Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 136

Okay, so it's another all-VHS-only batch, with nothing that anyone except the most hardcore of vintage anime fans would be likely to have heard of, excepting, just possibly, an adaptation of a work by the exceedingly famous Rumiko Takahashi.  But so what, I say!  Everything's probably up on YouTube, and we've long since established that a few real gems slipped through the DVD net, so there's always reason to be hopeful.  And sure enough, there are a couple of treats in this batch, along with probably the single most enjoyable piece of vintage anime I've watched in months - though, as you'll see, enjoyable for absolutely all the wrong reasons!

This time around: Wanna-be's, Junk Boy, Crystal Triangle, and One-Pound Gospel...

Wanna-be's, 1986, dir: Yasuo Hasegawa

There's not a lot of anime set in the world of pro wrestling, so that's one thing Wanna-be's has going for it right off the bat, and given how much time I spend grumbling about how the medium had a tendency to rehash subject matter well beyond the point of reason or good taste, an unusual setting is a definite plus.  Granted, Wanna-be's does squander that advantage pretty heavily, as if certain themes were so ingrained into the anime mindset of the era that to leave them out was practically inconceivable, and so we end up with a show about professional wrestlers being secretly trialled on super-soldier drugs by an evil corporation in which the climax involves a deliriously dumb-looking monster that the plot hasn't set up even slightly.  But that still leaves us with roughly half the 45-minute running time devoted to a topic that feels quite fresh, and that's more than can be said for the majority of these shorter OVA movies.

Originality, of course, is no guarantee of quality, but in this instance, it does work out that way: Wanna-be's is invariably at its best when it's inside the ring.  That's partly because the action is a strength, but it's notable how much less true that is when it involves that aforementioned dumb-looking monster, so it's fair to say that the wrestling is the key ingredient.  And I don't know that you even need to like or care about wrestling for that to be the case, given that I've never been much of a fan and, perhaps more so, how little this has to do with the real-world sport.  In Wanna-be's, you see, professional wrestling is one hundred percent real, and our heroines just want a fair fight, so that when their antagonists, the Foxy Ladies - who, inevitably, are neither foxy nor very ladylike - cheat constantly and shamelessly, we're meant to find this weird and shocking rather than par for the course.  It's a bit of a hurdle to get over if you've seen any wrestling at all, but it proves to be the right approach, since we end up with the best of both worlds: the fights are ridiculously violent and over the top, yet there's still a measure of dramatic tension, since we're expected to believe that our heroines really are being horribly mauled, the more so because the opening sequence is a false start with a different pair of protagonists who end up on the wrong side of the Foxy Ladies and their shenanigans.

So some fun wrestling scenes in a wrestling-themed anime, and that's definitely a win, but the running time and the misjudged monster battle ending mean that we only actually get a couple of them, which is unfortunate given that nothing else works anywhere near as well.  Wanna-be's has a fair bit of talent behind it, enough to nudge it into the realms of just-above-average animation-wise, with some appealing Kenichi Sonoda designs for its stars, mechanical designs from the soon-to-be-more-famous Shinji Aramaki, and direction from Yasuo Hasegawa, of Riding Bean and Megazone 23 fame, and all of them make the most of what they have to work with.  But what they're working with is an overstuffed script that never finds an organic way of marrying the wrestling stuff with its evil corporation side plot, and instead lets them trundle along next to each other until they're suddenly mashed together in the final third, to the benefit of neither.

Maybe, then, I'm giving Wanna-be's too much credit for dipping into subject matter we don't see much of, in anime or elsewhere, and maybe I'm a sucker for stuff like this - it reminded me of Ayane's High Kick and the Grappler Baki OVA, both of which I liked a fair bit - but I had quite a lot of time for this one.  It's daft, energetic, and full of personality, and that remains true all the way through; I can't exaggerate how cheesy and out of place that final monster is, yet I don't know that I'd swap it out if I had the option, because what kind of vintage anime fan would turn their nose up at professional wrestlers battling a boggle-eyed slime monster?  Well, a more sensible one than me, obviously, and if that's you then stay clear, but just know that you'll be missing out on a pretty good time.

Junk Boy, 1987, dir: Katsuhisa Yamada

If you're not wholly sold on Golden Boy, the six-episode series that follows lecherous genius Kintaro through a series of adventures that play out like The Littlest Hobo if the littlest hobo was a sex pest, then, "It's like Golden Boy but with a less likeable protagonist and only 45 minutes long" is unlikely to be much of a pitch.  And sure, Junk Boy got there first, but history has no end of duff prototypes that would go on to spawn infinitely better finished articles.  At any rate, it's apparently impossible to discuss Junk Boy in any way that isn't a comparison with its near namesake; I couldn't find a single review that made the effort, so I'm certainly not about to try.  Nope, Junk Boy is the lousy version of Golden Boy by inarguable consensus, and if you already suspected, as I do, that the first couple of episodes of Golden Boy were the lousy version of that particular setup, there's no obvious reason to be giving this one a chance.

But Drowning in Nineties Anime isn't about doing what's obvious, or sensible, or likely to be of interest to anyone on the planet other than me, it's about reviewing every last bit of nineties and nearly-nineties anime out there for my own weird amusement, and so here we are, with a title that, for once, the consensus has dead to rights.  Yes, Junk Boy is Golden Boy but worse in every meaningful way.  And yet, I confess, there were a few minutes at the start where I dimly hoped this might prove not to be the case, or at least that Junk Boy was enough of its own thing that the derogatory comparisons were slightly missing the point.  Because from the off we're encouraged to sympathise with Kintaro, even if we're unable to condone his pervy antics, whereas Junk Boy spends a good half of its brief running time seeming quite happy for us to regard its protagonist Ryohei Yamazaki with the same revulsion and contempt that everyone in the cast does.

Who can blame them?  Ryohei is a completely wretched human being without the slightest hint of self control, who gets his big break on the staff of the nonsensical magazine "Potato Boy" thanks to his unerring ability to get an erection at the slightest provocation, making him the ideal candidate to pick which saucy pictures they ought to publish in what we're led to believe is pretty much the Japanese version of The New Yorker, only with much more porn.  This is inordinately dumb, but since we're laughing at Ryohei rather than with him, that doesn't altogether stop it being funny in places, and I was beginning to wonder if I mightn't have stumbled on not Golden Boy's crappy progenitor but its subtle antithesis, a show about a creep that absolutely knows he's a creep and discourages us from showing him the least glimmer of sympathy.  Well, Junk Boy sure suckered me, and in so doing - and abruptly positioning Ryohei as a valid love interest for Potato Boy's star reporter - effectively sets itself on fire and runs around screaming for the remaining twenty minutes.

Narratively, then, Junk Boy is mostly irredeemable, but on one point I'll break from the consensus: it looks pretty good, and director Katsuhisa Yamada makes capable use of his medium to keep things visually interesting, even beyond the basic visual interest of lots of scantily clad women and a "hero" with a semi-permanent boner.  Making Ryohei an out-and-out cartoon amid a generally quite realistic cast isn't the most outlandishly imaginative of ideas, but it works, and does more than the narrative itself to sell his slender redemption arc, since it's inherently easier to sympathise with someone who begins to look basically human than someone whose mouth takes up half their face.  Goodness knows, that's not a reason to watch it, since we've covered dozens upon dozens of works that featured solid, well-directed animation without being actively painful to spend time around for a good portion of their length, but it made it harder to flat-out hate, so there's that.

Crystal Triangle, 1987, dir: Seiji Okuda

The thing with movies that are so bad they're good is that they're hard to spot in the moment: either films that are actually just flat-out lousy get awarded a cult status they don't deserve or else the true works of misguided genius are ignored due to their obvious and abundant flaws.  And so we come to Crystal Triangle, a title that received no love whatsoever back in the day and vanished without a trace, not being picked up for a DVD release by even the notoriously undiscriminating U. S. Manga Corps.  And yet, with the benefit of an awful lot of hindsight, Crystal Triangle is a joy, treating with stony-faced seriousness a plot so deliriously preposterous that it's impossible to predict from scene to scene and often from shot to shot.  It reminded me quite a bit of Spriggan, a film that gets away with its bonkers narrative by distracting us with superlative animation and some of the better action scenes ever animated, and Crystal Triangle, with its middling budget and decidedly action-averse hero, isn't capable of pulling that same trick.  But that's OK, because who would want to be distracted from a tale that opens with the news that the biblical ten commandments were merely a footnote to the real message God intended for humanity and then proceeds for ninety minutes to find the absolutely weirdest approaches to material that never stood a hope of being anything except weird.

Now, to be fair, when I say that Crystal Triangle is bad, it's this commitment to pushing a fundamentally ludicrous setup in all the silliest directions whilst at the same time apparently failing to notice how mad it's being that I'm referring to and not the actual craft on display.  I mean, the script, obviously, is an hallucinatory mess that feels like something an AI might throw up after watching too many of those "What if God was an alien and the pyramids are really cosmic radio antenna?" so-called documentaries; but that aside, it's apparent that everyone knew what they were doing, even if they failed to realise what a lunatic exercise they were doing it in service of.  It may never approach the heights of Spriggan, but not much does, and judged by realistic standards, it looks quite nice, with distinctive character designs, detailed backdrops, some imaginative direction from Okuda, and the odd sequence that genuinely impresses, such as the massive dogfight that takes up quite a chunk of the finale.

Then again, I can see why those contemporary reviewers failed to notice such virtues, since to acknowledge how well animated said dogfight is requires dealing with the fact that it's happening in the first place, and and why, and what other lunacy is going on at the same time, and since you've already been making those sorts of mental gymnastics for over an hour by that point, it's probably easier to dismiss it all as shonky crap and move on to something less intellectually demanding.  Still, not every experience in life needs to be easy, and not every masterpiece needs to be rational or coherent, and sometimes it's fun to watch something going off the rails with unstoppable, fearless determination.  Crystal Triangle is exactly as hard to find as you'd expect of a VHS-only anime that was forgotten almost as soon as it was released, but that's not to say you shouldn't flog one of your less useful organs to get a copy, because this thing deserves a cult following that consists of more than just yours truly.*

One-Pound Gospel, 1988, dir: Osamu Dezaki

I realise it's perhaps a ridiculous thing to say about someone who's had such immense success and influence, and whose three biggest hits are all readily purchasable on Blu-ray, but I feel like Rumiko Takahashi has been done a bit dirty in the West when it comes to the availability of the anime adaptations of her works.  Because, sure, Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha are great, and much-loved, and easy to come by, but what about Maison Ikkoku, eh?  And, for our current purposes, what about her splendid shorter works, so many of which came out on VHS back in the day only to vanish into the ether?

I don't know that One-Pound Gospel is definitely the best of them - Mermaid Forest is awfully worthwhile, and its sequel Mermaid's Scar is arguably even better - but it is, at any rate, a thoroughly delightful bit of work and amply good enough that you'd think someone would have wanted to get it out there on DVD, especially with the benefit of Takahashi's name being attached.  Yet now it's thoroughly lost and largely forgotten, and while we've had to wrestle with bigger and more tragic injustices over the years here at Drowning in Nineties Anime, still, it's sad that something so sweet and charming and top-to-bottom well crafted should suffer so crummy a fate.

If I had to guess at a reason, other than the likeliest one of sheer bad luck amid a confused and competitive market, I'd say that maybe One-Pound Gospel's misfortune was to be neither fish nor fowl in a world where it's always easiest to sell something when you can easily tell people what it is.  And when that's a romantic, lightly comic boxing drama, it might already seem as though you have at least one genre too many for the average viewer, the more so when one of the participants in said romance is a nun.  Oh, and also the boxer in question, Kosaku Hatanaka, has an eating disorder that's wrecking his burgeoning career, which is what brings him into the orbit of the kindly but somewhat fiery Sister Angela, and already we have a lot of wheels spinning for a work of less than an hour in length.

Yet everything fits together elegantly, with the main narrative thrust coming from everyone around him - increasingly including Sister Angela - trying to persuade Kosaku to stop pigging out before bouts to the point of making himself sick, and then the romance building steadily in the background, and the comedy hovering around the edges, rarely rising to laugh-out-loud funny but keeping something that could easily be a bit grim and off-putting gentle and warm.  One of Takahashi's great virtues as a writer is to never set herself above her characters, even when they're being dreadful, and One-Pound Gospel's protagonists are considerably easier to be on side with than the likes of, say, Urusei Yatsura's Ataru.  No jokes are aimed at Kosaku's uncontrollable love of food, nor at Sister Angela's slightly muddled faith, for all that we can see that these two have flaws they really need to move beyond if they're ever to succeed in their chosen paths.  Indeed, what's really surprising is how seriously One-Pound Gospel takes the boxing material and the travails of making a career out of so physically demanding a sport; never is it taken for granted that Kosaku necessarily should keep fighting, and his decision whether or not to do so is as much a source of narrative tension as the more obvious matter of his pre-bout gluttony.

 None of this is the sort of relative subtlety I'd necessarily associate with director Osamu Dezaki, but working under the pseudonym of Makura Saki, as he does here, seems to have lightened his touch somewhat, and the only real bursts of his characteristic style come in some painted stills towards the end.  Kenji Kawai's score is similarly unimposing, and the animation, while consistently good, is rarely showy.  The only truly standout aspect is some striking character work on the two leads: both of them are so pleasant to look at that the designs practically sell the romance in themselves, since who wouldn't fall in love with such an adorable pair?  And, really, the same goes for One-Pound Gospel itself, in that I struggle to imagine how anyone could spend the better part of an hour with this little charmer and not come away feeling awfully warm and snuggly towards it.

-oOo-

That felt like a good batch, in spite of the presence of Junk Boy, and even Junk Boy redeemed itself in some small degree by being marginally better than I was expecting, or at least better animated.  But both Wanna-be's and One-Pound Gospel were thoroughly enjoyable, and indeed among the better short OVA movies I've come across, and their obscurity is exceedingly unearned.  Though not so much as that of Crystal Triangle, a masterpiece of absurdity so wondrous that it ought to be taught in elementary schools.  Seriously, go watch Crystal Triangle this very moment, every second of your life that you spend without experiencing its delights is a waste you'll regret.  And certainly don't go and check the actual score I've given it on on the index pages, because it's totally an 11 out of 10, honest.

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

* Oh, and a Blu-ray release.  Get right on it, please, Discotek!

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 135

I'm emphatically not going to make a habit of reviewing series here, but I am 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 Slayers 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 Slayers: Book of Spells, Slayers: Excellent, The Slayers, and Slayers: Next...

Slayers: Book of Spells, 1996 - 1997, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe

It's early days, of course, but if there's better Slayers 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?

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 Slayers 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.

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 Slayers: Book of Spells 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 Slayers: Book of Spells 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 Slayers 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.

Slayers: Excellent, 1998, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe

The worst thing I have to say about Slayers: Excellent is that it's not quite so across-the-board strong as Slayers: Book of Spells, and I think that comes down more or less entirely to production values.  Book of Spells 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 Excellent never quite hits that same level.  I mean, it obviously is 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.

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 Slayers stories here is comfortably on a par with and perhaps a fraction above what Book of Spells had to offer.  And in one way at least, it has more of an OVA vibe: whereas BoS was content to offer up a trio of standalone tales that could, with a spot of trimming, have fit comfortably into a TV show, Excellent 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.

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 Slayers 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.

Ultimately, all a three episode Slayers OVA has to do is offer up three really good Slayers episodes, and Excellent 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 Slayers 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 Excellent to largely live up to its name.

The Slayers, 1995, dir: Takashi Watanabe

With the films and OVAs behind me, two things about this first season of the Slayers TV series took me by surprise, and neither in a good way.

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 this cheap?  The Slayers 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.

The second surprise was a nastier one: The Slayers 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 Slayers 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 The Slayers, 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.

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 that would be fine if The Slayers was more than casually interested in pointing out how silly the clichés it trades in are.  There's a bit of that - this is still Slayers, 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.

If that were all there was to The Slayers, 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 The Slayers' 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, The Slayers 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 Slayers 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.

Slayers NEXT, 1996, dir: Takashi Watanabe

I can't prove that the makers of Slayers NEXT 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.

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 something.

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.

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.

For all that Slayers NEXT 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 Slayers TV series, I really can't complain too hard.

-oOo-

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 Slayers, and that's a nice note to end on, isn't it?

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 134

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 Explorer Woman Ray, Grey: Digital Target, DNA Sights 999.9, and The Adventures of Kotetsu...

Explorer Woman Ray, 1989, dir: Hiroki Hayashi

Everything that works in Explorer Woman Ray, 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.

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 Explorer Woman Ray 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 something 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.

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.

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 Explorer Woman Ray 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 were 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.

I don't know that all this makes Explorer Woman Ray 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, Indiana Jones-aping action is a fine idea in theory and one that's hard to botch entirely.  Explorer Woman Ray 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 Sol Bianca 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 Explorer Woman Ray 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.

Grey: Digital Target, 1986, dir: Satoshi Dezaki

All credit to Grey: Digital Target, 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.  Grey 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.

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.  Grey 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 Grey 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.

The reason all of this matters enough that I've devoted a full paragraph to it is partly that Grey: Digital Target 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?

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 Grey 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.  Grey: Digital Target 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.

DNA Sights 999.9, 1998, dir: Masayuki Kojima

DNA Sights 999.9 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.

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 DNA Sights 999.9.

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.

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 DNA Sights 999.9 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.

The Adventures of Kotetsu, 1996, dir: Yûji Moriyama

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 The Adventures of Kotetsu feeling you've seen it all before, when, in truth, it's not doing anything drastically wrong.  Well, it is 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?

The point I think I was trying to make is that The Adventures of Kotetsu 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 The Adventures of Kotetsu have a lot of flailing plot threads once you stop to think about it.

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, The Adventures of Kotetsu 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.

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 Project A-Ko sequels and peaked with Macross Plus, knows his way around this kind of material and injects plenty of energy into what could easily have felt inconsequential and too familiar.

And those, really, are the two poles of The Adventures of Kotetsu: 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, The Adventures of Kotetsu does a satisfactory job of ticking all those boxes.

-oOo-

As you've probably realised by now, or else new all along, Grey: Digital Target 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.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 133

 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 Zillion, 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 Zillion: Burning Night, Rail of the Star, Dragon Slayer, and Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past...

Zillion: Burning Night, 1988, dir: Mizuho Nishikubo

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 Streets of Fire on the anime scene.  Heck, it probably has 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 Bubblegum Crisis, which in itself would go on to be enormously influential, homaged its opening scene and much of its style about as enthusiastically as it's possible to homage anything.  Or so you'd think had you never seen Zillion: Burning Night, 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 Streets of Fire managed.

All of which might come as quite the surprise to the viewer who'd made their way through Zillion the TV show's 31 episodes and came to this 45-minute OVA expecting more of the same.  For Zillion was a fairly standard teen-oriented sci-fi action affair whose main distinction would have been its close association with laser tag guns and Sega video games had it not had the good fortune of being made by the team that was just about to become the mighty Production I.G.  Though, actually, that's a little unfair: Zillion 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.

Zillion: Burning Night 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 Zillion and still look plenty good, and Burning Night 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 Streets of Fire 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.

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 Zillion: Burning Night 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 Zillion the TV series and how amused it seems with itself over that fact.  So thank goodness Burning Night 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 Funimation's complete and sensibly priced Blu-ray set is absolutely worth taking a chance on.

Rail of the Star, 1993, dir: Toshio Hirata

Pretty much everything that works in Rail of the Star 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.

This places Rail of the Star 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 Rail of the Star'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.

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.

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 Rail of the Star has going for it: the animation is awfully barebones for a feature film, reminding me of nothing more than the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature 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, Rail of the Star isn't on a par with classics like Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen, or even the similar but more recent Giovanni's Island; 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.

Dragon Slayer, 1992, dir: Noriyuki Nakamura

In a way, what I found most frustrating about Dragon Slayer 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."

The Dragon Slayer 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 Urban Vision'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: Dragon Slayer 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.

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 - Dragon Slayer 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.

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 something 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.

Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past, 1989, dir: Hiroyuki Ebata

My hope for Dog Soldier 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 Rambo 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 Dog Soldier isn't really that committed to ripping off First Blood 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.

The story takes a while to coalesce, and this is actually a plus point, since the chaotic opening is as good as Dog Soldier 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.

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.

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.

-oOo-

I'd say that Rail of the Star'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 shockingly off-topic Wikipedia entry - 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, Zillion: Burning Night is terrific fun, and well-deserving of its rather baffling presence on Blu-ray, so there's that.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 132

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.

So, with thumbs pointed firmly upward, let's have a look at Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, Kabuto, Blue Sonnet, and Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals...

Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, 1985, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko 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 The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko shine.

Kunihiko Yuyama went on to have a weird old career that involves a quite horrifying number of Pokémon 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 The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko 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.

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 The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko it simply feels right in a way that trying to hammer a single aesthetic onto those three very different characters couldn't.

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, The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, 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.

Don't come to The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko 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.

Kabuto, 1992, dir: Buichi Terasawa

Not for the first time, I find myself baffled as to why UK distributor Manga put out some absolute dross in their budget Collection range and yet failed to relicense some of their better VHS titles for DVD.  Because Kabuto - or Raven Tengu Kabuto in the US, or Raven Tengu Kabuto: The Golden-Eyed Beast in its original title - feels like the very epitome of what The Collection was about, except for the part where it's pretty good.

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 Vampire Wars, and Kabuto, 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.  Kabuto 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.

This is frustrating, since good action would have really elevated a title that has quite a lot of the stuff.  Fortunately, Kabuto 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 Kabuto 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.

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 The Terminator 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 Manga's dub is quite respectable for a change, and all in all, trivial and flawed though it is, Kabuto is about as thoroughly and delightfully nineties anime as you could hope to get.

Blue Sonnet, 1989 - 1990, dir: Takeyuki Kanda

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 Blue Sonnet, 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.

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 Blue Sonnet 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.  Blue Sonnet 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 Ringu, 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.

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.  Blue Sonnet, 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.

It's fair to say that Blue Sonnet 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 Blue Sonnet 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.

Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, 1994, dir: Rintaro

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 Legend of the Crystals is the first attempt to adapt the enormously long-running and popular Final Fantasy 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 Galaxy Express 999 and The Dagger of Kamui and Metropolis fame, among much else, and cap that off with animation by the famed studio Madhouse, and you're into the realms of the truly baffling.

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 Legend of the Crystals 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 Madhouse'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 Final Fantasy series, well, the next time Square took a stab at this would be with uncanny-valley-fest The Spirits Within, and enough said about that.

Though, no, let's say one more thing.  Among the more obvious ways in which The Spirits Within missed the mark was by doing nothing with the Final Fantasy 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 Advent Children 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 Legend of the Crystals got it right first time, acting as a sequel to Final Fantasy 5 but with a mostly new cast, allowing it to tell its tale without getting too bogged down in worldbuilding or exposition.

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 Final Fantasy 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 Legend of the Crystals isn't taking its Final Fantasy-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.

-oOo-

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!

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