Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 139.5

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

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

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

Black Jack: The Movie 1996, dir: Osamu Dezaki

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

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

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

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

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

X, 1996, dir: Rintaro

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

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

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

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

Armitage III, 1995, dir: Hiroyuki Ochi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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



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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 139

Whoever would have imagined there could be enough sexy anime left to cover for another sexy anime special?  Wait, no, that's actually the least surprising thing imaginable, isn't it?  After all, sex and violence were pretty much the bread and butter of vintage anime - though I wouldn't want to have to say which was which in that analogy.  And ultimately it's probably not worth worrying about, not when we've got quite the interesting selection this time around, with four titles that come at the topic via distinctly different angles, in the shape of Hanappe Bazooka, Weather Report Girl, My My Mai, and The Sensualist...

Hanappe Bazooka, 1992, dir: Yoyu Ikegami

For all that his work thrives on pushing the limits of morality and taste, to call author Go Nagai a provocateur is probably giving more credit than he deserves - so let's go instead with button-pusher.  And Hanappe Bazooka finds him in a very button-pushy mood indeed, as a brief plot summary should illustrate: the titular Hanappe, a born loser who responds to his daily bullying by peeing himself and running away, inadvertently summons demons while masturbating to a pornographic video he's stolen, and said demons, once they're through seducing his parents and sister with untold wealth and some good, old-fashioned demon sex, grant him the power of a magical finger that allows him to destroy at will and force any woman to do his bidding.  You can probably imagine by this point what Hanappe's bidding involves.

I don't mind a bit of provocation, but having my buttons pushed is usually a sure way to wind me up.  The former can be a means to make us question our assumptions or step out of our comfort zones; the latter is a cheap bid to shock for the shake of being shocking, and that's not even hard to do, since as long as you know where the boundaries lie, all it takes to overstep them is the confidence you'll get away with it.  And so, in theory, I'm no fan of Go Nagai.  Yet, to my mild irritation, I find myself liking the adaptations of his work more often than not, and here with are with Hanappe Bazooka, 45 minutes of the most obvious shock tactics imaginable, and I honestly kind of loved it.

Self-awareness, I think, is what makes all the difference.  Well, that and some rather impressive animation, that being one of the surest ways to get the best out of adapting Nagai's oeuvre.  Good animation can inject a bit of nuance that's not necessarily there in the script, or sell a gag that could easily fall flat, or make us warm up to characters who are basically horrible, and all of that's the case here, with the two demons that Hanappe finds himself saddled with - the marvellously named Mephisto Dance and Ophisto Bazooka - being clear highlights.  Much of what they get up to is objectively horrifying, yet Ikegami and crew keep them bound to a delicate line between nightmarish incarnations of gleeful evil and cartoonish buffoons, while also somehow making them kind of sexy when that's what the plot requires, as it frequently does given that Hanappe's family are more than pleased with the prospect of finding themselves the centrepieces of a demonic harem.

That's quite the needle to thread, but Hanappe Bazooka manages it, finding laughs in the most awful places, and somehow even conjuring up something of a redemption arc for the patently irredeemable Hanappe.  When, in its last quarter, we're expected to buy a drift towards seriousness and register Hanappe as an actual human being, it feels more like yet another leg pull than a genuine lack of tonal consistency, and that brings us back to the self-awareness: it's the difference between someone trying to shock or finagle us and someone openly admitting they're messing with us, and look, this is how we're going about it - boy, you never thought we'd go there, huh?  We're in on the joke, and wherever the material heads, the goal is always for us to have fun, even if it's the sort of fun that comes from giggling at absurd displays of debauchery.

Now, I appreciate that many people aren't ever going to chuckle at scenes of a middle-aged couple having outlandish sex with enormous cartoon demons, and that those people are almost certainly more in the right than I am on this one, the more so since this belongs to a breed of cheerfully tasteless anime that had been rendered largely extinct by the end of the last century.  Heck, I suspect that, from distributor ADV's perspective, it didn't last even that long: at the point Hanappe Bazooka was released on VHS, you could presumably get away with this sort of thing, whereas a DVD a year or two later might have whipped up a degree of outrage wholly out of proportion to so trivial a title.  But that's as may be; personally, all I ask of a nineties comedy OVA, even one so depraved as this, is that it looks great and makes me laugh, and Hanappe Bazooka manages both of those with aplomb.

Weather Report Girl, 1994, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

Weather Report Girl, it turns out, is the hybrid of Network and Showgirls that I never knew I needed.  From the former it borrows the basic concept of a struggling TV show exploiting an anchor's eccentric, damaged behaviour to boost their ratings, while from the latter it takes a female protagonist who's altogether happy to treat her body as a tool with which to gain the success she craves and to trounce any woman who dares compete with her - oh, and lots of boobs and cattiness and general depravity.  And it shares with both an absolute black-heartedness and a mercilessly dark sense of humour, though, this being nineties anime, that doesn't mean we can't have the odd thoroughly silly joke too.

We can safely assume Showgirls wasn't actually an influence, since it released a year later, and though Network seems more plausible, Weather Report Girl being a fairly obscure, hentai-adjacent title from three decades ago, I doubt very much I'd ever be able to find out.  Still, the similarities are more than superficial on both fronts, and even if this was just a case of parallel evolution, the intent is much the same: to point accusing fingers at a media that's always hunting for new lows to sink to in search of the slightest bump in viewing figures and then to point out that they only get away with it because that's precisely what people want from them.

At the heart of this particular media storm is our antihero Keiko Nakadai, a raging monster of ego seemingly without any capacity to think of anyone but herself, but with a great body, precisely the combination of characteristics she needs to seize on the big break of a shot at being Channel ATV's stand-in weather girl.  And seize on it Keiko does, finding a tenuous excuse to show her pants to the viewing public, a stunt that almost gets her fired until the execs notice how their ratings have shot up.  From there, there's no stopping Keiko, and certainly the former incumbent of the job she's just stolen doesn't stand much of a chance, no matter how underhanded her tactics.  She's quick to learn a lesson that the execs take a while longer over: Keiko is an uncontrollable force of nature on nobody's side but her own, and now that she's got a taste of the big time, nothing and no-one will stand in her way.  Which might suggest we ought not to be on her side either, but like all great movie psychos, Keiko is awfully fun to watch, in precisely the sort of car-crash-entertainment manner the show is mocking us for enjoying.  It's not so much that we want her to succeed, or even that we don't sympathise with the poor souls who get trampled along her road to success, but her antics are so unpredictable and so gloriously lacking in restraint, taste, or decency that it's impossible not to want to see what she'll get up to next.

In keeping with its protagonist, Weather Report Girl manages the feat of being simultaneously well made and kind of unpleasant to experience, especially when it comes to the character designs.  It affects the women more than the men, who are mostly just bland, as though the designers were no more interested in them than the female cast are - it's startling, incidentally, how little time the show has for even the possibility of heterosexual relationships! - while they, and Keiko in particular, are offputtingly angular and freakishly wide-eyed.  That may seem a strange choice for an anime that makes a show of selling itself on sex appeal, but it works well for the satire, leaving no doubt whatsoever over which of Keiko's attributes are sending those ratings sky high.  And even when it's not exactly pleasing to look at, it's always visually interesting, as you might expect from director Kunihiko Yuyama, who built himself quite the CV throughout the eighties and nineties before he sold his soul to the dark gods of Pokémon.  Possibly that makes Weather Report Girl a title he'd quite like to forget he ever had a hand in, grubby and disreputable and mean-spirited as it is, but sometimes grubby, mean entertainment is precisely what the doctor ordered, and this crams quite the dose into its brisk ninety minutes.

My My Mai, 1993, dir's: Osamu Sekita, Hiromichi Matano, Nanako Shimazaki

My My Mai brings us to a couple of landmarks: I'm reasonably sure it's the last U.S. Manga Corps DVD release we'll be covering here, and that also makes it the last of their nervous attempts to introduce some slightly hentai titles into the US market, a bold move surely destined to fall flat given that a) America and Japan have exceedingly different attitudes towards sex and b) none of what they licensed was terribly good.  Which isn't to say I haven't enjoyed some of them, if only for the excuse to comment on the distributor's amusing attempts to toe a line they were clearly making up as they went along, selling titles on their sexiness while steadfastly pretending they weren't so sexy as all that.

My My Mai falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, in that sometimes it's awfully obsessed with sex and sometimes, even for fairly long stretches, it's content to be a silly comedy with an exaggeratedly buxom heroine who's not great at keeping her clothes on.  The concept, certainly, is suited to going either way: Mai is an all-purpose problem solver of sorts, and since she's apparently not old enough to vote and her primary assets seem to be of a physical nature, it's often the case that problems get solved with a spot of disrobing.  The packaging seems to think she's a counsellor of sorts, but I'd be willing to bet that any psychiatry qualifications she has were bought on the internet, and it's puzzling that her services are so in demand that clients seek her out by name.  All of which is to say that, even by the standards of mid-90s anime sex comedies, My My Mai doesn't make a ton of sense, and since it doesn't care much about its own setup and largely ditches it for much of the second episode, that only becomes truer as it goes on.

Still, let's meet Mai halfway and agree that, yes, she's a counsellor who just happens to do most of her counselling in her underwear, for all that the first story - there are four, split across two episodes of 40 or so minutes - takes pains to make clear that she's a good girl who certainly wouldn't work in a hostess bar unless she got shanghaied into doing so.  This happens, incidentally, because she's trying to track down a mysterious rogue doctor, and it's only when said doctor turns out to be a client of said club, and then turns out to have a multiple personality disorder that makes him turn into a monster, that My My Mai begins to show its true colours - which is to say, this is one strange, silly show, and equally as interested in being strange and silly as it is in getting Mai out of her clothes at every opportunity.

Perhaps that explains the look of the thing, which is about as sexy as an algebra exam.  It leans hard into grotesquery, and while Mai gets off fairly lightly compared with some of the cast, that's not to say there's much about her design that's actively pleasant.  Even if that weren't the case, the animation is mediocre enough to suck most of the energy from any scenes that are meant to be titillating, and it's hard to imagine the viewer so starved of stimulation that they'd come to My My Mai for that reason.  

This is a problem for the first episode, which struggles to take the nonsensical setup somewhat seriously and can't get the balance of tones right and ends up being weird in ways more off-putting than fun.  But by episode two, there's evidently been something of a behind-the-scenes reshuffle, and while Mai is still nominally in the sexy counselling business, it doesn't matter much.  Of the two tales there, the first, picking up on a trivial thread from episode one and running with it in preposterous directions, is most entertaining, but the second, a haunted house story of sorts that gets increasingly demented as it goes along, isn't far behind.  Both are still quite ugly, but the ugliness is at least in tune with the material, and all in all there's quite a good time to be had.  Who knows, perhaps if we'd got a third episode, that would have been something genuinely special?  Yet in its absence, we're left with a puzzling little curio that's just about odd enough to be worth a look if oddness is your thing, but nothing more than that.

The Sensualist, 1991, dir: Yukio Abe

Truly, I take no pleasure in recommending titles that are unreasonably difficult to get hold of.  In my perfect world, all anime would be available to everyone whenever they liked, the creators would be getting properly recompensed each time, everything would be sunshine and rainbows, and we certainly wouldn't ever have to deal with anything as appallingly hard to find as The Sensualist.  We've been mostly discussing for a while now stuff that never got past a VHS and perhaps a laserdisc release, with the luckier cases curated by those copyright-neglecting folks at YouTube.  But The Sensualist blows that out of the water: not only was it exclusive to videotape, it was exclusive to British videotape, and then only from the wildly obscure and short-lived Western Connection, whose dodgy handful of releases were routinely shamed by the average fansub.  And this absolutely sucks, because it's wonderful, and if its visuals are dazzling on a scruffy, badly produced video print, it's painful to imagine how they'd look on Blu-ray.

An impossibility, surely; The Sensualist is almost entirely forgotten these days, and it's highly unlikely there's a single decent print left out there, the more so since you can't even get hold of it in its native Japan.  And of all the injustices we've encountered here in our long trawl through vintage anime, that's one of the more anguishing, because a world that remembered The Sensualist had been made, and that, yes, artsy, sexy, trashy, gorgeous, hypnotically paced adaptations of historical novels are a perfectly valid thing for animation to be doing, would be a better one than ours.  As it is, this feels like something that dropped in from another reality, one in which the boundaries of anime were much broader, its assumptions about what an adult audience might be prepared to digest much less constrictive.

The historical novel in question is Saikaku Ihara's Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko, which documents the sexual escapades of its hero, Yonosuke, from young childhood to old age.  The Sensualist, wisely, doesn't try and cram all of that into a 55-minute runtime, opting instead to focus on a particular incident with an older Yonosuke assisting a dim-witted friend who's gambled a particularly precious asset on the possibility of bedding a prostitute so high class that, without Yonosuke's intervention, she wouldn't so much as speak to him.  But twining around this, we have a loose overview of Yonosuke's life, conveyed in blocks of text and often abstract scenes, frequently but not always involving human bodies and their interactions, along with images of nature and sometimes of nothing much at all, though there's always just enough cohesion to remind us that, whatever else is going on, this a tale primarily about sex.

I said that The Sensualist seems like the product of another reality, and if that's partly due to the subject matter, it's as much down to the animation, which feels like a simulation of what might have happened had anime blossomed in a Japan that had never experienced industrialisation or Westernisation and had somehow carried the sensibilities of Edo art intact into the modern era.  Since we're already dealing with feature-quality animation helmed by a director more familiar with being an art director, The Sensualist was always going to look nice, though by the usual metrics of frame rate and such, we're some way off the top tier.  But as a florid, dizzying reproduction of another age through its own art and sensibilities, there's simply nothing like it.  The imagery is routinely exquisite, not to mention imaginative almost to the point of obtuseness - there's a particularly memorable shot that gets terribly caught up in geometry for no obvious reason but to great effect - and Keiju Ishikawa's score is almost better, if that's possible, doing its own bit to first reproduce the artistry of a long-bygone age and then ever-so-steadily merging it into the present.

To what end?  Well, there we come the tiniest bit unstuck, in that, if you tried to convince me The Sensualist is nothing but exorbitantly pretty soft pornography, I don't know that I could talk you round.  It's neat that Abe and his team manage to make their material feel contemporaneous without even slightly sacrificing its historicity, but it doesn't actually do much to elevate a narrative that's fun, funny, erotic, and shaded with a touch of darkness (since we're introduced to a Yonosuke who's well past his prime and hardly glad about the fact) but not in and of itself up to anything very sophisticated.  But then, perhaps that's the point: The Sensualist, for all its gorgeousness, for all the superficial glamour of the culture it reproduces, isn't about sophistication, it's about sex, and the many and varied joys of that extreme intimacy, and if it's sometimes a bit overly blunt in getting there, nevertheless you're unlikely to see a more lovely, entrancing, and convincing take on that particular topic.

-oOo-

I'm going to miss these sexy anime specials - which isn't to suggest we're all done with sexy anime, only that the odds of getting four such titles together in the eleven posts we have left seem rather slender.  All joking aside, I do think there's often something fascinating about them, since sex is a topic that's at once as universal as anything can be and culturally specific in ways that are often not immediately obvious.  It's evident by now that throughout the nineties, certain corners of the industry were experimenting with what they could - and should - get away with, and to what ends, while half a world away, the US market was asking the same questions while also struggling to adapt them to an audience with very different views and tolerances, and I for one find that all quite fascinating.

As this post illustrates, that's not to say the results were always, or often, works of great meaning and genius, but they were routinely good entertainment.  And that just occasionally a work like The Sensualist would slip through makes it awfully sad that by the twenty-first century, everyone had mostly concluded that the way to mix sex into their anime was with intrusive, objectifying "fan service" that was as much a genuine way of engaging with the topic as the average action movie is a searing examination of the psychological consequences of violence.  Sexy nineties anime, for all your many and varied failings, you made the world a more interesting place, and I for one will mourn your passing.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 138

As we get increasingly close to running out of stuff to cover, so I get more frustrated with not being able to bunch what's left in any sort of sensible order.  I was one title short of getting a Go Nagai special together, and odds are that once I've reviewed them all separately, that missing title will appear out of nowhere, but what can you do, eh?  Well, I did have a fall-back plan, and we should be getting to that next time around - and then there's landmark post number 140, for which I have some definite plans, probably! - but in the meantime, I'll take some comfort from the fact that we have a lost treasure in amongst Space Warriors, Delinquent in Drag, Megami Paradise, and Sanctuary...

Space Warriors, 1989, dir: Noboru Ishiguro

I'll let you in on a little secret that distributor U. S. Manga Corps didn't want you to know: Space Warriors is really the first OVA adaptation of the extremely long-running Locke the Superman manga, following upon the heels of the motion picture released five years earlier in 1984.  And while I can totally see why they might not want to drop an adaptation of a middle chunk of a lengthy manga that presumably was effectively unknown in the West into the American market, it's nevertheless a little disappointing to see them getting up to the sort of shenanigans they pull here.  And yes, I realise I'm perhaps the only person on Earth who thinks that highly of U. S. Manga Corps, and yes, I acknowledge that they perhaps oughtn't to have been putting it out there in the first place, but if there was one thing you could generally count on them for, it was treating their releases with the bare minimum of respect, which is to say, providing the option of subtitles and not messing with the source material.

Space Warriors, as we're obliged to call it, no matter that it's the most generic sci-fi title imaginable, was, so far as I can tell, that rare U. S. Manga Corps release that was only ever distributed in dubbed form, and that's presumably because enforcing a dub made it somewhat easier to get around how they'd tinkered with the original footage.  Based on the available evidence, it was nothing more drastic than lopping off the intros and outros from a three-episode OVA to convert ninety minutes of material into a 75-minute film and adding one of those deeply aggravating "here's what's happening right in front of your eyes" style narrators, and the dub isn't horrible or anything, but it does seem like there were better ways to get to the same place.

Then again, probably it doesn't matter, since, whatever we call it, Space Warriors isn't terribly good.  Nor, in fairness, is it terribly bad: it is, in fact, almost so perfectly mediocre that it warrants a title like Space Warriors.  And this is almost more frustrating for the presence at the helm of Noboru Ishiguro, who had previously directed stuff like Macross and Space Battleship Yamato and Super Dimension Century Orguss and absolutely knew his way around a spot of space opera.  In effect, this just means there are moments when something better and more exciting shines through Space Warriors' bland drama, which centres on the titular Lord Leon's attempts to revenge himself upon the evil corporate overlord Zog and our hero Locke's efforts to stop him, for, uh, reasons?  I guess to ensure the operation of true justice, or somesuch, except that Zog is so brazenly awful and his crimes against Leon and his blind sister so blatant that it's tough to sympathise with Locke's motives or even to understand them.  And this, unfortunately, leaves us squarely without a protagonist, since Leon is too much of a demented antihero and said sister is so dull that I can't be bothered to look up her name.

So there are some individually cool sequences, Leon's introduction being perhaps the standout, and even with a less than stellar budget at hand, Ishiguro knows his way around sci-fi spectacle and gets some mileage out of anything involving outer space and the rather nicely designed ships that navigate it.  But he can't do much to rescue the thin human drama that makes up by far the larger part of the proceedings, and that in turn means it's tough to stay tuned in long enough for the next visually interesting thing to happen.  Indeed, all that really distinguishes the material is an absolutely bonkers ending - one of the most bonkers endings from a period of anime where bonkers endings were no rare thing, I dare say - and that, along with U. S. Manga Corps's clumsy tinkering, are just barely enough to make it stick in the memory for a few hours.

Delinquent in Drag, 1992, dir: Yūsaku Saotome

The concept of Delinquent in Drag is more complicated than its title suggests, though not by much.  Thanks to an administrative error, our protagonist, Banji Suke, finds himself enrolled in a new school under the wrong gender, and his father, who's largely to blame, tricks him into attending on his first day in a girls' uniform, setting up a misunderstanding that Banji - now going by the contracted nickname of Sukeban, or "delinquent" -  soon decides there's little advantage in setting right.  The wrinkle, though, is that Banji and his parents are all supernaturally strong and prone to outlandish violence, so that Banji rapidly earns the attention of everyone in the school with something to prove, including various bullies and athletes and even the school's mysterious head teacher.

What all of that boils down to is variations on four broad categories of joke, and I don't think I'm doing Delinquent in Drag a disservice by suggesting that every second of its 45-minute running time* falls into one of these.  We have Banji's run-ins with various competitive and / or antagonistic pupils, which he generally wins effortlessly; we have Banji creeping on his new best friend, a girl who stubbornly refuses to see through his feeble disguise; we have high-jinks with Banji's parents, who alternate between trying to kill each other and lusting after each other in the most inappropriate circumstances; and as a sort of subset of that last one, we have an excruciating sequence in which Banji's mum, who we discover is only eleven years older than her son, decides to hit on him in sexy lingerie, to his father's very reasonable horror.

The parental stuff that isn't that is quite amusing, without ever rising to the level of actual gags.  The same goes for Banji's clashes with other students, which are probably the highlights of the whole endeavour.  On the other hand, Banji using his false identity to hit on his deluded female friend is as obnoxious as you'd expect, and a symptom of the deeper problem that, for someone who wrote so much of it, Go Nagai - whose work, unsurprisingly, this is adapted from - was pretty bad at sex comedy.  Which is a subgenre that anime gets wrong as often as it does right, admittedly, but it's most noticeable here because the formula feels so similar to other, better works, most obviously Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2.  And the difference is that, for Takahashi, the gender-swapping and subsequent misunderstandings are merely a jumping off point that leads to much funnier places.  Here, when Banji molests his baffled friend, that's all the "joke" there is, and I doubt very much it would have landed better in 1992 than it does in 2024.

But the bits that do work work well enough, and they're in the majority, and there's enough energy and silliness to carry the OVA through its rougher patches.  Director Yusaku Satsuki (or possibly Yūsaku Saotome, depending on whether you believe ADV's characteristically sucky packaging over Wikipedia) does nothing to elevate his material, but nothing much to harm it either bar letting its worst moments drag on past the point of common sense.  However, the art style is awfully committed to Nagai's character designs, which don't work well in motion, so its not as if the visuals are a boon either.  And then you get to the end and discover that Delinquent in Drag stops dead without resolving half the plot threads it's set up, and at that point it's hard not to feel that your time has been mostly wasted.

Megami Paradise, 1995, dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima

There's an unwritten rule around these parts that I try to review titles as the publisher released them, which is to say that if they were to, for example, do something as unscrupulous as pretending that the second half of a two-episode OVA less than an hour in total length was a sequel, then I'll pretend likewise.  I mean, I won't, I'll grumble about it like mad, but that's how it's gonna get reviewed.

And this does poor Megami Paradise no favours whatsoever.  There are surely OVAs so wonderful that they could get away with the sort of mercenary nonsense ADV pulled here - and why does it always seem to be ADV, eh? - but there's simply no mistaking Megami Paradise as anything besides a part one.  It's barely even half a story; rather, it's the "getting the gang together" introduction before the actual story gets going.  And, assuming there weren't further chapters planned and ADV didn't also release something unfinished, the odds are that all the meaningful events will be coming in part two.  Though it's worse even than that, given that this is a video game tie-in for the RPG of the same name, and it very much plays as though it expects us to be aware of that and well-versed in the game's lore, since the alternative is taking in an inordinate amount of exposition and lightning-fast world-building while also keeping track of a largish cast and what plot there is across the course of less than thirty minutes.

I mean, it's not Game of Thrones or anything, but it's an odd enough setup that it would be nice to hang out and familiarise ourselves a little before the plot kicks off.  The title translates as "Goddess Paradise", leaving the implication that everyone in the all-female society we're presented with is an actual deity, a possibility the script leaves wildly unaddressed.  Certainly, nobody does anything terribly goddess-like, for all that magical powers and superhuman prowess seem to be pretty much a given.  At any rate, our protagonist is Lilith - surely not the Biblical Lilith, but really, who knows? - who, as we meet her, has been chosen as bodyguard for the land's new ruler and tasked with recruiting her colleagues-to-be.  This is complicated by how the role is viewed as largely ceremonial, to the extent that no-one worth having would consider it, but rather more so once a mysterious antagonist starts taking out promising candidates from the shadows for reasons that aren't so much as hinted at by the time the credits role.

So we've got a bit of fantasy, a spot of comedy, a touch of mystery, an action climax, and some uncomfortable fan service that feels awfully tick-boxy, though ADV felt the need to pointedly mention it on the packaging.  That aside, none of those elements are really weaknesses, but only the comedy comes close to being a strength, and then solely on the strength of a likeable pair of leads, that being the put-upon Lilith herself and her accidental first recruit, Rurubell, a pleasant force of chaos in what would otherwise be an awfully join-the-dots narrative.  And while the animation is reliably competent, there's precisely one sequence that genuinely impresses, and you can tell the animators knew it and put their hearts into every frame.  The less-than-imaginative character designs are more hurtful, since this is the sort of thing that would benefit from some flamboyance, and the best that can be said for what we get is that you can tell everyone apart.  Only the propulsive score does much to distinguish itself, but while it's great that there's something to make the action seem exciting, it doesn't stick in the memory.

A perfectly average, title, then, and generally I'm quite okay with perfectly average anime, given that the average of nineties anime is respectably solid.  But one episode is one episode, however much you dress it up and add digits to the title of its second volume, and Megami Paradise is nowhere near the quality levels that would be required to make what ADV pulled acceptable.  It's possible that the second half will be good enough to warrant a recommendation for the two together, and since they're bound to be on YouTube, that counts for something.  But right here and now, we can only work with what we've got, and what we've got is over in the blink of an eye, which also happens to be how long you'll be thinking about it once it's done.

Sanctuary, 1995, dir: Takashi Watanabe

We've covered more than enough vintage anime by this point to know that, as a rule, "adult" translates almost entirely to "boobs and bloodshed".  And this is certainly the case with OVA film Sanctuary, though - surprisingly for what's essentially a crime movie - there's a lot more of the former than the latter.  Now, boobs are fine and all, but the problem, as we've seen more times than I care to think about by now, is, firstly, that the requirement of being titillation tends to get in the way of the requirement of telling a story, and secondly that once you've decided your main reason for including female characters is so their clothes can come off at regular intervals, the odds of getting complex, independently motivated female characters who aren't treated appallingly both by the narrative and the men in the cast tend to decrease exponentially.

I bring all of this up not to criticise Sanctuary, since what's the point of blaming something for being of its time and tied to the commercial requirements of an era when, even within Japan, the idea of marketing animation that wasn't actual pornography exclusively toward adults was deemed a bit of a weird and risky notion?  No, I raise it because Sanctuary is the rare exception that has genuinely mature themes and content to go along with its implausibly sized breasts and splatters of gore.  Indeed, our first glimpse of bare flesh, all of about a minute into the just-over-an-hour running time, is in an actual sex scene that treats both participants as actual human beings, though it has to be said that it doesn't serve much in the way of narrative purpose besides giving one of our two protagonists an opportunity to set out what will be our core theme for the remaining sixty minutes and change.

That would be Akira Hojo, childhood friend of and social counterpart to Chiaki Asami: the shadow and the light, as they term it themselves, since Akira is a yakuza while Chiaki is a political advisor with ambitions towards a place in the Diet.  But really, Akira and Chiaki are working towards the same end, the sort of social reform that will make Japan a truly safe place for them - a sanctuary, if you will! - and they're willing to tear down whatever and whoever gets in their way, be it senior politicians in Chiaki's case or Yakuza heads in Akira's.  The reason for their double-pronged approach is the realisation that any traditional route would take them decades and leave them as precisely the sort of compromised old men they find themselves set against.  Except that, for all their fierce willpower, intelligence, and lack of mercy towards those who stand against them, the old guard is just as without conscience and has considerably greater resources to throw their way.

It's dynamite subject matter, as relevant now as it was three decades ago, and it's tough not to be on side with our antiheroes, for all that they're hardly complex characters; Chiaki, indeed, has little to do until past the midpoint, and Akira, by nature of his occupation, gets to be considerably more interesting.  But since this is more than anything a battle of wits, it barely matters that the pair are cyphers: all we need is the tension to keep ratcheting up, and Sanctuary has that down and then some.  Mostly terrific animation doesn't harm matters, either, since this would all fall flat without realistic character designs and realistic designs don't work well if they're not slickly animated and set against backgrounds that convincingly evoke the real world - even if, as here, it's a particularly stylised, noirish take on that world.  The soundtrack, meanwhile, goes to some exceedingly of-its-time places, but in a mostly good way that feels an ideal fit for the material, and even flings in a couple of licensed tracks that I suspect might be one of the reasons this never got the DVD release it so obviously deserved.

To return to the beginning, then, it's faintly disappointing that Sanctuary wasn't willing to go all in and extend its boldness and complexity in all directions; by the standards of its era, it's not especially exploitative, but its failings are that bit more frustrating for being surrounded by so much brilliance, especially when it has the opportunity to really develop one of the tiny number of women in the cast who gets to actually do something, police deputy-chief Kyoko Ishihara, and tosses it away.  Yet what works does so spectacularly, making for some mesmerising drama that only tightens its grip as the minutes pass by and the stakes grow higher.  As such, while Sanctuary may not quite be anime for adults in all the best ways, it comes a heck of a lot closer than the vast majority of titles, and that it could pull that off while being so thoroughly entertaining and yet wind up as obscure as it has seems desperately unjust.

-oOo-

Well, that's only one recommendation, whichever way you shake it.  There was nothing here I actively disliked, not even anything I didn't get a measure of enjoyment from, but Space Warriors and Delinquent in Drag just didn't have enough to distinguish them from similar and better titles and Megami Paradise, which actually charmed me quite a bit in retrospect, was still one damn episode stuck on a video tape that probably cost about $35 back in the day.  But never mind, eh?  Sanctuary is good enough to make up for all of them.

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

* Which ADV claim to be "approximately 60 minutes", the big old bunch of lying liars.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 137

For the first time in a while, and possibly the last time in a while, we have a theme, though not quite so ambitious a one as I'd hoped for.  I was going for "lousy Western adaptations of anime kids' films", but Madman ruined that with a nice, respectful release - curse them! - and so we're stuck with just "anime kids' films", three of which happen to have been treated with hefty amounts of contempt by their distributors.  Ah well!  Let's have a look at The Dog of Flanders, Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy, Junkers Come Here, and The Secret of the Seal...

The Dog of Flanders, 1997, dir: Yoshio Kuroda

So low was my enthusiasm for The Dog of Flanders that it's been sitting on my shelf for literally years.  And that had little to do with the film itself, though I'll admit that the subject matter didn't entirely grab me - and more on that in a moment.  But primarily, it was to do with the knowledge that, in a bid to transform Japanese children's entertainment into American children's entertainment, distributor Pioneer had done a right old number on the film.  That didn't account for the choice to go with a non-anamorphic, letterboxed print, mind you, but it certainly must have been the logic behind going dub-only and putting an unusual degree of effort and expense into said dub, up to and including casting actual famous actor Robert Loggia in a major role*.  And it explains also - while making no less gross and unforgivable - the decision to heavily re-edit the footage, lose 11 minutes from a hardly bloated 103-minute running time, and replace the ending with a sappy montage.

The best case scenario, then, was great material mangled into a less than ideal form.  Yet, on top of that, the original source for this - by which I mean not the beloved 1975 TV series that director Kuroda remade here but the 1872 novel A Dog of Flanders - sounds, in synopsis, like so much nineteenth-century misery porn, and that's a subgenre I've no fondness for at all.  It can be done well, like anything, and Japanese cinema has produced more than its fair share of great but horrifyingly depressing kids' entertainment, largely thanks to their national disinclination for sheltering the young'uns from the sort of harsh realities that might scar their tender minds for life.  But that brings us back to the Pioneer problem, and their bid to sand all the sharper edges off a work that, on paper, consists of not much besides sharp edges.

Pioneer, as it turns out, certainly do deserve a ton of blame, and while they couldn't quite wreck The Dog of Flanders, it wasn't for a lack of trying.  However, for its first half, when the film is largely operating in a slightly gloomy but generally warm and kindly slice-of-life mode, the damage is minimal.  Of the leads, Brady Bluhm as our ill-fated protagonist Nello is perfectly fine, Loggia brings some real sweetness and gravitas to the part of Nello's grandfather, and only the brilliantly named Debi Derryberry, as Nello's fiscally mismatched chum Alois, is actively harmful, leaning into a schmaltzy, juvenile mode that the film itself has little interest in.**  And the narrative, buoyed by Kuroda's sensitive directorial touch and some simply designed but subtly lovely animation, trundles along absorbingly, keeping its focus firmly enough on its core human cast and titular pooch Patrash that it's almost possible to ignore the thunderclouds of tragedy gathering on the horizon.

Even when those tragedy-clouds burst, it's not like everything that's been working up until then simply vanishes.  Nevertheless, I did find that last third something of a slog, and not a very rewarding slog at that.  But this is probably the point to admit that I can't imagine loving the Japanese version of The Dog of Flanders either, or that it could fix my biggest issue.  The fact is, me and The Dog of Flanders were never going to be on the same wavelength, since for all its kindly humanism, it seems awfully determined to find something noble and uplifting in the suffering of Nello and Patrash, even though most of it is caused by awful rich people and a society built from the ground up to ensure that they'll almost invariably win and the likes of Nello will likely as not get crushed, no matter how good-hearted, honest, and talented they may be.

It's possible that the 11 minutes of cut footage mostly consisted of furious Marxist sabre-rattling, but I think it's likelier that they were just scenes that might make small American kids feel sad.  Whatever the case, the re-edited ending is a disaster, transforming the message from one I already wouldn't have a great deal of sympathy with - something like "It's terrible that good people suffer, but what can you do, plus it's all part of God's plan" - to one more along the lines of, "It's terrible that good people suffer, but as long as little rich girls get to grow up and be happy nuns, we needn't worry about it too much."  There are those, I'm sure, who'll find even the American cut adorable and heart-rending; if you've a soft spot for classic Japanese children's films and can bear with a mildly unsatisfactory dub, that might be you.  And yet, politics and all else aside, I think most viewers will ultimately be left feeling short-changed by a work that was so obviously sabotaged by its distributer out of a lack of faith in its audience.

Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy, 1984, dir's: Hiroshi Sasagawa, Jim Terry

If we absolutely have to have anime heavily mangled to fit Western markets, then, for me, Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy is one of the less obnoxious ways to go about it, taking a goofy bit of entertainment for Japanese kids and transforming it into a goofy bit of entertainment for American kids in such a fashion that the result is effectively a new thing that can't really sully the reputation of the original.

Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy is the second of two movies mashed together out of footage from the long-running, much-adored seventies show Time Bokan, though with such drastic liberties taken that it almost seems justifiable that Jim Terry gets a sole director credit on the IMDB page.  And already I've gone and called Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy a movie and given it more credit than it really deserves, since reconstructing a TV show with, presumably, not much in the way of ongoing narrative into a coherent feature film is way beyond the level of ambition that anyone brought to this project.  Rather, we get bits of a half-dozen episodes, with something of an introduction to get us past the fact that we're already well into what story there is and a vague sort of conclusion that can't even wrap up the sole plot thread we've had dangling in front of us for the last hour and change and hints at further adventures that were never to come.  With hacking together ninety minutes of cogent storytelling from 60-some TV episodes off the cards, the actual localisation comes down to erasing as much of the Japanese-ness as possible by renaming everyone and everything*** and then plastering on lots of songs, because songs are a thing kids' movies have, right?

The dub is fine, mostly, with decent work from everyone who gets to put on a silly voice - that includes the villains, clear highlights, the professor whose genius for inventing half-assed time travel devices is the prime mover for everything that goes on, and a pair of talking parrots - and competent work from everyone else, barring Kathy Ritter as female lead Starr, who gets the sole character trait of "simpering".  And only now do I discover that Ritter was also playing pretty much every other female character, including the main villain, my favourite performance by far, so I can't be too hard on her, but my gosh is Starr grating.  She also gets the absolute worst of a batch of songs that never rise past tolerable, a soapy love ballad directed, worryingly, at her grandfather; though, to its credit, it's one of the rare moments where the soundtrack does more than describe exactly what we're watching but with some execrable wordplay to conjure up a pretence of humour.  Thank goodness, then, that none of them last for more than a minute or two.

So not an adaptation for the ages, then, for all that it's more harmless than not.  But the creators made one good choice, at least, and that was the show they picked to build their parvum opus out of.  Time Bokan is a wacky bit of fluff for kids, but it's good at being that, with a ton of visual imagination and joyful energy and wholehearted commitment to cartoon logic; really, the fact that we have characters time travelling into fairy tales is evidence enough of that.  And this was, and remains, the only incarnation of Time Bokan to reach the States (barring the much later OVA Time Bokan: Royal Revival, covered here) so it's nice to get a glimpse of what it had to offer.  The problem is that by the 45-minute mark, we've had that, and with a format every bit as inflexible as most early children's TV shows, the remainder is merely more of the same except with increasingly grating music.  At 60 minutes, I suspect I'd have been quite kindly disposed to this, and I still sort of am, but I was also ready for it to stop well before it did.

Junkers Come Here, 1995, dir: Jun'ichi Satô

After such a very long time spent reviewing vintage anime, you'd think I'd have a pretty comprehensive grasp on what was out there.  The last time I was blindsided by the existence of a DVD release was with Hermes: Winds of Love, and that turned out to be because it's an enormously terrible film made by an honest-to-goodness cult to spread their crazy about, and the world had sensibly responded by quietly pretending it didn't exist.  But lo, here we are with Junkers Come Here, a film that somehow managed to pass me by for the longest time, for no reason I can put my finger on.  It's simply never talked about in vintage anime circles, and at first I blamed that on its being out of print and / or only ever released in Australia, but no, there was a US release, and while it does indeed appear to be no longer in circulation, copies are easy to come by at sensible prices.

So, with all of that, it's got to suck, right?  Well, no, it's actually very good indeed, and only falls a little shy of greatness.  That's almost entirely down to one thing, which we may as well get out of the way: Junkers Come Here is kind of slow, and kind of awkward in its pacing, and probably didn't quite need all of its 105-minute running time to accomplish the stuff that it does so well.  I recall reading - and I can't find where, so it's possible I've got this wrong - that the film was originally released in short episodes and subsequently cobbled together into a movie, and whether or not that's the case, that's certainly how it feels.  Most scenes are strong in their own right, but sometimes they play out fractionally longer than they need to or reiterate information we've already absorbed or just suck air from the pacing at points when forward momentum would do the movie more favours.

These are, mind you, all fairly innate problems to the anime slice of life genre, and Junkers Come Here is absolutely that, first and foremost, with a gentle vein of comedy humming along in the background and a mounting shift towards heavy drama past the mid point.  Our heroine is 11-year-old Hiromi Nozawa, perched so awkwardly on the cusp of young adulthood that she doesn't even have the capacity to be wowed at the fact that her pet schnauzer Junkers can talk and, as she'll eventually learn, perhaps also grant wishes.  So I guess we need to add magical realism to our list of genres, as well, except that Junkers Come Here is as grounded as a tale of a girl and her talking dog could hope to be, and while it thankfully doesn't lean too hard into the customary "is this animal really talking or is this child just desperately lonely" business, it wouldn't take much massaging to convey these same events without any supernatural elements whatsoever.

Because, oh yes, Hiromi is desperately lonely, though that's a slight spoiler, I guess, since it takes the major events of the film to force her to confront the isolation she feels, as in short order she learns that the live-in tutor she has a crush on will soon be leaving to marry his girlfriend and that the parents she almost never sees are contemplating a divorce that would place them on different continents.  That's as much plot as there is, barring the occasional magical intervention from Junkers: the bright, smart, precocious Hiromi is forced to acknowledge her own mounting pain and so to act upon it, if she possibly can.  And heck, that sounds rough doesn't it?  But partly because Hiromi is exceedingly likeable and self-aware and partly because we always have Junkers on hand - one of the more charming and least anthropomorphised talking animals you're likely to come across - it's never out-and-out depressing, though it's perfectly possible you'll shed a tear or two before the end.

Barring a single sequence towards the end, this isn't the sort of material that demands to be animated, and despite the presence of a heavy-hitter director in the shape of Jun'ichi (Sailor Moon) Satô, Junkers Come Here rarely gets up to anything too flashy.  The designs are simple and appealing, while the animation - which looks awfully rotoscoped in places, whether or not it was - is only as complex as it needs to be to sell the reality of the film's settings, and sometimes even that's a bit much for the budget.  Nevertheless, with its soft storybook backgrounds, distinctive characters, and careful balance of realism and abstraction, it's about as good as you could hope for from a non-Ghibli film aimed principally at children.  And indeed, that was an aspect I found especially satisfying by the end: though we might make comparisons, most obviously to Kiki's Delivery Service, Junkers Come Here is that rare anime work in the for-kids-but-good-enough-for-adults-to-love-too genre that doesn't feel terribly indebted to Ghibli's overwhelming presence.  It's very much its own thing, and regardless of the slightly lethargic pace and the odd animation hiccup, that thing is lovely, thoughtful, and insightful, handling difficult subject matter with exactly the right combination of delicacy and brusque honesty.

The Secret of the Seal, 1992, dir: Norifumi Kiyozumi

It's easy to see the thinking behind The Secret of the Seal.  The 1992 anime film Tottoi was already based on a Western source, a series of novels by Italian author Gianni Padoan, and the end result could, if you squinted, pass quite comfortably as an American movie.  Said squinting would require glossing over a few details, like an exceedingly unhurried pace and a level of violence towards the end that probably wouldn't have made the cut if this had begun as an American project, but on the plus side, there were none of the usual inconveniences that came with transporting anime to the US market, like everyone having unacceptably non-European names and skin tones.  Granted, the island of Sardinia, where almost the entire film is set, was probably about as alien to the average American kid, but distributor Celebrity Home Entertainment certainly don't seem to have been inclined to overthink such an apparently easy win. 

Nor did their ambitions stretch to anything beyond the most shabby, barebones of translations, with one exception: there are a couple of original English-language songs on the soundtrack, and though both are gratingly awful and lyrically destitute, they probably cost at least something.  Indeed, while it may be my natural bias in assuming that Japanese composers are by and large less crass and lazy when it comes to this sort of thing, I'd be willing to bet that quite a chunk of the soundtrack was replaced: a tune near the start that couldn't sound more like hold music if it tried has the definite stink of Western tinkering to it, whereas the odd piece later on is legitimately pleasant and works to enhance the visuals rather than providing a tooth-grinding distraction.

But that, anyway, is as ambitious as things get.  The dub is mostly ghastly, full of adults pretending badly to be children, and since that accounts for most of the cast and since Christine Cavanaugh's take on our protagonist Tottoi is an extreme low point, that's a definite problem.  Granted, rotten dubs are to be expected with this sort of thing, but Celebrity Home Entertainment decided to take things a step further.  Presumably at some point The Secret of the Seal was presented in some sort of serialised form, or possibly they just had no faith in their material, because every few minutes, one of the characters narrates a comment along the lines of "As much as everything seemed fine, disaster was around the corner!"  Not one of these adds any information the film doesn't otherwise provide, a couple of them are flat-out lies, and every time it happens, it kills whatever momentum has been building.

Which, admittedly, is never much.  As fun as it would be to get terribly indignant about how Celebrity Home Entertainment ruined a masterpiece, the truth is that they took a mediocre movie and made it into a bad movie.  The plot, such as it is, follows the bland Tottoi as he and his little sister get dragged off to his father's Sardinian homeland after their mother's death from "pollution-related illness" - the second indication we get, after an opening shot of smoke-belching factories, that the film doesn't intent to be remotely subtle in its environmental message.  And, to be clear, I'd have no problem with that if its environmental message was a coherent one, but sadly it's just the usual kiddie-movie claptrap.  Tottoi finds a mother seal and her cub, though he's been told they've been made extinct by intensive fishing, and his stupidity and spinelessness nearly get them forced into captivity, until the film eventually has to wrap itself up with a happy ending that falls apart when you think about it at all.  And though credit is deserved for not anthropomorphizing its non-human characters and having the sense to acknowledge the threat an adult seal poses, the moral still ends up as the same one these things almost always trot out: "We have to protect animals, so long as it doesn't cost us anything much and so long as they're mammals and not something we find weird and unattractive, like octopi, because screw those guys!"

Combine that ill-thought-out moralising with a crawling pace and animation that, barring the odd nice underwater sequence, screams made-for-TV, and indeed, made for TV by people who weren't inclined to put in the work necessary to make this anything special - just how do you make the stunning vistas of Sardinia look this bland? - and you have a movie that's tough to recommend.  Add in the efforts of Celebrity Home Entertainment, though, and it becomes almost impossible to imagine an audience that might find any measure of joy here.  Perhaps you could use it to teach your kids what not to do if they have any interest in becoming conservationists?  Failing that, you're left with a mediocre anime movie drawing on what was likely a mediocre book, and rendered less than mediocre by a distributor who never once seem to have considered that not worsening their source material might be an option.

-oOo-

Given that my express goal was to review a bunch of anime that was mishandled by its US distributors, I suppose this was never going to produce much in the way of classics, so probably it's for the best that I had to fill out the post with something that was treated with more respect and also happened to be rather wonderful and a clear standout: Junkers Come Here is a really good children's film that ought to be better known, so at least I have that to recommend.  And The Dog of Flanders certainly has its virtues, even in the form that Pioneer chose to release it, so I guess the moral here is that all anime children's films ought to be about dogs, or something?  Or, at any rate, not about seals or parrots.

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

* A magnificently misguided choice if, like me, you first discovered Loggia through David Lynch's Lost Highway, a performance that doesn't exactly scream "kindly grandpa."

** Disappointingly, Sean Young, as her barely credited adult counterpart, does nothing to set things right.

*** The only example of this that actively annoyed me is perhaps the most necessary: at one point, the villains get a shape-changing tanuki robot to ride around in, and so adamant is Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy that what we're looking at is a cat that we even get a song to that effect.