No themes, no gimmicks, and nothing much to discuss by way of an introduction this time around: we're back on the titles picked at random off the shelf. Though actually it occurs to me now that, if I'd wanted a theme, three out of four of these are instalments in significant series or franchises, and who knows? Maybe that was what I was going for and forgot!
Whatever the case, the end result looks a lot like Megazone 23: Part 3, Devil Hunter Yohko, Lupin the Third: The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure, and Gall Force: New Era...
Given that the ending of Megazone 23: Part 2 not only didn't require a second sequel but, you'd have thought, made the prospect practically inconceivable, it's safe to say the one we got is something of a wonder. Really, managing not to be completely superfluous or retrospectively damage what had come before would have counted as an achievement, so that it not only finds a way to pick up a story that seemed unpickupable but adds nuance and thematic layers is remarkable. Arguably, that's not quite the same as saying it's a "good" sequel - for many, the ideal sequel to the first two parts would be one that didn't exist - and nor is it the same as saying it's a successful standalone film (or rather, two-part OVA) given that it's probably incoherent without a detailed memory of the earlier instalments. Nevertheless, if we had to have a follow-up, it's hard to imagine how it could have worked out much better.
To dig into the plot without spoiling the first two is perhaps impossible, so look away now if you're reading the review for a second sequel having not seen the preceding entries! Much time has passed since the events of the second movie and our protagonist this time is Eiji Takanaka. Along with his friendship group of hackers and gamers, Eiji lives in the deeply cyberpunk city of Eden, balanced to the nth degree by its controlling computer systems so that sooner or later humanity will be worthy to step outside its walls and into the rejuvenating Earth outside. Except, that promise has been on the cards for so long that it's starting to seem dubious, and as we learn early on, the increasing suicide rate implies that Eden's social engineering isn't working as well as might be hoped. But Eiji doesn't care about any of that: his success as a star player of the popular game "Hard On" (no, I didn't make that up) has landed him a prestigious role with E=X Corp, the city's caretakers, and one of the perks of the job is a certain transforming motorcycle / robot that's awfully familiar if you've seen parts one and two.
The way this echoes those previous entries without precisely aping them is one of part 3's biggest virtues, and that constant ringing of changes makes the film feel both fresh and like a commentary on the wider narrative. Eiji makes very different choices to his predecessor Shogo and generally is much less of a youthful hothead; moreover, Eden is a very different culture to that of Megazone 23. In a sense, this makes the increasing reliance on what's come before in the second episode a source of mild frustration, yet it's done as well as you could hope, expanding the material, raising interesting questions, and justifying its existence by implying that what we thought we knew wasn't as cut and dried as it appeared.
All of this is enjoyable stuff, and it's difficult to see why Megazone 23: Part 3 isn't more highly regarded, but for one thing: it's clear that the money ran out. The animation is frequently terrific and often solid but lacking - there's a noticeable absence of shading in many sequences - and then, in a handful of scenes, is reduced to being literally a slideshow. It's a shame, because at its best it exceeds either of the previous parts, both of which were decidedly inconsistent too. At least the score is as wonderful as ever, with appropriately futuristic instrumental pieces combining with ear-wormy J-pop in a way only late-eighties anime could pull off so perfectly. And given that those unfinished scenes add up to no more than a few seconds in total, they're hardly ruinous, especially given how much goes right elsewhere. Megazone 23: Part 3 is that rare third sequel that doesn't drop the ball, capping off a genuinely special series in style to such an extent that it left me wanting to rewatch the entire trilogy.
Devil Hunter Yohko, 1990-1995, dir's: Katsuhisa Yamada, Hisashi Abe, Jun'ichi Sakata, Akiyuki ShinboIn 1992, a start-up video publishing company named A. D. Vision brought out their debut release on VHS to an unsuspecting US market, a huge gamble at a time when anime was largely unknown in the West or else viewed as the reserve of children, having travelled via the distorted medium of shows like Robotech. What they needed was a flagship title: as co-founder Matt Greenfield put it, something that "...was really very unique, that people were going to say 'Whoa! What was that?'" And against the concerns of Japanese producer Toho, what they settled on was the recently released OVA Devil Hunter Yohko; indeed, only the lack of a better offer closed the deal. Yet despite Toho's doubts, history was on the side of the company that came to be known as ADV Films, who would go on to be one of the biggest players in the Western anime market.
All of which background knowledge makes the first episode of Devil Hunter Yohko a weird old watch, for basically two reasons. The first is that there's not much to it from the perspective of 2019: it's an origin story with pleasant characters, mediocre animation, and a moderately catchy opening theme, but nothing that screams "peg on which to hang the fortunes of an entire company." And a lot of that has to do with our second reason, in that, to the modern eye, Greenfield's "very unique" title is precisely not that. See if you've heard this concept before anywhere ... a teenage school girl discovers she's the latest in an ancient line of young women tasked with battling demons that are intent on making an almighty mess of the world, but she'd rather spend her days chasing boys and hanging out with her friends. Ring any bells? Then you're probably one of the seventy trillion people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or heck, maybe you've just seen one of the many anime titles that would subsequently cover similar territory to Devil Hunter Yohko.
But Yohko beat even the Buffy movie to the punch by a good two years, and if anime was mining similar ground, it probably wasn't in quite such bloody and brazen fashion. So yes, it's probably the case that in 1990 Devil Hunter Yohko was sufficiently unusual and exciting, no matter that its first episode was tacky and exploitative and cheap-looking. Indeed, if we were being cynical, that tacky exploitativeness might even have been viewed as an asset, since if there's one thing it's safe to say American media didn't have a glut of at the start of the nineties, it was mainstream releases featuring naked teenage girls.
You know the funny thing, though? After that rocky opening, Devil Hunter Yohko would turn into something genuinely good. Not great, though it flirts with greatness - the fifth of its six episodes (if we count the fourth that's a bunch of music videos) is kind of splendid, and really does beat Buffy to a lot of its best ideas. At any rate, the proceedings seriously improve as they go along, the production standards go up, better directors take a shot at the material, the supporting cast broadens in interesting ways - in particular, Yohko's ex-devil-hunter grandma is a marvellous character - and the result actually does end up being the sort of title you might cautiously gamble a start-up business on. Everything Devil Hunter Yohko did would go on to be done as well as or better elsewhere, and even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be any sort of classic. But a fun release with a bunch of neat ideas that happens to be one of the cornerstones of anime history? That's fine, too.
What was I thinking, buying a film in one of my least favourite franchises and from one of my least favourite directors? Well, I saw a cheap copy, you see, and anyway, I've been steadily warming up to the adventures of womanising, rubber-limbed daredevil thief Lupin the Third, even though the last of these made-for-TV releases I picked up was pretty damn lousy. Series debut The Mystery of Mamo, for example, is actually rather great. Nevertheless, it seemed there was a fair chance this one would be going straight on the resell pile.
So colour me surprised: it's a lot of fun. Lupin himself is at his least irritating and his supporting rogues gallery are on fine form, especially the arch-thief's long-suffering nemesis Inspector Zenigata, arguably the real hero of the show and here mostly concerned with trying to eat his dinner as non-stop madness unfolds around him. But mostly what works is a plot that's insanely busy even by Lupin standards, but also crammed with genuinely engaging elements. Frankly, any story that sees the gang hunting the treasure of a Japanese pilot from World War 2 while crossing swords with Britain's greatest superspy and cross-dressing neo-Nazis is bound to hold the attention. Yet for a franchise that often leans toward being exhausting and overstuffed - a flaw even the great Hayao Miyazaki failed to entirely avoid - it's impressive that the movie mostly manages to shuffle around its many moving parts in a clear and orderly fashion, bouncing from set-piece to set-piece without drifting into pure chaos while also maintaining a consistently madcap pace.
Ought we to thank Dezaki for this? The director is certainly on well above par form, and the material seems to have brought out a playfulness that I've noticed nowhere else in his output. Of course, all his usual stylistic tics are here: the heavy use of really obvious filters, cuts to painted still images, that thing where he repeats the same brief burst of action three times in a row for no obvious reason. But they're fairly innocuous, and on the whole, Dezaki does - dare I say it? - a pretty good job. Indeed, aside from the odd moments where his quirks really do get the better of him, it's a solid-looking movie, and vastly superior to The Secret of Twilight Gemini, released a year later.
I should at least be able to complain that the only release available in the UK was dub only, but the dub is actually hard to fault, with the central cast giving strong performances that feel faithful to the spirit of the characters and the rest steering clear of outright hackwork. Indeed, with nothing I can pin down as a genuine flaw, I'm half inclined to say that The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure is my favourite of the (admittedly not many) Lupin movies I've seen. The Mystery of Mamo and The Castle of Cagliostro are both objectively better, but they're also both that bit too long, whereas Harimao's Treasure clocks in at a neat ninety minutes and so avoids overstaying its welcome. Then again, I say this as someone with a low tolerance for the show's protagonist and zany comedy in general, so what do I know? Nevertheless, if "the Lupin film for those who find Lupin films kind of annoying" is a recommendation, then consider this recommended.
All credit to Gall Force: New Era, it takes a commendable stab at wrapping up not only the two OVAs that it directly sequels, Rhea Gall Force and Gall Force: Earth Chapter, but also the original trilogy comprising Eternal Story, Destruction, and Stardust War. Indeed, it's Eternal Story that it feels closest to in terms of narrative and tone, especially once we get into the second of its two episodes. Bringing to a meaningful close an epic that's spanned five previous titles spread over two series is no mean feat, and even attempting it is ambitious.
Unfortunately, this is the last nice thing I'll have to say about Gall Force: New Era, and even then, frankly, it would have done better not to try. Despite the presence of director Akiyama and writer Hideki Kakinuma, both of whom stuck with this franchise from beginning to end, this has the feel of fans attempting to tie up a whole bunch of loose - and not so loose - threads, without necessarily understanding why any of them matter. Thus we have the return of the crew of the Starleaf from the original trilogy, who we've already been led to suspect are reincarnating their way through the ages, but in a tale that leaves them as unrecognisable ciphers with almost nothing to do. For most of ninety minutes they're literally just passengers, and one of the most dramatic scenes finds them bickering among themselves for no good reason. If this was meant to hark back to the first film that made this cast so memorable, it's a bizarre way of going about it.
Then again, no-one does much of anything in Gall Force: New Era. The first of its episodes largely consists of establishing its setting - of an Earth recolonised and edging toward stability after the events of Earth Chapter and a subsequent clash with a post-human species tackily named Yumans - and then in disrupting that setting as a fresh conflict wipes away all that off-screen progress in a matter of hours. The second episode, the one that wants to remind us of Eternal Story, backs itself into a corner whereby we pretty much know how things will turn out, simply because, if they don't, a major character's motivations will remain in the dark and the plot will be one big hole - though even once we learn what's been going on, that only introduces more questions. I can't go into those without massive spoilers, but it very much feels as though Akiyama and Kakinuma have forgotten the essential rules of their own universe in their enthusiasm for wrapping everything up on a suitably nostalgic note.
You know what would have made me nostalgic for the first Gall Force trilogy? Great production values. Neither Rhea nor Earth Chapter equalled the technical virtues of their predecessors, and New Era takes an even more dramatic leap in the wrong direction. It looks cheap, and even the technical designs are frequently lousy, while Sonada's character designs don't benefit at all from the budget animation. Heck, even the music is merely fine! Take away the excellent animation, the earcatching soundtrack, and the distinctive female cast given actual agency in a plot with enough original ideas to differentiate itself from the mass of similar titles, and it turns out there really isn't much to Gall Force at all. I've never wanted the critical consensus to be wrong on a title more than with this one, but the best that can be said for Gall Force: New Era is that it's a reminder of how marvellous the original trilogy was in all the wrong ways. No wonder the series sputtered out after this.
-oOo-
Some good stuff there: The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure remains maybe my favourite non-Miyazaki directed Lupin film, Megazone 23 Part 3 is better than it has any right to be, and Devil Hunter Yohko recovers from a shaky start to be a bit of a delight. But, for me anyway, its nearly all outweighed by the bitter pill that is Gall Force: New Era, though I went in knowing that its reputation was less than stellar and though the second phase of Gall Force was never on a par with its first. But what a mediocre finish to a series that began so fantastically! Ah well, to love nineties anime is to love disappointment, as the saying I just made up goes.
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