Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 151

 Here we are, then, with the post after what really ought to have been the final post of Drowning in Nineties Anime, 150 being a nice, round number and all.  But I had four titles left to review - OK, three plus one I felt obliged to take a second look at, out of an idiotic sense of completism - and what could I do?  I mean, other than just not worry about it, given that no one could possibly care?  Well, that wasn't going to happen, so here we are, with the true last post of this alarmingly long-winded series.

Or is it?  But that's a question with no neat answer, so let's come back to it in the conclusion, once we've taken a look at our could-be-final batch of Salamander, Bite Me! Chameleon, Urotsukidôji IV: Inferno Road, and Prime Rose: A Time Slip of 10'000 Years...

Salamander, 1987 - 1989, dir: Hisayuki Toriumi

I can't think of much that would recommend a more than two and a half hour long OVA to me less than learning that it was based on a series of side-scrolling 2D shoot-em-up video games.  Granted, the late eighties and nineties saw no end of anime video game adaptations, and many of them were perfectly fine, and a handful were even great.  But most of them were based on RPGs, which leant themselves readily to being adapted into a more narrative-heavy medium, or fighting games, which didn't, but at least had a pre-created roster of visually interesting characters and some semblance of a plot.  Now, I admit that I've barely played a single side-scroller, but they've never struck me as having much in the way of story beyond, "You're a spaceship, keep travelling up (or right) until you run out of stuff to kill, then stop."

Yet, as Salamander illustrates, meagre source material needn't necessarily be a bad thing.  Sure, a lazy team would string a bunch of action scenes along the barest bones of a plot and call it a day.  But if you were writer Kazusane Hirashima, you might think to yourself, "Why shouldn't this be a rich, galaxies-spanning space opera with an elaborate backstory, a dash of cosmic horror, and a cast with actual personalities?"  And if you were director Hisayuki Toriumi, you might look at the script you'd been handed and think, "You know what, I could actually make something of this."  And so, across three 50-minute episodes, we get a genuinely solid sci-fi OVA, with detailed, distinctive designs, exciting action, and some thoroughly respectable animation that shines not just when spaceships are blasting the heck out of weird aliens but also in the quieter, more character-focused moments.  But the wildest thing is that Hirashima and Toriumi still find ways to respect their source material, with numerous charming nods towards the games that feel like the best kind of fan service, taking time to think through how to represent side-scrolling action and waves of enemies moving in tandem in ways that look cool rather than goofy, and even working in narrative reasons to explain such unlikely tactics.

At this point, you might be wondering how you've never heard of Salamander, what with it being perhaps the only attempt to translate its particular sub-genre of video game and also somehow being kind of great - and for that we must thank our old pals at Western Connection, that brief-lived UK distributor who never survived long enough to get past VHS releases and apparently burned most of the licenses they'd gathered when they went down, dooming their catalogue to eternal obscurity.  However, as I've noted before, in spite of an apparently near-total lack of quality control, Western Connection did release some gems, and they seemed to be getting their act together somewhat towards the end, so that Salamander didn't fare too badly in their hands.  The subtitles are quite wonky, despite being credited to noted anime buff Jonathan Clements, but the print is respectable, the packaging looks fairly professional, and really the only thing they get wildly wrong is mis-ordering the three episodes.

That sounds like a big deal and isn't, since it turns out episode 2 is a prequel fleshing out events briefly summarised in the first episode and setting up the core cast at greater length, and watching them in either order has its benefits.  And for the purposes of the modern viewer, it barely matters anyway, since whoever took the time to rip all three episodes and chuck them on YouTube was also thoughtful enough to return them to their proper order, something I know because I could only find the first tape and got into a mild panic when I went to watch the second episode, only to discover it was identical.  As to whether you should bother with it, I'm not certain Salamander's so good that it transcends its origins; it does fun things with the limitations of being a video game adaptation, but at the end of the day, that's still what it is.  Yet if you can get past that, it's comfortably in the upper tier of vintage anime sci-fi, and had it been released by anyone else, I've no doubt it would be fondly remembered. 

Bite Me! Chameleon, 1992, dir: Atsushi Kase

Bite Me! Chameleon probably never stood a chance in the US, and to get quite a bit ahead of ourselves, that's no great injustice.  Still, with decades of retrospect, it's apparent just how doomed it was before it even hit the shelves.  Some of that, inevitably, has to be laid at the door of distributor ADV, who were so bad at knowing what to do with these smaller titles that you have to wonder why they bothered.  Their efforts here began with a name change - in Japanese, it's just Chameleon, in reference to the protagonist's slippery personality - and got as far as making a big point of how shocking their release was.  I mean, a big point: we get a presumably self-inflicted Parental Advisory warning, along with the not-quite-accurate declaration that "There's no level to which this film won't sink" - it's not a film for a start, but the first of six OVA episodes, though you can see why they'd want to gloss over that.  Then, on the back, they go even further and announce that it's "Not to viewed by anyone under the age of... well anyone."  Way to reduce your potential audience to zero, ADV. 

The intention, of course, was surely to pitch this towards teenage boys, what with its blatant promises of depravity and hints of violence and naked girls.  That makes a measure of sense, since teenagers were presumably the intended audience in Japan, albeit for somewhat different reasons.  Bite Me! Chameleon, you see - and you know what, I'm calling it Chameleon from here on, because that's a truly ghastly bit of word salad ADV came up with - is kind of a pastiche of the gang-focused youth culture popular at the time, the sort of thing Akira got so much mileage out of a handful of years earlier, and its angle is to take something that was already fairly shocking and amp up the shock value to absurd levels.  Which is where we hit the heart of the translation problem, in that to understand a parody of something, you have to understand the thing itself, and Japanese and American youth culture weren't in a remotely similar place in the early '90s: to the viewer without a clue about yankis, Bōsōzoku gangs, and yakuza wannabes, there's a far higher learning curve to the material than it could hope to warrant.

Not, as I said at the start, the world's greatest injustice, and yet, if only because I'm a contrarian, I'm going to fight Chameleon's corner a little.  The thing is, that core idea isn't a bad one, assuming you do have enough of a cultural grasp to follow along, and there's definitely humour to be milked from it.  Thus we get as our central character the wildly charmless would-be gang leader Yazawa, doomed to failure by being all of about two feet tall and weak as a three-legged kitten, but with enough of a devious edge and lack of moral compass that he sometimes comes out on top anyway.  That's enough of a setup to produce a handful of funny moments, though few come from the eagerness to shock that ADV put so front and centre.  Here in 2026, anyway, with nine million or so episodes of South Park behind us, it's not so alarming as all that: someone gets peed on, used tampons make an appearance, there's that brief flash of nudity ADV were quick to slap on the back cover, and of course there's a fair bit of swearing.  Least palatable to the modern viewer is likelier to be the gay panic that was so seemingly inescapable in this stuff, though even that gets ever-so-slightly redeemed in the show's final moments.

Predictably, it's not as though the production values offer a distraction, either; the rock soundtrack is perfectly acceptable, though deployed with a thudding lack of thought, and the animation is on the cheap side but nuanced enough to sell a gag when it needs to, especially when it comes to Yazawa, a hideous cartoon aberration dropped into what's otherwise a fairly standard-looking piece of comic anime.  Which, by the way, brings us to Chameleon's biggest failing, assuming you can get past all the above: even if his adventures have a sort of slow-motion train-wreck quality that's easy to get caught up in, Yazawa is utterly unsympathetic, to the extent of being actively annoying to look at, and no one else in the cast picks up that slack.  That leaves us with 50 minutes of watching mostly unpleasant characters in mostly unpleasant scenarios, some of which are intermittently funny, some of which aren't, and that's not enough to make a comedy worthwhile.  I didn't resent my time with Chameleon, which is more than I'd hoped for based on its tiny handful of reviews, and I apparently found it funnier than almost anyone else outside of Japan, but aside from its value as a weird cultural artifact, that's as far as I'd go.

Urotsukidôji IV: Inferno Road, 1993 - 1995, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Shigenori Kageyama

So, yes, I've sort of already covered the fourth entry in the Urotsukidôji series, under the title of Infernal Road - note the two letter difference! - back in post 122.  But that was a review of the only version I could lay my hands on, released by UK distributor Kiseki, which had the sizeable failing (or, given that I hated it, sizeable benefit) of only containing the last of three episodes, with the first two, effectively banned at the time in both the UK and the US due to the seismically awful decision to drag children into the rape-and-torture shenanigans of the Urotsukidôji universe, presented only as scripts.  And now, thanks to Discotek - uh, thanks, Discotek - we get to finally see what all the fuss was about.  I won't, then, bother recapping or revising my thoughts on that third episode, except to note in passing a couple of points where I think I was unfair, the main one being that the animation is nowhere near as bad as I made out; it's even pretty solid, and indeed only the first of the three parts manages to seriously embarrass itself, with a handful of genuinely incompetent moments.  But I can't stand by my suggestion that this was a half-hearted rush job: individual moments and occasional entire scenes are moderately impressive, the backgrounds are consistently terrific, and Masamichi Amano's score, which I've persistently failed to sing the praises of, continues to be far too good for the material it's stuck with.

But like I said, there is some lousy animation in there, and it's unfortunate that it's clustered in the first episode, which would have been irredeemably awful even if the finest talents in Japan had clubbed together to give it their best efforts.  Aside from the aforementioned moments of plain incompetence, we get that staple of bad anime, the character designs that all feel as though they've wandered in from different projects; and again, I don't want to suggest that anything could have redeemed the wretched tale on offer, (though, between us, I'm about to sort of suggest just that in the next paragraph), but the last thing you need with material this sordid and dumb is for the visuals to be adding to the problems.  

At any rate, I feel like digging into the plot would be a waste of words when I can just type "evil psychic children force their parents to have orgies for their entertainment" and move hastily on.  Except that here we are and it's that next paragraph, and while I refuse to argue there was ever such a thing as a good version of this plot, if there was, episode two is certainly a damn sight closer to what it would be.  Shifting the focus away from sexual violence is an immediate and massive win; the nadir of part one is an interminable rape scene that somehow manages to be both incredibly unpleasant and lazily half-hearted, and is thus the lowest point of a franchise that clocked up so many, many low points.  What I neglected to mention, though, is that part one also rolled out some exceedingly distressing horror, including perhaps the most visceral sequence we've had up to that point, and while it's still utterly unpleasant, it's also imaginative and legitimately shocking.  Part two doesn't have any single moment as effective, but it's generally more focused on horror - some of it psychological rather that merely gross, even! - and features some solid, creepy imagery, and generally manages to find more interesting ways into the whole "evil psychic children" shtick, including hints of surprisingly thoughtful social criticism and limited but interesting attempts to tie this side story into the wider Urotsukidôji mythos.

None of which is to say that it doesn't suck or that it wasn't horribly misconceived from the ground up or, heaven knows, that you should watch it, but fair's fair, there's stuff that works here, and on a second watch, I'd extend that to the third episode too: in particular, when it bothers to indulge in the horror part of the Urotsukidôji equation, it's pretty effective.  That can't help one of history's most deflating endings, and it's gobsmacking to discover that the alternate ending added in for the movie version actually manages to be worse: granted, it's nasty and misogynistic and so much more in keeping with everything we've suffered through up to this point, but it's also profoundly nonsensical and still pays off effectively none of the narrative threads that have been piling up over the last goodness-knows-how-many hours.  So while Urotsukidôji: Inferno Road may be marginally less dreadful than I originally made out, it's still a terribly misconceived side story tacked onto one of - nay, two of! - history's worst franchise conclusions, and I'm still more than comfortable in suggesting you avoid it like the plague.

Prime Rose: A Time Slip of 10'000 Years, 1983, dir: Satoshi Dezaki

Here's an exciting precedent for the final review of our possibly final post: I'm covering something that practically just came out, and for, I believe, the first time outside of Japan.  Indeed, this one took me by surprise, since I'd never heard of Prime Rose and didn't know AnimEigo had released it until after the fact, despite following them on the social medias and whatnot.  This came as part of the distributor's recent change in direction, whereby they actually put new stuff out occasionally and don't rely on Kickstarter campaigns and the same handful of titles they've been releasing for, like, two decades, and suggests that maybe the next logical step in that plan might be to actually tell people when you have something new for them.  Regardless, it's exciting progress, as is much of what this new incarnation of AnimEigo is up to.

And with all that, it's a shame Prime Rose: A Time Slip of 10'000 Years sucks quite as hard as it does.

I'll say this in its favour: while it reminded me a lot of Space Firebird 2772, another Osamu Tezuka adaptation from a mere three years earlier, which I covered a couple of posts ago, it's not half so annoying as all that.  This I put down not to better source material, since the plotting is every bit as illegible and possibly more so, but less direct involvement from Tezuka, who I'm coming to suspect was effectively Japan's version of Stan Lee: sure his influence was profound, sure he created lots of well-loved characters, but that's not to say you'd actually want to go back and read his work.  Maybe that's unfair, especially since I haven't tried to read anything by Tezuka, but I refuse to believe that the top-to-bottom mess that is Prime Rose's script can be solely, or even mostly, down to screenwriter Keisuke Fujikawa, who appears to have spent most of his efforts in trying to ensure that scenes at least follow on comprehensibly from each other.

That plot, then, so far as I could make sense of it, which I absolutely couldn't: the evil entity Death Mask, a big floating head in space, splits in two and plummets to Earth, landing on two cities, which somehow catapults them and all their inhabitants 10'000 years into the future.  Our hero, Gai Tanbara, is sent forward in time to investigate - rather than, say, back in time a week to evacuate the two cities, though unlimited time travel seems to be a thing in this universe - and discovers that, in the span of zero years, the two cities have turned into facsimiles of ancient Rome and ancient-Vague Generic World Culture, and are fighting at the behest of Death Mask, except not really, since the Romans - sorry, Gromans! - have already won and enslaved the Genericans or whatever they're called.  But they haven't counted on the plucky princess Prime Rose, who sets out on a quest for revenge over her murdered lover that she's forgotten about within three scenes and... Well, stuff.  Lots of stuff.

What saves Prime Rose, ever so slightly, is that some of that stuff is, if not good, then at least fun and odd enough to provide transitory amusement and a distraction from the general incoherence.  On the other hand, some of it is plain awful, and nothing more so than the character of Bunretsu, who stows away with Gai and proceeds to spend the next hour being a hate crime against the very notion of comic relief characters.  Bunretsu is repellent on every level, from his design through to the way he spends most of the second half leching over Prime Rose, who transforms from warrior princess to simpering pin-up girl so fast that it's lucky she didn't die of self-inflicted whiplash and thus becomes the second worst thing in her own movie.

Though the scene in which she somehow makes having a bath in a puddle look like the world's sluttiest strip tease, then freaks out at Bunretsu for watching her, does at least wake up the animators, who before and after seem quite happy to just get the job done: it's not an ugly film, but when it's not fixating on Prime Rose's bum, it's also not one that's willing to try very hard or attempt anything very visually interesting, and that's before you get to Tezuka's designs, which are an acquired taste that I don't plan on acquiring any time soon.  The score fares better, but not so much better that you'd actively choose to listen to it, and that leaves the movie without a single standout feature.  No, I lie, Prime Rose does acquire the ability to turn her body to stone at one point, and that makes for a couple of novel sequences, while also facilitating her rapid arc from feisty sword-fighting rebel to literal sexy ornament.  And yet it is all extremely weird, and I can't honestly say I took no pleasure in how bewildering and nonsensical the plot was, and the animators truly did put their hearts into that puddle bath scene, so I'd be lying if I said I didn't get some enjoyment out of it.

-oOo-

Was that it?  Are we done?  Can I go do something, anything else with my life?

Er, maybe.

Unless I get over this misguided sense of completism, there are a still a couple of loose ends to be tied up, but I also don't have enough titles to cover for another full post, so maybe that'll happen and maybe it won't - though if it does, it won't be for a while, given that I'll have to watch all of Dancouga, and that's a looooong show.  And then, as illustrated above, it's not as if we don't get the occasional new release, especially given that AnimEigo seem willing to step beyond the self-imposed limits they and Discotek have been setting themselves of mostly rereleasing stuff on Blu-ray they've already put out on DVD.  Prime Rose may not have been good - boy, was it not good! - but at least it's something new, so who knows what the future might hold? *

Perhaps more interestingly, if only for me, there are a couple of listicle-type posts I'd quite like to cobble together, to tie a bow on this enormous endeavour.  Those won't happen any time soon, though, given that I really do have other stuff to be getting on with.  All of which is to say, this actually is the final post of Drowning in Nineties Anime - for now, and until it isn't.

So... bye?

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

* At time of writing, we've just had a few surprising and exciting reveals from both Discotek and AnimEigo - whoever would have imagined we'd be seeing Blu-rays of gems like Outlanders or Ruin Explorers? - so I for one am feeling cautiously optimistic. 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 150

Here we are, at extremely long last: the end of Drowning in Nineties Anime, a project I started on a whim back in (checks) oh, my goodness, 2015, that's insane.  11 years!  I was a mere child back then, full of boyish hopes and dreams!  What have I been doing with my life?  Whose is this wrinkled face that stares back at me from the mirror?

Eh, what the heck, it's been fun.  Who wouldn't want to spend 11 years watching a metric buttload of vintage anime and writing dumb reviews of it?  And whatever the travails along the way, we get to end on the highest of highs with the last part of our Studio Ghibli special, a particularly nice note to finish on since there's essentially no risk of a bad film, or even a less than great film, sneaking in.  A controversial claim?  Surely not when we've got Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbours the Yamadas ahead of us...

Pom Poko, 1994, dir: Isao Takahata

There's some fun to be had in comparing and contrasting Japan's premier animation studio with its Western counterparts Disney and Pixar, and Pom Poko draws that sort of comparing and contrasting more than the majority of Ghibli films, in that it's hard not to go into it feeling you know more or less how it's meant to go.  If you're a parent with young kids or enough of a die-hard animation nerd to watch movies that are primarily geared towards such an audience, you've inevitably seen more talking animal movies than you can begin to count, and even the subgenre of films that pit talking animals against the devastation caused by their human neighbours is hardly small; just this year we had Pixar's Hoppers doing precisely that.  But while I doubt Takahata, a director who's always struck me as extremely unconcerned with what anyone else was doing, was thinking in such competitive terms, nevertheless, for the average Western viewer, Pom Poko hits differently for how similar it is to its endless counterparts - which is to say, barely at all.  Because, you know, magical racoon* testicles and all that.

It sure is hard not to get caught up with the magical racoon testicles; but really, the frequent display of animal genitalia, while something it's fair to say we'll absolutely never see in a Disney movie, is only one small part of it.  For a start, Pom Poko positions itself as a documentary of sorts, in that it's narrated to us and structures itself according to the illusion of presenting true events as they happen rather than by any narrative structure; though, as the Japanese title hints heavily, it's really more like a war record, since the sole throughline is its protagonists' conflict with the selfish humans who are rapidly annihilating the habitat they've made their home for countless centuries.

Whichever way you look a it, there's not a lot of plot; in common with basically all of Takahata's Ghibli work, it instead favours chapters composed of roughly related incidents.  Being documentary-like, Pom Poko spends an awful lot of time on topics that would have no place in a more narrative-heavy film: it's quite happy to put whatever minimal story it has on the go just to observe its cast eat, play, tussle, bicker, and flirt.  Indeed, those are essentially its only two modes: we're either watching racoons battle their unknowing human antagonists, mostly using the range of magical abilities granted to them by Japanese folklore, or we're watching them hang out.  You might say it's not a lot to fill a nearly two hour running time, and you might be right; even by Takahata's standards, Pom Poko feels a little aimless at points.  On the other hand, and again as with all things Takahata, it's hard to point at any single moment and say, "Well, that needed cutting," when everything is so delightful in its own right.

Inevitably, that has a lot to do with the animation, which is a leap in ambition from a director who was never remotely lacking in that department.  The considerable cast all have at least four modes of representation, from realism through a couple of levels of cartoonish deformity to the human forms they adopt as part of their terrorist campaign, and the mind boggles at the thought that must have gone into keeping all this comprehensible, the more so since Pom Poko makes it look effortless, switching between modes with playful abandon, sometimes to land a joke but often apparently for the sheer joy of such animation tomfoolery.  It's perhaps not the loveliest of Ghibli films, but it's inarguably the most fun in how it makes use of its exquisite craftsmanship to get up to some often very silly things.

Yet I'd hate to leave you with the impression that silly fun is all Pom Poko has going for it, or even what it's primarily up to.  As much as it's often charming, weird, and funny, it's also, at times, an immensely dark, difficult piece of work: were we not talking about the director of Grave of the Fireflies, I'd say unhesitatingly that it contains the grimmest scenes in Ghibli's canon, and I still suspect that its ending hit me that bit harder.  More here than elsewhere, Takahata's humanism and unwillingness to moralise or villainise lead to some heart-breakingly empathetic places.  Pom Poko doesn't hate humans, as its raccoon protagonists don't; indeed, it struck me on this most recent watch how, though they're never not raccoons, they're also often stand-ins for humanity, constantly doing the wrong thing for the most innocuous of motives.  Pom Poko shows with a clear-eyed gaze where that's led us and acknowledges that we've lost more than we can ever replace - a moral that, again, makes Disney and Pixar at their most dour feel almost chirpy.  Then again, that Takahata perfectly balances that essential bleakness with so much giddy light-heartedness points to just what an incomparable genius the man was, and why, ultimately, such comparisons are bound to fall flat.

Whisper of the Heart, 1995, dir: Yoshifumi Kondō

Studio Ghibli would produce many fine films made by directors who weren't either Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, but the only one I'd unquestionably place alongside the works of those masters is Yoshifumi Kondō's Whisper of the Heart.  And okay, it does get to cheat a little, in part by having Miyazaki on board as its scriptwriter and in equal part by feeling like something of a synthesis of a lot of what the two founding fathers of Ghibli had been up to over the last decade.  That stretches to the odd direct reference - a clock branded Porco Rosso is the obvious one, and I'd swear there's a nod to Nausicaä there too - but mostly it's to do with how the material splits the difference between its two influences.  In terms of subject matter, it's very much in keeping with Takahata's output, most obviously Only Yesterday, being a coming-of-age tale with a female protagonist that treats the perspective of its youthful characters with absolute seriousness and good faith; but there's enough of a hint of magical realism, including a story within a story that briefly diverts into pure fantasy, for some major Miyazaki vibes to creep in, and of course his contribution of the script makes it feel quite different to what Takahata might have done with similar material.

None of which is to say that Kondō did nothing other than synthesise, or even that Whisper of the Heart feels particularly beholden to anyone's idea of what a Studio Ghibli movie ought to be.  A lot of what sets his approach apart is a fixation on capturing the realistic texture of 14-year-old Shizuku Tsukishima's life, whether that be emotionally - it invests much energy into a potential love triangle that basically goes nowhere, but teaches us a good deal about who she is as a person - or in terms of the physicality of its Tokyo locations, which is a significant leap in the representation of real spaces from anything the Studio had tried before.  Indeed, there are times when Kondō's adherence to reality borders on the pathological, with multiple scenes of foot and vehicle traffic that must have absorbed many hundreds of animator hours and could mostly have been snipped without dinting the narrative.

This is, obviously, not meant as a criticism: a huge part of the whole Ghibli thing was about providing exactly the amount of resources necessary to make a project the best version of itself and not a yen less, and as a result both of that refusal to stint and Kondō's obvious fascination with moving his cast through a variety of real-feeling spaces, Whisper of the Heart has a concreteness that surpasses anything in the Ghibli catalogue.  By the same measure, Kondō's willingness to include any number of tangents large and small so long as they deepen our understanding of and identification with Shizuku pays enormous dividends by the end.  This first becomes apparent in a scene midway through the film that would comfortably sit among my Ghibli top ten, as a musical interlude develops into both a character-defining revelation and a thesis on the social value of art, whilst also being heart-stoppingly lovely.  And from there onwards, the benefits of Kondō's approach never stop being obvious, as he transforms some basically rather slight material into the stuff of epic drama.

Aside from a bit of will-they, won't-they romance that never worries itself unduly with the won't-they part, the only real conflict in Whisper of the Heart is between Shizuku and herself, as she strives to turn her half-hearted passion for writing into something deeper and more meaningful and in so doing discovers both the transcendental joys and soul-wracking despair of being truly creative.  That right there, incidentally,  is surely the most Miyazaki-esque part of a script that, given how much it might seem to tie in with some of his other projects, most notably Kiki's Delivery Service, doesn't actually have that many of his fingerprints visible upon it.  But while "creativity is absolutely necessary to a civilised society and also makes nigh-impossible demands on those who commit themselves to it" is a thoroughly Miyazaki message, Kondō's take still feels distinctive, largely refusing to be about anything other than Shizuku and how she gets through this first big artistic trial by fire.

If I have any criticisms, they're all very trivial.  While the animation is largely phenomenal, there were odd moments of character art that felt below Miyazaki / Takahata levels of perfectionism, though of course that's a ridiculous bar to measure anything by.  Perhaps the biggest issue plot-wise is that the climatic scene feels kind of odd and old-fashioned, though it's book-ended by a wonderful moment of Shizuku figuring out what sort of person she'll be in a romantic relationship and is followed by one of those classic Ghibli 'let's actually finish the movie over the closing credits' sequences that wraps things up on a far more perfect note.  Other than that, you might certainly argue that it feels rather minor compared with much of Ghibli's output, focusing as it does so narrowly on its heroine and the handful of people around her.  You could argue that, I say, but I'd counter by pointing out that few films had more influence of me as a writer or taught me more succinctly that doing anything of value requires effort, sometimes more effort than you believe yourself capable of giving - and if you're the sort of person that speaks to, there's really nothing minor about Whisper of the Heart at all.

Princess Mononoke, 1997, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

There was a time when I'd have told you that Princess Mononoke was my favourite film of all time, and for a much longer period, I'd have insisted it was my favourite of Studio Ghibli's works.  And it's not as if I've exactly changed my mind on either front, more that, the older I get, the less inclined I am to pinning myself down to favourites.  Still, I'm never going to be the guy who tells you that Princess Mononoke isn't a masterpiece for the ages.  And I wouldn't have even considered that an opinion in need of defending until I discovered that my favourite film reviewer (okay, I still do have some favourites!) Tim Brayton expressed some ever-so-slightly damning opinions on it.

Now, it would be churlish to write a counter-review, so I won't be doing that, but that knowledge did leave me with a return viewing where I felt the need to dig down into precisely what about this particular film had affected me so profoundly in my early twenties.  Most obviously, of course, it was that I'd never seen anything remotely like it: I'd seen hardly anything from Ghibli and not much anime in general, but even if that weren't true, it wouldn't have made much difference, because there wasn't another film like Princess Mononoke in 1997, within or without anime.  Compared with everything Miyazaki had done previously, it was startlingly violent: for me as an anime newbie, seeing arms and heads being lopped off in an animated film was shocking enough, but I can only imagine what the impact would have been for those who'd been following the director's career.  More than that, however, Mononoke is a film for adults in the best of ways: it's smart and complex and demanding, sometimes a little too much of those things to be wholly entertaining.  And in 1997, that just wasn't what fantasy movies were - though describing Miyazaki's dizzy cocktail of history and myth as fantasy is awfully reductive in itself.  Granted, there was plenty of live-action Japanese cinema that had mixed historical fact with folkloric fantasy, but nothing came close to the intricate cosmology Miyazaki built here, which borrows from Japanese mythology without ever seeming beholden to it.

Uniqueness needn't necessarily equate to greatness, though when you're dealing with one of the finest directors of all time, there's a fair chance of one leading to the other, and even if Princess Mononoke were somehow a failed experiment, its bold genre reinvention would be thrilling in itself.  For me, Mononoke is absolutely not a failure of any sort, but if I was pressed to accept a single criticism, it's that the movie has to keep a heck of a lot of plates spinning, and there's a stretch towards the middle where that threatens to become too much.  Part of the issue is that the first hour or so is almost perfect in how it tethers our perspective to that of protagonist Ashitaka, so that, though we learn a lot and meet a sizeable cast, we do so as he does and through his actions and interactions.  And here it helps that Ashitaka is an exemplary main character, a patently good man who, as we encounter him, suffers a terrible, unfair fate that will test his goodness to the core.  Even as he tries to do the right thing by everyone, whatever the cost, a part of him - his demonically possessed arm, strictly speaking, but I think we can allow a bit of metaphor here - is aware that there are quicker, bloodier solutions at his disposal, and that those might even work out better in the long term.

His counterpoint is Lady Eboshi, for my money the greatest of Miyazaki's ambiguous antagonists.  You could very easily make a film in which Lady Eboshi, who has carved out a small empire within a wholly patriarchal world and then filled it with rescued prostitutes and lepers, among other undesirables of the outer world, was an unequivocal hero, and I suspect you could even cut it together out of the footage that exists in Princess Mononoke.  But then, she isn't really the villain of the piece: that would be the monk Jigo.  Except that Jigo is really only a cynical pragmatist working in service to the emperor, so maybe the emperor is the truest villain - except that we never get to hear their side of things, and anyway, that's assuming we choose to agree with Ashitaka that the deeply ambivalent divinities and spirits of nature that throng the movie are essentially good, which is quite the leap.

Like I said before I got sidetracked, a  lot of spinning plates, and for a brief spell towards the middle, when we lose Ashitaka as our narrative anchor, it arguably gets a bit much.  But that's as far as I'd go, it really is: there's a stretch of Princess Mononoke, between the essential perfection of the first act and the apocalyptic grandeur of the last, in which the number of moving parts Miyazaki has set in motion becomes mildly overwhelming.  Could he have streamlined things?  Perhaps dropped a character or two?  I think so, yes, but I also think the cost would have been considerable.  And here's where I differ hard from Tim's opinion: for me, Mononoke is Miyazaki's most profoundly humanist and empathetic film, and it gets there largely through complexity and counterpoint.  Strip that away, strip the ambiguity of so many conflicting agendas that we can't simply dismiss as wrong and the manner in which irreconcilable perspectives are given equal space, and you lose the core of the film's argument, or perhaps rather it's refusal to present a clear argument.  For Princess Mononoke isn't a film of answers, and especially not of easy ones; though it's widely regarded as an ecological fable, even that's a simplification given how dangerous, merciless, and strange nature is frequently shown to be and how its central avatar is a god who grants both life and death without apparent discrimination.

By all means, then, come for the exquisite animation, for Joe Hisaishi's flawless score, for the thrilling action, the gut-wrenching horror, the weirdness and whimsy: you could absolutely watch Princess Mononoke as a work of epic fantasy, and though it's perhaps more arduous and depressing then nearly any other work in that genre, nevertheless, it's extraordinarily successful.  What's kept me returning, though, and I think what truly made me fall in love so hard all those years ago, is watching Miyazaki attempt to process all of his troubled views on humanity and nature via a single motion picture, and, like Ashitaka, to do so with eyes unclouded by hate.  He may not offer much in the way of answers, but the questions he posed here have stayed with me for more than two decades.

My Neighbours the Yamadas, 1999, dir: Isao Takahata

Uniquely among Ghibli's output, I bounced off My Neighbours the Yamadas pretty hard when I first watched it, many a year ago, to such an extent that I never revisited it until I was obliged to for this review.  I doubt I'm the only one, and I don't exactly blame my younger self.  Takahata's films are invariably less immediately accessible than Miyazaki's, more episodic and less propelled by clear-cut narratives, and, without exception, his Ghibli movies where more focused on Japanese culture and geared towards Japanese audiences that those of his co-founder, or indeed of most anime directors obliged to keep one eye on the international markets.  Then there's his interest in eschewing strict realism in animation, which had been building steadily throughout the latter half of his career and drifting ever closer to full-blown abstraction.

All those trends would reach their pinnacle with My Neighbours the Yamadas.  Based on a manga series by Hisaichi Ishii, Takahata's film eschews an overall plot altogether, opting instead for a series of episodes of varying lengths, from a few seconds to a few minutes, bound together by loose themes, hand-drawn intertitles, and a handful of haiku, which probably comment more on the action than is obvious to the non-Japanese viewer.  But then, here we find Takahata showing as little interest as he ever would in said viewer, making My Neighbours the Yamadas the sole Ghibli film that gains meaningfully from having a solid knowledge of Japanese lifestyles and culture and that can be a bit off-putting without it.  (A superficial example: there's a lengthy gag built around the fact that none of the characters know the difference between Kekko Kamen and Kamen Rider, one so untranslatable that Optimum's subtitles simply decline to try.)

Then there's the animation, which really deserves a paragraph to itself.  It's up to some pretty extraordinary things, but ones that, bar a few showcase scenes, are only likely to seem extraordinary to those with a bit of a handle on how animation works.  The goal, clearly, was to take the style and format of a gag-strip manga and translate it into three-dimensional motion without in any way sacrificing its gag strip nature.  This Takahata and his crew did by reproducing the manga's simple character designs - by Ghibli's standards, simple is a small word indeed to get at how utterly stripped of detail they are - and then using computers to an extent the studio had never previously considered to put us, effectively, inside the comic book world.  Think it through like that, take time to understand the complexity that's going into making something that superficially looks sparse and crude, and you really have to be impressed, even before you get to the handful of sequences that go all-in on the capacities of computer-aided three-dimensional animation and are wildly impressive by any stretch of the imagination.

Not an easy film then - except that, on a minute-by-minute basis, it's very easy indeed.  Takahata being Takahata, the episodes are every one terrific, with jokes that are frequently laugh-out-loud funny backed up with just enough thematic backbone, emotional depth, and appreciation that life can be pretty horrible on occasions to keep the movie from feeling too lightweight.  If it's about any one thing, it's about marriage, with family following a close second, specifically the notions that to weather a marriage over the course of years and to make a family work, whatever your part in it, are tasks that takes actual, constant commitment, but that making such a commitment brings its own rewards, be they often small and silly.  Which is a damned nice theme, coming from the man who was perhaps cinema's greatest proponent of niceness, a quality that, in Takahata's hands, reaches heights of genuine profundity.

Reader, with all that, I still didn't quite love My Neighbours the Yamadas.  Oh, I certainly spent the opening few minutes bewildered at the idea that I'd somehow failed to appreciate its merits, just as I'd hoped I would, in large part because its first big set piece is one of the most dazzling feats anywhere in Ghibli's oeuvre, as audacious in its use of abstraction and collapsed time to convey the highs and lows of years of marriage as its more widely celebrated equivalent in Pixar's Up.  And all that good feeling had returned by the end, which does a splendid job of convincing us that something that's felt rather aimless throughout its running time, has, in fact, been a single, uniform movie.  But there were definitely a few minutes during the middle where I felt that aimlessness and wondered if what I was watching mightn't have worked even better as a TV series - perhaps because many a great anime TV series has subsequently followed this formula to often excellent effect.  Maybe, just maybe, 104 minutes is fractionally too much running time for something so loosely structured, though I'd hate to be the poor editor who had to choose which wonderful sequence or other would end up on the cutting room floor.  On the other hand, I'm finding Takahata to be one of those directors whose work takes time to get and benefits greatly from exposure, so maybe next time I really will adore it - and for the uninitiated viewer, my advice would be to start elsewhere in the great man's CV and find your way back to this one, safe in the knowledge that there'll be plenty to reward your patience.

-oOo-

And there we go: 150 posts, 600 reviews, plus a few more because I'm bad with numbers, and basically every anime film and OVA from the '80s and '90s released outside of Japan covered, not to mention a handful of TV series, because I'm equally bad at keeping to self-imposed limitations.  It's been a heck of an undertaking, it's consumed a huge part of my life and probably too much of my money, and I have no regrets.  Now, all that remains is to say...

Next up: post number 151.

Uh, yeah.  Looks like I'm also really bad at finishing things at the point when they obviously ought to be finished.  See you next time, I guess!

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

* I know, I know, they're tanuki not raccoons, but somehow "magical raccoon testicles" is just more fun to type.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 149

So here we are, the last ever "normal" post of Drowning in Nineties Anime - though I'm not sure what that would mean for a blog series that has spent so much time chasing up weird avenues and wandering off on strange tangents.  I mean, were all those sexy anime specials normal?  In hindsight, probably not.  And while this isn't that, we do have the hint of a theme, in that I'm taking the opportunity to have one last trip back to the eighties and pick up a few significant strays that slipped through the net, or else - as in the case of our first title - got overlooked by virtue of being so damn significant that reviewing them felt like a fool's errand.  But if writing 150 posts of vintage anime reviews isn't a fool's errand in itself, I don't know what is, so let's double down, wrap up those loose ends, and take a look at Akira, Space Firebird 2772, Adieu Galaxy Express 999, and Barefoot Gen 2...

Akira, 1988, dir: Katsuhiro Ôtomo

The reason I've left possibly the most famous anime film of all time until our second-to-last post is simple: it's always felt extremely pointless for me to discuss it.  For what possible use can there be in reviewing Akira in the year 2026, nearly four decades after it became, almost immediately, one of the most important and influential movies ever made?  Heck, without Akira, there's a meaningful chance this very blog wouldn't exist and that I wouldn't be the hopeless anime nerd I am.  Oh, Japanese animation would surely have made its way into the West in some form or another, but it's simply impossible to exaggerate the contemporary impact of Ôtomo's movie, and that's perhaps truer here in the UK than anywhere else, since the burgeoning Manga Video, who for an age would be practically the only voice in anime distribution, pushed the film relentlessly and seemingly for years after its initial release.  For the longest time, Akira was anime and anime was Akira, in a way that perhaps no other film has so wholly defined its medium.

You know what?  Whatever else I'll have to say about it, not all of which is going to be 100% positive, it earns every iota of that seismic cultural impact.  We've certainly worked our way through enough anime by this point to acknowledge that Akira was part of a number of contemporary trends rather than the lightning bolt from the heavens it felt like for those of us who knew next to nothing about Japan's long tradition of animation: if nothing else, it couldn't have happened without the very specific context of a nation with money to burn and a willingness to burn it in sizeable quantities on animated cinema made exclusively for an adult audience, a combination that was, at that point, still almost unthinkable in the West.  But bottomless heaps of money is only half the battle, and it's thanks to Katsuhiro Ôtomo and the many supremely talented individuals he gathered around him that the end result was a work of stupendous ambition in almost every possible way.

Above all else, Akira is a staggering feat of the animator's art.  The level of detail is frankly ludicrous; the sheer number of sequences that would be the show-stopping pinnacle of any other film is absurd.  There's effectively no corner cutting, not even of the most basic sorts that have been making hand-drawn animation economically feasible since the dawn of the craft, such as reducing the frame rate at points where only the pickiest of viewers would notice, let alone care.  Only Ghibli and a very small handful of Disney films do anything comparable, and even then, there are aspects where Akira is untouchable: I don't know that anyone's ever created more fluid, detailed action sequences, and Ôtomo's dedication to reproducing the complexities of light is head and shoulders beyond what anyone else has attempted.  It's not beautiful, as such, because it portrays quite a staggering amount of unpleasantness and ugliness over the course of its two hours, but it's awe-inspiring, a work that, even on what must have been my fifth or sixth viewing, made me want to gasp out loud at least every ten minutes.

I'd argue, then, that we really do have to regard Akira as a timeless classic regardless of its actual content: if it were the most generic nonsense imaginable, it would still be a must-watch.  But whatever else we can say about Akira as a narrative, it's not generic.  In a sense, it's maybe not all that original either, in that you can absolutely see where all the bits and pieces are coming from: a healthy dose of Blade Runner here, a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey there, a splash of American superhero comics deconstruction, along with plenty of Japan's idiosyncratic biker gang culture and various then-zeitgeisty philosophical notions.  However, in place of absolute originality, what we get is the furious blending of ideas and influences that only a unique creative consciousness can produce, so that Ôtomo's take on Blade Runner, with its abandoned attempts at civic reconstruction, creeping industrialisation, and seemingly endless graffiti, would go on to be practically as influential in its own right.

More than that, though, Ôtomo's most interesting and distinctive quirk was to centre his big-ideas science-fiction epic around characters both distinctly normal by the standards of the genre and in many ways quite unsympathetic.  While we get the usual mad scientists, tough military men, and corrupt politicians you'd expect of a story like this, our kind-of hero and our kind-of antagonist are, essentially, nobodies, albeit nobodies who spend their spare time tearing about on high-powered motorbikes getting into horribly violent high-speed battles.  And this is where Akira becomes something almost unique, and also where it ever so slightly loses me.  For all that Kaneda and Tetsuo make for a fascinating central duo, they can be pretty damn hard to be on side with; but even more crucially, the film spends a lot of its running time tying itself in knots to keep them towards the centre of the plot, and still has to sprawl off on some hefty diversions that leave the middle act especially feeling stretched and chaotic.

Yet I don't know that those issues are fixable or that I'd want them to be fixed: maybe Ôtomo could have streamlined his ideas into something clearer and more coherent, but the heart of the problem is that he wants his grand tale of human evolution to be centred on a couple of orphan biker kids who don't altogether fit there, and take that from Akira and you've lost something awfully special.  It's an inarguably flawed film, I think, one that I have boundless admiration for but can't altogether love, though there are no end of individual moments I'd cheerfully lay down my life for if push came to shove; and I don't know where that leaves us, the more so since you've almost certainly already seen it and formed your own judgement years or entire decades ago.  Still, I was glad of an excuse to revisit it, and it occurs to me now that it's one of only two films I own any merchandise for* - Kaneda is sitting on his too-cool-for-words bike, pointing his laser rifle at me as I write these words - so it obviously owns some major real estate in my heart.

Space Firebird 2772, 1980, dir's: Taku Sugiyama, Osamu Tezuka

Having already sat through it twice, I'm not about to test the hypothesis, but I do wonder if watching Space Firebird 2772 with the sound turned off would address some of its more glaring issues.  It would at least save you from Yasuo Higuchi's clamorous, manipulative score, and while the plot would still be a nonsensical amble consisting almost entirely of diversions and dead-ends, at least you'd be spared the precise details.  But more to the point, you'd be able to focus on the one aspect that does, more or less, work: Space Firebird 2772 is at its best - by which I mean, the dizzying heights of "quite good" - when it's operating as a showcase for animation that was, I imagine, at about the cutting edge of what anime was capable of in the year 1980, and which hits some genuinely sublime heights on a regular basis, even if it doesn't hit them all that consistently.  Near the start, for example, there's a shot of a car travelling through a three-dimensional cityscape that's the most naked bit of showing off, and reminded me of similar showing off in other anime, except that it goes on for about three times as long and is even more needlessly complicated and extravagant, zooming in and out and shifting angles and never running out of ways to be ingenious.

There's also, to be fair, lots of stunning animation that actually serves a narrative purpose, but I picked on the fact that director Sugiyama thought it appropriate to put a hold on his story while his crew flexed their cityscape-drawing muscles because it's an example of a tendency that hamstrings Space Firebird 2772 throughout.  The film has mostly been released in the West in a much shorter version of about 90 minutes, compared with the original's just over two hours, and I'm never one to advocate censorship, especially the kind that's just hacking at someone else's cultural works to make them slightly more palatable for the kids - plus, by all accounts, the shorter cut is incoherent - yet I'd be lying if I said that losing thirty minutes wouldn't have solved a bunch of my problems with Space Firebird 2772, or at least would have made it easier to stay awake.

Here, then, is the plot that Sugiyama and his co-director and producer, who happened also to be original creator Osamu Tesuka, felt needed two full hours to be told: Godo, a lab-grown human, is tasked with tracking down the titular space firebird, a dangerous cosmic entity of vast and mysterious powers, in the hope that it can save the dying Earth, which he does.  There's more going on around the edges, of course, much more: before he can even head off into space, Godo has to fall in love with a woman from the ruling class and be packed off to a forced labour camp as punishment for stepping out of bounds - which illustrates, incidentally, the other profound problem with Tezuka's plotting, in that this society, in which everyone's assigned their social role at birth but somehow there's still a ruling class, which is or isn't hereditary based on the requirements of not even individual scenes but individual lines of dialogue, makes not the tiniest iota of sense.

Anyway, flabby and rambling as this is, squint hard and you can sort of see how it's meant to fit together, since it's important to the ending that Godo learns that human women are deceitful shrews and you're much better loving the sexy robot that raised you from a baby, especially since she can also transform into a sexy carry case, a sexy bike and a sexy jet.  Because, oh right, Space Firebird 2772 has sexual politics that are horrifying even by 1980s standards!  (Though still not as horrifying as Olga the robot nanny's transformation sequence, which is the rawest nightmare fuel.)  The moral here really does seem to be that the only woman worth romantically involving yourself with is one who's obeyed your every whim since you were a baby, and if there was any doubt, the ending doubles down hard, while also erasing any last bits of sense or coherence to have strayed that far.

And goodness, here I am in the closing paragraph and I haven't even touched on the appalling comic relief characters, who include an alien who cleans incessantly and sometimes stops the plot dead to do little cleaning-based musical numbers, and an alien who's a dice for some reason.  I swear, either of them on their own is worse than any comparable character from the lowest depths of Disney's canon, and the two together would be enough to shatter a much better film that this one.  They point, I suppose, to the problem above all others, the one that makes Space Firebird 2772 misconceived from the ground up, which is that it hasn't the faintest clue what audience it's chasing and sees nothing wrong with butting apocalyptic dystopian science-fiction up against comic interludes of a sort that would struggle to amuse a bored toddler.  It's a self-indulgent mess, and while editing would make it a shorter, more palatable mess, it couldn't hope to fix the incoherent world-building or the horrible attitudes towards women.  And it's frustrating indeed that it's so stunningly animated at points that I can't discount it completely, so thank goodness for volume controls.

Adieu Galaxy Express 999, 1981, dir: Rintarô

You might argue that writer and artist Leiji Matsumoto and director Rintarô were the perfect creative marriage, and you might equally argue that nobody could have been a worse choice to bring order to Matsumoto's evocative but incoherent science fantasies than a man who could be spectacularly great at putting any given scene together but whose greatest weakness became apparent when it was time to tie all those stylishly constructed scenes together.  And, on the strength of Adieu Galaxy Express 999, I'd suggest that both of those arguments are right.

What doesn't work here comes down, largely, to plot, assuming you're basically on side with Matsumoto and happy to ignore things like characters that are essentially ciphers standing in for concepts and emotional states - and thus, with one or two exceptions, pretty dull.  But I am, for the most part, willing to give Matsumoto the benefit of the doubt, since the things he did well, he did better than pretty much anyone: his wildly romantic, purposefully implausible flights of fantasy are something special and inimitable.  Which is where, I suspect, the problems began, for - as I understand it, which I'm not sure I do - Adieu Galaxy Express 999 was specifically a sequel to the film Galaxy Express 999, but not necessarily to the TV show that film was compiled from nor Matsumoto's source manga, which in any case was incomplete at the time the first movie was made.  Whatever the precise details, Adieu Galaxy Express 999 felt to me like a skilled imitation rather than something taken directly from its author's works, and one that was obliged to restart a narrative that had already been wrapped up quite tidily.

This, frankly, makes the first act or two of Adieu Galaxy Express 999 a bit of a slog - which sounds worse than it is, since the film has at least four and maybe five acts.  At any rate, there's the need to reignite a conflict we had every reason to suppose had been wrapped up, then to set up a new quest for our youthful hero Tetsuro (whose soul character trait, now that I think, is "youthful"), and then to build a fresh mystery around the already fairly mysterious Maetel.  And none of it's bad, but none of it's terribly engaging either, the more so since it's so beholden to Matsumoto's highly episodic mode of storytelling.  Even having seen the film before, I was beginning to wonder by the mid point whether any of this was going anywhere, so it was a relief when the third act came along and finally kicked events into gear.  (It's easy to spot given that it's introduced with a sequence, signalled by the stirring but derivative score's sole dive into electropop, that's one of the most sublime series of images Rintarô ever created.) 

From there, Adieu Galaxy Express 999 manages to be quite spectacular for a while, and also to pay off on all the narrative threads it's been doling out, and if this were the conclusion, I think I'd be pretty well-disposed to the film.  Unfortunately, as noted, that third act isn't actually the end, and we still have quite a chunk of story to stagger through, including the introduction of a new antagonist that serves no apparent function except to exacerbate what's already happening (but, in fairness, looks awesome) and a twist that might have been moderately clever had it not been telegraphed so extensively and also done much better by another science-fiction juggernaut a mere year before.  Oh, and Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas turn up, because why not?

This also happens to be the point where the one thing that's been inarguably working until now, that being the animation and the often thrilling uses Rintarô puts it to, takes something of a nosedive.  There's some appalling re-use of looping backdrops during the second climax, which are hard not to notice since you often get multiple instances of the same repeating figures and objects on screen at the same time, and which, once noticed, go a long way towards wrecking everything else.  But shoddy though that is - and it goes on for what feels like a good five minutes - it's thankfully the exception rather than the rule in a film that's more often beautiful and filled to brimming with wild flights of fancy.  None of that keeps Adieu Galaxy Express 999 from being a mess - as messy as anything on either of Matsumoto and Rintarô's CVs, which is absolutely saying something - and yet it's a beguiling mess all told, one that manages to throw up astounding bits and pieces at such a regular clip that it's hard to be genuinely bored or even unimpressed.

Barefoot Gen 2, 1986, dir: Toshio Hirata

If the idea of a sequel to Barefoot Gen - a film, I'd imagine, whose reputation among those who haven't seen it is "that movie about Japanese kids in World War 2 that isn't Grave of the Fireflies" - seems a bit odd, then we ought to remind ourselves that both features are based on the many-volume autobiographical manga by Keiji Nakazawa, which would follow its youthful protagonist all the way through to his mid teens.  Yet, as much as I hate to use such words to describe such a raw portrayal of human grief and suffering, there was something quite neat and tidy in the narrative arc of the first Barefoot Gen, which followed Gen through the horrors of the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima and left him at what felt like, at least by the standards of everything that had come before, a relatively hopeful point.

Barefoot Gen 2 gives the lie to that, in that the closest thing it has to a comparable arc - and this is a spoiler, I suppose, though you'd have to be seriously film-illiterate to not pick up on it - is Gen's mother's protracted death from radiation poisoning.  Around that, we have Gen and his adopted brother Ryuta foraging for survival in what, even three years later, still looks very much like a postapocalyptic landscape, at first on their own and then later, once they've befriended a pack of street orphans, as part of a tiny, self-constructed society.  This is presented, as you might expect from an adaptation of an autobiography, and much as the first film was, in a series of loosely linked episodes.  And many of these episodes are great, plus there's no denying their cumulative power, as we're forced, over and over, to examine exactly what it means to survive in the debris of a city that lacks almost all the basic infrastructure we associate with survival.

Unfortunately, what blunts their effect is that this is a sequel to a film that did mostly the same things but in almost every way better.  I say almost, because the animation here is probably a touch improved - though, at the same time, Hirata does nothing to push the medium in the sorts of ways Masaki did the first time around.  At any rate, everything else is a small step down, and it does mostly result from that structure, or the lack thereof.  The film is awfully shapeless, and it has less room for variety.  I noted in my review of Barefoot Gen that it pulled off the unenviable task of mixing a cheery tale of boyhood high-jinx with some of the most wrenching horror ever represented in animation; but while it dips its toe into horror, Barefoot Gen 2 is necessarily more restricted to Gen and Ryuta's childish antics, which we're encouraged to view (if only by composer Kentarô Haneda's bouncy score, and boy is that a crewmember I'd have rather not seen return) from something akin to their own perspective.  By extension, this means that we don't get much in the way of nuanced characterisation, and Gen, in particular, is unfailingly good and kind, even when he's doing things that, were we not so bound up in his perspective, might be viewed as pretty crummy.

I wouldn't say these aren't problems; they definitely are.  No matter how well something works, no matter how poignant and important and revealing, impact is always going to get dulled by repetition, and the business of survival, stripped to its barest elements, is very repetitive indeed.  As an example, by the midpoint, I'd lost track of how many scenes of characters crying I'd sat through, and I think it's undeniable that a third as many would have been just as moving, if not more so.  Yet I do think that's a response unfairly coloured by the existence of the original Barefoot Gen, and while it's that bit harder to avoid with a sequel, it's dumb to be critical of art just because there's better art out there.  Plus, Barefoot Gen 2 does carve out its own niche: the one inarguably smart decision made here was to jump ahead three years, so that, in part by bringing our own knowledge of how Japan would eventually drag itself back from this devastation, we can see Gen's struggle as part of the first tentative steps towards putting the trauma of the atomic bombing behind him.  It's a worthwhile movie, then, especially if you've any interest in modern Japanese history, and much of it works very well indeed; it just suffers from being the sequel to a major work and being obliged to retread so much of the same ground.  

-oOo-

I guess it would have been nice, in a penultimate post focusing on four films that have all, at some point or another, been regarded as classics, to have more than one movie that I don't have some significant issues with.  On the other hand, at least we get to wrap up with four films that I would recommend any serious fan of vintage anime should try and make time for, even if I'd feel awfully guilty and even a bit sadistic at including the largely wretched Space Firebird 2772.  But it looks pretty, and I'm afraid that, if you're serious about this whole vintage anime thing, then one of the downsides is that you're going to sit through the odd title that looks pretty and gets almost nothing else right.

Thankfully, that will absolutely not be a problem with our next and final post, because that's the third leg of our Studio Ghibli special, and - spoiler alert! - Ghibli just do not make bad movies.**

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* The other being the Armitage films, should anyone be interested.

** Yes, I'm including both Tales From Earthsea and Earwig and the Witch there, and yes, I'll fight you!  Though, in the case of Tales From Earthsea, it'll probably be the sort of fight where I go down after one light slap and stagger off mumbling to myself.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 148

This post has been an unusually long time coming, given that, before I could say anything sensible about the four Armored Trooper VOTOMS OVAs that released pre-2000, I really needed to find time to watch the TV series, all 50-some episodes of it, and as a result, the box set ended up sitting on my shelf for many a year as other, shorter shows came and went.  Then, once I'd finally made it through - and it's pretty great, but the not the best paced or least repetitive, so there were breaks along the way - I then had to watch the OVAs I'd come for, and write them up, and more months went by.  And now here we are, and I learn that what was a reasonably priced box set at the time I set out on this is now fantastically rare and going at ludicrous prices, so that sucks.  All I can do is comfort myself with the thought that perhaps someday soon it will be rereleased in 4K, or perhaps 16K, or maybe Interactovision, because who knows what the future holds?

Well, Armored Trooper VOTOMS certainly has some ideas on the topic, none of them very cheerful, so let's dive into Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Last Red Shoulder, Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Big Battle, Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Red Shoulder Document: Origin of Ambition, and Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Brilliantly Shining Heresy...

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Last Red Shoulder, 1985, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

For the purposes of this blog, I'd been hoping these Armored Trooper VOTOMS OVAs would be standalone enough that I could potentially recommend them to viewers who hadn't already waded through the TV series, and The Last Red Shoulder, sadly, isn't that.  In actuality, it dovetails between the first and second arcs and is so annoyingly indispensable that I wonder why more of what's here didn't find its way into the show; were they really so dedicated to its "each arc is set on a different planet" structure that they couldn't slot in a little side story that adds a ton of clarity to what follows?

That side story finds our maybe-hero, maybe-antihero Chirico Cuvie hooking up with the surviving relics of the black ops military outfit he once belonged to, the titular Red Shoulders, to hunt down the officer who betrayed and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to murder them all.  However, it soon diverts to - but no, that's the most I can say without getting into spoilers, since the viewer who comes to this at its proper chronological point won't have met at least one of the core cast.  At any rate, the point at which The Last Red Shoulder really becomes useful, aside from deepening Chirico's backstory and setting up some important elements that will be picked up in the third arc, is in clarifying a major character relationship that, in the show, felt rather flimsy and nonsensical.  And, again, I find myself wondering what happened.  Did the creators realise they'd dropped the ball and seize the opportunity to plug a conspicuous gap?  Surely they didn't purposefully withhold this stuff so they'd have material for an OVA that came out a couple of years after it would have been really useful?

I guess the glass-half-full take here is that, as a VOTOMS film of a little under an hour, The Last Red Shoulder does a solid job of justifying its existence, both by finding a relatively self-contained tale to tell and by seizing on numerous opportunities to flesh out its source material in meaningful ways.  And it's possible I'm focusing on the wrong thing, anyway, or at least focusing on something that wouldn't have been the main draw for contemporary audiences, since the other virtue The Last Red Shoulder has going for it is being a proper OVA with something like a proper OVA budget, and thus having animation that's a meaningful step up from the TV series.  Admittedly, more time and money don't guarantee better results: the first time we see an Armored Trooper in motion is obviously meant to be something of a showcase, except that the extra resources appear to have gone mostly into lots of shading that just doesn't work.  But the overwhelming benefit is that, once we get into the second half, we finally get some good action sequences, practically a first from a series that had a ton of action, much of it ambitious, but never quite managed to do it justice because it invariably looked a bit shonky.

Armored Trooper VOTOMS with non-shonky action scenes is definitely a treat, since the VOTOMS had always felt cool in theory and a little bit duff in practice, and proper in-betweening and designs that don't wander off model and all that good stuff makes quite the difference.  Would that the same could be said for the score, which relies on the same handful of tracks that, if you've seen the TV show, will have become awfully familiar by this point - heck, even the opening and closing credit sequences get reused, reinforcing the sense that this is kind of just a longer episode that ought to have come out well before it did.  Which is fair, but also being mean with the benefit of hindsight, and while I can't imagine the uninitiated viewer finding a lot here beyond some respectable animation and solid storytelling, as an addition to the VOTOMS universe, The Last Red Shoulder does very much what I'd have hoped for. 

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Big Battle, 1986, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

Superficially, The Big Battle is up to much the same things as The Last Red Shoulder, in that it's an extra hour-long episode slotting into a gap in the TV show's continuity to shed light on a period that the series hurried past.  However, at the same time it's not that at all, to the point where, even having finished the show quite recently, I was puzzled by exactly how it was meant to fit, and the main giveaway was which characters happened to be present and know each other.  Which is to say that, while the events of the The Big Battle occur amid a time skip in the last episode, that knowledge isn't terribly important.  Sure, we get some idea of what was going on during that gap, and why such a gap occurred at all, and you might argue that the OVA informs the decisions made during the series' last few minutes.  But really, the significance of occurring so late in the narrative is not so much that The Big Battle clarifies what we don't know but that it summarises what we do.

So kind of a victory lap, then, though again, that's not exactly it; perhaps truer to say that what we have here is a concentrated burst of the things Armored Trooper VOTOMS was about across the course of its 52 episodes.  We have a new evil scientist, and a new and even more evil "perfect soldier" threat for Chirico to face off against; we have competing military factions still caught up in the superhuman arms race that's gone so spectacularly badly up to this point; and, in a nod towards the first story arc, we have gladiatorial battling using Armored Troopers, though The Big Battle ups the ante on that front by making one of the competitors an enormous mobile fortress.  Which, I think, finally gets us to precisely what the makers were trying to accomplish: more of the same to remind the fans of what they'd liked, but longer, bigger, and better.

If that was really the goal, I'd say that Takahashi and his team largely succeeded.  Mostly what that means is that the animation takes another significant step up, reaching all the way to "really quite nice by mid-eighties OVA standards."  And as I noted in regards to The Last Red Shoulder, VOTOMS is a franchise that gains enormously from quality animation.  Last time around, that primarily meant better action, and we certainly get that here, even if it feels ever-so-slightly thin on the ground until the final third; nevertheless, there's an excellent sequence of Chirico and Shako undertaking a stealth mission that's improved considerably by the visual upgrade.  But this time around, the dialogue scenes benefit too, with character designs feeling more emotive and staying resolutely on model.  Granted, it's never mind-blowing, but it's good enough to make both action and drama feel that bit more engaging.

Which leaves the problem, insomuch as there is a problem, lying with the story.  And I'm being vague there because, to a certain extent, this is an absolutely fine and valid use for an extra hour of VOTOMS: it really is nice to see familiar scenes and concepts dressed up in the animation finery they never quite got the first time through, and the climax is very much the sort of thing that the show obviously aspired to and could never quite land.  Yet it remains mildly frustrating that we gain so little new information here and that everything feels so well-worn.  Maybe this is only a problem because The Last Red Shoulder came along first and did manage to expand the VOTOMS narrative in small but significant ways, but it's a reaction I couldn't quite shake.  And frustratingly, that also means that, despite being much more standalone, The Big Battle remains another one for the fans, a shame given what an otherwise great introduction it would be to all of the franchise's preoccupations.  Yet I'm conscious I'm grousing about not a lot here, especially given that contemporary viewers would have had two years of separation from the series by this point.  If all you wanted was more VOTOMS, but dialled up to eleven, The Big Battle scratches that itch very well indeed, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.    

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Red Shoulder Document: Origin of Ambition, 1988, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

I doubt I could have told you what my ideal for one of these VOTOMS OVA follow-ups was until now, but here we are: Origin of Ambition was what I was after all along.  I can't say it does everything right, because what does?  But it gets shockingly close, and certainly it's an outrageously good example of how to build out a property without damaging what's come before.  Unlike the first two OVAs, it's a prequel, which feels like a logical way to go given that the start of the series very much plonked us into the middle of what was evidently an ongoing drama.  And sure enough, it proves an inspired choice, not to mention a deeply organic one: there's never the sense of new narrative being spun out to stretch a story that, at this point, might certainly be regarded as over and done with.  Rather, what we get here explains a lot that had been left murky and other aspects that seemed implausible even by the standards of mid-eighties anime, and does it altogether convincingly, and in so doing both tells a fine hour-long tale in its own right and improves upon the VOTOMS mythos as a whole.

On the plot front, that's all I want to say, given how well Origin of Ambition took me by surprise both with its overall story and with a couple of well-timed shocks along the way.  I'll only add that here, at last, we have a VOTOMS OVA that's relatively friendly to the viewer who hasn't waded through all those many hours of TV.  Which, unfortunately, isn't to say it's much of an entry point to the franchise: though, strictly speaking, this is the new beginning of all things VOTOMS, it actually functions better as a sequel, in that its revelations wouldn't have anything like the same oomph without knowledge of what's to come.  However, if you happen to be the prospective viewer who fancies dipping a toe into this large pond but has no desire to commit to 50-some episodes of television and goodness knows how many hours of sequels, prequels, and sidequels, Origin of Ambition would, at the very least, offer you an excellent hour of giant-robot sci-fi.

Which is to say that, in another first, we finally have a slice of VOTOMS that you could, if you so desired, enjoy purely on the level of spectacle.  Once again, the animation quality has taken a leap up from the series, but here, the difference is seismic: Origin of Ambition doesn't merely look great compared to a mid-budget TV show, it looks great full stop, and at points very great indeed.  And while I don't want to be dismissive of VOTOMS's character drama, the more so when Origin of Ambition does much solid work on that front, I feel safe in repeating that the aspect the vast majority of fans, and evidently the creators themselves, wanted to see handfuls of yen chucked at was the action.  In the series, it was ambitious but flawed; in the previous two OVAs, it was ambitious and more than passable; here, it's everything I'd have hoped for.  At last we get Armored Trooper battles that live up to the concept and those fantastic designs and the brutal, gritty combat the series promised but never quite provided, and it's a joy to behold - though Origin of Ambition is equally capable of making something as quotidian as a fist fight or foot chase look splendid as well.

Ideally, I'd wrap this up there; but Origin of Ambition does manage to trip itself up on one minor but frustrating front.  Moreover, it's down to an aspect that really ought to have been an easy win.  In another first, we get some new themes and arrangements from composer Hiroki Inui, which would be exciting were any of them a patch on what the TV show had to offer or indeed any good in their own right.  There are pieces that build and improve with repetition, but there are others that don't work at all and are actively distracting, both in themselves and due to how carelessly they've been slathered over dialogue or chopped into random-seeming snatches.  It's not a huge deal, goodness knows, but it's diverting enough that I'd feel bad about declaring this a flawless masterpiece for the ages.  Yet even with that niggle, I'm absolutely comfortable in calling Origin of Ambition both the clear highlight so far of a franchise that's already had more than its share and one of the best sci-fi OVAs to come out of a period that wasn't exactly short of excellent examples.

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Brilliantly Shining Heresy, 1994, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

Had you asked me in the early nineties whether I wanted any more of Chirico Cuvie's story, I don't know that I'd have said yes.  The series had wrapped up so perfectly, with an ending that could be equally interpreted as hopeful or nihilistic, and then Origin of Ambition had tied a neat bow on any loose ends that remained, and after that had come the 12-part OVA Armor Hunter Mellowlink - outside our remit thanks to the frustrating lack of a Western release - which had made a convincing argument that there was plenty of space in the Armored Trooper VOTOMS universe for new tales to be told around new protagonists.

But director Ryōsuke Takahashi and writer Sōji Yoshikawa felt it was time to bring Chirico back, and damn but I'm glad they did.  Far from being your typical tacked-on sequel, Brilliantly Shining Heresy feels very much as if the pair had spent the intervening years in constant planning.  Which normally would result in the opposite problem of a narrative that feels overly schematic, yet somehow they manage to avoid that too.  It's not as though Brilliantly Shining Heresy is indispensable, since there's no getting around how neatly the TV show wrapped everything up, but if Chirico was obliged to return, I don't know how it could have turned out much better than this.

For a start, we have a gem of a concept for why, though one I'll have to dance around if I'm not going to spoil an extremely long TV show.  Suffice to say that it makes sense, as does the three decade time gap, which is long enough to keep us from wondering too hard about those cast members who haven't returned and short enough that it's plausible for things to feel largely as we left them - though we'll also get a splendid in-universe explanation for why technology has moved on so little, one that covers the slightly ludicrous reliance on clunky one-man tanks that's been there to pick at since the start.

There's a lot of world-building here, including much that would have been nice to know a few dozen TV episodes ago, but it never gets in the way of an exceedingly straightforward core story: Chirico and Fyana get separated, Chirico tries to track Fyana down, and new antagonist Titania does her very best to kill him, largely because by this point everyone has decided it's effectively impossible, but also as part of a struggle to determine who'll be the new Space Pope.  Okay, so maybe not that straightforward, but the action - which is frequent and glorious - is enough to keep the extensive politicking from getting dull, and the politicking keeps Brilliantly Shining Heresy from feeling overly simplistic, for all that it's essentially a riff on The Terminator for quite a lot of its running time, albeit one where Skynet is basically the Catholic Church.  Best of all, for the first time we have an opponent for Chirico who feels like a meaningful threat, in part because Titania is actually a "Nextant", an updated take on the super-soldier technology that's been such a big part of VOTOMS, but as much and more so because she's a genuinely interesting character with a genuinely interesting arc to navigate through.

Animation-wise, there's a definite shock that comes with the transition into the nineties, and it's perhaps a good thing we had the in-universe time jump to soften that blow, but - aside from a lacklustre print that's a disappointing low point of the great-until-now Maiden Japan box set - the results are a glowing success.  Yet again, the action gets a noticeable boost, improving on the already high bar set by Origin of Ambition, and the revamped character and tech designs strike that fine line between fresh and respectful.  Composer Hiroki Inui, meanwhile, has some more new music, which manages to feel of a piece with what's come before without doing much to draw attention to itself.  Taken both on its technical merits and as a standalone story, then, I'd rate Brilliantly Shining Heresy up there with most any OVA from the nineties.  However, I've learned in writing this review that there are many who don't share my enthusiasm, and I can't really argue with their criticisms, particularly in regards to a controversial choice made towards the end; all I can say is that, for me, that didn't detract too much from the many other aspects that succeeded wonderfully.

-oOo-

Obviously, the conclusion here is that this was an uncommonly good set of OVAs, and to that I'll add that they came from a seminal TV show that's one of the prime texts of the Real Robot subgenre, up there with Gundam for quality and possibly influence as well.  But where does that leave us, when it's nigh-on impossible to watch?  As I said up top, hoping that it gets re-released, I guess, which is a rather sour note to end on - or would be were there not new VOTOMS on the way, and from the legendary Mamoru Oshii no less.  So maybe the odds of that re-release are better than they might otherwise have been, eh?

Next up: our last ever "normal" post before number 150, the wrap-up of the Studio Ghibli special and indeed of all things Drowning in Nineties Anime, and it's already mostly written, so hopefully the wait won't be quite so long this time...

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