With one exception, we're firmly in popular nineties franchise territory this time around, which inevitably proves both a good and a not so good thing. I've come out with one new favourite, at any rate, and there was generally at least some good reason that nineties anime franchises proved popular, even if those reasons aren't always one hundred percent apparent now.
Anyway, enough preempting! This time around we have: Dirty Pair Flash: Angels at World's End, Vampire Wars, Gunsmith Cats and Ranma 1/2 The Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China.
Dirty Pair Flash: Angels at World's End, 1994, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki
Perhaps it was foolish to expect much from this second, self-contained volume of Dirty Pair Flash, but I enjoyed the first quite a lot: it was derivative, but it was a lot of fun. Angels at World's End, however, is much more of the former than the latter. It has the vibe, in fact, of a show that's limiting its ambitions due to a tightening budget; you know how nineties sci-fi TV would always skimp by finding a naff excuse to stick its characters back in the twentieth century? Well, that's precisely what Angels at World's End does: it's a holodeck episode, in essence, with Kei and Yuri stranded at a theme park that recreates historic (that is, then present day) Tokyo in perfect detail.
Only it makes no sense for this to have been a budget saving measure, the animation is no worse than last time around and maybe even a fraction better, so the only possible explanation is that someone thought this was a good idea. Because clearly what one comes to Dirty Pair for is not explosions or laser fights or spaceships, its an episode where an underdeveloped side character falls in love with a flower shop girl that ends in a bizarre gay panic punchline.
In fairness, that's the only really terrible episode, though it's terrible enough to cast a pall over the other four. The beginning and end are perfectly fine and feel at least somewhat in keeping with the first volume; the other two are too flamboyantly strange to really dislike. One finds the Pair lodging in a haunted girls' dormitory, and feels very much like a parody of the Asian horror boom before the Asian horror boom had actually begun. The other finds them trying to escort a professional shyster to prison in order to blow the reward money on a posh meal, and despite the fragile premise is perhaps the most enjoyable of the five.
Angels at World's End, then, is very much a wasted opportunity; the best thing it does is to develop the characters a little, but even then it feels as though the point is to watch Kei and Yuri moving nearer to their classic incarnations, which is really only interesting if you're familiar with the earlier show. A tough recommendation to anyone but obsessive fans of the franchise, who surely already own it, and I suspect I'll be approaching the third and final volume with a bit of trepidation.
Vampire Wars, 1990, dir: Kazuhisa Takenouchi
When I discovered recently that the reason these Manga Collection dvds insisted on playing in a box in the middle of the screen was down to a setting on my PlayStation*, I found myself wondering if perhaps I hadn't been unduly harsh on them: after all, four I'd even kept, and the last couple I'd reviewed had at least kept me amused. Sure the mandatory dubs were atrocious and sure there were some profoundly dubious inclusions, but maybe Manga deserved at least a little credit for the notion of a series bringing anime to the West at knockdown prices.
So it's with some relief that I report that Vampire Wars is rubbish, and rubbish in precisely all the ways that I've been criticizing these things for over the last few months: mediocre animation, rotten translation, listless performances** and, to cap it all off, a plot that simply stops at the end of its running time, with all the really interesting parts left dangling. And it's not like there aren't at least a couple of those, in a story that pits the CIA against space vampires and doesn't even feel the need to make that hook the focus of its narrative.
Then again, the actual focus is our "hero", retired ex-pat terrorist Kuki Kosaburo, who is never for one millisecond of screen time as interesting as that summary makes him sound. What follows is a boilerplate, if excitably bloody, thriller that takes a good two thirds of its running time to get round to the fact that we could have been hearing about goddamn space vampires all this time. Come to think of it now, Vampire Wars reminded me a bit of Psycho Diver, which went to similar lengths to be all dark and hard boiled and edgy and to avoid absolutely everything that might have been interesting about its own plot. And now I've been reminded of what a miserable load of nonsense Psycho Diver was! Curse you, Manga Video, and curse your stupid Collection!
Gunsmith Cats, 1995, dir: Takeshi Mori
Gunsmith Cats is terrifically good. And I almost feel like I could leave the review there, really: this three part OVA is among the best I've encountered in just about every way and I urge you to try and find a copy.
But perhaps I'm only being reticent because, as with so many of these things, it's not easy to pin down precisely what makes Gunsmith Cats stand out so dramatically. I could certainly point to the animation, and rightly so, it's top notch, not to mention well directed, with some of the loveliest backgrounds I've seen in pre-twentieth century Eastern animation. The opening sequence is particularly terrific, an effortlessly cool slice of pop art eye candy that prefigures (and perhaps betters) the similar work in Cowboy Bebop. But there's much to love elsewhere as well, and I'd be hard pressed to point at another anime that captures the feel of being a manga come alive quite so well as Gunsmith Cats does.
Of course, sad to say, not everyone gets so excited over exemplary animation. For those philistines, I suppose that Gunsmith Cats would be merely a well put together thriller with a couple of likable leads, some absolutely cracking action sequences and a fun, bluesy soundtrack. Though even then, there's a little more going on than all that. Gunsmith Cats is rare for anime in being set in the US with a largely American cast, but of course the version of Chicago where our heroes Irene "Rally" Vincent and "Minnie" May Hopkins run their titular gun shop and practice their sideline in bounty hunting is one filtered through a distinctly Japanese sensibility. More than that, it's clear that creator Kenichi Sonoda gained most of his appreciation of American culture from seventies crime movies - and really, who can blame him for that? Judged solely on the extraordinary chase sequence in the second episode, with Rally tearing about in a muscle car drawn in absolutely fetishistic detail, surely no one.
The thing is, Gunsmith Cats meshes its two sensibilities in a hugely satisfying way, with something of a Western animation influence creeping in that I've rarely seen in anime: just look at Minnie down there in the bottom right of the poster, and particularly the design of her eyes. The overall effect is a general mode of realism that makes the traditional anime excesses - grenades thrown by the dozen are a particular favourite - stand out as charmingly goofy. And that same balance of Western influence and anime sensibility stretches even to the plot, which finds the cats mixed up with a shady politician and a conspiracy within the ATF, yet also throws in a murderous Russian hitwoman for good measure. (Its a story, by the way, that feels unexpectedly current, even a shade satirical; like most aspects of Gunsmith Cats, it's aged well.) Heck, there's even a making of documentary on the DVD, which all alone is better than (and nearly as long as) Vampire Wars.
I'm finding that these positive reviews are breaking down into three basic categories: things I enjoy for largely dubious reasons, works of transcendent excellence that are much more than just good nineties anime, and those that are typical but exemplary examples of the work coming out of that decade. Gunsmith Cats is without doubt in that last category, but definitely at its upper edge; it certainly has nothing to apologize for when pitted against more recent work.
Ranma 1/2 The Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China, 1991, Shûji Iuchi
Rumiko Takahashi's manga Ranma 1/2 was quite the sensation, running for nearly nine years and to 38 volumes, producing two anime series (one of which reached an extraordinary 143 episodes) and three films, among other spin-offs. Yet, like many of these things, its concept was simple enough at heart: protagonist Ranma has been pledged by his father to marry tomboy Akane, who wants nothing to do with him. Oh, and due to an accident at some magical hot springs on the way, Ranma turns into a girl whenever he gets wet. And his dad turns into a panda. So, okay, not that simple.
Anyway, by the time we get to Ranma 1/2's first feature film outing, the series had had time to get a great deal more complicated than all that, and as far as I can judge (partly from having read and enjoyed the first two volumes of the UK manga release) had done so by Takahashi piling on more characters, all with their own quirks and many of them also shapeshifters of one ridiculous sort or another. Big Trouble in Nekonron, China expects you to be up to date with much of this, which probably seemed a good deal more reasonable when it came out; on the other hand, MVM video had the decency to include some brief profiles of the core cast and no one has more than a couple of character traits at most, so it really doesn't matter a great deal. What's much more important is that you're willing to get on board with a story where the main intellectual demand is working out what characters have turned into which cartoon animals.
On the one hand, Big Trouble in Nekonron, China functions surprisingly well as a feature length tale: it has a beginning, a middle and a clear climax, it makes use of all its characters, and gags and themes set up in the early portions all have a payoff by the end. On the other, there's nothing about this story that wouldn't have worked amply well as three episodes of an ongoing show; the closest it has to a dramatic hook is that it takes the characters away from Japan for a trip to China. The only sequence that really feels like its doing something dramatically outside what an episode of the series might deliver, in fact, is the opening, which involves just about every significant character in a madcap chase sequence after master Happosai, a tiny, ancient martial arts teacher with a fetish for stealing underwear. Nothing here screams "needs the resources of a motion picture" and nothing particularly suggests a proportionate increase in effort or funding. Frequently excellent composer and Mamoru Oshii favourite Kenji Kawai delivers the score, but then he also worked on the series and in any case it's far from his best work; the animation is very much of the "gets the job done" variety, neither impressing nor drawing attention to itself with any significant flaws.
None of which sounds especially positive, but I think it gives a fair impression of what to expect: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China is not the kind of film adaptation that takes its source property to new heights or in ambitious directions but the kind that does broadly the same thing at more than the usual length and is content to call that a day. Fortunately, the thing in question is a great deal of fun, and so an hour and a quarter of it in one go is a pleasantly concentrated burst of such fun - even if during the middle its constant mania threatens to become a little enervating. I like Ranma 1/2 the franchise, it's funny and sweet and immensely daft, and I liked this film adaptation, but there's no getting around the fact that its one for the fans or for those aligned with its wacky, none too subtle blend of humour.
-oOo-
So Gunsmith Cats was pretty damn great. And I've no regrets over the time I spent with Ranma 1/2; at any rate, it's ended up on the "to keep" shelf rather than the "get out of the house as quickly as possible" shelf, so that's something. But Vampire Wars has already faded mercifully from memory, and I'm trying hard not to think about the fact that I have a whole nother volume of Dirty Pair Flash to get through, which I'll inevitably hope will be as good as the first while secretly knowing that it's more likely to be as joyless as the second.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* A note with the benefit of hindsight: No it wasn't, it's because Manga insisted on releasing non-anamorphic DVDs long after everyone else had the decency to stop doing so, and their crappy releases will never look right on widescreen TVs no matter how many settings you tweak.
Anyway, enough preempting! This time around we have: Dirty Pair Flash: Angels at World's End, Vampire Wars, Gunsmith Cats and Ranma 1/2 The Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China.
Dirty Pair Flash: Angels at World's End, 1994, dir: Tomomi MochizukiPerhaps it was foolish to expect much from this second, self-contained volume of Dirty Pair Flash, but I enjoyed the first quite a lot: it was derivative, but it was a lot of fun. Angels at World's End, however, is much more of the former than the latter. It has the vibe, in fact, of a show that's limiting its ambitions due to a tightening budget; you know how nineties sci-fi TV would always skimp by finding a naff excuse to stick its characters back in the twentieth century? Well, that's precisely what Angels at World's End does: it's a holodeck episode, in essence, with Kei and Yuri stranded at a theme park that recreates historic (that is, then present day) Tokyo in perfect detail.
Only it makes no sense for this to have been a budget saving measure, the animation is no worse than last time around and maybe even a fraction better, so the only possible explanation is that someone thought this was a good idea. Because clearly what one comes to Dirty Pair for is not explosions or laser fights or spaceships, its an episode where an underdeveloped side character falls in love with a flower shop girl that ends in a bizarre gay panic punchline.
In fairness, that's the only really terrible episode, though it's terrible enough to cast a pall over the other four. The beginning and end are perfectly fine and feel at least somewhat in keeping with the first volume; the other two are too flamboyantly strange to really dislike. One finds the Pair lodging in a haunted girls' dormitory, and feels very much like a parody of the Asian horror boom before the Asian horror boom had actually begun. The other finds them trying to escort a professional shyster to prison in order to blow the reward money on a posh meal, and despite the fragile premise is perhaps the most enjoyable of the five.
Angels at World's End, then, is very much a wasted opportunity; the best thing it does is to develop the characters a little, but even then it feels as though the point is to watch Kei and Yuri moving nearer to their classic incarnations, which is really only interesting if you're familiar with the earlier show. A tough recommendation to anyone but obsessive fans of the franchise, who surely already own it, and I suspect I'll be approaching the third and final volume with a bit of trepidation.
Vampire Wars, 1990, dir: Kazuhisa TakenouchiWhen I discovered recently that the reason these Manga Collection dvds insisted on playing in a box in the middle of the screen was down to a setting on my PlayStation*, I found myself wondering if perhaps I hadn't been unduly harsh on them: after all, four I'd even kept, and the last couple I'd reviewed had at least kept me amused. Sure the mandatory dubs were atrocious and sure there were some profoundly dubious inclusions, but maybe Manga deserved at least a little credit for the notion of a series bringing anime to the West at knockdown prices.
So it's with some relief that I report that Vampire Wars is rubbish, and rubbish in precisely all the ways that I've been criticizing these things for over the last few months: mediocre animation, rotten translation, listless performances** and, to cap it all off, a plot that simply stops at the end of its running time, with all the really interesting parts left dangling. And it's not like there aren't at least a couple of those, in a story that pits the CIA against space vampires and doesn't even feel the need to make that hook the focus of its narrative.
Then again, the actual focus is our "hero", retired ex-pat terrorist Kuki Kosaburo, who is never for one millisecond of screen time as interesting as that summary makes him sound. What follows is a boilerplate, if excitably bloody, thriller that takes a good two thirds of its running time to get round to the fact that we could have been hearing about goddamn space vampires all this time. Come to think of it now, Vampire Wars reminded me a bit of Psycho Diver, which went to similar lengths to be all dark and hard boiled and edgy and to avoid absolutely everything that might have been interesting about its own plot. And now I've been reminded of what a miserable load of nonsense Psycho Diver was! Curse you, Manga Video, and curse your stupid Collection!
Gunsmith Cats, 1995, dir: Takeshi MoriGunsmith Cats is terrifically good. And I almost feel like I could leave the review there, really: this three part OVA is among the best I've encountered in just about every way and I urge you to try and find a copy.
But perhaps I'm only being reticent because, as with so many of these things, it's not easy to pin down precisely what makes Gunsmith Cats stand out so dramatically. I could certainly point to the animation, and rightly so, it's top notch, not to mention well directed, with some of the loveliest backgrounds I've seen in pre-twentieth century Eastern animation. The opening sequence is particularly terrific, an effortlessly cool slice of pop art eye candy that prefigures (and perhaps betters) the similar work in Cowboy Bebop. But there's much to love elsewhere as well, and I'd be hard pressed to point at another anime that captures the feel of being a manga come alive quite so well as Gunsmith Cats does.
Of course, sad to say, not everyone gets so excited over exemplary animation. For those philistines, I suppose that Gunsmith Cats would be merely a well put together thriller with a couple of likable leads, some absolutely cracking action sequences and a fun, bluesy soundtrack. Though even then, there's a little more going on than all that. Gunsmith Cats is rare for anime in being set in the US with a largely American cast, but of course the version of Chicago where our heroes Irene "Rally" Vincent and "Minnie" May Hopkins run their titular gun shop and practice their sideline in bounty hunting is one filtered through a distinctly Japanese sensibility. More than that, it's clear that creator Kenichi Sonoda gained most of his appreciation of American culture from seventies crime movies - and really, who can blame him for that? Judged solely on the extraordinary chase sequence in the second episode, with Rally tearing about in a muscle car drawn in absolutely fetishistic detail, surely no one.
The thing is, Gunsmith Cats meshes its two sensibilities in a hugely satisfying way, with something of a Western animation influence creeping in that I've rarely seen in anime: just look at Minnie down there in the bottom right of the poster, and particularly the design of her eyes. The overall effect is a general mode of realism that makes the traditional anime excesses - grenades thrown by the dozen are a particular favourite - stand out as charmingly goofy. And that same balance of Western influence and anime sensibility stretches even to the plot, which finds the cats mixed up with a shady politician and a conspiracy within the ATF, yet also throws in a murderous Russian hitwoman for good measure. (Its a story, by the way, that feels unexpectedly current, even a shade satirical; like most aspects of Gunsmith Cats, it's aged well.) Heck, there's even a making of documentary on the DVD, which all alone is better than (and nearly as long as) Vampire Wars.
I'm finding that these positive reviews are breaking down into three basic categories: things I enjoy for largely dubious reasons, works of transcendent excellence that are much more than just good nineties anime, and those that are typical but exemplary examples of the work coming out of that decade. Gunsmith Cats is without doubt in that last category, but definitely at its upper edge; it certainly has nothing to apologize for when pitted against more recent work.
Ranma 1/2 The Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China, 1991, Shûji IuchiRumiko Takahashi's manga Ranma 1/2 was quite the sensation, running for nearly nine years and to 38 volumes, producing two anime series (one of which reached an extraordinary 143 episodes) and three films, among other spin-offs. Yet, like many of these things, its concept was simple enough at heart: protagonist Ranma has been pledged by his father to marry tomboy Akane, who wants nothing to do with him. Oh, and due to an accident at some magical hot springs on the way, Ranma turns into a girl whenever he gets wet. And his dad turns into a panda. So, okay, not that simple.
Anyway, by the time we get to Ranma 1/2's first feature film outing, the series had had time to get a great deal more complicated than all that, and as far as I can judge (partly from having read and enjoyed the first two volumes of the UK manga release) had done so by Takahashi piling on more characters, all with their own quirks and many of them also shapeshifters of one ridiculous sort or another. Big Trouble in Nekonron, China expects you to be up to date with much of this, which probably seemed a good deal more reasonable when it came out; on the other hand, MVM video had the decency to include some brief profiles of the core cast and no one has more than a couple of character traits at most, so it really doesn't matter a great deal. What's much more important is that you're willing to get on board with a story where the main intellectual demand is working out what characters have turned into which cartoon animals.
On the one hand, Big Trouble in Nekonron, China functions surprisingly well as a feature length tale: it has a beginning, a middle and a clear climax, it makes use of all its characters, and gags and themes set up in the early portions all have a payoff by the end. On the other, there's nothing about this story that wouldn't have worked amply well as three episodes of an ongoing show; the closest it has to a dramatic hook is that it takes the characters away from Japan for a trip to China. The only sequence that really feels like its doing something dramatically outside what an episode of the series might deliver, in fact, is the opening, which involves just about every significant character in a madcap chase sequence after master Happosai, a tiny, ancient martial arts teacher with a fetish for stealing underwear. Nothing here screams "needs the resources of a motion picture" and nothing particularly suggests a proportionate increase in effort or funding. Frequently excellent composer and Mamoru Oshii favourite Kenji Kawai delivers the score, but then he also worked on the series and in any case it's far from his best work; the animation is very much of the "gets the job done" variety, neither impressing nor drawing attention to itself with any significant flaws.
None of which sounds especially positive, but I think it gives a fair impression of what to expect: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China is not the kind of film adaptation that takes its source property to new heights or in ambitious directions but the kind that does broadly the same thing at more than the usual length and is content to call that a day. Fortunately, the thing in question is a great deal of fun, and so an hour and a quarter of it in one go is a pleasantly concentrated burst of such fun - even if during the middle its constant mania threatens to become a little enervating. I like Ranma 1/2 the franchise, it's funny and sweet and immensely daft, and I liked this film adaptation, but there's no getting around the fact that its one for the fans or for those aligned with its wacky, none too subtle blend of humour.
-oOo-
So Gunsmith Cats was pretty damn great. And I've no regrets over the time I spent with Ranma 1/2; at any rate, it's ended up on the "to keep" shelf rather than the "get out of the house as quickly as possible" shelf, so that's something. But Vampire Wars has already faded mercifully from memory, and I'm trying hard not to think about the fact that I have a whole nother volume of Dirty Pair Flash to get through, which I'll inevitably hope will be as good as the first while secretly knowing that it's more likely to be as joyless as the second.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* A note with the benefit of hindsight: No it wasn't, it's because Manga insisted on releasing non-anamorphic DVDs long after everyone else had the decency to stop doing so, and their crappy releases will never look right on widescreen TVs no matter how many settings you tweak.
** Another note with the benefit of hindsight: for some weird reason I felt the need to track down the US release of Vampire Wars, which has the decency to include the original language audio track with subtitles, and it's ... well, still not good, but substantially less painful, and even mildly entertaining. I still can't recommend it, but my original review definitely feels kind of harsh.
