to fix some aspects of <b>Heirs to the Stars </b>while breaking others in a fashion that does barely a thing to nudge the overall quality in one direction or another. So, for example, there's considerably more new animation this time around, and the integration is generally better, and for that matter even the original TV footage seems to have improved somewhat or perhaps was chosen with more care. But then the new footage is generally less impressive, to the point where I occasionally found myself struggling to tell which was which. There's also some prominent use of CG, something that was hardly guaranteed to go well back in 2005 and doesn't particularly here, aggravating the general tendency of the "modern day" footage to be too glassily smooth and polished. On balance, the shift towards visual consistency probably has to be regarded as an improvement, and if nothing else it means we get some action sequences that are legible and thus reasonably exciting, but it's less than I was hoping for when I noted the ratios of old to new footage.</p><p>On the plot front, meanwhile, some effort has gone into addressing the aimlessness that afflicted <b>Heirs to the Stars</b>. The answer <b>Lovers </b>brings - look, it's right there in the title! - is to focus on the relationship side of things, which <b>Heirs to the Stars </b>largely neglected. Sometimes this pays off, in that there are lengthy sequences where <b>Lovers </b>behaves like a proper film, focusing on the interpersonal conflicts of a manageable bunch of characters in a handful of locations rather than batting madly around the solar system while flinging names and faces at us seemingly at random. The trouble is, judging by what I've seen of his work and certainly by what's on offer here, Tomino is awful at writing relationships, and the central one, between reliably dull protagonist Camille and enemy pilot Four Murasame, is no hook to hang a movie on. Possibly it would have worked better with the breathing room of multiple episodes, but it's hard to wish for more scenes of incoherent teenage romance. Four reminded me strongly of Quess from <b>Char's Counterattack</b>, one of my least favourite characters anywhere in anime, and if she's not quite that bad, her actions are just as unmotivated by anything that could be considered reasonable or believable human behaviour.</p><p>Then again, perhaps Camille secretly found her as irritating as I did, since within minutes of their earth-shaking romance reaching its inevitably tragic ending, he's making out with someone else - again, presumably a consequence of cramming hours of footage into ninety-some minutes, but it doesn't make things less absurd in the moment. And what's worse, the price we pay for this slightly more lucid change in direction on one front is that the wider conflict hardly makes a shred of sense: I could offer no better summary of the plot than "The good people try and stop the bad people from doing bad things while running away a lot." A degree of that probably comes down to my fuzzy memories of part one, but contemporary audiences had waited five months between entries and it was twenty years since the TV show had aired, so I reckon I can be forgiven for a gap of a couple of weeks, and I don't feel bad about suggesting that the fault lies in some thoroughly inarticulate storytelling.*</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8tcASlot_aXhUSoKUtrQW49bB975J6R8tbNHe8h0LUYeNxBzy8w-emIb6-3ZoFoLwZ2tNrNSL2urdlw2z1GpmQmguAS9Si5UECmTiGFVVTPqn8FajmBf2JXpjTt6mYQYmhL9lOyG-ApGI27QpWPJZnPSG5m957h4bFGuEikobzEQvT2ahCCd74rQ/s1130/Mobile%20Suit%20Zeta%20Gundam%20Love%20is%20the%20Pulse%20of%20the%20Stars.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8tcASlot_aXhUSoKUtrQW49bB975J6R8tbNHe8h0LUYeNxBzy8w-emIb6-3ZoFoLwZ2tNrNSL2urdlw2z1GpmQmguAS9Si5UECmTiGFVVTPqn8FajmBf2JXpjTt6mYQYmhL9lOyG-ApGI27QpWPJZnPSG5m957h4bFGuEikobzEQvT2ahCCd74rQ/s320/Mobile%20Suit%20Zeta%20Gundam%20Love%20is%20the%20Pulse%20of%20the%20Stars.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488584/" target="_blank">Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, Love is the Pulse of the Stars</a>, 2006, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino<p></p><p>I'd naively hoped that this last entry might be the point at which the series really began to pick up, perhaps became the original <i>Gundam </i>movie trilogy managed to end on a high note that made it feel retrospectively more like a trio of proper movies than a massive quantity of TV footage chopped, often clunkily, together. No such luck: despite containing the largest percentage of shiny new twenty-first-century footage, <b>Love is the Pulse of the Stars</b> is comfortably the worst of three films that only ever succeeded in clawing their way up to fairly good.</p><p><b>Love is the Pulse of the Stars </b>doesn't manage that much. Oh, maybe there's the odd scene, but if there was, I refuse to be blamed for missing it, since the hundred-minute run time is an almighty slog: with two movies of back story, countless characters major and minor, and not one iota of an attempt made to re-establish anyone or anything, keeping the barest grasp of what was going on was such an ordeal that I had no energy left for discerning okay-ness from mediocrity.</p><p>By the end, it's tough to imagine that there could ever have been a worthwhile three movie adaptation of <i>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam</i>, at least with this particular approach. There are elements to this one I personally found wholly off-putting, like a drift into vague spiritualism in a series that's always struck me as avoiding that sort of thing hard, and I could definitely have done without the bizarre "The Zeta Gundam is powered by love or maybe ghosts or some damn thing" twist we get in the back half. But there is certainly good stuff in here; the problem is that it's so rarely foregrounded. With the running time hobbled by the determination to re-animate so much of the footage, there isn't room to balance the wider conflict, which is on a particularly enormous scale this time around, and once again that means a focus on interpersonal dramas that simply aren't that interesting. It really does reach ludicrous heights here, as giant robot fight after giant robot fight is reduced to clashes of personality between people who were once friends, lovers, enemies, or a combination of the three, and always seem to somehow know who they're up against. Meanwhile, the whole interplanetary war that you might naively imagine would be the point is sidelined so hard that I truly don't think it's followable without having seen the series.</p><p>So are there any compensations? Not really, no. For all that there's theoretically 80% new footage here (which, yes, makes this vastly more a film from 2006 than a TV series from the eighties, but it's too late to worry about that!) the animation is, on a whole, that bit weaker. This possibly has something to do with just how much <b>Love is the Pulse of the Stars </b>is mobile suit battles, something Tomino is bafflingly bad at directing given how much experience he'd clocked up by this point. He routinely acts as though space is a flat plane, the older footage continues to suffer from being awkwardly zoomed in to suit the cinematic aspect ratio, and the balance of CG and traditional animation is never quite right, as it rarely would be for another half decade or so. So for all that the visuals are the strongest aspect - after, perhaps, a noticeably more novel and interesting score - they're not the sort of strength that could hope to make up for some disastrous narrative weaknesses. I'm sort of glad I sat through <i>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation </i>to fill in a gap or two in my <i>Gundam </i>knowledge, but I can't think of any other reason to devote five hours of your life to these movies.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159567/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivBRrydoTjd07bq0Mv1GNtP5YUsqxpSIiTceVC5qm6OYwGhkYm4zKbIHBB0ROoiN2n5KQfQcHl1h1lCCvlsCZ9_LpJdj5T3Og7liTGUNOo_9w_IoajhE5IwFhIsDH0JqaDduGykS9aDuWXNA3zv2T154DbW7xM_oeWYb4bOGtItjnA5XPi6SWTnqU/s1130/Mobile%20Suit%20Gundam%200083%20Stardust%20Memory.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivBRrydoTjd07bq0Mv1GNtP5YUsqxpSIiTceVC5qm6OYwGhkYm4zKbIHBB0ROoiN2n5KQfQcHl1h1lCCvlsCZ9_LpJdj5T3Og7liTGUNOo_9w_IoajhE5IwFhIsDH0JqaDduGykS9aDuWXNA3zv2T154DbW7xM_oeWYb4bOGtItjnA5XPi6SWTnqU/s320/Mobile%20Suit%20Gundam%200083%20Stardust%20Memory.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159567/" target="_blank">Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory</a>, 1991 - 1992, dir: Mitsuko Kase, Takashi Imanishi<p></p><p>Throughout most of my watching of <b>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory</b>, I was confident I'd be starting this review by declaring that I'd gone from some of the weakest <i>Gundam </i>entries I've encountered to one of the finest, if not the very best. And now, coming out of its thirteenth and final episode, I still think that's the case, I'm just disappointed that I'm having to hedge that statement a little. So let's be clear up front: <b>Stardust Memory </b>is superb, both top-tier <i>Gundam </i>and top-tier science fiction in general, not to mention an extremely high water mark for animation and one of the better OVA series ever produced. It's excellent stuff and I recommend it, I'm merely sad to not be recommending it unreservedly is all.</p><p>But that start - oh my! The first episode, in which the first of two experimental Gundam units is stolen from a base on Earth and rash greenhorn test pilot Kou Uraki borrows the other in an attempt to retrieve it, is as near to flawless as you could dare to hope. And what's more astonishing is that the level of quality barely slips for its immediate successors, building out the cast and context with slick economy while never losing track of the core conflict and mixing compelling character drama with absolutely thrilling action. Really, I'd struggle to point to anywhere in the first two thirds where a foot is inarguably put wrong; my heart sank slightly when the conflict left Earth for outer space, since, for me, <i>Gundam </i>is always at its best when it's not just mobile suits whizzing around against a black backdrop, but the actual dip in quality is negligible, in large part because the storytelling is so good that the shift feels both natural and necessary.</p><p><b>Stardust Memory</b> will eventually take that dip, and I could point to the exact moment at which it happens, but I won't because it would be both an enormous spoiler and somewhat unfair: the scene in question is superb in its own right and the partial reboot of the narrative that follows is, again, both earned and dramatically satisfying. The problem is merely that it pushes <b>Stardust Memory </b>from a track that felt genuinely fresh onto one that's more familiar <i>Gundam </i>fare. Familiar <i>Gundam </i>fare delivered superlatively, no doubt about it, and yet there's an awful lot of <i>Gundam </i>in existence, and there are beats that had been hit many a time by 1991 and would go on to be hit many times more, and so the early freshness is all the more exhilarating, just as its lack is that bit more frustrating - though even then, <b>Stardust Memory </b>is canny enough to use the experienced viewer's assumptions against them to pull off some real shocks.</p><p>It helps, obviously, that <b>Stardust Memory </b>both looks and sounds extraordinarily good. Indeed, if <i>Gundam</i>'s ever reliably looked better than this, it's outside of my experience. Obviously, that means that the giant-robots-fighting stuff is magnificently animated, but so is everything else, from the most mundane conversations through to the most trivial of character details. Neither Kase nor Imanishi ever get particularly show-offy in their direction, but it's purely because they don't need to when every shot feels like showing off. Chuck in some left-field soundtrack choices that feel like they ought not to work at all and end up as a triumph of constructing a unique mood and you have the sort of show that you genuinely could enjoy without following the plot purely for its overwhelming quality.</p><p>So, yes, it's great, and I'd feel terrible if I left anyone thinking overwise. It's only that a <b>Stardust Memory</b> that had stuck to its early guns and been largely insulated from the wider <i>Gundam-</i>verse in the manner of other highlights like <b>War in the Pocket</b> and <b>The 08th MS Team </b>would have been both a new favourite and an easy recommendation to more or less everyone, whereas the one we have, which starts out as that and ends up getting awfully busy with filling plot gaps from other shows, isn't quite there. If you're a <i>Gundam </i>fan, then obviously this is indispensable, and likewise if you're a <i>Gundam </i>casual like me, and if you don't even know what a Gundam is but love sci-fi and outstanding animation, then this should be high on the list of franchise entries you really need to sit down with regardless one of these days.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>It gives me no pleasure to be mean about <i>Gundam</i>, the rare series that has absolutely earned its out-sized cultural impact by being far more often excellent than not. But then, it gave me no pleasure to watch <i>Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation</i>, so what can you do, eh? Still, I'm very glad we got to say our last goodbye** to the <i>Gundam</i>-verse with an entry that shows off so much of what makes it so special.</p><p>Next up: hopefully some stuff that's actually definitely from the nineties!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p><div><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></p><p>* If more evidence were needed, I'd point to the crucial scene that relies on two children hidden in a spacesuit failing to hear or even notice a heated conversation taking place roughly a metre from their heads.</p><p>** OK, so there might be a <b>Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 </b>compilation movie to get to at some point...</p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-82990122397095430962022-12-19T20:53:00.004+00:002022-12-19T20:59:47.475+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 122<p> Normally, I'd be feeling bad about rambling on about another thoroughly obscure bunch of titles, but a) it's not as if there isn't worse to come if I don't give up on this madness soon and b) this is the rare post that throws up something I'd never heard of and ended up slightly loving and c) the one title here that's remotely well known is a return to a franchise we'd have been better off forgetting all about. Yes, it's the end of <i>Urotsukidôji</i> - at least for our purposes - and of a journey that began with <b>Legend of the Overfiend </b>practically at the beginning of this series. Can the finale redeem everything that's come before it? Well, let's just say I'm not sure it's the worst of the batch from amongst <b>Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction</b>, <b>Magical Twilight</b>, <b>Gravitation: Lyrics of Love</b>, and <b>Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4Hk3CIfDFCwQZghWY4WxeEN4WFBREHIKA9EFfcv27vEQE1tH1DB8KhuLtV31rIqWOOLcZY-vTLuSV1buEYQuQrWihNoepPqOZHhsltmKhyo-TusdhJJxloz-Tsuh4t6Y-LOzvuqsePnRVi3f4aVK0D28Wr6NHUrl6aM5Qz89eK633SnEitWgxJYw/s1130/Riki-Oh%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4Hk3CIfDFCwQZghWY4WxeEN4WFBREHIKA9EFfcv27vEQE1tH1DB8KhuLtV31rIqWOOLcZY-vTLuSV1buEYQuQrWihNoepPqOZHhsltmKhyo-TusdhJJxloz-Tsuh4t6Y-LOzvuqsePnRVi3f4aVK0D28Wr6NHUrl6aM5Qz89eK633SnEitWgxJYw/s320/Riki-Oh%202.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203074/" target="_blank">Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction</a>, 1990, dir: Satoshi Dezaki<p></p><p>I remember musing last time as to why no "proper" distributor* ever picked up the two <i>Riki-Oh</i> OVAs that were released in 1989 and 1990 respectively. Well, here, no doubt, we have part of our answer: <b>Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction </b>is abysmal. And normally I hate to pre-empt a conclusion this far into a review, but there's no use dancing around the facts on this occasion, since I'm not going to have anything nice to say. No, wait, the closing song is OK. But that really is it.</p><p>It shouldn't need pointing out that <b>Riki-Oh 2</b> is the sequel to <b>Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell</b>, yet it's easy to imagine the viewer who could get all the way through the latter without realising it had anything to do with the former. That sort of thing isn't altogether uncommon in the world of manga adaptations, where it makes sense to focus on discreet arcs that are a fit for your running time whether or not they necessarily link together, yet it feels as though there ought to be <i>some </i>connective tissue - heck, the protagonist being recognisably the same in all but a handful of shots would be a start. And this is especially weird given that both share director Dezaki, a creator of modest but definite talents who apparently forgot everything he knew in the span of a year. <b>The Wall of Hell </b>was no masterpiece, but it had style, and that style carried it a long way, injecting energy and tension into some basically schlocky material.</p><p>Here he does the opposite, and while I don't think we should be throwing too much shade in Dezaki's direction, it's certainly the case that more could have been done with this setup. It's overly busy and definitely too reliant on coincidence and storytelling shortcuts, but it's not hard to see from what we get here how the material might have played out better, as it no doubt did in the manga. Following his escape from the hellish prison of the first OVA (I presume), our hero Riki is intent on tracking down his long-lost brother (I think, maybe) who he abandoned when they were children. This quest takes him to the southernmost cape of Japan (I'm completely guessing) where, in a distressing bit of fiction foreshadowing reality, a malfunctioning nuclear plant has left a chunk of the country supposedly uninhabitable - though in the world of <i>Riki-Oh</i>, that just means it's been taken over by evil sorts as a base for their vague but no doubt nefarious plans.</p><p>Let's cover one example of how spectacularly shabby <b>Child of Destruction</b>'s narrative delivery is and move on. It's self-evident that Riki's abandonment of his brother is the beating heart of this material, yet here's how that vital moment plays out on screen: the two are playing hide and seek and it's Riki's turn to hide; as he's running off, a limousine pulls up and the old man inside says, "Wouldn't you like to come and live with me, though?" which Riki agrees to without a second thought; as the car drives off, he sees his brother sitting waiting in the snow and looks mildly troubled; and that's our lot. So far as it's possible to judge by what we're shown, Riki left his little brother to die because he kind of forgot about him, and wouldn't it be rude to ask the kindly stranger who's just effectively kidnapped you if there might not be room in his mansion for another random kid?</p><p>With no one willing to find space in a 45-minute OVA to explain the lynchpin of the whole plot, this never had much hope of succeeding on a story level. However, I've had kind words to say about many a narratively disastrous piece of anime before now, and so we return to why I don't know that this shambles was altogether Dezaki's fault, for all that he did nothing to right it: <b>Child of Destruction </b>evidently had no budget, and its animation is horrible, and that horrible animation kills every scene stone dead. There's stuff that could be fun - the action and gore were clearly intended to be - but apparently there wasn't even cash to splash on what ought to have been highlights, since they're as visually malnourished as the rest, constantly relying on the most obvious shortcuts. And that pushes <b>Child of Destruction</b> down from being merely bad to the realms of face-slappingly bad, because what sort of early nineties OVA can't find a few yen to make its outrageous gore and over-the-top fights look cool? Fail that and you've failed everything, which, as I've hopefully established, is precisely what <b>Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction </b>does.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110436/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8L8hGfX_f2AmjwxQbYzEfhSHNEExBfLAcqX6nHZBjYSx02RQ3H1ze0ljEZm94GinDQc0KmydgEcZsJPR5xskX1jdGnwPMl3BnDK0NYq8ULO5eNXzOsXf4iD4-VeZSkKNYK77phM8UW8NgTZujTmkhgTFRA2A44UYZQFv-UlcEmYUraMnTxJ3H9kc/s1130/Magical%20Twilight.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8L8hGfX_f2AmjwxQbYzEfhSHNEExBfLAcqX6nHZBjYSx02RQ3H1ze0ljEZm94GinDQc0KmydgEcZsJPR5xskX1jdGnwPMl3BnDK0NYq8ULO5eNXzOsXf4iD4-VeZSkKNYK77phM8UW8NgTZujTmkhgTFRA2A44UYZQFv-UlcEmYUraMnTxJ3H9kc/s320/Magical%20Twilight.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110436/" target="_blank">Magical Twilight</a>, 1994, dir: Yoshiaki Kobayashi<p></p><p>In spite of appearances, the reason I swore blind I wouldn't review hentai here and then went on to review quite a lot of hentai is not, in fact, that I secretly just wanted to watch a load of hentai and talk about it in public. No, it's more that, compared with most of what we might categorise as pornography, the boundary between hentai and regular anime is an awfully vague and blurry one, and there's sometimes no sure way to separate one from the other. But on this occasion I'm pushing that argument about as far as it will go, because, yes, <b>Magical Twilight </b>is most definitely hentai, and yes, I knew that going in, and the only real excuse I have is that numerous reviews suggested it was good enough that, if you squinted a bit, you could watch it as plain old anime.</p><p>That's sort of true but mostly not: there's a ton of explicit sex in <b>Magical Twilight </b>and, compared with some of the titles we've covered here, it's hard to imagine how you could snip it out and cobble anything remotely coherent from the remainder. Though for the first episode, anyway, this seems like it might not altogether be the case: the basic setup, with white witch Chippie and her promiscuous frenemy Irene sent down to the human world to accomplish the practical part of their witching exams by ingratiating themselves with a randomly chosen human, could easily be the setup for your standard comic nineties OVA were events played out a little differently. This is less true of the two-part follow up, which relies heavily on Chippie's now-love-interest Tsukasa getting jiggy with every remotely appropriate female he lays eyes on, yet its heart remains in the world of romantic comedy and so does the bulk of the material.</p><p>Marking on the exceedingly slidey scale of vintage hentai, the sexy stuff is relatively innocuous, which means there's a bad witch who gets sexually assaulted into giving up on her quest to kill Tsukasa and a teenaged girl who wants to sleep with him because she watched her mum sleeping with him and got awfully horny as a result, and actually, now that I think about it, probably more of the sex is non-consensual than not, though that generally means Irene using her magic to have her way with Tsukasa, and there's no indication that he's particularly traumatised by the experience. Again judging entirely by the standards of nineties hentai, I guess that leaves us somewhere around "only a bit gross"? At any rate, the animation is respectable enough that these look like real people conducting recognisable acts that horny naked people might get up to, which is by no means a given, so I'm willing to suppose that as hentai it's fairly successful, if perhaps a bit on the unimaginative side.</p><p>Which leaves us with everything else, and as often seems to be the case, the everything else fares a good deal better. <b>Magical Twilight </b>is fairly half-hearted as pornography, whereas as a comedic fantasy it's entirely solid and occasionally much better than that. The animation is respectable, the character designs are appealing, and there are a handful of properly good gags, most memorably a magically assisted game of ping-pong that gets wildly out of hand. Sad to say, though, it's still too committed to being hentai to make the most of its fun setup and characters and as hentai it devotes a lot of time to scenes that are staged largely identically, and so, at the end of ninety minutes, it finds itself sat uncomfortably between two rather nondescript stools. If a fantasy comedy with lots of generic but competently handled sex scenes is the one thing in the world you're craving, it's hard to see how this would majorly disappoint, but for the rest of us, there isn't enough here that's at all special.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0776778/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSk10aZqvcwQ44BSSVscWDtQjgUlIZamossJCiWiHNPffGc7CJO01ulqooE8-7N-Niz2h4NZ6vlM9yzfU4TCjPhCKYQQVxWmj9pz_4NUXCVD8kdFtGoXeG6q5uJm3Thd9po0Q0T-XWZEMCCL0lTKq-5N9adBzEoZ62HC9Krjo3PW6Pff5yf3zjltA/s1130/Gravitation%20-%20Lyrics%20of%20Love.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSk10aZqvcwQ44BSSVscWDtQjgUlIZamossJCiWiHNPffGc7CJO01ulqooE8-7N-Niz2h4NZ6vlM9yzfU4TCjPhCKYQQVxWmj9pz_4NUXCVD8kdFtGoXeG6q5uJm3Thd9po0Q0T-XWZEMCCL0lTKq-5N9adBzEoZ62HC9Krjo3PW6Pff5yf3zjltA/s320/Gravitation%20-%20Lyrics%20of%20Love.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0776778/" target="_blank">Gravitation: Lyrics of Love</a>, 1999, dir: Shin'ichi Watanabe<p></p><p>One of the nice things about this whole reviewing-abolutely-all-of-the-'90s-anime deal is that I've been obliged to give attention to a lot of titles that, for one reason or another, I'd otherwise have skipped. And OK, that hasn't always been a positive since some of that stuff was eminently skippable, but it's nice to sometimes have your preconceptions proved wrong and be entertained by something you wouldn't normally have given the time of day. Such is the case with <b>Gravitation: Lyrics of Love</b>, and a cover that does practically nothing to sell what lies within to the viewer seeking anything besides romance between a couple of unusually pretty (well, unusually by non-anime standards) guys.</p><p>Now, it's not that <b>Lyrics of Love - </b>a subtitle nearly as off-putting as the cover art! - <i>doesn't</i> offer that. Our hero Shuichi Shindo, lead singer of the band Bad Luck, is certainly head over heels for author Yuki, and though it's not altogether evident for much of the running time, there are clues enough that Yuki feels the same way, albeit in a more stand-offish and cynical fashion. For Shuichi's love is very much of the puppyish, unfiltered kind, and so it is that, as we join the story, a period of coolness on Yuki's part has sent him into such a spiral of misery that he's incapable of writing lyrics for the band's upcoming new album. While that mightn't normally be an issue, since everyone else would be happy to bring in a songwriter from outside, Shuichi is just as outspoken when it comes to his musical career, and he's already bragged to the media that nobody but him can do Bad Luck's music justice.</p><p>So we have hot guys being in love, not to mention a fair bit of lust - which is quite refreshing given how much anime of the period tends to veer towards prudishness when it's not being out-and-out hentai - and we have music as a central story element, and all of that you could certainly work out from the DVD art and accompanying blurb. But that <b>Lyrics of Love </b>happens to also, maybe even primarily, be a comedy? That you'd never guess, which sucks when what we have here is among the funnier comedies to come out of anime in the nineties. Indeed, it's all the funnier for being ostensibly not much of a comedy at all, since much of the best humour rises out of situations that aren't, on the face of it, especially humorous. The benefit is that it gets to be wildly goofy at points without ever <i>just </i>being goofy; somehow, the push and pull of extreme silliness and high emotions works in harmony rather than opposition. Were this not a comedy, Shuichi would be a bit obnoxious and Yuki even more so, but seeing a lighter side to them actually makes their tumultuous romance more engaging and sympathetic, such that when, towards the end of the second of its two episodes, <b>Lyrics of Love </b>is obliged to take its plot seriously enough to bring things to a conclusion, it's drummed up ample good will for a theoretically contrived conclusion to be warm and satisfying.</p><p>Had this arrived a few years earlier, then, we might be looking at something of a minor classic - but as I'll never tire of pointing out, 1999 was a bad year indeed for anime as an art form and long after the point when OVA meant the sort of budget that got you near the realms of feature-film animation. Frankly, <b>Lyrics of Love </b>barely holds up compared with the TV of the time, and that's quite the damning criticism. I get that not all anime fans are obsessed with the niceties of animation, I do, but there's no avoiding how it hurts the material here, with the musical numbers suffering the most: judging by what we see, there are Punch and Judy shows with more stage presence than Bad Luck. Thankfully, their songs hold up better, enough to be toe-tapping even if not quite enough to convince you they'd be much of a big deal in real life. Still, that leaves us with a musical romantic comedy where all three core elements are good to great and only one significant weakness, which is mostly more of an annoyance, so I think we can comfortably call this a recommendation.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182905/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghr06lC-QpbuyG7jaRKH_08tjo6syu3VZyNhtWZQaPrjwk53T-BGNVtQFV0CILVeY0BJkP0Ce8TwQu0MSb9iyIKooa1zLfo5fPF4L--KXJJDh0NiMLMi0mBHDqhqxkkk6Y6k5mrybgYSzJr6fq2h1Tb9vm9ZoVh0lZGnpakyKp6YXQdF9W_BGNZ34/s1130/Urotsukidoji%20Infernal%20Road.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghr06lC-QpbuyG7jaRKH_08tjo6syu3VZyNhtWZQaPrjwk53T-BGNVtQFV0CILVeY0BJkP0Ce8TwQu0MSb9iyIKooa1zLfo5fPF4L--KXJJDh0NiMLMi0mBHDqhqxkkk6Y6k5mrybgYSzJr6fq2h1Tb9vm9ZoVh0lZGnpakyKp6YXQdF9W_BGNZ34/s320/Urotsukidoji%20Infernal%20Road.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182905/" target="_blank">Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road</a>, 1993 - 1995, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Shigenori Kageyama<p></p><p>I've frequently been disgusted by the <i>Urotsukidôji</i> franchise, and sometimes angered by it, and often bored, and just occasionally amused, but until now, I can't say I ever felt sorry for it. Yet that was my main reaction to <b>Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road</b> (or <b>Inferno Road</b>, as it appears to be known to everyone but UK distributor <i>Kiseki</i>.) I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I dislike this series, and yet I don't know that even I would have wished upon it such a paltry nothing of a finale. For all that this has been mostly nasty, silly, juvenile stuff, in its best moments, as far as the first two entries go at any rate, there was a certain apocalyptic grandeur to be found, not to mention some really determined cynicism and wallowing in the deepest depths of human ugliness and suffering, and the one thing you'd have a right to hope for from a franchise that sets itself those sorts of goals and intermittently hits them is that it go out with a bang and not the most strangled of whimpers.</p><p>But that's not what fans were given in the mid-nineties, and it's certainly not what eventually arrived on the shores of the UK, since the first two episodes of the three-episode OVA were banned outright and appeared merely as scripts on <i>Kiseki</i>'s<i> </i>otherwise bafflingly thorough DVD edition.** That leaves us with some 40 minutes or so of actual footage including credits, presumably cut down from the more standard 45-minute run time: a whopping 40 minutes to send off multiple hours of narrative spread over three not-entirely-reconcilable timelines, and boy is <b>Infernal Road </b>not remotely up to that task. Nor is the problem the missing episodes, which appear to have been a self-contained tale that didn't move the main story forward one iota, which is in itself a weird move and probably a clear pointer to what went wrong here: everything was in such a mess by this point that it's almost impossible to imagine what a satisfying conclusion would look like, all the more so since we've already had a couple of conclusions that were about as satisfying as it was reasonable to hope for from a property where apocalypses are practically an everyday occurrence.</p><p>I admit that I couldn't remember much of the events of previous entry <b>The Return of the Overfiend</b>, since it was bad and I haven't wasted any thought on it since I watched it, so I guess it's my fault that I couldn't recall who most of the characters were that we meet racing in a tank through the ruined remnants of Japan on a mission to defeat the probably-bad messiah the Chōjin with the aid of the possibly-good messiah the Kyō-Ō. Nevertheless, <b>Infernal Road </b>couldn't possibly do less to reintroduce them or to re-establish their goals or to ease us back into the wider context or to explain who their antagonists are or what their beef is. Indeed, <b>Infernal Road </b>has no time at all for the viewer who isn't 100% steeped in <i>Urotsukidôji</i> lore<i>, </i>which is ironic given that they, presumably, would be the selfsame viewer who'd be most frustrated by its manifest failings both as a final send-off and a story in its own right. For that mission to get the Kyō-Ō to the Chōjin and the various attempts to impede it is really all there is here, meaning a fair amount of violent action and the odd dash of demon rape - but much less of both that in any previous entry, even accounting for the reduction in length - and then an ending that I won't spoil except by saying that I couldn't even if I tried.</p><p>Nothing could have saved this material, and given the track record it had to work with and the fact that even the best <i>Urotsukidôji</i> entries were deeply flawed, and taking into account that the taste for this sort of stuff was already dwindling fast by 1993, saving was likely never on the cards; but the one thing that frequently pushed past instalments up to the level of intermittently entertaining is the odd bit of quality animation, so it's a further blow to <b>Infernal Road </b>that it contains no quality animation whatsoever and not much that would pass as basically competent. It's ugly, small scale, and achingly cheap, with a palpable sense of creators who just wanted to get something out the door so they could move onto doing anything else with their lives. So I suppose the only real plus is that, even for the most devoted fan, there's no reason to track this down: on its own merits it's effectively worthless, and as a conclusion to <i>Urotsukidôji</i>'s grand, gross, baffling saga, it's truly bad enough that anything you care to make up will likely be better. No, seriously, try it: in my version, the Kyō-Ō and Chōjin hugged it out and ended up living together in post-apocalyptic Tennessee raising demon llamas, and that's <i>still </i>an improvement.</p><div>-oOo-</div><div><p>So probably not a great post for anyone else, but a definite win for me in that <b>Gravitation: Lyrics of Love </b>was a nice and out-of-the-blue surprise and I'm at last completely done with <i>Urotsukidôji</i>, although knowing me I'll probably feel the need to pick it up on Blu-ray at some point in the future to make absolutely sure it's as unpleasant and basically shabby as I remember it being, the way I did with <b>Violence Jack</b> (which was and wasn't but mostly was.)</p><p>Next up: probably the <i>Gundam </i>special in which I bend the definition of nineties anime far past its breaking point...</p><p><br /></p><div><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>* Both were put out by a company that I think is called <i>AVP</i>, unless that's just a random bit of text on the box. They did a relatively acceptable job with <b>Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell</b>, for all that nothing about it looked what you'd call professional. <b>Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction</b>, however, which needed all the help it could get, is lumbered with some of the most incoherent subtitling you're ever likely to see.</div><div><br /></div><div>** Seriously, if you want a great summary of <i>Urotsukidôji</i>'s by this point exceedingly dense and tangled mythology and enormous cast, this is the place to find it.</div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-47875906701680693012022-11-12T20:43:00.002+00:002024-01-01T17:01:50.910+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 121<div>To be clear, I'm definitely not going to start reviewing different releases of the same titles because that would be nuts and there would be no end. And I feel like I'm opening a dangerous door just by setting the precedent, but there's no getting around the fact that there's a meaningful difference between reviewing all of the first run of <i>Project A-Ko</i> sequels together - as they were compiled on DVD under the banner of <b>Project A-ko 2: Love and Robots </b>- and reviewing them separately as they're now being put out on Blu-ray by our good friends at <i>Discotek</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or to put it another way, I justified double-dipping on the <b>Project A-ko 2 </b>Blu-ray by convincing myself it was okay because I'd cover it here, and don't think that means I'm necessarily going to pick up the other two when they arrive, <i>Discotek</i>! Frankly, compiling the three together was by far the more reasonable way to go, and who am I kidding, my money is basically yours at this point. Hold on, I'm pretty sure I still have a kidney left that I can hock. While I search, why don't we take a look at <b>Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</b>, <b>Super-Deformed Double Feature</b>, <b>You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials</b>, and <b>Riki Oh: The Wall of Death</b>?</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRwxkwOY2VsrFJ-_NZu6cku2nfNK-8sF_61fgcHoF88yBfQT9Edd6AmJfIkOaVDMm0js-Oj6SSaCjY8IAV_WIYRjHtLYL_DwO1-cRa03GdU8FOBAdYdp0ZuW-W15_QFhZdjW1l2LBp_45Kb5R-B1dVNuj7XrqWhRPYpUARCYawMpfnIbsQyIe4Dos/s1130/Project%20A-ko%202.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRwxkwOY2VsrFJ-_NZu6cku2nfNK-8sF_61fgcHoF88yBfQT9Edd6AmJfIkOaVDMm0js-Oj6SSaCjY8IAV_WIYRjHtLYL_DwO1-cRa03GdU8FOBAdYdp0ZuW-W15_QFhZdjW1l2LBp_45Kb5R-B1dVNuj7XrqWhRPYpUARCYawMpfnIbsQyIe4Dos/s320/Project%20A-ko%202.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093792/" target="_blank">Project A-Ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</a>, 1987, dir: Yûji Moriyama</div><div><br /></div><div>It's hard to say what the perfect sequel to <b>Project A-ko </b>would have looked like. But my instinct is that, at the very least, it would have needed to be ambitious in the ways the original was. And that immediately rules out all the usual avenues because if there's one thing that made <b>Project A-ko </b>stand out, it's the extent to which it did the unexpected. In a sense, that's <i>all </i>it does: what narrative there is ricochets from idea to idea based on little more than what will be funny or interesting in the moment, and its most arresting aspects, like that gloriously singular soundtrack, feel like conscious attempts to stand out from anything that was happening at the time. What sets <b>A-ko </b>apart is an impish inclination to rush off down any rabbit hole that takes its creators' fancy while giggling at the conventionality of its peers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ironically, the final <b>A-ko </b>entry, released under a dizzying number of titles but reviewed here as <b>Project A-ko: Uncivil Wars</b>, took a decent swing at doing the same by chucking out almost everything except the title and the barest bones of the characters, and I remember it as being pretty sucky and probably the worst of the bunch, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. Or maybe you can only pull off that sort of trick the once, the more so since <b>Project A-ko</b>'s moment was a brief one indeed: barely any time had passed before the market was heaving with anime that parodied other anime, many of them recycling exactly the same jokes in a fashion that must have rapidly made <b>A-ko </b>look a mite dated if you didn't know how many of them it had got to first.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's commend <b>Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group</b> for one thing, then: it sure did come out quickly, in less than a year in fact, and that was probably a wise move. Given that turnaround time, it's safe to say ambition was firmly off the table, and so all hope of a sequel that would push the envelope in the ways <b>Project A-ko </b>did, and with that being the case, what we got was hardly the worst-case scenario. <b>A-ko 2 </b>goes down a pointless route, but it's an earnest and faintly ingenious attempt to continue a narrative that had no need of being continued. Picking up a matter of days after <b>A-ko</b>'s events, it finds that show's alien invaders now stuck in an immobilised spaceship and trying to make the best of a bad situation by selling themselves as the city's new hot tourist spot. Or is it all a cunning plan to kidnap the chirpily obnoxious C-ko, who they regard as their lost alien princess for reasons I can't remotely remember? Probably, but that's not enough to prevent our hero A-ko from agreeing to try and fix their ship in exchange for a free meal. And in the meantime, wealthy genius B-ko's latest scheming gets waylaid by her father's even schemier scheming, as he pilfers her latest design and convinces the authorities to let him use it in an attempt to loot the crashed ship for its neat alien technologies.</div><div><br /></div><div>Writing it all down like that, <b>A-ko 2 </b>sounds both busy and nonsensical, much as the original <b>A-ko </b>was, and you'd think that might be a good thing. It <i>does </i>have a degree of the same energy, which is probably its biggest asset: there's not a lot that unquestionably, consistently works, but nothing doesn't work for long enough to become a drag. With the same production values as its predecessor, I think I'd go further: the big action climax is well-conceived enough that it might have been something quite special. But even with barely more than half the running time to be filled, <b>A-ko 2 </b>is a tremendous step down, and while that mostly just leaves it looking a bit cheap, there are moments when it looks really, really cheap*, with designs going wildly off-model and, for some reason, the absolutely worst lip-synching I can recall ever seeing in anime. Can we blame that on a diminished budget? How exactly did they get lip-synching so wrong that it's noticeable in scene after scene? Was it a joke?</div><div><br /></div><div>Hey, at least the soundtrack's pretty good, which makes it another step down if you're as in love with what Zito and Carbone conjured up for the original <b>A-ko </b>as I am, but on its own merits it stands up well against anything else that was happening at the time. Can we say the same for <b>Project A-ko 2</b>, I wonder? Not when it comes to the animation, no, it really is objectionably sloppy at points, but for the rest... Sure, why not? <b>Project A-ko 2</b> is a fun little time-waster that likely as not will leave you in a better mood than it found you, and that's fine and dandy, while also making for a crushing disappointment on just about every level.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160929/" target="_blank"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160929/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyRFbvKHcq64Tiept7D7Beyr-EdvwxIv_8uemrtHrt8O61gShqswxz6kWVsXZRk0nN5IZryYqX2ae-MI1hGiyeiRFJXv92ggH2t98Bq-qwir5FzLri3NEcbhyJYma5PBFLVMvnpQwJJm6cEDwgzJbhe-3GLmOehENdbQlTF4SSLxPZ0tsSaiC9k6A/s1130/Super-Deformed%20Double%20Feature.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyRFbvKHcq64Tiept7D7Beyr-EdvwxIv_8uemrtHrt8O61gShqswxz6kWVsXZRk0nN5IZryYqX2ae-MI1hGiyeiRFJXv92ggH2t98Bq-qwir5FzLri3NEcbhyJYma5PBFLVMvnpQwJJm6cEDwgzJbhe-3GLmOehENdbQlTF4SSLxPZ0tsSaiC9k6A/s320/Super-Deformed%20Double%20Feature.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160929/" target="_blank">Super-Deformed Double Featur</a>e, 1988 / 1992, dir's: Katsuhito Akiyama, Tatsuya Masaki</div><div><br /></div><div>I've never pretended to be writing these reviews for much besides my own amusement, but occasionally we come to a title where it really does feel like I'm talking to an audience of one. For a start, the compilation known to Western audiences as <b>Super-Deformed Double Feature </b>was only ever released on VHS, so far as I know, and while you can find its crucial portions on YouTube, that's not <i>quite </i>the same experience, for reasons we'll return to. At any rate, the difficulty of laying hands on a video tape from thirty years ago is barely half the battle. Of the two short animated features included, the first, <b>Ten Little Gall Force</b>, requires that you be a substantial fan of the first <i>Gall Force</i> series, while for the second, <b>Scramble Wars</b>, you'll also need a fair knowledge of the second wave of <i>Gall Force</i> entries plus <b>Bubblegum Crisis</b>, <b>AD Police</b>, and <b>Genesis Survivor Gaiarth </b>of all things. I know there are plenty of <b>Bubblegum Crisis </b>fans still around, and <i>Gall Force </i>has its following, but <b>Gaiarth</b>? I'd be surprised if anyone who isn't me has watched that one in the past five years. All of which is a massive shame because, if you fall into the miniscule demographic that ticks all those boxes, <b>Super-Deformed Double Feature</b> is a blast.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Ten Little Gall Force </b>is a comedic making-of of the first two <i>Gall Force</i> features, except that, outside of the recycled footage, all the cast and crew are represented by cutesy chibi versions of themselves, leaving the bizarre implication that what we call anime is actually the outpowering of some parallel cartoon universe striving for what we'd consider realism. At no point do the chibi actors comment on how bizarre their in-film counterparts look to them, but that's about the only comedic stone left unturned across a frantic 16-minute run time. There are clever gags, there are dumb gags, there are sight gags, there are surreal gags, and there are even quite a few rude gags, which begs the question of whether we truly needed to see the <i>Gall Force</i> gang both chibified and naked. And obviously we didn't, but it does feel in keeping with the <i>Gall Force </i>ethos of matching the most high-concept sci-fi with the most low-brow exploitation; I'd forgotten quite how seedy <b>Eternal Story </b>got amid its heady pacifist space opera musings, but <b>Ten Little Gall Force </b>wasted no time in reminding me! Then again, I ought to have expected fan service from something that couldn't possibly have been made more for a specific fanbase: this was unmistakeably made by people who loved <i>Gall Force</i> for people who loved <i>Gall Force</i>, with the caveat that if you truly love a property, it's OK to make fun of it in some fairly mean ways.</div><div><br /></div><div>The same goes for <b>Scramble Wars</b>, if not more so, which is only appropriate for something that pits the casts of <b>Bubblegum Crisis</b>, <b>AD Police</b>, <b>Genesis Survivor Gaiarth</b>, and other properties from studio <i>Artmic </i>against each other in a <b>Wacky Races</b>-style contest with an outrageously huge cash prize at the end of it. <b>Scramble Wars </b>takes up the lion's share of the tape and so gets to develop a bit more, which means it's that bit better for being able to set up jokes rather than rattling about like a pingpong ball in a spin dryer as <b>Ten Little Gall Force </b>did. Though requiring a wider breadth of knowledge in theory, it's also less reliant on in-jokes, though there's a truly joyous one for the <i>Gall Force</i> fans; but front and centre it's a <b>Wacky Races</b> rip-off, and I'm happy to call it the best of that plentiful subgenre. It's also probably technically superior, though a startling aspect of both is how well made they are, even if each cheats in its own ways, <b>Ten Little Gall Force </b>by pilfering footage from the <i>Gall Force</i> movies and <b>Scramble Wars</b> by setting the action on Gaiarth and so getting its background art for free.</div><div><br /></div><div>Admittedly, I was always likely to say nice things about this one, since I love <i>Gall Force</i> and <b>Bubblegum Crisis</b> and and even have a soft spot for <b>Genesis Survivor Gaiarth </b>- which is why I'd argue that watching <b>Ten Little Gall Force</b> and <b>Scramble Wars </b>back to back won't quite substitute the true <b>Super-Deformed Double Feature </b>experience. The reason being that <i>AnimEigo </i>saw fit to include a couple of short documentaries, and while the animations are the obvious stars, the live action stuff is charming in its own right. The first focuses on Kenichi Sonoda and is worth watching for his one-man anime movie alone, while the second follows the <i>Gall Force</i> cast as they record one of the songs for the soundtrack and is nearly as fun if you're the kind of person who'd consider watching that sort of thing. But put all four segments together and what you have is seventy minutes of vintage anime nerd nirvana.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have an abiding hope that one day we'll get a <i>Gall Force </i>blu-ray set - it's crazy how ignored the franchise has been given some of the rubbish that's been rescued over the years - and if and when that magical day should come, it only makes sense that <b>Super-Deformed Double Feature </b>will make its welcome return as a bonus feature, that being more or less what it always was, albeit in an age when bonus features were another thing you were expected to splash out for. Should that not happen, I guess you can always go ahead and watch <b>Ten Little Gall Force </b>and <b>Scramble Wars </b>on YouTube; just remember to feel slightly sad that you're not getting the whole of one of vintage anime's most charming, if phenomenally niche, experiences.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKK6SurLEvhAuMV4MIVIJ7RzyJvkiXOvsLPRkqrvJDKv9GV_2STQsIX5MSKZW7xpZ3I8fqQ6HISdDXwykteeCtLetVMV-lTCMb3xtTH068hpV0keObzvUu9p7x24jPcRuOD10_3bAEw4T91vNun0EakE5lL7sLGZPBMbiFxdQ_mi9Ms8FC0A3bUhw/s1072/You're%20Under%20Arrest%20Mini%20Specials.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1072" data-original-width="751" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKK6SurLEvhAuMV4MIVIJ7RzyJvkiXOvsLPRkqrvJDKv9GV_2STQsIX5MSKZW7xpZ3I8fqQ6HISdDXwykteeCtLetVMV-lTCMb3xtTH068hpV0keObzvUu9p7x24jPcRuOD10_3bAEw4T91vNun0EakE5lL7sLGZPBMbiFxdQ_mi9Ms8FC0A3bUhw/s320/You're%20Under%20Arrest%20Mini%20Specials.jpg" width="224" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4164662/" target="_blank">You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials</a>, 1997, dir: Junji Nishimura</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's how bad the <b>You're Under Arrest Mini Specials </b>are: this was one of the very first DVDs I bought to review here, many a year ago, and I got most of the way through it before giving up in despair, since when it's been gathering dust on my shelf, taunting me with its grimy presence. This is also how bad the <b>You're Under Arrest Mini Specials </b>are: amid a collection of twenty stories of seven or so minutes, three of them pit our heroic traffic cop pair Natsumi and Miyuki up against panty thieves, and those three episodes occur one after the other. I can imagine the writer so devoid of imagination that they'd fall to so miserable a cliché of bad anime, and if I really stretch, I can imagine the writer who'd go back to that well not once but twice more, but to then tell those stories back to back? No, that beggars belief. And it's hardly the only idea that gets reused here, either, though I suppose "idea" is too strong a word for most of what's on offer.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the law of averages, not all of those twenty mini-episodes are terrible, though the failure rate is impressively high. Nevertheless, they're practically all bad in a few basic ways: almost all the humour (and humour is definitely the goal here, for all that it's one more occasionally brushed against than hit) is broadly sex-based, in that the antagonists are creepy guys of one sort or another that Natsumi and Miyuki have to put in their places, generally through violence. But the whole thing is so leering and creepy that it feels far more on the side of the men than our heroes, who are generally treated with no real respect whatsoever; if I told you they spend ten minutes out of the two and a half hours of material here doing anything that resembles actual police work, I suspect I'd be exaggerating. There are also some strikingly nasty gags at the expense of trans character Aoi Futaba, who I'm fairly sure was treated with a heck of a lot more respect in both the OVAs and the film, and in general, none of the cast feel like they have much to do with their earlier incarnations: they're stock types plugged in to stock narratives, many of which could have wandered in from any show.</div><div><br /></div><div>The better sections, then, tend to the be the ones that remember what <i>You're Under Arrest</i> is about and that the concept was never, "Oh my god! Women cops, whatever next?" Whenever Natsumi and Miyuki are behind the wheel of a car, proceedings pick up considerably, but that amounts to a minute of two, presumably because animating cars costs money and nobody wanted to spend more than the bare minimum on this: it's distressingly cheap-looking from start to finish and if there was ever a point where director Nishimura brought any flair to the proceedings, I must have blinked and missed it. Heck, even the music is actively dull, and I struggle to think of any anime from the period that couldn't muster at least one decent tune. Really, the whole business has the feeling of something made as an obligation by people with no affection for the source material and no sense of what to do with it; not that it was ever a good fit for these bite-sized episodes, but the eagerness to veer as far as possible from what the show was traditionally good at in favour of the most generic plotlines imaginable is truly baffling.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'll say this much: by the end of what amounted to a second watch, the <b>You're Under Arrest Mini Specials </b>had worn my down from active dislike to surly indifference, and there were points, albeit brief ones, when I got caught up in a couple of the better stories. Aside from the nastiness toward Aoi, there's nothing here that's worthy of real anger or contempt, though that only makes it more frustrating from a reviewing perspective, since I'd always rather have a terrible title that I can merrily tear into over one I'm bored just thinking about. And it's conceivable that were this mess not dressed up in the ill-fitting clothes of one of my favourite anime franchises, I'd be a little more kindly disposed to it. But it is, and I'm not, and it's thoroughly depressing that this tacky, lifeless nonsense will be our last brush with <i>You're Under Arrest </i>after the highs of the OVA and movie.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilbb6keQ8aycrl_uijoVPExOhRGup1vHWaOz-nU9UySqgKY6hu8lwU8mVLTZ2Fmiyz3ngZgTnk-htvN5OssugqQQJK0iIrPSgfLTU4dfVEmVsS1BYbvekhOW4iALqy15h22tSMu-Q1rNqhdWrhsAT0laLjDEUy6BcNY1qPmpjnpHbGluSrDbWh3Iw/s1130/Riki%20Oh%20The%20Wall%20of%20Hell.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilbb6keQ8aycrl_uijoVPExOhRGup1vHWaOz-nU9UySqgKY6hu8lwU8mVLTZ2Fmiyz3ngZgTnk-htvN5OssugqQQJK0iIrPSgfLTU4dfVEmVsS1BYbvekhOW4iALqy15h22tSMu-Q1rNqhdWrhsAT0laLjDEUy6BcNY1qPmpjnpHbGluSrDbWh3Iw/s320/Riki%20Oh%20The%20Wall%20of%20Hell.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3296930/" target="_blank">Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death</a>, 1989, Satoshi Dezaki</div><div><br /></div><div>As a prime example of the mission creep that's overtaken this review series, I offer the fact that once, very long ago, the plan was to cover only films and OVAs from the nineties that had been released in the UK and were readily available, and now here we are with something from the eighties that has seemingly never once had what you might call a "proper" release anywhere outside of Japan. The only physical copy of <b>Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death </b>you're likely to come across was, so far as I can tell from the shonkily produced inlay, distributed by a company called <i>AVP</i>, on whom the internet yields precisely no information. It looks awfully like a knock-off, yet you do occasionally see a new, sealed copy floating about, so maybe it's legitimate in some loose sense of that word?</div><div><br /></div><div>Whatever the case, it's probably not the sort of thing we ought to be concerning ourselves with, any more that it would make sense to be reviewing, say, fansubs of shows videotaped off Japanese TV. Except for two things: one is that, against all the odds, this 45-minute OVA has managed to retain something of a reputation for itself, as perhaps the least known but still occasionally talked about member of the fraternity of video-nasty-style titles that were so many people's introduction to anime back in the day; and secondly because the wider world of <i>Riki-Oh </i>has left its own legacy, in the shape of the live-action film <b>Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky</b>, a film prestigious enough to recently get the deluxe Blu-ray treatment - a fact that makes it all the weirder that no one in the West has seen fit to pick up this OVA and its sequel. (<i>Media Blasters</i> apparently did, but lost the rights before they could do anything with them.)</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Story of Ricky</b> is a gleeful dive into violent excess on a par with any splatter movie you can name, at least as far as delivering maximal quantities of latex and stage blood to provide some ingeniously horrible gore effects goes. Whether it's a "good" film is perhaps besides the point, though it's certainly put together with a degree of craft that you mightn't expect from something that's aiming, above all, to be shocking and gross. Personally, I was exhausted well before its end, so the notion of the precise same story told in half the time had a definite appeal, the more so since that story is better fitted to 45 minutes than 90: our hero, Riki-Oh / Ricky, has been condemned to a privatised prison run by a hierarchy of increasingly monstrous tyrants, from gang leaders up to the warden and beyond, and while they're initially willing to leave him be due to his nigh-inhuman martial arts abilities and seeming obliviousness to pain, that status quo barely outlasts the first proper scene. With the prison's fragile totalitarianism at risk, the only way to go from there is a series of ever more over the top efforts to put our hero in his place, especially as it becomes evident that he didn't end up in this particular prison by accident and won't be done before he's settled some business of his own.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both live action film and OVA tell a largely identical tale in superficially identical fashions, in that both are primarily vehicles for lots and lots of bloody violence. So nothing could have surprised me more than how <b>The Wall of Death </b>approaches that violence. It's certainly there, and it's certainly graphic, but what it isn't is fun in the manner that the movie's take on identical scenes tends to be. And here, of course, I'm referring to a very specific sort of fun, but there's an undeniable gleefulness to the movie's take on this material that's largely absent from <b>The Wall of Death</b>. The gore is off-putting and very much seems as though it was meant to be, even in its more absurd moments, of which there are considerably less this time around.</div><div><br /></div><div>Is this a bad thing? Is it a good thing? Truly, I'm not sure. I can't say I enjoyed <b>The Wall of Death </b>less, but that's arguably just because it didn't outstay its welcome, and while I'd give both interpretations a similar score, here it would be averaging out a much narrower range of highs and lows. It's relatively well-made, though rarely strikingly so; the animation is resolutely fine and all that visually sets the title apart is some unusually nifty editing, which adds a punchy, unnerving rhythm that's a definite boon. And while would be easy to condemn the focus on plot over spectacle when surely no one would come to any version of <i>Riki-Oh </i>for the plot, it's hard to see how the narrative could have been trimmed back more without straying into incoherency. Still, the fact remains that the only reason anyone's likely to seek out <b>The Wall of Death </b>is for its place in the video nasty pantheon, and while it warrants inclusion, I suspect the measure of seriousness it applies to material that's arguably better suited to <b>The Story of Ricky</b>'s<b> </b>gleeful excess will make it slightly unsatisfying for most.</div><div><br /></div><div>-oOo-</div><div><p>My goodness, this is really getting to be an exercise in futility! Two recommendations for things that are nigh-impossible to watch (I mean, I <i>guess </i>I recommend <b>Riki-Oh</b>) and two titles that I hadn't much time for but that are easy to find - or, wait, no, a quick check suggests that the <b>You're Under Arrest Mini-Specials</b> are even getting a bit rare, and goodness knows that's not likely to ever get a rerelease because, as I think I may have mentioned in my review, it sucks goat nostrils.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>* And for all the deservedly nice things I've said about <i>Discotek</i>, their Blu-ray print needed a fair bit more work or perhaps was from a source that was beyond entirely salvaging. At any rate, it's nowhere near on a par with what they delivered for the first <b>A-ko</b>.</div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-31260316658975162562022-10-10T19:07:00.001+01:002022-10-10T19:07:54.823+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 120<p>So much for posting more regularly! Ah well, I've a few of these on the go and my day job situation is hopefully settling down a bit, so there's hope yet, though I dimly remember saying much the same not so long ago. As for a common thread, the closest we have is "titles that are <i>really</i> hard to find these days," which is likely to be an extremely prominent theme for the foreseeable future. All of which is to say that I have nothing to say and we might as well just get on with looking at <b>Dragoon</b>, <b>Megaman: Upon a Star</b>, <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer</b>, and <b>Iron Virgin Jun</b>...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-KnJrz8I3UshFVNg0FaPik6o-ToAdFnLx3sPoVK3bZ0PgNpDR7KmgAbfFtwi7osIQVmeUIVbRacOJpmrv_IWr0gynn1D4m2SWeBaDtKnGxE7gBKPXCARJX3K7gOlusXZQy7If-2RufioC5bUBslwMD5a12z21ataqpSuADConJ0KJNCIwrWJJ24E/s1130/Dragoon.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-KnJrz8I3UshFVNg0FaPik6o-ToAdFnLx3sPoVK3bZ0PgNpDR7KmgAbfFtwi7osIQVmeUIVbRacOJpmrv_IWr0gynn1D4m2SWeBaDtKnGxE7gBKPXCARJX3K7gOlusXZQy7If-2RufioC5bUBslwMD5a12z21ataqpSuADConJ0KJNCIwrWJJ24E/s320/Dragoon.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4829622/" target="_blank">Dragoon</a>, 1997, dir: Kenichi Maejima<p></p><p></p>If there's one thing you need to know about <b>Dragoon</b>, it's that it has nary an original idea anywhere in its head, except perhaps for the incorporation of science-fictional elements like giant airships into an otherwise fantasy-style narrative - only, by 1997 that had in itself become a cliché in the wake of Hayao Miyazaki's <b>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind</b> and <b>Laputa: Castle in the Sky</b>, and thinking about it, if there's one thing you <i>really </i>need to know about <b>Dragoon</b>, it's that it wants very much to be mentioned in the same breath as those two classics. Though the conversation would need to be along the lines of "<b>Laputa </b>sure is a great movie, but have you ever considered how much better it would be with lots of bare breasts?"<p></p><p>And having summed up <b>Dragoon </b>as <b>Laputa </b>with a fraction of the budget and endless shots of boobs, I could certainly call this review done, with the only caveat being that, depending on your preferences, I've either made it sound awful or awesome and it isn't either. The word I'd opt for, rather, would be "pleasant", in the way that only something wholly predictable and unchallenging can be. While its obsession with lingering over its female characters' exposed upper halves, regardless even of whether they're adults or not, is certainly sleazy, that aside it's all quite sweet and good-natured and relatively bloodless. If you like straightforward fantasy tales, and if you especially like straightforward fantasy tales that toy at incorporating the odd sci-fi element, it's safe to say you'll get on fine with <b>Dragoon</b>.</p><p>None of this would be half as true, mind you, were it not for some surprisingly and consistently decent animation, which makes an out-sized difference in pushing <b>Dragoon </b>up from the realms of not-badness. Were there more to visually differentiate it, was the world-building more imaginative, say, I'd go further, but as it is, only some reasonably nice character designs do much to make the show stand out. Still, anime that's made with a measure of talent and care is generally better than anime that isn't, and <b>Dragoon</b>'s tendency to punch above its budgetary weight is a definite boon.</p><p>All of which would add up to a modest recommendation were it not for one last problem, the only one I'd consider a reason to definitely avoid <b>Dragoon</b> if you should find yourself craving some hackneyed nineties fantasy anime: as rote as its storytelling is, the characters are sympathetic enough that I wanted to see how things played out for them, so that the three episodes here<b> </b>end without so much as a cliff-hanger, having resolved nothing, is quite frustrating - and more so for how the opening sequence is a flash-forward to major events we'll never see play out. It's not ruinous, simply because what's come before isn't good enough and the tale it's been telling isn't unpredictable enough that never finding out where it's heading is especially painful. The best of endings wouldn't have nudged <b>Dragoon </b>into the realms of greatness, but the lack of even a half-decent one definitely does it no favours.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575176/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvhhBsqPlR2caNsnj3Q_qYP9w21brh90ovVHjCg0sCUawZI56EUkQabRbuVHDnw46Bn77xKtUy4zInV4hEKYCNBmMyYoNx1kDalQdqJ76LBZ9pXVkkKYWpaidA20nm3PWf3nblRdBQxR2YL4YuwotfxhsYKl-ucRK28VfLwR_WU0LuyLDk2RSoF30/s1130/Mega%20Man%20Upon%20a%20Star.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvhhBsqPlR2caNsnj3Q_qYP9w21brh90ovVHjCg0sCUawZI56EUkQabRbuVHDnw46Bn77xKtUy4zInV4hEKYCNBmMyYoNx1kDalQdqJ76LBZ9pXVkkKYWpaidA20nm3PWf3nblRdBQxR2YL4YuwotfxhsYKl-ucRK28VfLwR_WU0LuyLDk2RSoF30/s320/Mega%20Man%20Upon%20a%20Star.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575176/" target="_blank">Mega Man: Upon a Star</a>, dir's: Katsumi Minoguchi, Naoyoshi Kusaka, Itsurô Kawasaki, Minoru Okazaki<div><p>Given what an extraordinary amount of anime we've covered here, it's surprising how little we've come across that was expressly and primarily made for kids. Probably it's my memory being rubbish, but <b>Mega Man: Upon a Star </b>feels like practically a first. It has no interest in adding one iota of sophistication or nuance to cater to an older viewer and is wedded so hard to the perspective of its child characters that regular logic immediately flies out the window. On discovering that their reality has been invaded by video game characters, for example, the first concern of our young protagonist Yuuta's parents isn't to wonder at how the heck such an obvious transgression of the basic laws of reality might occur or what dangers having a mad scientist of apparently unlimited power and ingenuity running around their nation might pose but to question how their son is meant to fit all this commotion in around his schooling.</p><p>Honestly, that's kind of refreshing. <b>Mega Man: Upon a Star </b>is dumb as bricks, but it's the right sort of dumb, the sort that gets that we - and by "we", I definitely mean the under-ten viewer - want to be amused and entertained, and maybe if we get enough amusement and entertainment we must possibly tolerate a dash of education entering the mix. It strikes me only now that one aspect that sets this apart from most of what's aimed at children is that it's not very interested in humour. Its stakes are ridiculous, but <b>Mega Man: Upon a Star </b>takes them as seriously as can be. It actually plays quite fairly toward its young audience, and while it's absurd, it isn't pandering. Even that educational aspect I touched on comes from a charming, albeit baffling, place: since Mega Man the character is apparently American, the show is determined to have him learn a bit about Japanese culture, geography, and identity, for all that there's nothing here you wouldn't expect the average Japanese schoolchild to already know.</p><p>This makes no sense, but it makes no sense in harmless, appealing ways, which is <b>Mega Man: Upon a Star </b>all over. Its three stories are energetic and fast-paced enough that the silliness never becomes obnoxious. In the first, Mega Man escapes because Yuuta falls asleep at the controls of <b>Mega Man 5</b> - which raises so many questions the show hasn't the tiniest interest in exploring! - and is rapidly followed by the nefarious Dr. Wily, who immediately builds an army of robots and takes over an amusement park so that they can enjoy themselves, a plan that's actually not very nefarious at all, come to think of it, though once foiled, he <i>does </i>try and harness the tectonic forces of Mount Fuji to annihilate Japan. Maybe you should have just let him entertain his robots for a few hours, huh, Mega Man? Then in the second episode, Dr. Wily steals a time machine and uses it to travel back to kill Mega Man in the womb. Ha! No, he uses it to visit various of Japan's annual festivals and at one point steal some sweets, and also to gather a bunch of meteorites to drop on the nation, something it's fair to assume he could have done just as easily without a time machine. Though his half-hearted attempts to muck with the fabric of time still make more sense than what Mega Man gets up to in part three: suspecting that Dr. Wily is again up to no good, he starts roving forward into the future in search of a point when something outright bad enough is happening that it's definitely the work of an evil genius.</p><p>It's a lazy approach to hero-ing that has no right to succeed as well as it does, and by that point I have to admit I was firmly on the side of Dr. Wily, who's a good bit more proactive and benefits from Kenichi Ogata's delightful performance, which brings him to life as both gleefully wicked and ever-so-slightly senile. By comparison, Mega Man himself is rather dull, as are Yuuta and his sister, though it's fair to suppose that everyone involved is aware of this failing given that we're never apart from Wily for long. Still, all the voice acting is pretty good, and mostly so is the music, so long as it's adhering to what I take to be revamps of the game's themes and not hurling terrible rock ballads at us over the closing credits. But what surprised me was the animation, which is never what you might call impressive, exactly, yet always stays on the right side of decent to a degree it's fair to say would be wasted on its target audience. (Granted, the designs are a bit ghastly, but I guess we have to blame the game at least partly for that.) And so, as seems to be routinely the case these days, we're left with a title that I'm happy to recommend on its own merits - assuming you have a handy child you want to keep amused for an hour and a half while gently teaching them a bit about Japanese culture - and which is almost totally impossible to find. Hey, at least the crummy dub is on YouTube...</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPycpM8h2U3Z2tlKAcb0OD6OajCNH2ZT8-rKcszIsADVsR0rLj5XljWNyYX3PuoCyZpIV6wl2gGOhL64hQcRWHBvnzBBk9MQAqbZ_Ia31kSEieV_GEmvEB05kVgyuYXJbyXuzOC76G8M9aolYWbgg7eBayGtg6Js4sqIIBEdHPKOJrRvmZumlDEG8/s1130/Voltage%20Fighter%20Gowcaizer.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPycpM8h2U3Z2tlKAcb0OD6OajCNH2ZT8-rKcszIsADVsR0rLj5XljWNyYX3PuoCyZpIV6wl2gGOhL64hQcRWHBvnzBBk9MQAqbZ_Ia31kSEieV_GEmvEB05kVgyuYXJbyXuzOC76G8M9aolYWbgg7eBayGtg6Js4sqIIBEdHPKOJrRvmZumlDEG8/s320/Voltage%20Fighter%20Gowcaizer.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204034/" target="_blank">Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer</a>, 1996, dir: Masami Ôbari<p></p><p>Of all the directors active throughout the nineties with a distinctly recognisable style, I'd argue that Masami Ôbari was unique in that he never once made anything you could hands-down describe as good. Oh, I know the <b>Fatal Fury</b> movie has its defenders, and sure it could be worse, but who else was there who combined such a unique MO with such a thudding lack of genuinely stand-out work? Once you know what you're looking for, you can't miss an Ôbari character design, and there are other elements that carry over from project to project as well; the only one I have any wholly positive feelings for is his sure grasp of how bodies look in motion, which, when your CV contains a disproportionate number of fighting game adaptations, is certainly a virtue to cultivate. But then at the other end of the spectrum, he had a marked tendency towards levels of misogyny that stands out even in a decade when female characters being treated as victims, window dressing, or both was more or less the standard in anime: his women are invariably vixens or airheads and, whichever category they fall into, it's a safe bet their breasts will be bigger than their heads.</p><p>Now, this isn't a review of Masami Ôbari. I mean, obviously it has been for the whole of a paragraph, but it's not <i>meant </i>to be. Still, it seems to me a fair way into talking about <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer </b>because <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer </b>is about as Ôbari-ish as it's possible to be. It has all of his flaws on unmistakeable display, and, to be fair, all of his virtues as well. And, like <b>Fatal Fury</b> before it and <b>Battle Arena Toshinden</b>, released the same year, it's based on a video game beat-em-up, in this case one Ôbari also provided the character designs for. It's definitely possible to imagine this material in the hands of another director, but the result would have been a very different beast: better, perhaps, and surely more coherent, but perhaps a bit less interesting.</p><p>On paper, <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer </b>has no right to be any level of interesting. The plot is boilerplate and stupid, unnecessarily overwrought boilerplate at that. It dances around the crucial elements enough that everything seems vastly more complicated than it really is, and that's primarily the fault of Kengo Asai's script, which dresses up the stuff of fighting game plotting as though it were Greek tragedy, but Ôbari makes no moves to check that tendency. Barring an eleventh-hour twist that's only a twist if you've never played a video game, this could barely be more of a straightforward tale of disparate heroes banding together against an evil villain, yet it somehow drags that threadbare material out for a hundred minutes, for a good proportion of which the central conflict barely rears its head.</p><p>There was probably never going to be a good version of <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer</b>, and it's even harder to imagine such a version flowering out of Asai's florid prose - though I guess he had to pad the material somehow, and why shouldn't that be by having the cast spout nonsense philosophy at every opportunity? At any rate, I don't know that it's reasonable to criticise Ôbari for not transforming this into a classic for the ages. He does his own share of harm, though, and that's even supposing you aren't as horrified by his character designs as I am; but if you are, their flaws are harder to miss when he's this determined to show off their tackiest aspects. Even by nineties anime standards, the number of times a dialogue scene is shot from crotch or bum height is astounding, and there's so much unmotivated jiggling of boobs that at one point I burst out laughing because it kind of looked as though two characters' breasts were having their own private conversation.</p><p>Actually, <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer </b>is generally quite obsessed with sex, and the bouncing bosoms and endless shots of barely concealed crotches and bottoms become somewhat less noticeable when they're up against, say, an antagonist who's a monstrous hermaphroditic hybrid formed by an incestuous brother and sister. Yet, in common with all of Ôbari's work, it's also resolutely unsexy, in part because it's so hard to reconcile these designs with actual human beings. So the sexiness becomes yet another way for <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer </b>to be strange and unexpected, and that's what really saves it, in so much as anything does. Well, that and some frequently terrific animation, along with a few moments of visual genius: the "secret" final antagonist, in particular, is such a superb bit of design work that you can't but wonder how Ôbari managed to screw up so many of the others. Which is why, I suppose, I've spent so much of this review discussing him rather than the title in question: here as elsewhere, I find myself just impressed enough - by a terrific bit of action there, a perfectly composed image there, or just by the distinctiveness the man brought to such generic subject matter - to wish Ôbari had managed, just once, to conjure up a masterpiece.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432146/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgovhUY9S7O3KORTg8oAxEartd46RhxNLVgP8BNNVQvm3vb2T0ji89nplvXkwZMkXzZPNTWDJrkONx81MBGmcla4BPaf3CiIhKTectG6A9xrMvbheXDoMlP939-KTdqErArXLahJoG_kbNl0T_EY94xqujRfoxkNX7LeBtO3uH24mPAhMTBmZj520g/s1130/Iron%20Virgin%20Jun.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgovhUY9S7O3KORTg8oAxEartd46RhxNLVgP8BNNVQvm3vb2T0ji89nplvXkwZMkXzZPNTWDJrkONx81MBGmcla4BPaf3CiIhKTectG6A9xrMvbheXDoMlP939-KTdqErArXLahJoG_kbNl0T_EY94xqujRfoxkNX7LeBtO3uH24mPAhMTBmZj520g/s320/Iron%20Virgin%20Jun.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432146/" target="_blank">Iron Virgin Jun</a>, 1992, dir: Fumio Maezono</div><div><br /></div><div>The perfect, they say, is the enemy of the good, and perhaps that explains how <b>Iron Virgin Jun </b>can be both a largely faultless version of what it's trying to be and at the same time slightly hard to recommend. Then again, maybe that's inevitable when what it's trying to be is a 45-minute OVA adaptation of a short Go Nagai series. I'm not exactly a fan of Nagai's oeuvre on the whole, and I can't imagine a time when I'll ever be on side with the mean-spirited efforts to be vicious and gross that mark out a title like <b>Violence Jack</b>, yet the list of anime based on his creations that I have a measure of affection for is getting surprisingly long by this point. But with most of it, I fall into a middle ground of being amused by the absurdity and over-the-top imagination but let down by the lack of much else: there are plenty of solid Nagai adaptations but vanishingly few that push beyond that.</div><div><p>The manga of <b>Iron Virgin Jun </b>sounds startlingly unpleasant: if the Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, its "highlights" include a spot of bestiality and the potential rape of the protagonist as a major plot point, and the anime loses the former and tones down the latter, so it's already ahead of the game for those of us who aren't on Nagai's wavelength. Still, there's only so much you can do to sanitise a work by someone who's so eager to shock, and, in fairness, only so much you <i>should </i>do without losing the gleeful bad taste that's one of Nagai's hallmarks. So the threat of rape is still there, it's just introduced late and not taken terribly seriously, which arguably doesn't make it better but at least leaves room for <b>Iron Virgin Jun </b>to put its best foot forward. Plus, while my heart sank when the Golden Cherry boys were introduced, they being the gang dispatched to rob our hero Jun of her virginity, their character designs perfectly nail the balance of crass and ridiculous that Nagai thrives on: I won't spoil the gag, but I'll admit I laughed.</p><p>The Golden Cherry boys, however, are much nearer to the back of <b>Iron Virgin Jun </b>than the front, and what we start out with is the kind of goofy setup that's ideal for one of these shorter OVA films. Jun's - perhaps literal, to judge by appearances - ogre of a mother wants her to get married. Jun disagrees, and strongly enough so that she's gone on the run to make her point. But her family is outrageously wealthy and has no end of colourful henchpeople at their disposal and Jun's mother isn't beyond squandering those resources if it gets her daughter to comply, all the more so since her motives have little to do with wanting to ensure Jun's future wedded bliss. Fortunately for Jun, and for us since there'd be no plot otherwise, her iron physique and stock of wrestling moves mean she's more than capable of taking care of herself, which doesn't stop the sympathetic and slightly smitten servant Ohnami from tagging along.</p><p>There's plenty of material there for comedy, romance, and regular bouts of action, and that would probably suffice for something this short; but having set out its wares, <b>Iron Virgin Jun </b>then delivers enough of a larger plot that it actually manages to have a bit of meat on its bones. The animation is entirely fine, Maezono's direction is suitably energetic, and so is the unusually present score, which does more than its share of keeping the pace lively. As far as the source material goes, it's a mostly triumphant attempt at fitting it to the form of a short OVA movie, and thus we return to the opening point: it's possible to get most everything right and still end up with something that's merely okay. If you were determined to adapt a Go Nagai work that has many of his flaws and not quite enough of his virtues, and you had less than an hour to play with, I can't imagine how things would have turned out an awful lot better, but that's not to say it was ever a brilliant idea to try.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>I guess it's always nice to have nothing bad, right? Then again, it's also nice to have at least one thing that's categorically good, and I want to say that's <b>Mega Man: Upon a Star</b>, but that would be a lie brought on by going in with low expectations and being pleasantly surprised. Still, if we're looking at four distinctly average titles, at least they're the interesting sort of average: where else but in the world of vintage anime could you apply such a word to titles as merrily bonkers as <b>Iron Virgin Jun </b>and <b>Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer</b>? So I'm calling this one a win regardless.</p><p><br /></p><div><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-50400851058539957432022-08-14T14:38:00.001+01:002022-08-14T14:38:51.328+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 119<p>So, we're back in the eighties - but let's not grumble too much about how this nineties anime blog is yet again drifting back into the wrong decade, and this time even brushing the very bottom of said decade. Because if we're getting awfully close to exhausting the best stuff from the nineties, the eighties at least still has the odd gem left to offer, and frankly it's nice to be reviewing some titles that range from decent to excellent for a change, with more towards the top end than the bottom. In fact, we only have one arguably duff title - I say arguably because it's a well-loved classic! - from amongst <b>Be Forever Yamato</b>, <b>Lupin the Third: The Fuma Conspiracy</b>, <b>Tomorrow's Joe The Movie</b>, and <b>Barefoot Gen</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140703/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiCB_77HfTMJ2JjNvwKNQ1EaKIOwnZTjrVVSR3Dm_p8ks_xSBeA_X96cblSt_C51uHSb6N4NHN1HGYYNR9YtQykoVRJRAWvfhjQmuaaPHfCrQLQKFEFYuq8xo5eRlH5JJs5qRkyPblo5GsP8KRwaiGRk6_K0eXVCoKGOGrtvSjKzfIhghGexJLW0QI=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiCB_77HfTMJ2JjNvwKNQ1EaKIOwnZTjrVVSR3Dm_p8ks_xSBeA_X96cblSt_C51uHSb6N4NHN1HGYYNR9YtQykoVRJRAWvfhjQmuaaPHfCrQLQKFEFYuq8xo5eRlH5JJs5qRkyPblo5GsP8KRwaiGRk6_K0eXVCoKGOGrtvSjKzfIhghGexJLW0QI=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140703/" target="_blank">Be Forever Yamato</a>, 1980, dir's: Toshio Masuda, Leiji Matsumoto, Tomoharu Katsumata<p></p><p>While this is the first <i>Space Battleship Yamato</i> movie I've covered here, due to my determination not to be reviewing seventies anime in a blog series that's meant to be about nineties anime and has already strayed too far into eighties anime, I <i>have </i>actually watched the three preceding entries. So hopefully I have some idea what I'm talking about when I say that the problem with the series is that the first film neither wanted nor needed any sequels. Granted, the original run of the TV show was so unsuccessful that the episode count was cut by a third, but I've not seen it suggested that the follow-ups were an attempt to restore that lost material. Rather, it was the belated but monumental success of the film condensation of the series that gave birth to four sequels in a mere six years and which led to them so meticulously following the template it had set.</p><p>But <b>Space Battleship Yamato</b> the movie wasn't <i>trying </i>to set a template, it was merely making the best job it could of the nigh-impossible task of cramming twenty-six episodes into a moderately acceptable running time and cobbling together a coherent plot that didn't just feel like a bunch of disconnected things happening for two hours and change. I doubt anyone involved was thinking, "Hey, this is something that could stand to be replicated three or four times with slavish precision!" Yet <b>Space Battleship Yamato </b>was a hit, and the sort of ginormous, lightning-in-a-bottle hit that doesn't incline anyone to go all experimental on their audience.</p><p>Thus we come to <b>Be Forever Yamato</b>, a film that, while veering slightly further afield than either of the previous two sequels, nevertheless hangs so desperately to <b>Space Battleship Yamato</b>'s coattails that it ends up making nary a shred of sense. That's most obvious in the astonishing two-and-a-half-hour running time, which nothing in the story begins to justify, but really it's everywhere else as well. With that, said, though, the first third or so does at least give the impression we might be in for something different this time around, and most dramatically so in its opening scenes, in which the oft-embattled Yamato is conspicuous in its absence as an unknown force of alien invaders tear through our solar system, wreaking death and destruction and not stopping until they've enslaved the Earth and ensured there'll be no resistance by erecting a bomb with the potential to erase all life on the planet.</p><p>It's at this point that we're finally reunited with the Yamato and its crew - what's left of them, anyway, since <b>Be Forever Yamato </b>isn't above the odd cheap death to give some sense of stakes - and it's also at this point that the plot, such as it's been, starts to unravel hard. The entire business with the aliens and their weapon of last resort that they seem determined not to use is the major driver for everything that happens and it's brutally dumb if you pause to think about it, as is basically everything to do with them. They're a series of hazards and twists for our heroes to navigate rather than rational characters acting according to their own motivations, and since one of the things the <i>Yamato </i>franchise has been rather good at until now is giving its antagonists a proper measure of autonomy, this is more disappointing than in many another film that only bothered to think through half its conflict. There are developments in the back third that don't possess a shred of logic; I was reminded at points of <b>Star Trek V: The Final Frontier </b>and its hilarious "What does God need with a starship?" shenanigans, and if there's one thing you don't want your epic space drama to remind you of, it's <b>Star Trek V: The Final Frontier</b>.</p><p>Still, I'd argue that all this is salvaged by a couple of things. One is that there's something inherently appealing about the <i>Yamato </i>movies, which are vast and serious and absurd and occasionally thrilling in ways it's hard not to feel a touch nostalgic for if you're an anime fan of a certain age and inclination, and the other is that, while the animation isn't terribly reliable, there's are shots scattered throughout that are absolutely marvellous: put them together with a suitably sweeping score and there's definitely something intermittently special here. Yes, I <i>would </i>argue that, except that the only available release in the West is a very aged DVD from some outfit called <i>Voyager Entertainmen</i>t, and it sucks, and sucks that bit harder than their releases of the other films because, around the midway point, <b>Be Forever Yamato </b>decides to shift aspect ratios: you have to assume the idea was that the picture would get bigger in cinemas, but that isn't the route <i>Voyager Entertainmen</i>t<i> </i>went down, so half the movie ends up double-letterboxed. Should this ever get a blu-ray release in the West, I'd be a lot more kindly disposed toward it: a great print that showed off the better moments of animation would make its various problems far easier to ignore. But that's not what we've got right now, and what we've got really is quite a slog.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093896/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj4Hir55Hxpxxn9ZP3Knuu9DuPqkyJ-riAAjtXwFIxbYl12B7l1JM40OXkYcKsUwTZqHT58L7htTOSArlL-KB8O_eJm7UcjSHjL3y0OGcguUjep1vw6BjcY1P6Y4z0gfLH51vG9f3mQYXxgcZGcWZTHDHy0EiQbLQvoqvckWyMtGil4ZCE1TFV20Pc=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj4Hir55Hxpxxn9ZP3Knuu9DuPqkyJ-riAAjtXwFIxbYl12B7l1JM40OXkYcKsUwTZqHT58L7htTOSArlL-KB8O_eJm7UcjSHjL3y0OGcguUjep1vw6BjcY1P6Y4z0gfLH51vG9f3mQYXxgcZGcWZTHDHy0EiQbLQvoqvckWyMtGil4ZCE1TFV20Pc=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093896/" target="_blank">Lupin the Third: The Fuma Conspiracy</a>, 1987, dir: Masayuki Ôzeki<p></p><p>Given how quickly the series settled into a comfortable groove, it's easy to forget there was a time when nobody quite knew what it meant for something to be a <i>Lupin the Third</i> film. Oh, the core elements were there, of course, in Monkeypunch's manga and in the TV series, which had clocked up hundreds of episodes across three seasons by 1987; but what works in a comic book or in twenty minute bursts is hardly guaranteed to fill a feature-length running time. And it's also easy to forget that the three animated films prior to this point hadn't been reliably successful either with audiences or critics; bizarre though it seems in hindsight, Miyazaki's <b>The Castle of Cagliostro </b>was a notorious flop, no doubt in part because of its eagerness to break from the formula of <i>Lupin</i>-ness as it was then.</p><p>And so we find ourselves with the fourth animated <i>Lupin </i>feature and the first that wasn't a cinema release but an OVA, which at the time was quite a different beast to a TV special, of which the first of many would soon follow. No, in 1987, an OVA wasn't much of a step down, and yet it's worth mentioning because <b>The Fuma Conspiracy</b> feels smaller in scope than any of its predecessors. That's partly due to the running time, which doesn't quite break seventy-five minutes, but as much to do with the story's confinement to a single location, and a single location in the depths of rural Japan, picked apparently because the creators were sick of seeing Lupin in London and Paris but also because researching your own country is a heck of a lot cheaper than researching someone else's.</p><p>Another twist: <b>The Fuma Conspiracy </b>opens with a wedding, and not just any wedding but the wedding of regular cast member Goemon - a bum note, frankly, that hangs over the entire movie, since we know Goemon isn't going to get married and the film makes little attempt to convince us otherwise, so that the nuptials, which almost immediately get interrupted and transform into a treasure hunt, seem much like the clotheshorse to hang the plot around that they are. Nevertheless, for all that it doesn't hold up, it's certainly a novel way into the story, and an early indication of what I was trying to get at in the opening paragraph: <b>The Fuma Conspiracy </b>feels like the work of people who've gone back to square one on how to make a <i>Lupin the Third</i> film and are probing their way forward accordingly.</p><p>Which brings me at last to the point, which is that the most striking detail about <b>The Fuma Conspiracy </b>from a modern perspective isn't its quirks, of which it has a few - at the time it was lambasted for not using the regular voice cast in another bid to keep the budget down, and the shift to a more wallet-friendly composer certainly does the movie no favours - but how well it predicted what was to come. For all that it's definitely its own thing, with a softer, warmer visual style that's closer to <b>Cagliostro </b>than its successors, and the oddness of seeing Lupin running around the Japanese countryside, and the unconvincing hook of Goemon's wedding, the plot soon transforms into something remarkably familiar: Lupin and co square off against a band of colourful enemies in search of a McGuffin treasure, Zenigata and the local cops give lukewarm pursuit, and ultimately everybody comes together in the labyrinthine death-trap that houses said treasure, which you can be confident nobody will get away with.</p><p>A strange combination then: had <b>The Fuma Conspiracy</b><b> </b>occurred a decade later, it would stand out barely at all, and I guess that if you choose to ignore its context, it wouldn't much now, though the setting and the marriage gimmick are striking while you're watching. But to be clear, the formula that began to take its definite form here is one that works, and, done well, a formulaic <i>Lupin </i>can be a hell of treat. <b>The Fuma Conspiracy</b> turns out to be a pretty good stab, with few surprises but plenty of polish, and that's most evident in the animation, which is often splendid: the film's centrepiece is a mammoth car chase, and though a car chase might be the least unexpected element of a <i>Lupin the Third</i> movie, this one stands out by its sheer loveliness and ingenuity. Sad to say, loveliness and ingenuity aren't quite enough to make it genuinely fresh, and the one thing that could have pushed <b>The Fuma Conspiracy </b>into the highest tier of <i>Lupin </i>films is some genuine surprises, so we're left with an above-par entry that's historically interesting more than it's intrinsically interesting and frustratingly difficult to find. Hopefully that last matter will get sorted eventually; this is a title that would benefit enormously from the uplift to blu-ray. If and when that happens, it'll be one to jump on, but in the meantime, I guess it's only for completists and those eager to see a <i>Lupin </i>adventure dressed up in more than TV animation.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1682222" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEilrSQyN4vDMUFA43kto7gKpiZ-lgOVwviCQeTs4ko9TEtN0x9GtHCmoR7hUMTSCkdSgYRL5m5ivW_niouS6bWQJYI_gxbcwCkgNEKtWRB_ulDkH32nNHOMFhM-a_svOD2vCGib3IWi39dSdMm0cnrwXNjlU4E6L2WNtRI0gzQYIkr972ISi_fYxU8=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEilrSQyN4vDMUFA43kto7gKpiZ-lgOVwviCQeTs4ko9TEtN0x9GtHCmoR7hUMTSCkdSgYRL5m5ivW_niouS6bWQJYI_gxbcwCkgNEKtWRB_ulDkH32nNHOMFhM-a_svOD2vCGib3IWi39dSdMm0cnrwXNjlU4E6L2WNtRI0gzQYIkr972ISi_fYxU8=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1682222/" target="_blank">Tomorrow's Joe The Movie</a>, 1980, dir's: Yōichirō Fukuda, Osamu Dezaki<div><br /></div><div>I feel bad for starting off a review of a beloved classic by focusing on the negatives, but it's better that I get it off my chest right away: The animation in <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>is precisely as bad as you'd expect of a film cobbled together from a long-running early-seventies TV show and then some. But it's also worse than that, because the TV show was, one assumes, in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas the film, as presented on blu-ray and presumably as it was shown in cinemas, more or less, comes to us in the widescreen 16:9 ratio, which was almost certainly accomplished by cropping the existing footage. That, anyway, is how practically every shot across its two-and-a-half-hour running time looks: as though it's been zoomed in on to an uncomfortable degree. It's hard not to notice and hard not to be distracted by once you've noticed it, especially when the animation is so rudimentary in the first place.</div><div><p>Would you believe me if I said none of that matters? Would you believe me if I suggested that, just possibly, it works to the benefit of <b>Tomorrow's Joe</b>? Honestly, I'm not sure <i>I</i> would believe me, because great animation is a big part of what I love about anime and it logically follows that severely not-so-great animation is a major turn-off. Yet there <i>are </i>benefits, arising not only from the crudeness of the animation but from the crudeness of the designs as well, which are almost elemental in their simplicity. The most obvious is a sense that the events portrayed belong to the past: what we have here is an eighties movie of a seventies anime of a sixties manga telling a story from earlier in that same decade, and I don't know that slicker animation could get at that accumulated weight of years in the same way the rough-and-ready work here does. Equally, there's an energy that's perfectly fitted to the material - and I guess, two paragraphs in, it's high time to be mentioning that what we're discussing is a boxing movie, a genre that doesn't really need to look pretty but very much does need to draw you in with its physicality to the point where you practically feel the blows landing. This <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>absolutely does, and if it did so any better, I for one would have found it a tough watch, because - even putting aside the boxing scenes themselves - the events it shows are often staggeringly brutal, and I don't know that a more realistic portrayal would have stayed watchable for this sort of duration.</p><p>Again, for all that that sounds like criticism, I don't mean it to be. <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>is a pummelling movie and ought to be: our protagonist and definitely not hero is Joe Yabuki, who we meet as a cocky street kid picking a fight with a bunch of petty gangsters, ostensibly to help out a little girl but obviously as much or more so because he loves to scrap and has crappy impulse control. This we'll soon learn for a fact, as Joe's headstrong and self-destructive nature lands him in a juvenile detention centre, and from there in an even worse juvenile detention centre, all despite the efforts of well-meaning drunk Danpei Tange, a former boxer who's determined to harness the young man's potential whether Joe agrees or not.</p><p>Eventually, Joe relinquishes, though not for any real reason other than a desire to do better in the fights he's endlessly starting; it's a long way indeed into the film before he shows an interest in boxing as anything other than a medium for doing what he'd be doing anyway. And in that sense, While <b>Tomorrow's Joe</b> is definitely a boxing movie, it manages to be far more than merely a movie about boxing: there's a tremendous amount of material here, and I wouldn't be surprised if an hour goes by before Joe so much as steps inside a ring. Then again, the fact of being adapted from a 79-episode TV show gives the film an edge that perhaps no other boxing film has ever had: it gets to be an epic that's established its characters and arcs and themes well before it really commits to its primary genre, and in so doing, plumbs depths that boxing films rarely get close to. And here I should admit that I don't remotely like boxing, for all that it seems to be an uncommonly good wellspring for cinematic material - yet I can't remember the last time I was as glued to the edge of my seat as I was during the last twenty minutes of <b>Tomorrow's Joe</b>, a single bout shown in what has to be practically real time and played out as something akin to a chess match in an abattoir.</p><p>I didn't expect a classic of <b>Tomorrow's Joe</b>, for all its reputation. There are surely limits to what you can accomplish by hacking together TV show footage, especially when it looks as though nobody thought retouching the roughest patches might be a nice idea before they pointed it toward a cinema. So maybe the greatest accomplishment here is the editing, or whatever precisely the word is for the job of picking what out of thirty or so hours of footage makes it into a theatrical cut: this material works as a movie to a shocking degree, moving through clear arcs to be sure but always with momentum and an unmistakeable direction. While there's plenty to admire - I haven't even mentioned the tremendous voice acting or Kunihiko Suzuki's aggressively jazzy, funky score, which proves a far better fit than it has any right to - the greatest triumph is surely the phenomenal job <b>Tomorrow's Joe </b>does of carving out the leanest, most bare-boned version of its vast story and delivering it with propulsive force.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085218/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HvFcD-IbIDFikMWkIkwPNK_2flIX7bPhB0XUR656ZiR_B0ar9gAH3EZdb37GRMuFWg5UTZVMuEl-iLmBXqrR96ZPifYt5VSqhYVcMhoHNlsDiNhKlTuQJ_4eMLmVp1AytNQNM0Iqm2i66Rxr_Fgbgn8_eVt7IVTQ3JWWXb2-6Eh1wF-mmJdSEWg/s1130/Barefoot%20Gen.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HvFcD-IbIDFikMWkIkwPNK_2flIX7bPhB0XUR656ZiR_B0ar9gAH3EZdb37GRMuFWg5UTZVMuEl-iLmBXqrR96ZPifYt5VSqhYVcMhoHNlsDiNhKlTuQJ_4eMLmVp1AytNQNM0Iqm2i66Rxr_Fgbgn8_eVt7IVTQ3JWWXb2-6Eh1wF-mmJdSEWg/s320/Barefoot%20Gen.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085218/" target="_blank">Barefoot Gen</a>, 1983, dir: Mori Masaki<p></p><p>The 1983 film <b>Barefoot Gen</b> is up to at least three significantly different things, and, on the face of it, one of them is practically irreconcilable with the other two. First and foremost, it's a tale of survival during wartime, initially amid the increasingly intolerable depredations of the last months of WW2, when the writing was clearly on the wall for Japan's defeat, and then in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, one of the most desperately horrible periods of suffering that any population has known. And lest we fail to note just how horrible it is to be in a city under nuclear attack, <b>Barefoot Gen </b>is also quite explicitly a horror movie: its representation of what the bombing did to human bodies both during and after is unflinching and unsparing in a manner that would be impossible in live action, since no special effects shot could be so excruciatingly effective as the representations of melting flesh Masaki conjures up over and again.</p><p>Obviously, those two modes are a perfectly reasonable fit for each other. But then we get to <b>Barefoot Gen</b>'s third thread, the one which sets it apart from almost any similar film and indeed from the obviously comparable masterpiece <b>Grave of the Fireflies</b>: as well as the above, it's also a comedic tale following the adventures of the plucky titular character, something like if <b>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn </b>happened to be set amid the irradiated ruins of a major city. And here you'd have every right to expect things to come gravely unstuck, because that's one heck of a fine line to tread, the more so because we're tethered hard to protagonist Gen's perspective and very much expected to laugh at the things he finds funny, for all that six-year-old boys aren't known for their nuanced grasp of humour. Moreover, every aspect follows that approach, so that Gen and the other characters his own age look as though they've wandered in from a kids' movie, and Kentarō Haneda's score could be transferred over to said kids' movie without the slightest alteration.</p><p>A fine line to tread indeed, and yet it's not so much that <b>Barefoot Gen </b>somehow gets away with it but that, in attempting such seemingly incompatible goals and succeeding as well as it does, it manages to be both great and unique. And maybe the explanation for that lies in how wholeheartedly the film commits to its various strands: with such levels of intensity, any one of them in isolation would be unwatchable for ninety minutes straight. That absolutely goes for the horror elements, which are wrenching and gutting in a way that goes far beyond what horror generally even considers, be it by throwing the most violently awful images at us and daring us to blink or by going the other way and treating as perfectly normal, say, the facts that radiation burns are going to attract maggots and that a soldier with radiation poisoning might well bleed from his anus.</p><p>So we need the comedy, and more so we need Gen's innocence and plucky can-do attitude, in part to soften everything else to the point of watchability but as much so, and more so as the film goes on, to show us that even the innocence and can-do attitude of a good-hearted, brave, and optimistic child has its reasonable limits. That isn't to suggest the balance is always perfect: Haneda's music, particularly, is wedded far too much to the Gen we meet in the first third, before the bomb has dropped, and feels increasingly inappropriate the nearer we get to the end. And if we really wanted to nit-pick a film that arguably ought to be kind of critic-proof, I'd have to admit that it didn't tear me up emotionally the way <b>Grave of the Fireflies </b>(or the more recent <b>In This Corner of the World</b>) did.</p><p>Then again, I don't know that Masaki - or Keiji Nakazawa, author of the semi-autobiographical manga the film is based upon - were really after our tears, or at any rate whether that was anyone's priority. Masaki, certainly, seems primarily determined to make us walk in Gen's shoes, or rather, to stumble through the ashes barefoot as his young hero does, deprived of even so basic a protection as footwear. He's always gunning for the most direct and visceral reactions, be they happy or sad, be they giggling at the dumb antics and absurd arguments of little kids or trying to make sense of the sight of a starving baby suckling futilely at its dead mother's breast. To create something bearable from such material would be a big ask, so that <b>Barefoot Gen </b>manages to be often entertaining and always engaging even as it grips us by the throat and forces us to stare at images of almost inconceivable suffering is surely enough to warrant calling it a classic.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>Can it really be that we have a post with two strong recommendations - indeed, two titles that are pretty much must-sees if you're at all interested in vintage anime? It certainly would seem so, and I'd even go further and suggest that, whether you care for older anime or not but are in the business of watching good and important films, then <b>Barefoot Gen</b> is one you'll have to get to, the more so because it manages to be good and important without being preachy or suffocating in the manner of so many such movies.</p><p>Even more unexpectedly, there's nothing here that I wouldn't recommend to at least someone. <b>The Fuma Conspiracy </b>is a middling <i>Lupin </i>film with some unusually nice animation, so if and when it gets a re-release, fans of the series should definitely seek it out, and much the same goes for <b>Be Forever Yamato</b>, which I'm confident would go up in my esteem if I could just watch the thing in a good print.</p><p><br /></p><div><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-88864999440367059872022-07-03T20:02:00.002+01:002023-05-16T11:24:51.584+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 118<p>I know things have been awfully uneventful around these parts lately, and they're likely to stay quiet for a while longer, what with me having a new job and more or less zero free time and all. Nevertheless, I'm not the sort of person who, once they've set themselves the nigh-impossible task of reviewing every bit of anime released in the West in an entire decade, quits with the finish line in sight, and I have one or two posts nearing completion, so hopefully there won't be another gap quite so long as this one.</p><p>And more good news! We're back to having at least a couple of titles that you might possibly have heard of, in among <b>Mad Bull 34</b>, <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</b>, <b>Ninku: The Movie</b>, and <b>Guy: Double Target</b>...</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlQ3-ZG6vwpZQ1d5me-SJBSR1TczQrUDoyrxIOJ2d3n5XYNAdrF8FJsMwAK9mdCXCzySS8g97SDht9w7-a7HZ9JP-bC6C3BJnbcyxU1cNbMKKRykHZnKteZ-14RW7k2jUYv9DaqJl9KG4u81mwy4Y9hLSfxTEZ-hoBh5AnwEYSpFIqmOGnv9olOw/s1130/Mad%20Bull%2034.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHlQ3-ZG6vwpZQ1d5me-SJBSR1TczQrUDoyrxIOJ2d3n5XYNAdrF8FJsMwAK9mdCXCzySS8g97SDht9w7-a7HZ9JP-bC6C3BJnbcyxU1cNbMKKRykHZnKteZ-14RW7k2jUYv9DaqJl9KG4u81mwy4Y9hLSfxTEZ-hoBh5AnwEYSpFIqmOGnv9olOw/s320/Mad%20Bull%2034.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160503/" target="_blank">Mad Bull 34</a>, 1990 - 1992, dir: Satoshi Dezaki</p><div>I remember saying a while back that I'd finally exhausted all the really notorious video-nasty-style nineties anime, and oh what a fool I was! There was bound to be at least one more hiding away, and I certainly ought to have remembered <b>Mad Bull 34</b>, which, while not among the most oft-cited shockers, definitely had its share of reputation. Granted, we're a fair way from something like <b>Violence Jack</b> here, in that the sex and violence (and perhaps most often, sexual violence) are generally leavened by a lick of humour and a cartoonishness that holds them back from proper viciousness. All the same, we're looking at a title that chooses to call the first of its four episodes "Hit and Rape" and introduces its titular character by having him shoot a man's head to pieces in exceedingly graphic detail, so it's probably not the right choice to stick the kids in front of when they decide they want something slightly edgier than <i>Pokémon</i>.</div><div><p>That protagonist is John "Sleepy" Estes, AKA Mad Bull, the sort of cop who shoots first and pretty much never asks questions or does anything that resembles what those of us who aren't nineties anime writers might regard as police work. For about three minutes, this looks set to change when he's partnered with the Japanese-American Daizaburo "Eddie" Ban, a straight-laced sort who's disinclined to shoot perps into paste when he could, like, handcuff them or something. But one of the early twists on its formula that <b>Mad Bull 34</b> surprised me with is that Daizaburo comes round to Sleepy's way of thinking in barely any time, to the point of defending him impassionedly when his unique brand of policing finally gets taken to task at the end of the first episode.</p><p>Another unexpected element is how that first episode is more of a compilation, rattling through four or five largely self-contained plotlines, a format that's already out the window by the beginning of episode two. Indeed, <b>Mad Bull 34 </b>is hopeless at deciding quite what it wants to be, even down to the most basic level of how committed it is to the whole exploitation thing. Episode one really goes out of its way to amp up the violence and nudity, and wholly gross as that "Hit and Rape" title is, it's nevertheless pretty appropriate. And the second episode kind of sticks to that but soon decides comic violence is too much like fun, culminating in a section toward the end that veers hard into what we'd now call torture porn, as a female character the creators have actually bothered to develop slightly gets beaten and sexually assaulted and Daizaburo gets battered to a pulp in a sequence that seems to go on forever.</p><p>Seriousness, let alone a serious treatment of violence, is the last thing <b>Mad Bull 34 </b>is suited to, so it's a relief when the third episode shifts back toward material that's, if not exactly more light-hearted, then at least delivered with tongue closer to cheek. On paper, it's still grim stuff, as Sleepy and Daizaburo take it upon themselves to protect a female reporter determined to expose a serial rapist who's bought his way out of justice and find themselves targeted in turn by a gang of suicidal Chinese assassins; but it manages just the right measure of daffiness, and the violence of both sorts has been toned down to pretty much normal nineties anime levels, so it feels less as though it's going out of its way to shock. However, <b>Mad Bull 34 </b>being <b>Mad Bull 34</b>, a positive change in direction can't last more than an episode, and so we end on the lowest of notes, with a storyline that's both sillier than anything we've had yet and delivered with vastly more self-seriousness, while also making Sleepy seem like a spectacularly awful human being to a degree that blows right past the high bar the show's already set - the more so because it really seems we're meant to side with him as he sleeps with the deranged, cop-killing daughter of the best friend he got kicked off the force.</p><p>It's odd to come across a show that on the one hand seems to have such a clear sense of its own identity and on the other is perpetually losing sight of what it wants to be. Despite how I've probably made it sound, there are moments when <b>Mad Bull 34 </b>comes together: outside of the irredeemable last episode, the action is energetic, and Sleepy and Daizaburo have engaging chemistry, or do in the original Japanese - I forgot to sample <i>Manga</i>'s dub, but, judging by track record, its safe to assume it's dumb and awful. The animation rarely gets up to anything impressive and nor does Dezaki's direction, but there are some terrific New York backdrops and Sleepy's design is a source of joy, more akin to what Genndy Tartakovsky would get up to later in the decade than what most of anime was doing at the start of the nineties. As for music, the incidental stuff rarely rises past ignorable, but we do get a James Brown end track for episode one - yet another thing I'd never have predicted! - followed by songs from that master of cheesy nineties pop rock Joey Carbone; if they're not on a par with his <b>Project A-Ko</b> contributions, their presence is still a nice surprise. Which is a welcome development, really, when most of what's surprising about <b>Mad Bull 34 </b>is how it sets itself the seemingly straightforward task of being exploitative trash and manages to get even that wrong more than half the time.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdBRIWYzB0kXjVLCqMv_6H_rnkyf6G2TVU7CCKHq5VKnYjO7gQEsHW_sbs9CsXR6WEPa5-0PIoobgcKqta4g2bqlK5Gg88zPU1LRKnV8k2Ki2EalMkaRPw7RnHskdxEdDxTmwGh2lglCF0fFpHWQAsM8vHhyOEK96FXcpJGrXua9cMY8Sb2pq6IjM/s1130/Yu%20Yu%20Hakusho%20The%20Movie.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdBRIWYzB0kXjVLCqMv_6H_rnkyf6G2TVU7CCKHq5VKnYjO7gQEsHW_sbs9CsXR6WEPa5-0PIoobgcKqta4g2bqlK5Gg88zPU1LRKnV8k2Ki2EalMkaRPw7RnHskdxEdDxTmwGh2lglCF0fFpHWQAsM8vHhyOEK96FXcpJGrXua9cMY8Sb2pq6IjM/s320/Yu%20Yu%20Hakusho%20The%20Movie.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119171/" target="_blank">Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</a>, 1993, dir: Noriyuki Abe</div><div><br /></div><div>What's that you say, imaginary reader who's followed these posts from the beginning and actually remembers some of what I've written, I've already covered <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</b>? Ha! No, but I can see how you might make that mistake. What you're thinking of is what was released in the West as <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: Poltergeist Report</b>, and if you weren't entirely paying attention, you might well suppose that, because it's as long as a movie and animated to the level of quality you'd expect from a movie and pretty damn good to boot, it was therefore <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</b>.</div><div><p>Instead, what we have before us is, I think, a new first for <i>Drowning in Nineties Anime</i>. The franchise spin-off cinematic release that runs to about the length of a regular TV episode seems to be something unique to anime, and not many of them found their way over to the US and UK, since their function was presumably to be offered up in double bills that would compensate for their meagre individual running times. And <i>AnimeWork</i>s deserve a measure of credit, I guess, for attempting to replicate that concept, if only ever the once: <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie </b>came packaged with the equally short <b>Ninku: The Movie</b>, which we'll be getting to in a minute.</p><p>Maybe it'll be great, who knows? But it seems to me that there are some fairly large problems inherent in making a standalone franchise movie that runs to less than half an hour. We've seen some pretty good anime titles of that length, and one of my all-time favourite movies that's just outside the purview of this series, <b>Cat Soup</b>, is barely longer. Only, those weren't tied to a wider property, with all the expectations that involves, and it's that aspect which really sinks <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</b>. It needs to feel bigger than an episode, so rather than tell a fun little self-contained story, it has to aim for world-threatening stakes, except that it has no time to set up those stakes and no way of persuading us that any of its events are likely to have meaningful consequences.</p><p>This probably doesn't sound like that big an issue, yet in practice it gets in the way of everything that might otherwise work. There's some solid action along the way, but since <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie </b>only has time for a brief setup, a middle act that feels altogether like padding, and an epic climax that still seems rather knocked-off and trivial, it's mostly empty spectacle. And even putting that aside, the story still doesn't quite function: our heroes are set the task of rescuing someone they don't like and that we're given no reason to like either, and all the end-of-the-world stuff is so woolly that it's impossible to imagine it will come to anything important.</p><p>I wish I could be kinder. In theory, there's nothing that wrong with <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</b>, and technically it's perfectly fine, with a couple of standout sequences evidently there to say, "No, look, you're not just watching a TV episode in a cinema, honest!" But maybe a minute's worth of impressive animation is hardly reason to spend just shy of half an hour watching something so futile and generic. This has almost nothing to offer anyone bar existing fans, telling a tale we've seen variations of a thousand times and telling it badly, and I can't imagine those fans would be too impressed with a title that presumably offers less on the story front than what the TV show delivered on a regular basis.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3693148/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiakgKnfBFFAn0k7dTwahRxcFFi3mXQujEb1kb-qCbB8gJ69uES_KM3HqOwIOVbVcsbVL60ekz5Ne-jnNYbrB75faziY6DbJvqqQXXeMWQ8YqLb3bD9KK-UJ35ZYOHeZ-tZ9MyLlJB2RPLW3ubjuXL-ybK1KR-K-Np6vt8XZWrCOisPGhxaYGaQAM8/s1130/Ninku%20The%20Movie.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiakgKnfBFFAn0k7dTwahRxcFFi3mXQujEb1kb-qCbB8gJ69uES_KM3HqOwIOVbVcsbVL60ekz5Ne-jnNYbrB75faziY6DbJvqqQXXeMWQ8YqLb3bD9KK-UJ35ZYOHeZ-tZ9MyLlJB2RPLW3ubjuXL-ybK1KR-K-Np6vt8XZWrCOisPGhxaYGaQAM8/s320/Ninku%20The%20Movie.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3693148/" target="_blank">Ninku: The Movie</a>, 1995, dir: Noriyuki Abe<p></p><p>I don't know what life-altering experience happened to director Noriyuki Abe between the years 1993 and 1995, but where his <i>Yu Yu Hakusho </i>entry does most everything a short franchise movie ought not to do, his <b>Ninku: The Movie </b>works about as well as you could possibly hope such a thing would.</p><p>Okay, so I'm not being altogether serious. It's not as though Abe was the problem with <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie</b>, his direction there was perfectly serviceable, and it's not as though his efforts are <i>that </i>much more accomplished this time around, though he certainly does a more than respectable job. No, where <b>Ninku: The Movie </b>succeeds is more to do with setting itself the proper goals. Its story is ideally suited to its barely-more-than-a-TV-episode running time, it's so thoroughly standalone that I was never for a moment lost despite knowing nothing about the property besides what the ultra-brief intro chose to inform me, and yet it has just enough scope and style that you can tell it's not merely an extra episode stuffed into cinemas.</p><p>Above all else, though, <i>Ninku </i>the series is simply a better fit for this sort of thing. It's a comedy, which means it doesn't need to have any pretensions of epicness, but it's an action comedy, so it still gets to end on a fight sequence and rustle up the semblance of a three-act structure. To succeed, it merely has to deliver some solid laughs and a good scrap, and it manages both, and if that was all there was to the matter, I'd still be inclined to give it a thumbs up. So that the technical values are on the impressive side feels mostly like a nice bonus. To some extent, I suppose, this comes from a lack of familiarity with the series, which, annoyingly, never found its way to a Western release: that the art style is weird and abrasive and unlike most of what was going on in the mid-90s comes as a novel surprise, as does the extent to which the relatively simple but essentially realistic designs can be distorted in fun, interesting ways, making the brief bursts of action exciting not just on their own terms but as animation as well.</p><p>Perhaps, though, nerding out over the animation isn't the best way to go with a show in which, after all, one of the main characters is a penguin. That there's a measure of movie-style quality to be found here is a welcome bonus, to be sure, but <b>Ninku: The Movie </b>could look like garbage and still deliver twenty-some minutes of consistently funny gags. The setup sees our heroes, a bunch of highly skilled and highly dim-witted martial artists known as the Ninku, running into a bunch of Ninku imitators, to whom they soon find themselves employed as servants. To say more would surely spoil things given how little there is to spoil, but suffice to say that the central joke is a good one that makes for an often hilarious middle act, and the film has the sense to ditch it at precisely the point when it might risk getting tired to barrel on into its action climax.</p><p>Under normal circumstances, all of the above would still leave us at the point where so many of these reviews wind up, at which I have to concede that, sure, there's enjoyment to be had here, but is it really the sort that warrants hunting for a long out of print and hard-to-find DVD? And okay, yes, that's going to be the case for the vast majority of folks; but if you're the sort who tracks this stuff down, I'd propose that <i>AnimeWorks</i>' two movies-for-the-price-of-one gimmick narrowly edges this one over the line: <b>Ninku: The Movie</b> is a delight and <b>Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie </b>is worthwhile enough if you view it as a bonus rather than the main attraction.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301373/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4BbuTXvoTWfC5GFY5912oM8FIYMfq_fweDLenCcEBVz-XBp3My0Ps2xklMQ3lQeF5Jw92BgChxPZfcwUSU1ek29JuFsj8QzAsT2jio9vf_Akh9Pc5dhEBnT6Pb5AjL5o30a2rThXb5s0LJhspjmGPIaXC69ImybCuBs4KrUCBx8cR-DzjvhbdvRY/s1130/Guy%20Double%20Target.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4BbuTXvoTWfC5GFY5912oM8FIYMfq_fweDLenCcEBVz-XBp3My0Ps2xklMQ3lQeF5Jw92BgChxPZfcwUSU1ek29JuFsj8QzAsT2jio9vf_Akh9Pc5dhEBnT6Pb5AjL5o30a2rThXb5s0LJhspjmGPIaXC69ImybCuBs4KrUCBx8cR-DzjvhbdvRY/s320/Guy%20Double%20Target.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301373/" target="_blank">Guy: Double Target</a>, 1990, dir: Yorihisa Uchida</div><div><br /></div><div>Yeah, yeah, <b>Guy: Double Target</b> is hentai<b> </b>- hence, presumably, the faintly rude-sounding subtitle! - and so yet again I'm breaking my self-imposed no-hentai rule, and the only excuses I have are that I'm reasonably sure there was a cut version released in the West that removed all the sexy stuff and that, whether or not that's the case, it absolutely could have been, because the sex scenes here have so little bearing on the narrative that snipping them out would make no difference and would probably leave no-one any the wiser.</div><div><p>Moreover, as is often the case - and I swear this isn't just me being prudish! - the result would be an almost inarguable improvement, because <b>Guy: Double Target </b>is very bad indeed at being hentai and only slightly bad, heck even sometimes okay, at everything else it sets out to do. There are two substantial sex scenes in the first episode: the first is only a bit unpleasant in that one of the parties is presumably being coerced, though we're led to believe they're altogether happy with the situation, but it slams the brakes on whatever plot momentum has built up to that point, while the second is very deeply unpleasant to an extent that feels out of keeping with everything around it. As for the second episode, there's one brief, entirely consensual sex scene that's so mild they could have left it in a cut version and still got a pass from the censors. So whatever way you shake it, <b>Guy: Double Target </b>is crappy hentai.</p><p>This is good news for <i>Drowning in Nineties Anime</i> purposes, since hentai isn't our bag, and probably good news for <b>Guy: Double Target</b>,<b> </b>since it seems so disinvested in that side of things. The problem is that surrendering any running time at all when you only have seventy minutes in which to tell two entire stories is never going to be the best move, and it's not as though the material is to such a standard that the show can afford any more slipups. It's easy to see what the creators were after: something breezy, sexy, violent but basically fun, a kind of semi-pornographic sci-fi <b>Oceans Eleven</b> sort of deal (or in anime terms, <i>Dirty Pair</i> with half the Pair being, well, a Guy.) And its easy to see because there are moments when it succeeds and you're left wondering how everything else went quite so wrong. The opening scene of the second episode, in particular, finds just the right tone, before immediately dumping it with a resounding splat.</p><p>Interestingly, and as evidenced by the widely divergent approach to being - or not really being - hentai, each of the two episodes has largely different faults. Episode one is an exceedingly gory, trashy, rather muddled tale of a tyrannical prison built on a sentient planet that sometimes somehow turns people into monsters, and those two threads only gel when it becomes handy for the A-plot that there be some monsters to fight in the big action climax. Whereas episode two is the much less gory, somewhat less trashy, far too undernourished story of a religious cult with nefarious plans involving galactic domination and a giant golden statue that our hero Guy and his partner Raina reckon on stealing. The common thread between them is a lack of clear exposition and unfathomable character motivations: having watched this once while half asleep and again to make sure my half-asleepness wasn't to blame, I can't tell you what those nefarious plans involved, or how Guy and Raina thought they'd escape with a gigantic statue, or why they felt getting themselves thrown into the evil sci-fi prison in the first episode was a remotely sensible idea. So I'm going to go ahead and put the blame squarely on bad writing.</p><p>Generally at this point I'd propose that solid technical values, somewhat appealing character designs, and the odd bit of genuinely imaginative animation go some way to softening the blow; but in truth, none of those help much with nonsensical plotting. Even if they could, and even if there weren't too many moments of cheap shabbiness to counterbalance them, the first episode only really impresses with its icky monster designs and gross-out gore, while the second devotes too much of its creative energies to an action climax with no stakes or drama and not much ingenuity. So while a non-hentai cut of <b>Guy: Double Target </b>would allow its occasionally virtues to shine more than they do, that's not to say it would claw its way up to being worth watching.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>If this is one of those posts that makes it look as though the best is far behind us, then don't despair just yet! And by you, I mostly mean me, because there are certainly days when I gaze at the to-watch shelf and think that precise thought - but regardless, it's not altogether true. I'm far enough along with these posts to know that there's the odd gem yet to come, and as for this one, while it's about as small a triumph as you could hope for, <b>Ninku: The Movie </b>made me thoroughly happy for all of half an hour.</p><p><br /></p><div><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-86831732654406487032022-05-01T18:34:00.001+01:002022-05-01T18:42:15.448+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 117<p>I've been trying my best to keep the number of VHS-only titles I cover here to a minimum, since I'd rather focus on stuff that people might conceivably want to watch and / or be able to get their hands on, but the truth of the matter is that there really isn't much left that falls into either category. And the even truer truth is that - whispers! - I'd actually <i>rather </i>be delving into that particular rabbit hole; it feels like a return to the earliest days of <i>Drowning in Nineties Anime </i>when I hadn't a clue what I was getting into and every new watch was a strange and baffling adventure. Plus, it occurs to me that these truly hard-to-find titles are actually really easy to find if you don't mind heading over to Youtube, and while I've been snarky about their exceedingly lax approach to copyright theft in the past, it's hard not to view the way people are finding a home there for releases that would otherwise be long lost as an act of cultural preservation.</p><p>Mind you, whether they're worth either watching or preserving is a whole 'nother question! And one I'm about to have a go at answering in regards to <b>Panzer Dragoon, </b><b>Dark Warrior</b>, <b>Gude Crest: The Emblem of Gude</b>, and <b>Iczelion</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655624/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgaKMfVBzECrUTFFfFvCwKS7rwup7CEoYuen2dF5vd8NCKX7EAczdpbxtUXcy3x1BJOvh5ygagJU4uoNQAgN6nxl5Clh5QXTFJIFIP-srp7ODb1aNwvpz_RwGBpuT5JpIwwgfG4BmmGs76a0e7-zWcrUGpGgb-rYY3K53xDEbVSXJnIvRT-zIPur4Q=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgaKMfVBzECrUTFFfFvCwKS7rwup7CEoYuen2dF5vd8NCKX7EAczdpbxtUXcy3x1BJOvh5ygagJU4uoNQAgN6nxl5Clh5QXTFJIFIP-srp7ODb1aNwvpz_RwGBpuT5JpIwwgfG4BmmGs76a0e7-zWcrUGpGgb-rYY3K53xDEbVSXJnIvRT-zIPur4Q=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655624/" target="_blank">Panzer Dragoon</a>, 1996, dir: Shinji Takagi<p></p><p>For once we can do away with our usual opening question when it comes to these titles that didn't make it past a VHS release: the reason <b>Panzer Dragoon </b>never got as far as a DVD is that it's all of about twenty minutes long minus credits and crap. So let's begin instead by bemoaning the fact that, of all the video game series there have ever been, it's hard to think of one that would have offered better material for an anime adaptation, and this, <i>this</i>, is what the <i>Panzer Dragoon</i> universe got served with. I've only ever played <b>Panzer Dragoon Orta</b> on the original X-box, so I can hardly call myself a series expert, but that entry alone offered up one of the richest, most elaborate, most intriguing fantasy worlds I've ever encountered in a video game, and all somehow delivered mostly through the exceedingly limited means of an on-rails shoot-em-up. Only as I started researching this review did I discover that there's an actual <i>Panzer Dragoon</i> RPG, in the shape of <b>Panzer Dragoon Saga</b>, and the idea of an RPG with the sort of world-building that <b>Orta </b>got up to is a mouth-watering prospect.</p><p>But none of that helps <b>Panzer Dragoon</b> the anime. Okay, not entirely none of it: if there's anything going right here, it's that the world design hints at a vastly more interesting setting than what we're shown. However, those cool designs are rendered almost entirely in some of the worst CG that's ever made its way into anime, and this at a time when CG was never what you might, from our present perspective, regard as good. There is, it turns out, bad CG that you can smile along with because, hey, it was the mid-nineties and they were trying their best, plus it probably cost the budget of the average small island nation and took eight months to render, and then there's bad CG that just makes you want to slap the creators for ever thinking people would pay money to have their eyeballs seared by such ugliness. The models, in fairness, are just about passable, but the backgrounds ... my goodness, the backgrounds are horrible to look upon, and I refuse to believe there was ever a point in history when anyone would have believed otherwise. Though I can't verify the theory, I think it's likely the CG assets in <b>Panzer Dragoon</b> the anime are in fact the CG assets from <b>Panzer Dragoon</b> the Sega Saturn game from way back in 1995, and what would have looked perfectly okay in that context looks every sort of ghastly in an anime from 1996.</p><p>Should I talk about the story? I don't really want to, plus there basically isn't one. Our protagonist - Kyle in the godawful dub - gets attacked by a black dragon that kidnaps and kind of semi-absorbs his girlfriend Alita, who, in the closest we get to a vaguely distinctive angle, is blind, though practically nothing will come of this detail. Another dragon, this one blue, turns up and recruits Kyle as its rider so the pair of them can stop the black dragon getting back to a big metal tower that we saw in a brief opening sequence and thus doing bad stuff. But can the blue dragon be trusted? After all, it immediately kills a bunch of folks and ... wait, no, that plot thread gets dropped in all of about two minutes.</p><p>Again, I can't say there's absolutely nothing here, though <b>Panzer Dragoon </b>comes perilously close. The vehicle and dragon designs, as I've mentioned, are theoretically pretty neat, if you pretend they look how they're obviously meant to look and not how they actually do. The character designs are rather good on paper, which makes it all the more irritating that they were instead brought to life with computer animation that was hopelessly inadequate for the task at this point in history. There's an ever-so-slightly endearing bonus feature at the end showing how the concept art became the final product - spoiler alert! badly! - and the music that accompanies it is much nicer than anything in the finished product as it was released in the West, leading me to believe <i>ADV </i>mucked with the soundtrack, lest a beautifully sung track in Japanese highlight how their voice cast couldn't even handle stringing simple sentences together. And now I've run out of good points and I'm off to start a petition to persuade <i>Sega </i>to make an adaptation of <i>Panzer Dragoon</i> that isn't in the running for worst anime ever. Wish me luck!</p><div><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285506/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4q5GKR3ygwPd_Ej4_RIWxSFAXZouTTKDGrwRL9p6KFymnUinWT5QGIE6KfFapAyOtXKOpPf7gRGGV3FXBT6epvsoAuSlreJhiA0zvVpGRocLB9v8xlpDx5RS7GKK3_7hIQ2UUdsdcOh08JfV8skUW7LhfyWC1ImxlXNufPzuSpNz0JJZa2DkAw4/s1130/Dark%20Warrior.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4q5GKR3ygwPd_Ej4_RIWxSFAXZouTTKDGrwRL9p6KFymnUinWT5QGIE6KfFapAyOtXKOpPf7gRGGV3FXBT6epvsoAuSlreJhiA0zvVpGRocLB9v8xlpDx5RS7GKK3_7hIQ2UUdsdcOh08JfV8skUW7LhfyWC1ImxlXNufPzuSpNz0JJZa2DkAw4/s320/Dark%20Warrior.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285506/" target="_blank">Dark Warrior</a>, 1991, dir: Masahisa Ishida</div><div><br /></div><div>I've been working off the assumption that any titles that never made it beyond a VHS release were by and large quite rubbish, and that rule of thumb has served us fairly well, <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2020/11/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-88.html" target="_blank">with a few notable exceptions</a>. Yet throughout most of the two volumes of <b>Dark Warrior</b>, a show that has very little in the way of reputation and all of it bad, the thought I kept returning was "I've definitely seen worse." Of course, that's not saying a great deal at this stage, and perhaps the thought that would have been truer to the mark was, "Why did <b>Manga </b>stuff their <i>Collection </i>range of dodgy budget titles with so much garbage when they could have been putting out titles like this that are merely not very good?"</div><div><p>This isn't, I realise, a terribly useful way of starting a review of <b>Dark Warrior</b> itself, and possibly that's me deliberately ducking the issue, because <b>Dark Warrior </b>feels ever so slightly review-proof. I could tell you, for instance, that it features some truly abominable animation, and I wouldn't be lying: I don't recall the last time I saw this many genuinely dysfunctional shots*, wherein, say, a train jolts around a corner without any inbetweening or a whole conversation takes place without anyone on the staff remembering that people's mouths move when they talk. However, for all that, the bulk of the animation is perfectly serviceable and it's clear this wasn't the work of incompetents: there's the odd bit of nice character design here, the odd standout background there, and most of the really egregious stuff is confined to the first episode, with the second, by its end, veering dangerously close to looking quite decent.</p><p>Likewise, I might suggest that the plot is hackneyed crap of a sort that any vintage anime fan will have seen so often they could predict its every development, and stripped to the essentials, that's true. A part of me would prefer not to spoil it, for reasons I'll come to in a moment, but since the back of the box couldn't care less, it would be foolish of me to. In fact, let's just quote that box, because life's short: "Joe Takami had it made ... Then he found out that he WAS made ... And that the people who made him want him back!" Joe, you see, is actually a clone and for some reason that gives him superpowers, which basically mean he punches real good, and the evil organisation who made him are fascists set on creating a new master-race of humans (that the opening prologue is narrated, without context, from their point of view is an alarming way to kick things off!) Hackneyed crap, as a say, but it helps that <b>Dark Warrior </b>doesn't seem to realise and so busies itself with strange digressions that arguably make it more watchable than it might have been. A large proportion of the first episode is devoted to setting up a mystery the box has already given away, and I found myself quite drawn in, perhaps because Takami is a novel character as far as vintage anime is concerned, as though someone thought that what <i>The Guyver</i> really needed was Bill Gates for a hero. Genius software developers aren't exactly common protagonists in nineties anime, but that aside, Joe is self-absorbed and prickly, and a mass of contradictions in a way that proves to be nice foreshadowing: having established that he spends most of his time talking to the AI he built, it's puzzling when he declares that what matters most to him are his friends and family, but the incongruity will make perfect sense before the episode's done.</p><p>All the same, I suppose I'm largely commending the first volume of <b>Dark Warrior </b>for being better than it might have been, and often it's not even that: once it settles on being violent shlock, there's no option except to compare it with endless similar titles and conclude that most of them did the job better; in particular, there's a rape scene that feels like the most horribly shoehorned-in attempt to be shocking and leaves a very sour taste. So it's probably fair to say that most of my goodwill toward <b>Dark Warrior </b>arises from the second volume, which is arguably more familiar fare but does everything that bit better. Aside from the much-improved animation, the self-contained plot has enough odd grace notes to make it feel like its own thing: Joe makes friends with a young psychic girl in a manner that's actually quite sweet, a giant cloned killer whale is a major plot element (<b>Dark Warrior </b>really doesn't seem to have the faintest idea of what cloning actually involves!) and the action is more ingenious and relies less on gory punchlines. Really, then, the fair thing to do would have been to review the two volumes separately, and I would have, except it's a stone-cold fact that no one gives a damn about <b>Dark Warrior </b>and, for all that it kept me moderately amused for a couple of hours, there's no reason they should.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318517/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqf_jakvOcdJzn8Ozhpk-AnI0TqLVOxmRkw5jEqJMP5PwVEILPsUVtwX3p32CdpgS3iG5a1NUU3yASnwGSVyvtxHNTdIdM0ks2o8T6iobugaZjhu3RPb_uOt4qBUvYoB8Qxq2J-vNuBW7e8vQmKoQUY1KZ4Of5upbLmcTGud5L9H6DJ6mDmhOb8W4/s1130/Gude%20Crest%20The%20Emblem%20of%20Gude.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqf_jakvOcdJzn8Ozhpk-AnI0TqLVOxmRkw5jEqJMP5PwVEILPsUVtwX3p32CdpgS3iG5a1NUU3yASnwGSVyvtxHNTdIdM0ks2o8T6iobugaZjhu3RPb_uOt4qBUvYoB8Qxq2J-vNuBW7e8vQmKoQUY1KZ4Of5upbLmcTGud5L9H6DJ6mDmhOb8W4/s320/Gude%20Crest%20The%20Emblem%20of%20Gude.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318517/" target="_blank">Gude Crest: The Emblem of Gude</a>, 1990, dir: Kazuhito Kikuchi<p></p><p><b>Gude Crest</b> runs to forty minutes sans credits and has enough material - if perhaps not quite enough of a story - to cover twice that length without breaking a sweat. It opens with one of those narration-over-still-images prologues that were all the rage in fantasy anime at the time, probably because they were an easy way to save a bit of cash, except that in <b>Gude Crest</b>'s case, the prologue isn't done by the thirty second mark as was invariably the case. No, instead, when we get to what feels like the natural cut-off point, our trusty narrator moves on to another topic, and then another, and before you know it, two minutes have gone by and you've been introduced to a whopping slab of fictional history spanning entire millennia.</p><p>Whether or not we choose to consider this as charmingly committed or hopelessly naff, it's a fair indication of where <b>Gude Crest</b>'s head is at. As I suggested, the story, cut to its bare bones, is pretty slight, but the sheer volume of stuff that goes on around it and the numerous plot diversions that serve more to build character and add colour than to move things forward and the intricate window dressing that's strung over every aspect are all so involved that it feels like more than it is - at least until the end, which inevitably winds up seeming a touch rushed and anticlimactic when <b>Gude Crest </b>has invested so much energy in engaging us with its clichéd but elaborate world-building and its familiar but appealing heroines.</p><p>Those two are sorceress Efe and swordswoman Jira, and if there's any wrinkle in their <i>Dirty Pair</i>-style characterisation, it's that Jira is the rough one but also a former princess whereas what little we learn of the somewhat more refined Efe suggests she has a much more ordinary background. So points for slightly subverting a trope, I suppose, but points immediately taken back for how the two voice actors never quite find the spark their relationship requires, unaided by a script that has the feel of bantering dialogue without much in the way of actual humour. Still, for all that <b>Gude Crest </b>has the air of a comedy, that's not where its heart lies, and what we get instead is a certain energetic light-heartedness that's probably better suited to the show's busy fantasy milieu. A serious attempt at comedy would be one element too many for something that's already on the verge of being dangerously overstuffed, and anyway, the business Efe and Jira finds themselves mixed up is hardly the stuff of high humour, with an evil cult to be defeated, lots of politicking to be unravelled, and three identical-looking siblings to be defended (though one of them is dead before the five minute mark, so maybe not so much that last one.)</p><p>Not much else sets <b>Gude Crest </b>apart, though director Kikuchi is a bit more engaged and imaginative than you might necessarily expect; it's evident, anyway, that he was making actual choices about how to frame shots and such, and often those choices are good and eye-catching, which does a lot to stretch an obviously less than stellar budget. And even without Kikuchi's going the extra mile, <b>Gude Crest </b>looks pretty nice, with lavish backgrounds and quality character work that does much to plug some of those gaps the script never quite gets to. All in all, however, it's the ambition and attention to detail that really separate this short fantasy OVA from all the many other short fantasy OVAs from the time, and the earnest, mostly successful attempt to squish a novel's worth of material into so short a running time. For me, it worked more than it didn't, enough so that the result is one of those rare cases of a VHS-only title where I'm genuinely at a loss to explain why it never made it to DVD: <i>ADV </i>would certainly put out much worse than this charming, jam-packed little adventure.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110103/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkP9ECfhL_QIVcnaZJ4arfTJnifrcdGo8CnvwhyB3s-rCIJr21o5a6xLTPgmyUoG4XHIGoDpbgWp3tDwbf7gL1WIEfN63whqa-fYc9DDVtNCaPAblUNQjYFARvo2EjaRRSxFj-qFROowwdzsPGzjN-wATR2Rb2o_wZSmLWa6U69nVnU0TBYkxC7Us/s1130/Iczelion.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkP9ECfhL_QIVcnaZJ4arfTJnifrcdGo8CnvwhyB3s-rCIJr21o5a6xLTPgmyUoG4XHIGoDpbgWp3tDwbf7gL1WIEfN63whqa-fYc9DDVtNCaPAblUNQjYFARvo2EjaRRSxFj-qFROowwdzsPGzjN-wATR2Rb2o_wZSmLWa6U69nVnU0TBYkxC7Us/s320/Iczelion.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110103/" target="_blank">Iczelion</a>, 1995, dir: Toshiki Hirano<p></p><p>Oh what a tangled mess the <i>Iczer </i>series is! For <b>Iczelion</b>, AKA <b>Iczer Girl Iczelion</b>, is indeed, as the name sort of kind of suggests, a part of said series, which began with <b>Fight! Iczer 1 </b>and continued with <b>Iczer Reborn</b>, released in the UK and reviewed here as <b>Adventures With Iczer 3</b>. However, <b>Iczelion </b>is also much more of a reboot, though it has in common with the previous iterations a character called Nagisa, only now she has a different surname and hasn't much to do with the Nagisa we've come to know and tolerate besides being quite useless.</p><p>In <b>Iczelion</b>, that's more of an issue than it was in prior entries, since Nagisa has been promoted to protagonist, though the show will forget this regularly over the course of its two roughly half hour episodes, perhaps because it was a terrible idea. Nagisa, you see, is a high school girl with no special qualities except for a befuddling desire to become a professional wrestler in spite of how she's terrified of violence, and barely have we met her but she finds herself caught up in a scrap between a goofy-looking robot and some sort of alien aggressor. That robot, as it turns out, is more of a sentient armoured suit kind of deal, going by the name of Iczel. And Iczel's convinced, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, that Nagisa is just the sort of person it should be bonding with to defend the Earth from the evil space villains who plan to destroy it.</p><p>I realise it's a fool's game to criticise nineties anime for not making a lot of sense, but boy does <b>Iczelion </b>not make much sense at all. And I'm not even talking about the whole Iczel / Nagisa relationship, which, for some fifty minutes of the running time, involves Iczel attempting to persuade Nagisa to do anything other than attack monsters with wrestling moves or run away, and Nagisa determinedly doing whatever the dumbest thing might be in any given scene. No, that I found quite charming, given that I suspect most of us, as much as we might prefer not to admit it, would deal with such an outlandish situation in similarly dumb-ass ways, and Nagisa is more an engine to move the plot forward than an actual protagonist. Rather, the part of <b>Iczelion </b>that's flat-out nonsensical is how there are already three other girls out there who've bonded with Iczel units and all know each other and have even had time to give themselves colour-themed names and personalised special moves and whatnot. I mean, how long has this alien invasion been going on for? The implication as we first meet Nagisa is a matter of minutes, but the fact that there's an entire squadron of Iczelions kicking about implies weeks or months.</p><p>Am I nitpicking? Probably. Is there any value to nitpicking a two-episode OVA from nearly three decades ago? Possibly, but not when it comes to <b>Iczelion</b>, because everything that makes it kind of awesome comes from the Iczelion squadron, who surely ought to have been the focus from the off. Far more so than <b>Iczer Reborn</b>, <b>Iczelion</b> harks back to what made <b>Fight! Iczer 1 </b>such a treat, or parts of it at any rate. The gross-out horror and general weirdness is still largely absent, but the overload of imagination and the neat fight scenes are very much back, and most of the latter involve the rest of the Iczelions, rather inevitably given how fight scenes don't work when one of the participants is legging it toward the horizon. And fortunately, <b>Iczelion</b> is also something of a technical return to form: if the animation's good rather than great, it's enough to sell those many action scenes, and for bonus points we get a score co-written by the great Kenji Kawai, who could have breathed extra life into this sort of material in his sleep by this point in his career.</p><p>I don't know that solid animation, a neat score, and ingenious fight scenes are really enough to qualify <b>Iczelion</b> as legitimately good, but then, I'm not sure that was ever the goal. For one thing else that's returned from <b>Fight! Iczer 1</b> is the sleazy, pulpy tone, and whatever you might think of sleaze or pulp, it seems like the right fit for this material. It's exceedingly trashy - I'd struggle to think of any anime where the transformation sequences were so wholly an excuse for a spot of gratuitous nudity! - but then it's hardly pretending otherwise, and I seem to recall praising <b>Fight! Iczer 1 </b>for much the same approach, which is to say, accepting what it is and trying hard to be the best version of that.</p><p>You can knock the <i>Iczer </i>franchise for plenty of things, most noticeably starting on a far better note than it would ever hit again, but the results remain an appealing oddity. Despite sharing the same director, the hugely inconsistent and occasionally brilliant Toshiki Hirano, they barely feel like they belong together, yet the plus side is that they all have their own specific charms, albeit not all equally. I've warmed up a bit to <b>Iczer Reborn </b>since I first watched it, having seen it in the original Japanese instead of Manga's preposterous dub and with the context of <b>Fight! Iczer 1</b>, but I'd still rate <b>Iczelion</b> marginally higher. Its biggest fault, other than arguably focusing on the wrong character, is that it's too short, stopping just as it's about to get going. Still, this is definitely a title whose failure to reach DVD makes no sense, and I for one would be happy indeed to see this strange, inconsistent franchise be rescued from the rubbish heap of time.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>So there we have it: four reviews and only one title that categorically didn't deserve to make it to DVD. Okay, probably two, objectively <b>Dark Warrior</b> was fairly dreadful, and I probably ought to stop falling back on "but worse stuff got released!" as an argument given how astonishingly low that particular bar got on occasions: not being <b>Sword for Truth</b> isn't grounds for a recommendation! Nevertheless, that still leaves us <b>Gude Crest</b> and <b>Iczelion</b>, both of which are genuinely quite good and feel like strange omissions, especially the latter. Probably the explanation lies in how each segment of the <i>Iczer </i>saga found itself with a different publisher, but that's hardly fair on poor <b>Iczelion</b>, is it?</p><p>Next up: not another post of VHS-only stuff, I promise! Well, promise is a strong word, but I'll see what I can do...</p><p><br /></p><div><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p>* Okay, I do, it was <b>Gundress</b>.</p></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-73165005308147309572022-04-14T18:25:00.000+01:002022-04-14T18:25:05.637+01:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 116<p>Following on from last entry's worry that I'm getting awfully short of DVD releases to cover, another concern is that, with so few remotely well-known titles left to review, these posts will hit a point where we're wading through the dregs; since one of my goals has been to highlight the fact that, however tacky, derivative, and wantonly commercial it sometimes got, nineties anime was on the whole pretty good, I'd sooner not end up by putting out post after post of irredeemable crud! Yet, somehow, that point keeps on not coming, in part because the baseline really <i>was </i>pretty decent and even many of the least known titles had something to offer, but also in part because there truly is some brilliant stuff out there that we haven't touched on, whether famous or not. And so it is that, with well over four hundred reviews behind us, we still have a couple of titles here that I'm tempted to describe as classics.</p><p>Though granted we also have a couple of titles that I'd never in a million years consider calling classics! So what's what from amid <b>Getter Robo Armageddon</b>, <b>Compiler 2</b>, <b>Sprite: Between Two Worlds</b>, and <b>Neo Tokyo</b>?</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjrr67UlcaEPWt2EavJX-eWmBSxrWI8-rPjdheX3-K4kylYJNHSLxlmHm3762YvBxLFK5JJJoqdrtEiMVLYl3NqV9aKR1YL3rFqPD45sQYXdPQ5eUEAT3-MbNQPpQ0YsH-U35Y8cCXuc0h_WR1QQy1ENvvly-TYli4Ek9jdNq2956rirvKkBB5s1NA=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjrr67UlcaEPWt2EavJX-eWmBSxrWI8-rPjdheX3-K4kylYJNHSLxlmHm3762YvBxLFK5JJJoqdrtEiMVLYl3NqV9aKR1YL3rFqPD45sQYXdPQ5eUEAT3-MbNQPpQ0YsH-U35Y8cCXuc0h_WR1QQy1ENvvly-TYli4Ek9jdNq2956rirvKkBB5s1NA=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346226/" target="_blank">Getter Robo Armageddon</a>, 1998 - 1999, dir's: Yasuhiro Imagawa, Jun Kawagoe<p></p><p>Were all of <b>Getter Robo Armageddon </b>operating at the level of its first three episodes, I'm comfortable in saying we'd be looking at a masterpiece ... maybe a major masterpiece, maybe a minor one, but definitely a masterpiece of sorts, because those introductory episodes are as strong as just about anything that came out of anime in the nineties. What we have here is one of those gritty reimaginings of a classic property that were so extremely the rage at the time, and which could so easily descend into grimness for its own sake - an accusation you might be inclined to throw at <b>Getter Robo Armageddon </b>if you were going solely off a synopsis. Because it certainly feels as though its main purpose is to take everything that was sweet and good and innocent about classic giant robot properties and twist it in horrible directions. The genius scientist is a monster warped by the death of his daughter in a truly ghastly robot-combining accident, and is also back from the dead after apparently being murdered by the guy who surely ought to be our heroic protagonist, and who has to be sprung from prison so he can get right the murder he failed at / was actually innocent of the first time around. The kid sidekick is practically mute from trauma; the adult sidekicks are angry and bitter; the war against alien invaders that was supposedly won has in fact accomplished not a damn thing.</p><p>As I say, all the ingredients for something self-consciously grim and mock-subversive. But <b>Getter Robo Armageddon </b>gets it right: those opening episodes are like a scream from the subgenre's deepest psyche, plunging its gee-whiz decency into a hell it's wholly unprepared for. And I feel sure this can't be the first time somebody thought to mix horror with giant robots - that's kind of precisely what <i>Neon Genesis Evangelion</i> did, albeit in decidedly different ways - but I definitely don't recall seeing anything that goes down that road so hard and so effectively as <b>Getter Robo Armageddon</b>. The enemies feel like they've wandered in from one of Lovecraft's less pleasant nightmares, all claws and eyeballs and an alarming refusal to keep to one shape for more than a couple of seconds, but what's worse is that their presence has infected so much of the rest of the show, both figuratively and literally. To say more would edge into spoiler territory; suffice to note that there's a real sense of danger and of a world in which goodness is corrupted and transitory. Heck, even the giant robots are sinister, and all the more so because the average anime fan's brain is trained to see them as kind of quaint and goofy. It's all just <i>wrong</i>, in ways big and small, and there's something awfully exciting about that, the more so because the animation is good enough to make the material land with sledgehammer force.</p><p>I won't suggest things fall apart with episode four, because they absolutely don't. <b>Getter Robo Armageddon </b>is never less than good. But after that initial salvo, "never less than good" will still, at points, feel like awfully weak sauce. What happened, you see, is that original director and project head Yasuhiro Imagawa - he of <b>Giant Robo</b> fame - walked off, or else was kicked off, the project and seemingly left with all the information about where the already convoluted plot was heading locked in his brain. Thus, the show is forced to reboot itself with that fourth episode, which is fine in that Imagawa had already backed it into a corner where that was happening whatever, but not fine in that <b>Getter Robo Armageddon</b> will only ever feel like the same show Imagawa was making in brief spurts from then onwards. Let me stress: it could have been much worse. Kawagoe, his replacement, is no slouch, and while the animation budget dips noticeably at times, along with the near-hallucinatory levels of imagination, there isn't an episode that doesn't manage a few great moments on both counts.</p><p>Yet it would be hard indeed not to get to the end of <b>Getter Robo Armageddon </b>- which, let me stress, is certainly a brilliant ending in its own right - and not wonder what might have been. Shinzo Fujita and Yoshifumi Fukushima, picking up writing duties from Imagawa, make solid efforts to be faithful to the beginning he set out, but how do you be faithful to such a demented fever dream? There's no hiding the seams, and I suspect even a viewer with no knowledge of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans would notice something amiss. Of course, it's perfectly likely Imagawa would have messed this up in entirely different ways; I'm not a big enough fan of <b>Giant Robo </b>to believe he was capable of landing such an astonishing opening play. And maybe that means this was the best <b>Getter Robo Armageddon </b>we were ever going to get, one where reliable craftsmen took over from a visionary better at raising interesting questions than providing satisfying answers - sure, maybe. Whatever the case, we should be glad for what we got, imperfect but often brilliant as it is. But damn would it be a thrill to look into the parallel universe where Imagawa's version made it through to the end...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363528/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjkU9kl-y7dxY8Hk4Fiq_MKLgMfkI5pPYvER3fMVE-XyXIehw_k9hLry18tyilR-3gatHhlcnbMPr5CYXNW5iWvXqgbUvqs9LhOOWOC4lJN2CjAHc5K7iQsj-Z0kz4VJR2d3GMt6BRnZVYBAuKRGLSGrPjQj2athif27i1yr_bmTlSvVpfd_KzfA-M=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjkU9kl-y7dxY8Hk4Fiq_MKLgMfkI5pPYvER3fMVE-XyXIehw_k9hLry18tyilR-3gatHhlcnbMPr5CYXNW5iWvXqgbUvqs9LhOOWOC4lJN2CjAHc5K7iQsj-Z0kz4VJR2d3GMt6BRnZVYBAuKRGLSGrPjQj2athif27i1yr_bmTlSvVpfd_KzfA-M=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363527/" target="_blank">Compiler 2</a>, 1999, dir: Takao Kato<div><p>It's impossible to imagine a take on <i>Compiler </i>that wasn't at least a bit strange, but it's easy to imagine one that was much less strange than what was produced, across the course of three OVAs made by three different directors, at the back end of the nineties. And there already we've touched on part of the explanation for why, in that there's no sense that anyone here was remotely working from the same notes. Heck, it's hard to believe at points that they were adapting the same manga - said manga, by the way, being the creation of Kia Asamiya, who was also responsible for <b>Silent Möbius</b> and <b>Martian Successor Nadesico</b>, among other well-known works, and so presumably knew how to tell a story much more coherently than you'd ever imagine from watching the anime adaptation of <i>Compiler</i>.</p><p>The last time we encountered the series, not so long ago, we got two short episodes, one an uproarious comedy where the main joke was essentially "Ha! Osakans, am I right?" and the other a gloomy romance between a sentient computer program given flesh and a womanising drunkard. And I suppose we ought to be thankful that <b>Compiler 2</b> picks up <i>some </i>threads from what's come before, given how little it seems bothered about making concessions to the returning viewer or indeed the viewer who hasn't already read a good chunk of the manga: at any rate, we're still following the adventures of Compiler and Assembler, refugees from the digital world who've decided they'd much rather hang out in ours with their sort-of-boyfriends than bother to try and conquer it and are happy to scrap with their former masters if that's what it takes to maintain their otherwise carefree lifestyle. And both the comedy and romance elements are still on the table, this time mixed together rather than held at arm's length, though the focus is equally as much on action and - shockingly for a show as laid back and ramshackle as this one - on the conveying of an actual plot.</p><p>This is, in itself, no bad thing, though it's not really playing to <i>Compiler</i>'s strengths. Or rather, strength singular, since the only thing that truly sets it apart is that giddy sense of anything-goes weirdness, and trying to tell a somewhat reasonable story with a beginning, middle, and end doesn't gel with that so well. Though, to be fair, while the story itself is fairly coherent, the telling is still quite bonkers, if only because nothing about the premise makes a lick of sense, and the more so here in the twenty-first century where the mere matter of flinging around computing terms no longer makes things sound cool and science-fictional. In this second OVA, we never once see the digital world whose overseers have offered Compiler and Assembler a somewhat contrived choice between returning home in the knowledge that all memory of them will be erased from our reality or staying on the understanding that, if they do, the world will be destroyed; but it's impossible to piece together how the place is meant to function based on the scraps of information we get thrown.</p><p>Thinking about it, the biggest failing here is probably the amount of time that goes into making that extremely ginned-up conflict and the world-building in general makes any measure of sense. If you need to have your characters actively discussing how the evil scheme they're caught up in is kind of nonsense, something's certainly gone wrong somewhere. It all feels very much like an attempt to wrap things up in a manner that the first OVA couldn't possibly have been less interested in, and mostly for that reason, at no point is <b>Compiler 2</b> ever quite so much fun as the first episode of <b>Compiler</b>. But it's a good deal more so than the second episode, and judged by the general standards of anime rather than the highly specific standards of this one series, it's arguably better across the board than either: if nothing else, the animation is rather nice, especially by 1999's low bar, and the balance of comedy, romance, action, and general oddness is just about right. At any rate, it left me with a definite soft spot for the franchise, bewildering and routinely dysfunctional as it is, and if you enjoyed the original <b>Compiler</b>, I can't think of a good reason why you wouldn't also enjoy <b>Compiler 2</b>.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4110092/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEha5vdU-CwWq7PRtGMmWaflGoKsB6l7UGQqn0tneXtR1ZSFNFX5XJQJGKnEqJPd0pXbHV8J-YcILqXC3RqythxsxASFVEomvVKZWCqJw7-FHkmEXFMDV6ITYl8p28W0uGRjprRpFsicfS7htH7---iO6OfMxb_jY6v2st8h-_6IS-XLMC_um2C_-Vo=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEha5vdU-CwWq7PRtGMmWaflGoKsB6l7UGQqn0tneXtR1ZSFNFX5XJQJGKnEqJPd0pXbHV8J-YcILqXC3RqythxsxASFVEomvVKZWCqJw7-FHkmEXFMDV6ITYl8p28W0uGRjprRpFsicfS7htH7---iO6OfMxb_jY6v2st8h-_6IS-XLMC_um2C_-Vo=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4110092/" target="_blank">Sprite: Between Two Worlds</a>, 1996, dir: Takeshi Yamaguchi</div><div><p>Of all the strange and dubious decisions made by distributor <i>U. S. Manga Corps</i>, their attempts to bring over a number of milder hentai releases while going out of their way to hide the fact that they were hentai is surely the hardest to wrap your head around. And of all the strange and dubious titles that were licensed under that strange and dubious decision, <b>Sprite </b>stands out especially in that it's impossible to imagine how this was meant to work.* It's so clearly pornography that you wonder how anyone supposed they could pass it off as anything else; I mean, <b>Fencer of Minerva</b> was kinky as heck but you could sort of squint and pretend you were watching a regular fantasy anime for much of its running time, and there's no amount of squinting that will get you past the turns that <b>Sprite </b>takes in the second half of its eighty minutes. Yet take that away and there's not a lot left. The blurb has to be one of the briefest <i>U. S. Manga Corps </i>ever came up with, and the cover art is noncommittal enough that you have to flip over to the slightly less deliberately misleading back of the box to have any hope of guessing what you're in for.</p><p>Then again, perhaps that's not terribly surprising when what you're in for is a soft-porn tale about a teenage girl with severe mental health issues.</p><p>Let's be fair, there are absolutely ways you can come at the topic of multiple personality disorder that don't automatically make your story totally traumatic. It's a concept that's been abused enough that the average viewer's reaction is more likely to be to take it with a pinch of salt than to feel sorry for the poor, benighted soul who has all this going on inside their cranium. It's entirely easy to envisage a version of <b>Sprite </b>that doesn't have us thinking about this stuff too seriously, one where a female lead who flips to an alternate personality who's bolder, sexier, and more prone to violence is played for laughs - and who knows, maybe that's even what the makers thought they were up to? I mean, if they did, they were enormously bad at their jobs, but it's conceivable.</p><p>Sounds unfair? Then I guess it's time for a plot summary! Our protagonist is Tohru Takamura, who we meet as he's about to start living with relatives while his mother's in hospital. Barely has Tohru set foot on the property before he's inadvertently sprayed water over his cousin Manami and spent what feels like somewhere in the region of seven minutes ogling her sodden breasts, an event we'll later get to see him celebrating in classic teenage boy style with the aid of a box of tissues. Manami is a shy, retiring sort, the more so since she's recently drawn the ire of a gang of bullies at her school; but when Tohru tries and fails to come to her rescue, Manami responds in totally un-Manami like fashion by beating the crap out of them and generally behaving like an altogether different person. That person turns out to be Nami, her alternate personality, who's everything she isn't and happy to do all the things she won't, such as getting sexy with Tohru despite his manifest failings as a human being. The only problem, assuming you don't consider bullying and debilitating mental health issues problems - and there's no real indication the makers of <b>Sprite </b>did! - is that both personalities are convinced they'll disappear if they ever become too subordinate. Tohru wants to help, or at any rate wants to sleep with both Manami and Nami, but what's a boy to do when the girl he's living with turns out to have a promiscuous alternate personality who's totally up for up it? If your first guess was not "urgently seek the advice of a qualified psychiatric professional," there's a fair chance you've successfully pre-empted the plot of <b>Sprite</b>.</p><p>There's nothing here that truly works: the animation is just about as good as it needs to be and never remotely more and the soundtrack stands out solely for including a tune that brazenly rips off the theme from <b>Top Gun</b> in a way anyone who's ever seen <b>Top Gun</b> couldn't possibly miss. But that doesn't mean <b>Sprite </b>can't be kind of hypnotic. Like a lot of bad anime, its refusal to go down the easiest route - indeed, its determination to pursue any number of totally incompatible routes all at once - takes it to places that are more interesting than you might expect from the setup. And also, in fairness, much more creepy and disturbing. As with most of the titles <i>U. S. Manga Corps </i>brought over in their bid, presumably, to trick Western audiences into watching hentai without their noticing, it makes for a fascinating time capsule, but unlike most of them, it isn't much actual fun to sit through.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185481/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvkL24KnazDmg7HsqmeBOvRG5g7nlktgs40KsudzToIG0ZdOnYcEIYpnAAB_kkcrHxRgIfVvT2iHBjgvm30jA4xyCIP724sViWeBRmVp9kTLeMbMY6v4-bJ00crlLPZDjDu5_ZauUyIFmUGxtf_OrRxp1DGJePCp5PRpWwaRR9OcX05NGWysue-4E/s1130/Neo%20Tokyo.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvkL24KnazDmg7HsqmeBOvRG5g7nlktgs40KsudzToIG0ZdOnYcEIYpnAAB_kkcrHxRgIfVvT2iHBjgvm30jA4xyCIP724sViWeBRmVp9kTLeMbMY6v4-bJ00crlLPZDjDu5_ZauUyIFmUGxtf_OrRxp1DGJePCp5PRpWwaRR9OcX05NGWysue-4E/s320/Neo%20Tokyo.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185481/" target="_blank">Neo Tokyo</a>, 1987, dir's: Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Katsuhiro Ōtomo</div><div><p>Outside of <i>Studio Ghibli</i>, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to suggest that there were no three more important directors working in anime at the back end of the eighties than Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and Katsuhiro Ōtomo. In the same year that <b>Neo Tokyo</b> was released, Kawajiri put out <b>Wicked City</b>, the first of a string of seminal works that did as much as anything to set the template of what a certain breed of anime would look and act like throughout the coming decade; Ōtomo, meanwhile, was a year away from <b>Akira</b>, and along with <b>Neo Tokyo </b>would be involved in 1987 with another anthology movie that feels very much like its spiritual twin, the superb <b>Robot Carnival</b>. And if Rintaro was arguably past the most significant and influential portion of his career, he still had one of his finest works, <b>Doomed Megalopolis</b>, waiting in his near future, a title that's every bit as genre-defining as Kawajiri's efforts.</p><p>So how the hell has <b>Neo Tokyo </b>vanished from the face of the Earth and the memories of all but the most hardened of vintage anime fans? For what reason is its DVD release one of the rarest and most hard to find? If, as seems likely, <i>ADV </i>just didn't produce anywhere near enough copies, perhaps in the assumption that they could only hope for the niche-ist of niche audiences, even having made up a new title to cash in on <b>Akira</b>'s enormous fame and the Ōtomo connection**, why has no one sought out the license since? Why don't we have a blu-ray of this thing? Could it be that three of the if not necessarily most talented but definitely most interesting and significant creators of pre-twentieth century anime just somehow managed to produce a sucky movie between them?</p><p>Reader, they did not. But they definitely did produce a very weird one, and now seems as good a time as any to wade into the specifics of each segment. Rintaro gets to go first, and if his section gives a taste of what's to come, it's only by being random enough that the astute viewer will realise they're better off chucking their preconceptions out the window. The marvellously titled <i>Labyrinth Labyrinthos</i> follows a young girl and her cat as a game of hide and seek takes them into a fantastical and sinister other world, and - no, wait, that's pretty much the entire story. But since storytelling was invariably Rintaro's weakest point, the opportunity to go all in on imagery and ideas does him no end of good, especially since (and this is true of all of <b>Neo Tokyo</b>, incidentally) the animation is routinely astounding. At any rate, other than to slap us around with some delirious weirdness, <i>Labyrinth Labyrinthos</i> mostly serves as a way into the film proper and to Kawajiri's entry, <i>Running Man</i>, which - uh, still doesn't have all that much of a story. Indeed, until I read the Wikipedia entry, I couldn't have told you what it was about at all, except that there's a racing driver and a private detective who does nothing besides offer up a spot of narration and maybe the racing driver has psychic powers or something? It's almost as much of a mood piece as <i>Labyrinth Labyrinthos</i>, but with a very different mood, and since Kawajiri was nearly as great a visual stylist as Rintaro, that turns out to be perfectly okay, though it remains probably the weakest segment.</p><p>Which brings us to Ōtomo's <i>Construction Cancellation Order</i>, and while I'm sure there's an argument to be made that it's not the strongest part, I can't imagine what that argument might involve. At last we get an actual, proper plot, though Ōtomo's tale of a beleaguered salaryman trying to convince the robot foreman of an entirely robot-run construction project buried deep in the depths of a South American jungle that the project's been cancelled is still more about mood that anything else. And here's what, for me, pushed <b>Neo Tokyo </b>past the point of being a good but haphazard compilation of stunning yet faintly unsatisfying short films into the realm of definite greatness: somehow, against all the odds, it feels like a single movie with overarching themes and attitudes, though I'm not convinced even its three creators could have articulated what those themes and attitudes are. Unlike, for instance, <b>Memories </b>- and say what you like about Ōtomo, the man's certainly had his hand in more than his fair share of excellent anime anthology projects! - it somehow pulls off the trick of feeling like a unified entity and so of being better than the sum of its already strong parts. Which makes the only real dissatisfaction that, at fifty minutes, it leaves you wanting more than it has to provide; one more piece, from a director on a par with Rintaro, Kawajiri, and Ōtomo, and we'd be looking at an undeniable classic, rather than what for all the world feels like (and couldn't possibly have been!) a trial run for the masterful <b>Robot Carnival</b>. Still, put the pair of them together and you'd have one of the greatest anime double bills imaginable, so that's really the tiniest of criticisms.</p><p>-oOo-</p><p>Anything else I might have to say here is overshadowed by the fact that I finally got to watch the somewhat legendary <b>Neo Tokyo </b>and that it didn't disappoint. It's a fine little film on its own, but more than that, it's such a nexus of everything important that was going in anime in 1987 that it's always felt like a gaping hole in my knowledge. Taken purely on merit, though, <b>Getter Robo Armageddon</b> was nearly on a par, and while <b>Compiler 2</b> very definitely wasn't, it was at least a fun diversion. Would that the same could be said for <b>Sprite</b>, which I'd got my hopes up for on the back of how cheerfully demented some of <i>U. S. Manga Corp</i>'s other attempts to bring hentai titles over without anybody noticing were! Nevertheless, three of out four is still pretty good going this late in the game...</p><div><p><br /></p><p><b><span><br /></span></b></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">* The more so because their routine pre-credits disclaimer about how none of the characters involved in sexual situations are under eighteen rings more untrue than ever here when the show is transparently set in a high school.</div></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">** The actual Japanese title, I believe, translates as the far superior and more appropriate <b>Labyrinth Tales</b>, whereas the English title the film gives itself is Manie-Manie, for reasons I've never been able to pin down. Though even that's better than the completely meaningless <b>Neo Tokyo</b>.</div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-86890698140430307312022-03-03T18:04:00.001+00:002022-03-03T18:04:16.955+00:00The Outfit is Out<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi_Eelg6KA1yxEq0d0aSX4cm7PGWJPZS3RZe5vunyvDlUSop-IG2Fsu4n__9ksStdmSxyRgYRa_RE7L3XQzemNJcLTDl9F1Fljmz1JnMYQFJdC3Dky2GC4AQXASOoABwLU_iA7xPmHO9Hbe2G5SqNmJCZxTCgeJJt2OrYOwy5B3qaIrZ23YK42XknM=s900" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="587" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi_Eelg6KA1yxEq0d0aSX4cm7PGWJPZS3RZe5vunyvDlUSop-IG2Fsu4n__9ksStdmSxyRgYRa_RE7L3XQzemNJcLTDl9F1Fljmz1JnMYQFJdC3Dky2GC4AQXASOoABwLU_iA7xPmHO9Hbe2G5SqNmJCZxTCgeJJt2OrYOwy5B3qaIrZ23YK42XknM=w261-h400" width="261" /></a></div> I'm sure there's a pun title there I'm missing, but I'm playing catch-up here, having somehow managed to forget the release date of my own book, so it'll have to do. Strictly speaking, the e-book and I assume the audiobook are already out as of the first of this month and the UK print edition is released today, which the US print edition should also have been, but mysterious and unforeseen factors have pushed it back a couple of weeks and it'll now be landing on the 16th. Still, that's only a couple of weeks, right? With everything that's going on in the world right now, it's hard to begrudge a two week delay!<p></p><p>As for whether or not you ought to grab a copy of <b>The Outfit</b> in whatever format and at whatever time, obviously that's between you and your conscience, and I'm sure there are lots of people out there who have no interest in reading the bizarre ripped-from-true-life tale of how the future Uncle Joe Stalin and his merry band of Bolshevik cutthroats pulled off one of the most outrageous open-air robberies in history, getting away with a small fortune that they then somehow how to smuggle out of a city under total lockdown and find some way to spend when the news of their misdeeds had spread through every corner of Europe. I admit, that's the kind of cosy, everyday tale that's unlikely to rouse the more thrill-seeking of readers, but hopefully there are at least one or two people out there who can do without the excitement of chases and gunfights and explosions (okay, it has all of those too) and tolerate a few hours of musty history. Well, if you think that might be you, here's the blurb:</p><p><b><i>Lies and double-crosses, secret police and explosions, a carriage chase, a mattress stuffed with cash and a one-eyed master of disguise…</i></b></p><p><b><i>In 1907, the revolutionary Joseph Djugashvili – who would later take the name Joseph Stalin – met with an old friend, a clerk at the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire, for a glass of milk. Over talk of national pride, the spirit of the new century and Djugashvili’s poetry, they agreed the beginnings of a plan.</i></b></p><p><b><i>With the aid of the Outfit, Djugashvili’s hardened crew of “expropriators,” they would pull off the biggest, bloodiest and most daring robbery in Georgia’s history, and ruthlessly change the direction of the Bolshevik revolution forever...</i></b></p><p><b>The Outfit</b> is available in e-book, audiobook, UK paperback and very soon US paperback, from all good book retailers. And probably all bad book retailers, too, I'd imagine, but best not to buy from them, eh?</p>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-18313442664247249172022-02-25T18:50:00.003+00:002023-03-06T07:03:35.959+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 115<p>Here's a worry: we're not terribly far off the point where I run out of DVD-released titles to review, and since I'm still unhealthily addicted to vintage anime after all these many years, that's inevitably led me to seek out more and more stuff that never made it as far as DVD. But while I've never pretended these posts served much of a purpose, filling up entire entries with titles that never even made it onto a remotely modern format seems a bit pointless even by <i>Drowning in Nineties Anime</i> standards.</p><p>Thankfully, we're not quite there yet, or even all the way through the relatively well-known stuff; heck, this time around we have a franchise that was revamped not so long ago and two that are still going strong. But yes, we also have something that never made it past a VHS release, and for better or worse, that's likely to be a feature of most posts going forward. Put it all together and you get <b>Ushio & Tora</b>, <b>Case Closed: The Last Wizard of the Century</b>, <b>Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team: Miller's Report</b>, and <b>Compiler</b>...</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12623320/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgqwHT2_4Q6bScNAQUpTor7TjVfkPNm8nWn4gztRHCzmimAUFQMJgCgjVE4vVjk7-djHUMMkY6skJH79Y1XOyAU7pRfjsSR5IC2rJGqVpLSNCx0Y9HfcLVWu6yyykUGq4nxVwekHh_K8K6a26bPL0QCc8n8IWOCn_ytHdAxdM_hb03vRLygG2NOhVs=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgqwHT2_4Q6bScNAQUpTor7TjVfkPNm8nWn4gztRHCzmimAUFQMJgCgjVE4vVjk7-djHUMMkY6skJH79Y1XOyAU7pRfjsSR5IC2rJGqVpLSNCx0Y9HfcLVWu6yyykUGq4nxVwekHh_K8K6a26bPL0QCc8n8IWOCn_ytHdAxdM_hb03vRLygG2NOhVs=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12623320/" target="_blank">Ushio and Tora</a>, 1992 - 1993, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama<p></p><p>Is it too much to ask of a comedy action horror show that it be uncommonly great at delivering comedy, action, and horror? A not entirely serious question, I admit, because obviously it's a big ask that anything be uncommonly great on even a single front, but still, we could all point to any number of anime, or to any amount of genre fare in general, and pick endless examples where more subgenres were crammed in than the creators rightly knew what to do with or where one or more elements felt as though they'd been included more from a sense of duty than any creative passion.</p><p>What's most striking about <b>Ushio and Tora</b>, then, is not so much its uniqueness - of which there's not really that much to speak of, though the core concept is a brilliant take on tried-and-tested ideas - but the extent to which it does everything it tries its hand at to such a remarkably high standard and with such obvious enthusiasm. The action is thrilling. The horror is ingenious and freaky and really quite shocking in places. The comedy is actually funny and a welcome relief rather than an annoying distraction. And even when <b>Ushio and Tora</b> steps outside of those comfortable boxes and dabbles in, say, a spot of light-hearted romance, it still manages not to embarrass itself.</p><p>Really, though, it's bromance that's the order of the day, as that title suggests, or as it does if you know that Ushio is a kid who happens to stumble upon the monster his ancient ancestor once supposedly defeated sealed up down in the cellar with a magic spear stuck in him, which Ushio is fool enough to pull out, and that he decides on a whim to name said monster Tora, because he looks as much like a tiger as he does anything else. From there, you can sort of see how things will go, with Ushio and Tora butting heads and battling other supernatural threats as a grudging team, and Ushio getting into trouble over the presence of a giant carnivorous demon that only he can see, but what sets <b>Ushio and Tora </b>apart is how wholeheartedly it commits to every element of that concept. To focus on a single example, it's striking how Tora never becomes a safe presence, in spite of the frequent jokes at his expense: even in the latest episodes, where he's notionally on side with Ushio, he's a fearsome, unsettling presence, and that has much to do with Chikao Ôtsuka's outstanding performance in the role, veering between snarling menace and self-satisfied amusement and generally finding the perfect meeting point of the two to conjure up a hundreds-of-years-old hellbeast that we both fear and want to spend time around.</p><p>Which isn't to suggest that the rest of the cast and crew aren't doing nearly as good work; bar some opening and closing themes that I never warmed up to, there's no trace of bad craft here. The writing is thoroughly ingenious, finding a constant stream of fresh takes on familiar ideas and dredging up foes from the darkest corners of Japanese folklore that I, as someone who's seen far too many similar titles, had never encountered. And the animation and direction are equal to the writing: it helps that the show has such a distinctive look, one of almost unpleasantly rich oranges and blues and character designs that are always a little too dirty and jagged, but that's not to dismiss what a terrific job Yuyama does. Managing such a range of tones and nailing them all without letting the seams show is nobody's idea of easy, but Yuyama - and <b>Ushio and Tora </b>in general - sure does make it look that way.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067920/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi1q11i1Zz-KMwt-8R6EgAuwEnzHtU2PwRgOiCKtdZcMBba8A5FrGOeLngbf1929PzyubDphHCN3zo9QFefIbfcUDqNWqZwgBptIf5qui0jkgbYb_DoVzn875dgE8JUMvCWptCqYsh7LYfnym3wIC9ntFenPkycahCN3rWZw77Cb_FEdiZDdFQ1jkg=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi1q11i1Zz-KMwt-8R6EgAuwEnzHtU2PwRgOiCKtdZcMBba8A5FrGOeLngbf1929PzyubDphHCN3zo9QFefIbfcUDqNWqZwgBptIf5qui0jkgbYb_DoVzn875dgE8JUMvCWptCqYsh7LYfnym3wIC9ntFenPkycahCN3rWZw77Cb_FEdiZDdFQ1jkg=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1067920/" target="_blank">Case Closed: The Last Wizard of the Century</a>, 1999, dir: Kenji Kodama, Yasuichirô Yamamoto<p></p><p><b>The Last Wizard of the Century</b> is, I would say, the first legitimately good film in the <i>Case Closed</i> franchise. Oh, the first two had their virtues, and certainly both made for an enjoyable watch, but with this third movie, the franchise finally manages to deliver an entry where the virtues are significant and the flaws are trivial enough not to be much of a problem. It is, mind you, definitely no more than good, and at this point I wonder if <i>Case Closed </i>has any real seeds of greatness in it. I suspect that you could bend this formula far enough that it would produce a work of genuine excellence - if only because, here in the third film, there are elements moving visibly in the right direction - but we're a fair way from that point yet.</p><p>But I came to praise <b>The Last Wizard of the Century</b>, not to bury it, so let's begin by noting that it omits the cardinal sin of the first two entries, that of making its central mystery very obvious indeed. Granted, the villain of the piece is nearly as immediately guessable as on the last two occasions, but their identity is far less significant this time around, and I think that's the crucial difference: in place of a murder mystery, what we have instead is a <b>Da Vinci Code</b>-esque historical thriller, and there are enough different moving parts that the pleasure is less in getting ahead of its conundrums than in keeping on top of them enough to cling on for the ride. In this, I'd argue that <b>The Last Wizard of the Century </b>still manages to cheat a bit, in that the crucial details are reliably obvious but thrown at you, sometimes, so rapidly that it's tough to keep track; but then, this being <i>Case Closed</i>, anything at all important gets laboriously repeated once its significance is revealed, so it's barely an issue.</p><p>Arguably this is still rather dubious behaviour for what's meant to be a mystery, but as I noted the last time we looked at <i>Case Closed</i>, that evidently isn't high on the franchise's priority list and its probably pointless to grumble too much about its failures to do something that was never on the cards. Plus, the plot is legitimately fun, even when it's milking some fairly over-explored historical ground: we have the murdered Romanov family, we have Rasputin, we have a previously undiscovered Fabergé egg or two, and chuck in a genius sneak-thief foil for Conan and an assassin with a penchant for shooting people in the eye and there are more than enough spinning wheels to produce something satisfyingly convoluted. There's an awful lot of narrative to get through, enough to comfortably warrant the film's hundred minute running time, and that has the added virtue of making it feel more like a proper movie and less like a TV special, as per the previous two.</p><p>Not that the technical values exactly scream cinema release. In fairness, the animation is more than respectable, but it's easy to miss how impressive it frequently is when the direction is so leaden. For this entry, the helmer of the first two and the next few to come, Kenji Kodama, is joined by the man who'd be his successor toward the middle of the 2000s, Yasuichirô Yamamoto, and perhaps the results are a little stronger, but there's still a desperate lack of character and imagination: rare indeed is the shot where it feels like a choice was made that wasn't "let's make sure everyone's in shot." Fortunately, Kodama is at least good at keeping things moving at a fair lick, and that's enough to keep his limitations from harming the material. Plus, the rare occasions the film does decide to show off usually come just when they're needed: the climax, especially, manages to use the medium to make what on paper ought to be dull and talky legitimately exciting. All told, it's a marked shift in the right direction, and if the movies stuck to this upward curve, then I'm a little sad to be saying my goodbyes.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0945355/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhmuXQflkoK_8A1XnX7xLsxLO8_OUT9OW4S5FqSUezkY-eSNb6_1oNsXvzbaTuTJMwQkugj40p-lTEhiQw0rKJwKCnD8wzzNYlAzICRBv4YYBDhb0aWKodf-hYpGH7Lyygz8kl0qAZNUDnNV7IwpwFGh8z9HISRV1YLMJplCdslyJcYW_nVmnoTbVk=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhmuXQflkoK_8A1XnX7xLsxLO8_OUT9OW4S5FqSUezkY-eSNb6_1oNsXvzbaTuTJMwQkugj40p-lTEhiQw0rKJwKCnD8wzzNYlAzICRBv4YYBDhb0aWKodf-hYpGH7Lyygz8kl0qAZNUDnNV7IwpwFGh8z9HISRV1YLMJplCdslyJcYW_nVmnoTbVk=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0945355/" target="_blank">Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team: Miller's Report</a>, 1998, dir's: Mitsuko Kase, Takeyuki Kanda, Umanosuke Iida<p></p><p>Compilation movies are a tricky business, or they are if they blatantly don't have the running time to boil a given series down to even its barest essentials. <b>Miller's Report</b> runs to about fifty-five minutes including credits; <b>Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team</b>'s twelve episodes contained at least five times that much footage. So there was never any possibility of condensing the show in its entirety, and where did that leave its creators? Should they whip through hours of material at lightning speed? Should they focus on an isolated incident or two, or at any rate a single plot strand? Should they try and carve out their own story, even if that meant producing new footage?</p><p><b>Miller's Report </b>answers those questions with a resounding, "Yes, yes, yes, and yes." It recaps discreet chunks of narrative, almost all from <b>The 08th MS Team</b>'s first half, while adding what can't be more than a few minutes of new animation to smooth out some rough patches and generally give things a bit of meaningful shape. Some of the added scenes would have been ill-fitted to the show, but others feel a lot like outtakes, even though outtakes aren't really a thing in animation unless someone's done their job spectacularly badly. Still, we might cynically suggest that bits of this footage were held back purposefully, or at least were consciously sidelined at the scripting stage, because their insertion would definitely have made certain sequences flow together more smoothly. Mostly, though, what we get is recapping, with two events covered in considerable depth and a scattering of others whooshed past to give us enough information to follow along.</p><p> It doesn't altogether work, as you might expect, and for a viewer unfamiliar with the series, I wonder how some elements would work at all: major characters pop up incessantly without introduction, even well into the final third, their relationships to the rest of the cast never to be explained, and it would be generous to describe the results as a coherent plot. What we get, rather, is a series of happenings strung together loosely by theme and more so by a focus on protagonist Shiro Amada, his relationship with enemy pilot Aina Sahalin, and the resulting conflicts both moral and marshal. But it's here that <b>Miller's Report </b>plays its trump card, in the shape of its titular character, a mysterious government spook who when we first meet her is interrogating Shiro on the eve of his court martial for possibly collaborating with the enemy. This works on the simple level of offering a mechanism by which Amada can tell us his story, but to their credit, the film's creators dig deeper than that. Miller crops up again and again, and each time we learn a little more about her, though never so much that we have a clear angle on the character, until a final confrontation that does a fine job of offering a meaningful conclusion even though there's still a third and change of the show left to go.</p><p>Miller is an excellent addition, arguably enough so to single-handedly make the film that bears her name worthwhile. Her existence genuinely improves <b>The 08th MS Team</b>, challenging Shiro's values and judgements in ways that they conspicuously weren't challenged in the show, which always seemed to be largely on his side. Since we're talking about one of the finest <i>Gundam </i>series ever, though, it's not as though everything going on around her isn't great: it's hard to judge whether the animation's been polished up, because the show was so routinely superb on that front, but it's certainly terrific, and needless to say, the writing and direction are top-tier. The only real question, then, is who the heck would want to watch the thing when it has the potential to alienate both existing fans by offering them little they haven't already seen and new viewers by leaping over many a crucial detail. For the former, who'll likely own a copy anyway since it comes with the blu-ray edition, I'd suggest doing what I did and waiting just long enough that your memories have begun to fade, so that the movie becomes a pleasant reminder of how splendid <b>The 08th MS Team </b>was. And for the latter, though it might be puzzling in places, I can definitely see this working as a bite-sized introduction to <i>Gundam </i>for those wondering what the mega-franchise has to offer, even if there are undoubtedly better places to begin.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363527/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimNb_0VM8AQibMtlFiFHrOqZUpaasHKaT1vk1DQzDLYuM58199yj3ki-rEtF2siYn16suktRYtD3eWykgL_Lzjndu-xNl7y46H-Hp9wX9gK0-kKUqp7cvixGeTJkC33rgJ5HFXDguwMIeYfrs6dRlserJUpF3kYWU7-ogm2MqwnRXXutyTK12vnO0=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEimNb_0VM8AQibMtlFiFHrOqZUpaasHKaT1vk1DQzDLYuM58199yj3ki-rEtF2siYn16suktRYtD3eWykgL_Lzjndu-xNl7y46H-Hp9wX9gK0-kKUqp7cvixGeTJkC33rgJ5HFXDguwMIeYfrs6dRlserJUpF3kYWU7-ogm2MqwnRXXutyTK12vnO0=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363527/" target="_blank">Compiler</a>, 1999, dir's: Takao Kato, Kiyoshi Murayama<div><p>Imagine, if you will, a take on the <i>Oh! My Goddess </i>formula, whereby one of more supernaturally powered females force themselves into the life of a single, socially awkward male, but one commissioned about a week before it had to be out and created by people who'd never in fact seen <i>Oh! My Goddess </i>or one of its countless imitators and indeed had only ever had the concept described to them at two in the morning after a heavy night of drinking. So instead of a household of goddesses we have three invaders from what's described as a 2D world but must surely be intended to be some sort of cyber-realm within the Earth's computers, given that their names are Compiler, Assembler, and Interpreter. And having rapidly lost interest in that invading business, as we meet them Compiler and Assembler are shacked up not with one lone nerdy guy but with a nerd and his hard-drinking, lecherous brother, in between fending off occasional attacks from their former masters, though that's a matter no one appears to be taking remotely seriously.</p><p>If I'm being vague, it's because ninety percent of what I've described arrives in a brief introductory villain monologue: by the time we join the show, Interpreter has largely vanished from the picture and Compiler and Assembler have settled into a comfortable groove of hanging out with their kind-of boyfriends. Now obviously, taking a hackneyed concept, making it much dumber, and then largely forgetting about in favour of some random slice-of-life shenanigans is hardly the obvious route to great entertainment. And I'd be lying if I said <b>Compiler </b>wasn't a little terrible; but its unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to stick to a genre template that couldn't have been much easier to follow by this point definitely gives it a certain weird energy. This is truer of the first episode, which is positively demented and seems mostly to have been an excuse to make lots of jokes at the expense of Osaka and Osakans - here, by the way, the unexpectedly decent <i>ADV </i>dub surprised me by leaning hard into the culturally specific humour rather than, like, pretending this was all happening in Pittsburgh or something. I'd say a good sixty percent of the gags rely on knowledge of Japanese culture that the vast majority of Westerners won't have - the climatic one needs half a dozen screens of helpfully provided text to remotely comprehend - and yet somehow the sheer wackiness and enthusiasm is compulsive in and of itself. None of which is true of the second episode, which decides to take a deep dive into Compiler's relationship problems, while ditching the humour and the whole cyber-assassins-from-the-digital-world angle in favour of slightly gloomy melodrama. But while this is obviously much less fun than part one, if only because at no point does it feature a battle between giant animated corporate mascots, it again gains points for the what-the-hellness that's <b>Compiler</b>'s main redeeming feature.</p><p>Unsurprisingly, neither episode dazzles with its technical accomplishments, though in fairness neither is ever obnoxiously bad. Its apparent that a lot of the animators' attention was going into getting the bare breasts more or less right, because there are a ton of those on display - sentient computer programs, you see, do not understand this human concept we call "nudity" - but they also wake themselves up for the action sequences, which are commendably solid. And the music is perfectly fine, with a catchy enough opening track; plus, for the abovementioned mascot battle we get a riff on the <b>Godzilla </b>theme that's just different enough to avoid a lawsuit, and I'll never turn my nose up at a good Akira Ifukube pastiche.</p><p>If you've never heard of <b>Compiler -</b> aside from the many reasons I've covered above! - it's because <i>ADV </i>chose not to bring it out on DVD, though based on their advertising, it seems to have come awfully close. And while they'd release plenty worse titles on the format, I can't altogether criticise their decision: <b>Compiler </b>is a long way from indispensable. Still, if you're the sort of person who's inclined to dredge through the obscurest corners of vintage anime in search of titles that at least stand out as entertainingly strange, then it's very much worth a look; at any rate, the first episode is, and if that's enough to draw you into <b>Compiler</b>'s bewildering world then why not keep going? Though whether I'll feel the same having watched volume 2 - because, yes, there's more to come! - is anyone's guess...</p><div>-oOo-</div><div><p>So our first step in a while back to VHS-land wasn't a total washout, which is good news because, like I said at the top, those truly long-lost titles are going to be more than ever a feature going forward. As for the rest, the only absolute standout is <b>Ushio and Tora</b>, which I'm amazed doesn't have more of a reputation, but thinking about it, this was one of those rare entries with no real low points. Okay, except <b>Compiler</b>, probably, but let's not be mean about <b>Compiler</b>, it needs all the breaks it can get. I mean, you try holding your head high around all the young and up-and-coming animes when you didn't even get as far as a DVD and even your own creators have probably forgotten you exist by now!</p><p><br /></p><div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></div></div></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-72902873771092513402022-02-13T18:18:00.001+00:002022-02-13T18:18:35.159+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 114<p>One trend I haven't mentioned, but that's been a feature of the last few posts, is that I've been working through some stray <i>ADV </i>titles that for whatever reason I've missed along the way, and this concludes here with a look at a couple of their less well-known entries. I have a weird relationship with <i>ADV</i>, in that they probably put out more of my favourite stuff than anyone, and yet, of all the big distributors, I tend to feel most resentful about their crappier releases, some of which were extremely crappy indeed - I'm looking at you, <b>Samurai Shodown</b>, and I wish I didn't have to! I think it's partly the sense that, out of everyone, they really ought to have known better, and partly that, as much as an outfit like <i>U.S. Manga Corps </i>were responsible for their share of garbage, they did have <i>some </i>standards: they never, to my knowledge, released a dub-only DVD or recoloured blood green to try and evade the censors.</p><p>And all of this I mention because this time around we have both extremes, with an <i>ADV </i>title that I liked a great deal and one that offended me down to the very marrow of my bones. Add in the continuation of our <i>Case Closed</i> mini-marathon and something I'm trying hard to pretend isn't what it says on the tin and that gives us <b>Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, </b><b>Once Upon a Time</b>, <b>Case Closed: The Fourteenth Target</b>, and <b>If I see You in My Dreams: The TV Series</b>...</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjeualsGx_-PHVlD1FEUzbkIYKB7Z1c1f1SeRuskuBC8QJWUd82cKjouOcPDDVtohoATWh_U9D6GqLD17vrZzr_qFYIgS-F2htx1Ig43hxYqHG8NB4GJKi_cs9DW2xyq5yKXsOGASU0uLmVBaRjfemWwRVeYxnK552KwG2hhuTzyDaA3fmG7ba_6PU=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjeualsGx_-PHVlD1FEUzbkIYKB7Z1c1f1SeRuskuBC8QJWUd82cKjouOcPDDVtohoATWh_U9D6GqLD17vrZzr_qFYIgS-F2htx1Ig43hxYqHG8NB4GJKi_cs9DW2xyq5yKXsOGASU0uLmVBaRjfemWwRVeYxnK552KwG2hhuTzyDaA3fmG7ba_6PU=s320" width="227" /></a></div><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113169/" target="_blank">Galaxy Fraulein Yuna</a>, 1995 - 1997, dir's: Yorifusa Yamaguchi and Akiyuki Shinbo</p><p></p><p>If your main criticisms of <b>Project A-Ko</b> were that it took itself a bit too seriously and didn't contain about seven hundred major characters then, reader, I may have just the show for you! And if you further felt that the problem with <b>A-Ko</b>'s sequels was that they didn't ditch the goofy humour for soul-crushing bleakness, then I'm pleased to say the news is very good indeed. Not that I want to set out by implying that <b>Galaxy Fraulein Yuna </b>isn't its own thing, but neither would I feel I'd done anyone a disservice if they came away with that conclusion, because for the most part it's more about rearranging old ideas into vaguely novel configurations than it is coming up with anything you mightn't expect or have seen elsewhere.</p><p>It does, however, have one neat twist on the magical girl formula to which it generally hews quite closely - and wait, are science magical girls a thing? Okay, so maybe that's two twists, in that <b>Galaxy Fraulein Yuna </b>is clumping together some fairly traditional magical girl notions with a healthy dose of sci-fi action, but that's not so unexpected as its central big idea, for all that it's going to sound deeply hackneyed on the face of things. Our heroine Yuna, you see, though she has a science-magical costume change and a sword that appears out of nowhere and sometimes battles inside of a mech that otherwise follows her around as a cutesy chibi version of itself, isn't really much for fighting: she'd much rather solve a crisis using the power of friendship. And while, sure, that's a notion that's given lip service all over the place, here it really is at the core of everything to a surprising degree.</p><p>No doubt this is due in large part to how the two OVAs presented in <i>ADV</i>'s collected edition of their former VHS releases are spinning off from a long-running video game series, where it's easy to imagine how the notion of turning enemies into allies might function as a gameplay mechanic. But translate that into anime and what you get is an unusually good-hearted show about an unusually nice and caring character who genuinely isn't at all inclined to solve her problems with violence. Which isn't to suggest there isn't a whole lot of violence in <b>Galaxy Fraulein Yuna</b>, because there certainly is, and especially in the second, somewhat longer OVA, the one that drifts so hard away from the goofy comedy that until that point seemed to be very much what the franchise was about. However, even there, the emphasis is completely different, and it's startling just how much having a protagonist who truly wants to be everyone's friend regardless of how hard they may have been trying to kill her just a scene ago alters the usual dynamic of this sort of show. If only because it's the main reason the cast is so outrageously stuffed: when you turn all your enemies into allies, you end up with a heck of a lot of allies, and even though these two OVAs are set more toward the front than the back of the <i>Yuna </i>franchise, she's still accumulated more than her share of colourful former foes turned friends.</p><p>It's a nice hook, and the enormous cast is both a minor problem and the source of the odd good gag at the expense of those who end up getting sidelined. By the same measure, <b>Galaxy Fraulein Yuna</b> navigates the transition from comedy to tragedy unusually well, so it's not half the problem it might be. The two OVAs, for all that they came out fairly close together, are very much their own things, but that ends up as more a virtue than a flaw, especially since three more episodes of the extreme wackiness that characterised the original OVA might have grown wearying. And it helps that our director for part two is the mighty Akiyuki Shinbo, who I've often praised around these parts: he's not doing anything spectacular here, but he's a marked leap up from Yorifusa Yamaguchi, whose main virtues are not getting in the way of his material and marshalling his resources well enough for the odd standout sequence. Really, though, they're both quite capable of doing right by a title that, for all its similarities to lots of other stuff, stands out by getting plenty right and nothing conspicuously wrong and being awfully nice and good-hearted even in those moments when it's also being gruellingly grim and dark.</p><p><a href="https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0965649/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mVSjtE5f6z8/YaupKNEqdEI/AAAAAAAAMZ8/nvBFImnD8EgZSLNcP3wSPQy6Ydsf0dhGgCNcBGAsYHQ/s497/Case%2BClosed%2BThe%2BFourteenth%2BTarget.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="497" data-original-width="354" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mVSjtE5f6z8/YaupKNEqdEI/AAAAAAAAMZ8/nvBFImnD8EgZSLNcP3wSPQy6Ydsf0dhGgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Case%2BClosed%2BThe%2BFourteenth%2BTarget.jpg" width="228" /></a></div><a href="https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0965649/" target="_blank">Case Closed: The Fourteenth Target</a>, 1998, dir: Kenji Kodama<p></p><p><b>The Fourteenth Target</b> is an even worse murder mystery than the first <i>Case Closed</i> movie, <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper</b>, and that's quite the accomplishment. For the second time running, I guessed who the killer was in the scene they were introduced, and if I didn't also immediately predict their motive this time around, it's only because said motive would be quite impossible to predict without a slew of information that's revealed only when it absolutely has to be. And while the <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper </b>managed to fold in some fun little mini-mysteries for the audience to exercise their detecting abilities on, <b>The Fourteenth Target </b>can't even rise to that: aside from the odd sequence where we're expected to try and figure out what clue our hero sleuth Conan has noted but refuses to let us in on, there's only a brief logic puzzle that's shamelessly plagiarised from the first movie.</p><p>But then, I'm not convinced <b>The Fourteenth Target </b>cares about being a persuasive mystery; given how preposterous the central conceit is, it's hard to suppose that was anyone's goal. The plot this time around is convoluted enough to make Agatha Christie blush: a killer is targeting the acquaintances of hapless detective Kogoro Mori, working through them based on the numeric order of elements of their names that match up to the numbers of a suit of cards, counting down from thirteen to zero, because who doesn't have fourteen acquaintances with numbers in their names? And I guess I ought to have tagged that with a spoiler warning, maybe, but unless you can read kanji <i>and </i>can read character names that have been clumsily subtitled over <i>AND </i>can translate romaji into kanji at the speed of lightning, there's no possibility of you working any of this out in advance. See what I mean about how this functions as a murder mystery? Or rather, doesn't function at all?</p><p>The trick, then, is to not take any of what happens seriously, and fortunately, <b>The Fourteenth Target </b>is busy enough and fun enough on a moment by moment basis that refraining from doing so isn't much of a chore. It works much better as spectacle than <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper </b>ever tried to, buoyed by some improved animation that rises to the level of intermittently impressive, and for all the plot's failings as regards the genre it's superficially meant to belong to, it does a respectable job of churning out a string of absorbing incidents that are whizzed through with enough pace and vigour that armchair detectiving takes a backseat to simply keeping up with each new development.</p><p>What we have, then, is a good franchise movie, irrespective of the franchise the film actually belongs to: a hundred minutes flies by in a blur of comedy and action and suspense and the occasional dash of romance, and if none of it's especially memorable, nor is it ever dull. And as an entry in this particular franchise, <b>The Fourteenth Target </b>makes good use of the characters and digs into them in ways that actually feel quite meaningful, presumably because this early on it was still possible to chuck out major-feeling character revelations. It's a solidly good film in a way <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper </b>wasn't quite - but I'm increasingly wondering what a truly great <i>Case Closed </i>movie might look like and whether such a thing can even exist. It doesn't help that I still find the core concept deeply unconvincing, and I doubt "teenage detective trapped in a child's body solving crimes by routinely knocking out an adult detective and faking his voice" is going to get less implausible as the series goes along. But mostly I'm dubious that the creators are capable of crafting an actual mystery, one with - dare I say it? - multiple suspects with plausible motives. We have one more entry before <i>Case Closed </i>catapults itself into the new millennium, and it's a well-regarded one, so I guess there's still hope!</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092218/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgqKGTpEe4sq1RVtqqKTI-EvEsQqMBHVC_m23ps3uzr2q2CQyGtv9C3_2II2SqWGlSZr2N9B4qSH2MgBvv69ZJpKm_57T8H-tlhYYjuE5BqaY8mgaD2lGBoEhax76SzkkzDAwbOBtKQGqn-pCo1-2M5t7kb4VeG44Qgezxq6JlbzgWZGWrN-Py3amI=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgqKGTpEe4sq1RVtqqKTI-EvEsQqMBHVC_m23ps3uzr2q2CQyGtv9C3_2II2SqWGlSZr2N9B4qSH2MgBvv69ZJpKm_57T8H-tlhYYjuE5BqaY8mgaD2lGBoEhax76SzkkzDAwbOBtKQGqn-pCo1-2M5t7kb4VeG44Qgezxq6JlbzgWZGWrN-Py3amI=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092218/" target="_blank">Once Upon a Time</a>, 1986, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama (English-language version dir: Carl Macek)<p></p><p>Any attempt to grapple with the film known as <b>Once Upon a Time</b><i> </i>has to begin with the production company <i>Harmony Gold</i> and writer / director Carl Macek, and their presence is so prevalent that I do wonder if there's really any point in reviewing what they concocted as an anime movie at all. For reasons probably long lost to history, <i>Harmony Gold </i>took one look at the Japanese anti-war parable <b>Windaria </b>and thought, "Ah, here's something that would be a great fit for American audiences, if we can only retrofit it for kids, because obviously adults wouldn't ever watch an animated film." And this was the job they handed to Macek, who had already satisfactorily butchered together their most famous Frankensteinian hybrid, <b>Robotech</b>. What they didn't give Macek, however, if the man was to be believed, is a translated script or much of an idea of what the property they'd purchased was about, meaning that, even if anyone involved had been interested in respecting the source material in any way whatsoever, the odds of them pulling it off were vanishingly slender.</p><p>I think, though, that we can safely assume respect was on no one's list of priorities, because you don't create something as top-to-bottom ghastly as <b>Once Upon a Time </b>if you're approaching your job with anything like cultural sensitivity or a basic appreciation of the artform you're about to take a hammer to. It's hard to conceive of how this was ever meant to work - <b>Windaria</b>, even in the form <i>Harmony Gold</i> mangled it into, is startlingly violent and bloody for a kids' film, not to mention depressing as all get out - but it's still remarkable how wrong <b>Once Upon a Time </b>goes<b> </b>in so many different ways. Most of these stem from the voice cast, only one of whom could be fairly described as half decent, that being Russell Johnson of <b>Gilligan's Island</b> fame, who provides a measure of class and gravity and so succeeds in presumably the one thing anyone required of him. The script undercuts him horribly, since we're led to believe that Johnson's narrator, meant to represent an older version of protagonist Alan, has learned lessons and gone through moral crises that the material as presented doesn't support in the slightest; still, his presence, and the whole notion of adding a narrator to try and tie this mess together, is probably the closest Macek came to a sound decision.</p><p>Everyone else, though, is horrible, and horrible in ways that simply break the film wide open. In particular, there are a couple of vital relationships where it's crucial we believe characters are deeply in love, and the vocal performances lean more toward indifference or active dislike when they're not sliding into the muddled boredom that's the cast's baseline. I'll never cease to be in awe of how bad American dubs from this period could get, since surely the most impoverished amateur dramatics society could have pulled off a better job than this, but <b>Once Upon a Time </b>is striking for how little anybody seems remotely interested in salvaging the film. Johnson is fine, but he's clearly delivering precisely what he was brought in for and no more, and Kerrigan Mahan as young-Alan manages not to seriously fluff maybe half of his readings, but that's as good as it gets, and the bad is so very bad indeed.</p><p>And yes, I realise all I've done is talk about the adaptation and that I've said almost nothing about the film, but that's the problem right there: try as you might, it's agonisingly difficult to see the virtues of <b>Windaria </b>through the horrors of <b>Once Upon a Time</b>. As presented here, the plot just doesn't work: it takes more to deliver a powerful anti-war message than spending half your film presenting two sides gearing up for a conflict and the remainder showing that conflict in fairly unglamorous terms, and if <b>Windaria </b>had a message beyond "war is bad but people insist on doing it anyway, the fools!" then Macek managed to exorcise every last glimpse of it. And while there are moments of exciting animation and direction, there's a fair bit of cheapness and a general choppiness too; likewise, the score veers between effective and obnoxious, and since some new music was added, that may be on <i>Harmony Gold </i>as well, but still, there's little that truly stands out. The only aspects I'd say are unreservedly successful are the world-building and mechanical designs, both of which are sometimes good enough to salvage individual scenes from Macek's meddling, and the action sequences, which are genuinely exciting regardless of what nonsense is coming out of the characters' mouths.</p><p><b>Once Upon a Time</b>, then, is a maddening object: the good stuff is just about good enough that it's easy to imagine a much better version, and to suppose <b>Windaria </b>was that version and all the problems are down to Macek and his risible cast; then again, the story as presented is so barely functional that it's equally possible <b>Windaria </b>was broken in the first place, all the more so because it very much seems to be transparently ripping off <b>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind </b>in ways both big and small while not remotely having the budget to do that ripping off justice. Fortunately, we'll get to take a look at <b>Windaria </b>one of these days, since it's easy enough to find in fan-sub form, and hopefully we need give no more thought to <b>Once Upon a Time</b>, except to note that it's a frustrating, mildly intriguing time capsule from a period when anime movies were frequently bigger on ideas and ambition than execution and Western producers were quite capable of retroactively making a hash of all three.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426383/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVVSvEgDs0eOB-XgC80UlPR2vCNgg-axpmKwPTzuXnvoyo3P_k70F4QWEUOWp1TFAaTCqC8G8Wzx9XCNXpdDw-I7LSYh5ZUmN6RNphmLQjIzrDKxgKQAgh-4_Q9aHPe_BYkoBdQDYSAylfzG_dnRPUJ_TBmcL2TB7oQYGioxIVyxIUxDYcPnjosOc=s1130" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVVSvEgDs0eOB-XgC80UlPR2vCNgg-axpmKwPTzuXnvoyo3P_k70F4QWEUOWp1TFAaTCqC8G8Wzx9XCNXpdDw-I7LSYh5ZUmN6RNphmLQjIzrDKxgKQAgh-4_Q9aHPe_BYkoBdQDYSAylfzG_dnRPUJ_TBmcL2TB7oQYGioxIVyxIUxDYcPnjosOc=s320" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426383/" target="_blank">If I see You in My Dreams: The TV Series</a>, 1998, dir: Takeshi Yamaguchi<p></p><p>I could mention here how my self-imposed rules prohibit reviewing TV shows and I keep doing so anyway, but the fact is that it actually makes more sense to pretend that the supposedly TV version of <b>If I see You in My Dreams </b>is something other than that, because by television standards it's befuddling. Its running time comes in at just over two hours, and it consists of sixteen episodes, each with an end credits sequence, meaning - what? - maybe ninety minutes or so of actual show, not to mention how each episode scrapes in at not much over five minutes. How this aired in Japan I've no idea, but clumping it together and calling it a TV series leaves a very unwieldly and puzzling product indeed, one that for once might have actual benefitted from a spot of distributor interference: chop this up into regular twenty-two minute segments and you'd immediately have something a good deal more watchable.</p><p>Though the weird format is definitely a problem, other anime have shown that it's possible to make these bite-sized chunks of narrative work just fine, and in fairness, <b>If I see You in My Dreams</b> more or less pulls it off on an episode by episode basis ... but hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself. For what we have here is an alternate telling of a tale we've <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2021/07/drowning-in-nineties-anime-pt-104.html" target="_blank">already covered</a>, and which I had warm feelings toward, while admitting that it probably wasn't terribly special in the grander scheme and that quite a bit of it didn't land. In <b>If I see You in My Dreams: The OVA</b>, the most prominent of those flaws was the comedy, whereas here, it's the romance half of the romcom equation that gets short shrift. Meaning that theoretically there's an above-par example of the form to be had somewhere between the two, but let's come back to that, shall we?</p><p>Because, yes, <b>If I see You in My Dreams</b>: <b>TV </b>is a disaster of a romance, and would be even more so if you hadn't seen the OVA. Our young lovers are the shy and virginal Misou and the equally virginal and prone to unreasoning anger Nagisa, and there's just no damn reason the pair should be together or that their relationship, such as it is, should endure beyond the first episode. This time around, we don't get to see their initial meet-cute, so Misou is introduced stalking Nagisa at the pre-school where she works and Nagisa is introduced being mean to him, and so things go for quite a proportion of that two-hour running time. Nagisa allegedly <i>does </i>like Misou, for reasons we're never really made privy to - while he develops over the course of the show, he has precious little going for him at the start - but spends most of her time in a jealous rage over one unfortunately misinterpreted situation or another. And given that she has every reason to suppose Misou is at best an unrepentantly two-timing pathological liar, it beggars belief that she'd keep giving him chances, while Misou's habit of banging his head against the brick wall of her apparent indifference is more disturbing than charming.</p><p>Nor are those the only issues. <b>If I see You in My Dreams</b>: <b>TV </b>lacks the major saving grace the OVAs had of some nice animation, and though the designs remain appealing, what's done with them often isn't. It also treats Nagisa atrociously: we never get enough of her perspective to make her behaviour justifiable and the amount of time we see her showering or bathing becomes absurd well before the halfway mark. That this is a worse version of something that was only moderately strong in the first place is, I think, undeniable - yet it's not altogether a write-off. As noted above, the funny bits are often quite funny; there's only one real joke, which involves Misou reacting to a setback by cartoonishly turning to stone or floating away or somesuch, and it's so overused that the show even calls itself out on the fact, yet it's reliably amusing. What genuinely hits the mark, though, is what also worked for the OVAs: <i>If I see You in My Dreams</i> is so extremely specific. No grand and universal love story this, but a tale of normal, even nondescript people, mostly salarymen and women, and of a romantic pairing that truly could go either way and quite possibly oughtn't to succeed. That seems like an odd thing to praise, I realise, but there's something to be said for seeing the stuff of anime romcom play out with a cast and setting of a sort we don't often encounter. All the same, I suspect what relative appeal this does manage to scrape together would be lost on someone who wasn't already positively disposed courtesy of the OVA and curious for a different take on the material, so unless that's you, it's probably best to stay clear.</p><div>-oOo-</div><div><p><b>Galaxy Fraulein Yuna</b> was a bit of a treasure and feels like the first unequivocal recommendation I've made in a while; okay, maybe not unequivocal, since it's obviously not going to appeal to everyone, but if it sounds at all like your thing, it's worth seeking out. And while I can't say the same about <b>If I see You in My Dreams</b>, I'd argue that the somewhat hard-to-find release with both the OVA and TV series is a nice little curio that works better than watching either of them in isolation. As for <b>The Fourteen Target</b>, if and when <i>Discotek </i>get round to reissuing these earliest titles, I guess it's not one to skip, though that's hardly much of a compliment, is it? And the very best that can be said about <b>Once Upon a Time</b> is that it's going to be interesting how <b>Windaria </b>fares by comparison!</p><p><br /></p><div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></div></div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-10811135672370346332022-01-31T18:12:00.001+00:002022-01-31T18:13:05.877+00:002021: I Tried to Get Out and They Held the DoorIt's not as though, when I admitted around this time last year that I had no choice left except to give up on my lifelong dream of being a professional writer, I expected anyone to step in and magically fix things. Still, there's not being disappointed and there's being fine with a situation, and I can't say I'm altogether fine with the fact that a handful of people who might, with negligible cost to themselves, have made an enormous difference, chose instead to let a year go by without lifting a finger. The most obvious of those, of course, being my former publisher, whose inaction and disinterest have kept the fully completed fourth <i>Black River Chronicles</i> novel from getting out into the world, not to mention burying my also-ready-to-be-published novella <b>Graveyard of Titans</b> and leaving my <i>Tales of Damasco</i> trilogy in limbo. Which is to say that, yes, <b>The Black River Chronicles: Graduate or Die</b> is no closer to ever seeing the light of day. Not that I've altogether given up, but - especially given that my request for support from the SFWA went ignored for over ten months, and yes, I'm including them in the abovementioned 'small handful' - it's hard to see any reason to be hopeful.<div><br /><div>Mind you, there's an argument that my biggest enemy on the writing front in 2021 was myself, since I was the one who thought it was a good idea to try and finish the book I'd begun, <b>The Beasts of Siege City</b>, though the project had already become an act of masochism and clearly wasn't going to get any easier. Somehow I did indeed make it to the end, and insanely, what I was left with was some 350'000 words of novel, which is, I think, more than all three <i>Tales of Damasco</i> books together. That one is even less likely to be read by anyone, since it's broken as hell, to the point where I don't know how I'd even begin to go about editing it into shape. And if I was still writing, I think I'd be quite frustrated by that, since I know there's good stuff in there and that it might have been really good stuff if I'd come at the material when I was in a better state.</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Then there's the really weird thing, which is that, for all that it was most definitely the death knell of my decade-long career as a novelist, 2021 somehow turned out to be a bloody good year for short fiction sales - arguably the best I've ever had, depending on how you juggle the numbers. Is there some moral here? I'd like to think it's that the short fiction side of things might be worth persevering with, except that short fiction is a bitterly awful way to make money and the prospect of going back to writing as effectively a second job isn't something I can contemplate right at the minute. (Not that I exactly have a first job right at the minute; boy was 2021 awful in just about every conceivable way!) Still, if all that can be said is that this short spurt of sales was a last huzzah then, whatever, I'll take that, especially since it meant getting to return to some of my favourite markets and to work once more with some of my favourite editors.</div><div><br /></div><div>Even nicer, two of those stories would probably have been sunk if they hadn't made it into the venues I'd effectively written them for. Where else but <i>Mysterion </i>would have considered the lengthy magic-realist meditation on religion and isolation that was <a href="https://www.mysteriononline.com/2021/10/an-exchange-of-values-conducted-in-good.html" target="_blank">An Exchange of Values Conducted in Good Faith</a>? Where else would my experimental fantasy action story <a href="https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/fall-to-rise/" target="_blank">Fall to Rise</a> have fit but in <i>Beneath Ceaseless Skies</i>? And while it's possible to imagine the strange little horror fable <a href="https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/a-cold-yesterday-in-late-july/" target="_blank">A Cold Yesterday in Late July</a> elsewhere, there was no more perfect home for it than <i>The Dark</i>. Add getting a story I'd come to suspect was unsaleable, my warped spy pastiche <a href="http://distantshorepublishing.com/2021/05/07/m-a-t-e-r-knows-best/" target="_blank">M.A.T.E.R Knows Best</a>, into <i>Distant Shore Publishing</i> and a late-in-the-day acceptance from <i>On Spec</i> for my <b>Compassion Fatigue</b> - a personal-favourite piece that I spent years trying to shift finding a place in a 'zine I've been trying to break into for roughly as long - and then top it all off with a couple of anthology reprints and, on that single narrow front, 2021 was a total win.</div><div><br /></div><div>And of course there's one other bit of good news, in that my delayed <a href="https://rebellion.com/" target="_blank">Rebellion</a> novella <b>The Outfit</b> is out at the beginning of March, which I realise only now is all of about a month away. So that's exciting, and something I imagine I'll be talking about quite a bit in the coming weeks, so I won't say much here besides - Joseph Stalin! Pulling one of the biggest bank robberies in history! To fund the Russian Revolution! And it all really actually happened!!! </div></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9819307466394406.post-5048459206717008972022-01-21T19:18:00.000+00:002022-01-21T19:18:04.130+00:00Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 113<p>I'm always happiest with these posts when they're a weird hodgepodge, so here's a one that makes me very happy indeed: where else but in vintage anime reviews would you find magical girls rubbing shoulders with child detectives and S&M-loving princesses in the company of monster hunters? Though now that I think about it, I feel like there's probably a single anime show out there somewhere that includes all of the above! Heck, with a little tweaking, I've just described <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claymore_(manga)" target="_blank">Claymore</a>.</p><p>So to be clear, none of what I'm reviewing here is <b>Claymore</b>, which is a great show that you should definitely watch but came out a full eight years too late for our purposes. No, what we have this time is <b>Wedding Peach DX</b>, <b>Case Closed: The Time Bombed Skyscraper</b>, <b>Fencer of Minerva: The Tempest</b>, and <b>Blue Seed: Beyond</b>...</p><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ngHOdjsPQik/YYVNKapEVWI/AAAAAAAAMWM/dFZiNeDWIB8C02w9VrlwqctxPBA0Efj6QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1130/Wedding%2BPeach%2BDX.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ngHOdjsPQik/YYVNKapEVWI/AAAAAAAAMWM/dFZiNeDWIB8C02w9VrlwqctxPBA0Efj6QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Wedding%2BPeach%2BDX.jpg" width="227" /></a><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112221/" target="_blank">Wedding Peach DX</a>, 1996 - 1997, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama</p>I'm tempted to propose that, if you like magical girl shows, and if you like magical girl shows that make no pretence whatsoever of doing anything besides following the conventions of magical girl shows to the letter, then you'll almost certainly like <b>Wedding Peach DX</b> (for which, read "deluxe") and quite probably the 51 episode series to which this four-episode OVA was a sequel, too. And I think that's pretty fair, because <b>Wedding Peach DX</b> absolutely follows all the conventions, which, when it comes to this particular genre, are very conventional indeed: the group of neatly colour-coded female friends, the canned transformation sequences, the cartoonish creature sidekick, and the particular blend of light action, goofy comedy, romance, and kitsch, it's all here and all done more or less as it would be done in, to take the obvious example, <i>Sailor Moon</i>.<div><br /></div><div>As someone who's only slightly embarrassed to admit that they <i>do </i>like magical girl shows, in spite of and perhaps a little bit because of their extreme formulaicness, I did indeed enjoy <b>Wedding Peach DX</b>, but I'd also suggest that it isn't quite such a cut-and-paste job as I may have begun to make it sound. Don't get me wrong, if you've seen any <i>Sailor Moon</i> or anything at all similar to <i>Sailor Moon</i>, this will hold not one single surprise for you. But what makes it fun, aside from the fact that obviously this stuff is innately fun when it's done well or else the entire genre would never have become so enormous and enduring, is that <b>Wedding Peach DX </b>knows precisely what it is and knows that we know and is quite ready to use that shared knowledge to push what's already fairly silly into the realms of being really, really silly.</div><div><br /></div><div>This doesn't happen all the time, and it's not really a thing at all for the first and weakest episode, which mostly concerns itself with undoing the ending of the TV series to the point where we can have us a magical girl show at all. Though even then, there's enough of a weird edge that <b>Wedding Peach DX </b>is recognisably its own entity: there's its transformation sequences for one thing, which sees each of the girls fitted out in a wedding dress that burns away to leave their actual outfit, or how head love angel - oh, I ought to have mentioned, they're love angels and not magical girls at all! - Momoko's ultimate attack involves firing off a grenade launcher, albeit one with a heart-shaped sight. So sure, it's already somewhat strange, but for all of episode one and the bulk of episode two, it's strange within clear parameters that feel more as though it's nudging at the conventions than actively messing with them. However, by episode three, there's an undeniable knowing wink to the proceedings, and by the last episode, in which our heroes get turned into cats and replaced by feline doppelgangers of themselves, there's more knowing winking going on than there is anything close to conventional storytelling. The most obvious example, and perhaps my favourite moment across the entire nearly two-hour running time, is when Momoko looses her patience against a particularly annoying villain and yells "High-speed transformation of rage!" - at which point we're treated to precisely that.</div><div><br /></div><div>So all things considered, <b>Wedding Peach DX </b>does a good job of being just what you'd expect it to be while adding enough of a twist that it has a measure of character; it's easy to see why the show ran for so long despite being so superficially unoriginal. With that said, that it takes a couple of episodes for the proceedings to get going isn't great when a couple of episodes is half your show. There's never a moment when it's less than watchable - the animation is hovering around TV territory, but not obnoxiously so, and the music, of which there's a lot, is just the sort of joyously cheesy J-pop you'd hope for - but there's also only really an episode and a half where it's up to something remotely special. A pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours, then, but <b>Wedding Peach DX </b>is a far cry from being indispensable, though at the least you could do worse than tracking down the final episode on Youtube. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131479/" target="_blank"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131479/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IoLQzkPqPLs/YZAtM25vVTI/AAAAAAAAMXY/E1InO84LCYUDFNTog05utREq60DwHuXBgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1130/Case%2BClosed%2BThe%2BTime%2BBombed%2BSkyscraper.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IoLQzkPqPLs/YZAtM25vVTI/AAAAAAAAMXY/E1InO84LCYUDFNTog05utREq60DwHuXBgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Case%2BClosed%2BThe%2BTime%2BBombed%2BSkyscraper.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131479/" target="_blank">Case Closed: The Time Bombed Skyscraper</a>, 1997, dir: Kenji Kodama</div><div><br /></div><div>While we've touched on most of anime's megafranchises here, there's one that's eluded us so far and that's eluded me as a viewer entirely: until now, I hadn't seen so much as a scene of <i>Case Closed </i>- or <i>Detective Conan</i>, to give it its Japanese title - for all that there's a quite bewildering amount of it out there, be that the more than a thousand episodes of the TV show or one of the movies that have been coming out on a pretty much yearly basis since this first entry aired back in 1997. Mostly that avoidance was a matter of accessibility: of the three films released during the nineties, not one is readily available, with the original <i>Funimation </i>disks both long out of print and surprisingly hard to find, though <i>Discotek </i>have been doing a steady job of bringing out the newer entries and presumably plan to work their way back to the start sooner or later.</div><div><p>Still, if I sat about waiting for reissues, we'd never get anywhere, and so at last I've had my first taste of one of the most popular series in anime history. And lo and behold, it was ... er, fine, for the most part. But before we get into why I can't be more effusive in my praise, a quick intro to the concept, since I personally went in with a bunch of wrong assumptions, the most prominent of which being that our protagonist, Conan Edogawa, was a little kid who solved crimes. Which, okay, isn't a hundred percent wrong, or even slightly wrong, but the wrinkles are more than usually important: Conan, you see, is actually a teenaged detective trapped in the body of a child, for reasons this first film takes some pains to lay out, and is necessarily keeping this truth hidden from the world and most of those closest to him, including his friend Ran, whose roof he's now living under. Due to those circumstances, Conan is obliged both to give most of the credit to Rachel's dad Kogoro, also a detective but a thoroughly useless one when left to his own devices, and to rely on the gadgetry of his sole confidante, Dr. Agasa, to mask his involvement.</p><p>This is all much weirder than what I expected going in, and it takes a bit of getting used to, if only because it seems like an inordinate amount of busywork to get us to the point where we can watch a child detective solving crimes, which you'd assume would be the draw. I guess I'd better not generalise too hard on the back of ninety minutes of watching, but the impression I got is that <i>Case Closed</i>, like many a giant anime franchise, isn't desperately interested in the genre it sets itself up as: that's more a starting point to wrap a comedic action adventure around. At any rate, that's certainly the case in this entry, given that <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper </b>offers up a mystery so obvious that it's impossible to imagine the viewer who couldn't get far, far ahead of it: I'd figured out the identity of the antagonist before it was revealed there <i>was </i>an antagonist, and I don't claim to be particularly clever in doing so.</p><p>You'd think this would be a problem, and for me it definitely was, in that I like a good mystery and that makes it tough to enjoy a stupefyingly obvious one. But if we accept that <i>Detective Conan</i>, at least in this first instalment, was more looking for a frame on which to hang its action and comedy, then what we get just about does the business, with a couple of moderately thrilling set pieces and lots of mildly amusing shenanigans to fill the running time. Plus, it's not as though there's no cleverness to be found: the opening scene is a nice little murder mystery in itself, and there are other moments along the way where it's clear that writer Kazunari Kouchi could be getting a lot cleverer if the material allowed. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to claim that having an incredibly predictable mystery at its heart does the material any favours, if only because, if <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper </b>was to coast by as an action comedy, it would need to be a damn sight better at both action and comedy, and really just better generally. Director Kodama, who'd be the custodian of these films through to the early two thousands, brings nothing to the table besides an ability to keep the plot moving in a sprightly fashion: at no point is there an interesting creative choice made and never does he attempt anything that would elevate the proceedings beyond the level of well-made TV. Based on this and his efforts on the <i>City Hunter</i> films, I've no qualms about calling Kodama a hack, but he was definitely capable of better hackwork.</p><p>What saves the <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper</b>, then, in so much as anything does, is the mechanical efficiency of a well-worn franchise that's made of many solid moving parts, even if none of them are getting a very spectacular showing here. The basic concept is good fun and, for all that Kouchi's script treats the audience like morons, there's something quite neat and engaging in the way it nests lots of mini-mysteries into the proceedings, not all of which are so achingly obvious as the overarching plot. So a perfectly adequate starting point, I guess, one more likely to please the existing viewer than the neophyte for sure but unlikely to actively put anyone off. All the same, I hope there's better to come, because right at this minute I'm struggling to see what here warranted a thousand episodes and the better part of twenty-five sequels!</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249509/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jwO2WV4g_Cc/YaIk1poakZI/AAAAAAAAMY8/_a1a4H0yaME0rGH3rHdUQLUFflkL0xz9ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1130/Fencer%2Bof%2BMinerva%2BThe%2BTempest.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jwO2WV4g_Cc/YaIk1poakZI/AAAAAAAAMY8/_a1a4H0yaME0rGH3rHdUQLUFflkL0xz9ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Fencer%2Bof%2BMinerva%2BThe%2BTempest.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249509/" target="_blank">Fencer of Minerva: The Tempest</a>, 1994, dir: Takahiro Okao<p></p><p>First up, if you haven't seen the first volume of <b>Fencer of Minerva</b>, which <i>U.S. Manga Corps</i> dubbed <b>The Emergence</b>, there's no reason you'd want to bother yourself with this closing pair of episodes - unless, I suppose, you had an overwhelming desire to watch a simply animated sex scene or two and every other suitable title had vanished from creation. But let us assume that, unlikely though it is, you've watched the first volume and were so enamoured by its soft-porn paean to the joys of female sex slavery, mixed with some fairly involved political shenanigans and world-building and presented via some largely subpar animation, that you're itching to discover whether part two could possibly be as good. Should you, dear imaginary reader who almost certainly doesn't exist, take the dive?</p><p>Yes, you should, and having established that we have on our hands a title with no appeal to the vast majority of viewers and guaranteed appeal for an infinitesimally small minority, I guess I could wrap this up right here. But where's the fun in that, eh? And it would be bad form not to at least try and sum up why this second volume is a success by the dubious standards <b>Fencer of Minerva </b>has set itself. Though even that's a pretty easy one to answer: basically, it remembers the politicking and interesting world construction that the third episode briefly ditched and gets back to what made the first couple so mildly entertaining. Moreover, part two sidelines what were for me the least salutary aspects: it's with great relief that I get to report that at no point does anyone get whipped and then have it explained to them how much they enjoyed the experience, and if you can somehow ignore basically all the subject matter, the only really flat-out misogynistic detail is a bizarre moment in which our heroine Diana gets slapped for having the temerity to mouth off about chess.</p><p>In all seriousness, <b>The Tempest</b> is a fair bit less obnoxious in its attitudes toward women, which, while being an incredibly long way from saying it isn't obnoxious at all, nevertheless slightly surprised me. You'd assume this was geared toward a very specific market, so the fact that these last two episodes contain nothing that would be likely to cater to that market is probably a bit weird. There isn't even really that much sexual content this time around, and Diana - while still absolutely convinced that the best possible thing for herself and for women in general is enslaving themselves to a man - has developed considerably from the story's beginnings. She's vastly more in control of events, with her supposed master Sho largely wrapped around her little finger and doing nothing by way of protagonist duties, and the events of the seemingly-pointless-at-the-time episode three have left her both actively bisexual and eager to experiment, and now that I think about it, I'm not certain that anyone gets seduced anywhere in these two episodes except by her or by one of the women she in turn has decided to train up in the art of sex slavery and ... were they aiming for some kind of bafflingly wrong-headed feminist message here? Is such a thing possible?</p><p>I truly don't know, but <b>Fencer of Minerva </b>is definitely up to <i>something</i>, and that, along with its repeated attempts to tell a proper fantasy story set in a proper fantasy world, are enough for me to find it mildly intriguing and intermittently entertaining even when there's no denying that it does neither of those things well and has nothing - bar some inappropriately haunting music - to redeem it. I'm glad I saw it, and I'm glad <i>U.S. Manga Corps </i>were around to pick up a title that no one else would have touched with a ten-foot pole, and I kind of admire the makers of <b>Fencer of Minerva </b>for somehow carving a coherent five-part tale out of this material: I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone thought that making a fantasy adventure about how one woman brought about significant socio-political change through a kink for sexual subjugation was a good or rational idea, but given that they did, I guess we ought to be pleased that they stuck the landing.</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0889170/" target="_blank"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-893TQpa36KA/Ya52qxkPP8I/AAAAAAAAMaI/JI6N7kOPZBcs_5IHE4fCyw4jtw9ml6o3gCNcBGAsYHQ/s1130/Blue%2BSeed%2BBeyond.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1130" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-893TQpa36KA/Ya52qxkPP8I/AAAAAAAAMaI/JI6N7kOPZBcs_5IHE4fCyw4jtw9ml6o3gCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Blue%2BSeed%2BBeyond.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0889170/" target="_blank">Blue Seed: Beyond</a>,<b> </b>1996 - 1998, dir: Jun Kamiya, Kiyoshi Murayama<p></p><p>What <i>ADV </i>released as <b>Blue Seed: Beyond</b> was in fact two separate OVAs by two different directors and indeed two different studios, separated by the matter of a couple of years, and given that they're also up to completely different things, it seems unreasonable to try and review them as single entity. So let's not do that.</p><p>Firstly, then, we have the opening two-parter, which is more or less what you'd expect of a two-episode follow up to a long-running series, in that it serves as a sort of mini sequel that whisks us through a brand new conflict while letting us hang around with the familiar characters a little longer and see where they ended up in the time since the show ended. To some extent, this was wasted on me, as someone coming to <i>Blue Seed </i>afresh, but it was easy enough to gather the general concept and who everyone was. Though with that said, the Wikipedia entry makes the TV series sound quite complex and involved and not at all like the monster-of-the-week fare on offer here. Still, it's a perfectly diverting bit of B-movie fluff, and all the more so in the second episode, when our heroes head over to San Francisco to show the Americans how the experts go about fighting monsters - which is made especially hilarious because there's lots of talk about keeping the situation under wraps, and then they come up with a plan that could probably be photographed from space. It's very much that sort of anime, and there's nothing remotely special going on here, but there's nothing really wrong, either. And with the mighty <i>Production I.G</i> on animation duties, it never looks less than good, though by their unusually high standards, this feels a little phoned in, and it would certainly help if all the character and creature designs didn't seem like they'd wandered in from different shows.</p><p>Then the third episode is <b>Speed </b>in a hot spring resort, and is precisely as awesome as that sounds, assuming that your response to the pitch of "<b>Speed </b>in a hot spring resort" was "That sounds extremely awesome" and not "Uh, what now?" This immediately makes it the best <b>Speed </b>pastiche ever - yes, even better than the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uOX_hbkAMc" target="_blank">Father Ted one</a> - and, well, one of the top five hot springs resort episodes in anime at any rate, because while I generally hate them, they do throw up the odd gem when they manage not to be just an excuse to get the female cast in their birthday suits.* And look, <b>Blue Seed: Beyond</b> absolutely does do that, don't get me wrong, but then it reveals that there's a bomb in the hot spring that will go off if the water level changes even slightly, and then it throws in <i>monkeys</i>, and honestly, nothing I tell you is going to do justice to one of the most wildly amusing half hours of anime I've experienced. It even manages to look terrific, and I have next to no experience with studio <i>Xebec</i>, but that they shared an OVA with <i>Production I.G </i>and managed to come out effortlessly on top makes theirs a name I'll be keeping an eye out for in future.</p><p>Based on its first two episodes, <b>Blue Seed: Beyond </b>would be a tough recommendation to anyone who hadn't watched the series; it's fine and all, in an uninspired and pleasingly goofy way, but it's hard to imagine the viewer so starved of anime about pretty people fighting monsters that they'd want to seek it out. Then the third episode is unabashedly brilliant, though I'd imagine it's a fairly rubbish episode of <i>Blue Seed</i>, given that there aren't any monsters and you could easily switch out the cast with any random bunch of beautiful women (and one hot guy) and achieve largely the same results. Frankly, I don't know where any of this leaves us, but I had a good time with <b>Blue Seed: Beyond - </b>which is to say, an okay time and then a great time, averaged out - so I suppose I can't not give it a thumbs up.</p><p>-oOo-</p><div><p>It's weird to look back at this one and realise there's not a single standout, when there also isn't anything that I didn't enjoy. If there's any unifying factor, I suppose it's inconsistency: if all four of the titles here were as good as their best parts, they would be easy to recommend. For <b>Wedding Peach DX</b> and <b>Blue Seed: Beyond</b>, that means a mix of splendid and not-so-hot episodes, and for <b>The Time Bombed Skyscraper</b> it's a formula that harms as much as it helps, and for the second <b>Fencer of Minerva</b> volume it's ... okay, no, nothing in <b>Fencer of Minerva </b>really works and I'm largely giving it credit for not being as awful as it might have been, but hey, I sort of had fun with it!</p><p><br /></p><div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">[Other reviews in this series: <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_43.html" target="_blank">By Date</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_79.html" target="_blank">By Title</a> / <a href="https://davidtallerman.blogspot.com/2019/02/film-ramble-drowning-in-nineties-anime_20.html" target="_blank">By Rating</a>]</span></b></div></div></div><p><br /></p><p>* The <i>Ranma 1/2</i> OVAs and the second <i>Patlabor </i>OVA both spring to mind - er, excuse the inadvertent crap pun - as shows that managed to do great things with the formula.</p></div>David Tallermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14658931804635257650noreply@blogger.com0