Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 90

I suppose there are less logical ways to close out this busy year of vintage anime reviews than one last Dragon Ball Z post.  Whether or not I like the series (and honestly, I'm not fully decided on that question) it's been a big part of my 2020 experience; actually, I hadn't realised just how much so until I checked and realised I've covered all the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z films in the space of barely six months.  Well, okay, not quite all; we have one more to go, but the only self-imposed rule I've set for these posts that I'm yet to break is keeping them down to four reviews apiece, and wouldn't you know it but there's no way to divide thirteen films by four.

This, of course, is deeply irritating to my OCD brain, and let's hope Wrath of the Dragon is something pretty damn special, since it's going to annoy me no end to have to bunch it in with three unrelated titles.  But that's a stupid worry for another day, so in the meantime, let's take a look at films nine through twelve, those being Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound, Dragon Ball Z: Broly - Second Coming, Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly, and Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn...

Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound, 1993, dir: Yoshihiro Ueda

A mere four months separated the arrival of the ninth Dragon Ball Z film Bojack Unbound from the release of the eighth, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan, which I (checks notes) liked to a surprising degree.  Four months isn't a long time between movies, but Bojack Unbound feels like a very different beast for much of its running time, and there's the sense that a lot's changed in the show.  I mean, was Goku dead in the last one?  (Checks notes harder.)  No, it would appear that the main character of Dragon Ball Z was not, in fact, dead the last time we caught up with him.

In other film series, that might be important.  Here, it's a minor blip that no-one much appears to care about, and certainly not Goku himself, who seems quite content goofing off and playing cards in the afterlife.  In the meantime, his friends and family are all commiserating his untimely demise by entering into a fighting tournament, as you do.  In fairness to them, there's a big cash price and the opportunity to confront the legendary hero Mr. Satan at the end of it, and surely it's what Goku would have wanted?  Actually, we know it's what he'd want, since he gets to watch the contest on TV and cheer them on.

This is a fair summation of the level of ridiculousness Bojack Unbound is operating at, at least in its first half.  The fighting contest is treated with almost zero seriousness, which is a tremendous relief from a franchise that tends to take its fighting very seriously indeed, and Mr. Satan is certainly not fearsome final boss material, since he spends most of his time freaking out over how utterly outmatched he is and trying to run away.  And the combined results are fun of a sort we haven't seen around these parts in a fairly long while, and which generally gets relegated to comic interludes that don't particularly work.  If, like me, you much preferred the trivial goofiness of the original Dragon Ball to the interminable battling to save the world of Dragon Ball Z, this is all quite a delight.

It can't last, of course.  Every franchise has its rules, and in this case, the rules say the entire second half has to be a big old fight, so that's what we get.  It's not among the series' best, it offers up one of the most disposable antagonists yet, and it's all the more frustrating for spoiling a film that up until that point had been so enjoyably silly.  But it's also not horrible, and the animation is impressive enough to keep it on the right side of watchable.  (Actually, Yoshihiro Ueda's directorial debut marks a notable shift to a cleaner, crisper style; it's not necessarily better, but it looks a good deal more modern.)  What redeems the back half, and benefits the film greatly in general, is the lack of Goku.  Nothing against the guy, but it's an unexpected pleasure to see the supporting cast thrust into the spotlight, and his absence makes everything seem that bit more inventive, even the parts that are otherwise deeply familiar.  Altogether, this is the closest we've come to the Dragon Ball Z movie I've been dreaming of, the one with the courage to eschew the strangling formulaicness that's been present from the start, and while it's a shame that couldn't have gone further, it's enough to make for one of the more memorable entries.

Dragon Ball Z: Broly - Second Coming, 1994, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

In multiple ways, Broly - Second Coming feels like something of a soft reboot, or an attempt to nudge the franchise in a fresh direction.  For a start, we have a new opening sequence and theme for, I believe, the first time since the series began, and for another start, the focus is squarely on a younger generation of the cast, with the grown-ups nowhere to be found.  Our heroes this time are Goku's two sons Gohan and Goten, his fellow Saiyan's son Trunks, and Videl, the daughter of Mr. Satan, who I guess was a significant character in the series at this point, despite his lack of impact on the films?  At any rate, the overall sense is partly of a bit of a general spit and polish and partly of a bid to go down a Dragon Ball Z: The Next Generation route, perhaps with the goal of roping in younger viewers.

So it's a weird choice on the face of it to resurrect a former villain, especially one who was so enormously boring, and especially in such a credibility-shattering fashion as Broly - Second Coming decides to go with.  Broly, who we last saw, I don't know, dying in space or something, has apparently crash-landed on Earth, but he's been unconscious for years beneath a frozen lake because of reasons, and he's woken up now by Goten's whining over an empty stomach, which reminds him of how much he hated Goku when he was a new-born baby ... a new-born baby, presumably, with a really good memory and a really long vengeful streak.  Anyway, that's more than enough for our favourite monosyllabic slab of meat to start attempting to murder our young heroes, and this being Dragon Ball Z, ample setup for a thirty minute fight scene.

Now, the rationale may have been that there was a certain inherent drama in pitting a bunch of kids against a foe their parents barely managed to beat, and certainly the idea of unleashing Broly - who, as much as I dislike the character, is at least pretty damn intimidating - against children would, you'd think, raise the stakes, if nothing else.  However, that's not really what happens, since Broly - Second Coming refuses to take any of this too seriously.  If we divide the Dragon Ball Z movies into two camps, those that have some semblance of a plot and those that are essentially just enormous scraps, then this is more the latter, except that the light-hearted goofiness and the limited narrative setup from the first half heavily inform the rest, with what gravity there is (and the obligatory "Oh no, our heroes are clearly all beaten, how will they possibly get out of this one?!" montage) relegated to the last ten minutes.

This, I think, is the right choice, and the one that just about elevates Broly - Second Coming into the franchise's upper tier.  The comedy isn't especially funny, and it sure as hell isn't sophisticated, but with the hopelessly boring Broly as an antagonist, it makes for a satisfying contrast.  You suspect that writer Takao Koyama was fully aware of Broly's dramatic limitations, and reducing him to the status of a shouty, explodey object that the plot proceeds to happen around is a wise move on his part.  Indeed, as Dragon Ball Z gigantic fight climaxes go, this is one of the better ones, by virtue of having a fair few moving parts and a degree of narrative progression.  Granted, it backs itself into a definite corner, with two obvious deus ex machina by which this wholly one-sided fight seems likely to end, and kudos to Broly - Second Coming, I suppose, for going with both of them.  None of this makes it an exceptional movie, but it does make it a fun way to waste an hour, and a gentle attempt to do something novel with Dragon Ball Z's deeply inflexible formulas is definitely preferable than no attempt at all.

Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly, 1994, dir: Yoshihiro Ueda

What a strange little nothing of a film Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly is!  And that shouldn't come as a surprise, given that plenty of these have been brief, lightweight, trivial, or a combination of the three, but coming on the back of a run of movies that bucked the trend in one way or another, it's all the more noticeable that Bio-Broly just doesn't seem to have a lot of reason to exist.  Why bring Broly back immediately and for a third time?  Why bring him back as a slime-monster that has even less personality than his previous incarnation?  Why anchor that to a non-story about one of Mr. Satan's old school rivals trying to take revenge on him, especially given how much that angle fizzles to nothing once the action starts?  And from the perspective of someone who only knows these characters through the films, since when is Mr. Satan important enough to warrant such attention anyway?  I guess what I'm saying is, what the hell was anyone thinking when they made this?  I mean, other than, "Hey, you know what makes money, Dragon Ball Z films!"?

And look, it's not horrible, so don't let me give that impression.  It's not even bad, really.  It's certainly messy, and it cycles through at least four protagonists over the course of a forty-five minute running time, which is some decidedly untidy storytelling, but it's also par for the Dragon Ball Z course and thus not worth getting too wound up over.  Plus, in among the film's carelessly slammed together three acts, all of which conform to totally different genres, we do end up with a final chapter that's kind of a neat disaster movie, which is something we haven't seen from the franchise in a while.  In a series that's as obsessed with punching as this one, threats that can't be punched, like the absorbent slime that plays a big role in the climax, are good for wrinkling the formula in interesting ways, and I'm all in favour of interesting formula-wrinkling.

Really, though, this is awfully inconsequential, and seems to know it; was that why Broly was chucked in, to try and give a bit of unearned impact to a plot that would otherwise be so forgettable?  Add to that what was a minor issue in the last entry but is far more noticeable here, the fact that the younger cast members that now appear to be the focus really aren't convincingly powerful enough to be dealing with these sorts of threats, and I almost find myself wishing for Goku back, novel though this lengthy absence of his has been.  But what I'd really like is - and having looked at the running times of the two remaining movies, I fear this is optimistic! - a return to something more substantial-feeling, in the way Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan was.  Or failing that, I'd take a film that doubles down on the wackiness and humour as Bojack Unbound did.  But Bio-Broly offers up the worst of both worlds, albeit in a fairly harmless and inoffensive package, and surely no-one's crying out for that?

Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn, 1995, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

It's maddening to discover that we could have had eleven Dragon Ball Z films that were like Fusion Reborn, when what we've actually had was eleven films that were largely indistinguishable, with the odd special entry at least tweaking an overbearing formula in ingenious fashion.  And arguably, what's so brilliant about this twelfth movie is that, though it feels radically different to anything that's come before, it doesn't get there by flinging out the formula but by assuming we know it by heart and using that instead as a launch pad to somewhere far less predictable.  It has a first half that's mostly setup and a second half that's mostly a fight against a single, apparently unbeatable opponent, and it does both those things as well as any prior entry in the series, but for almost the first occasion, that's only a small part of what's on offer.

That we're in for something different is apparent from the beginning, which finds Goku in a fighting tournament in the afterlife, before rapidly shunting to another section of that selfsame afterlife, where the sort of clumsy mistake you might imagine would have happened at least once before in however many millennia this place has existed causes all the evil that's ever been to coalesce in the body of one teenaged oni.  The resulting creature, Janemba, will be our major threat for the movie, but meanwhile, the subsequent disruption has brought the dead back to life, which leaves all our less deceased heroes with problems of their own.  And while a brief fake-out leads us to suppose that means fighting the reincarnation of significant foe Frieza, what it actually amounts to is mostly Goten and Trunks battling Hitler and an army of Nazis for the purposes of comic relief.  Because Fusion Reborn is that kind of a movie.

There's plenty of weirdness for weirdness' sake here, and the film embraces it wholeheartedly, down to the level of experimenting with the animation in ways I'd never have dared imagine Dragon Ball Z would indulge in: those Nazi-fighting scenes, for example, are presented in a whole different style of their own, one that looks as though the characters are cardboard cutouts stuck onto the backgrounds.  But even when nothing that outright odd is going on, Fusion Reborn feels conscious of how goofy these designs are in a way none of the previous films have hinted at, and responds by dialling them up to eleven.  It's not a great-looking movie exactly, and indeed there are occasional shots and elements toward the start that are pretty crummy, but there's something terrifically exciting about a Dragon Ball Z film that gets how bizarre this all is and runs with it.  Really, that's the major success here, coupled with the aforementioned acceptance that, because we know inside out how these things function, that knowledge can be used to toy with our expectations.

Granted, it's not anything close to perfect, nor do I get the impression anyone wanted it to be.  Were it not for the fact that at heart it's basically doing the same things all the previous movies have been doing, albeit in more imaginative ways and with a healthy dose of surrealism chucked in, the approach could easily have ended up a total mess.  That aside, there are aspects that flat-out don't succeed; Shunsuke Kikuchi's score is pretty fine when it's being serious but obnoxious when it's aiming to emphasise the humour, and as noted above, experimenting with the animation occasionally just leaves it looking rough and unfinished.  Nonetheless, in the grand scheme of a series that's been spectacularly awful at taking chances, Fusion Reborn is quite the revelation: a film that understands what in Dragon Ball Z works and understands equally that it's not cool to keep making the same movie over and over again, but that such a legacy is an unprecedented opportunity to mess with an audience in all sorts of engaging ways.

-oOo-

As hinted in the introduction, though I wouldn't claim to be a Dragon Ball Z convert, it's hard to ignore how many of these I've enjoyed quite a bit.  My plan had been to tear through them for the sake of completism and then sell the box sets on, but that's been scuppered by how there's at least one film I really like in each.  And this set has already produced two, so, however Wrath of the Dragon turns out, it's evidently a keeper: Bojack Unbound I'll probably return to eventually, and Fusion Reborn would be my series favourite were it not for the fact that, eight years later, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods would be released, a movie so terrific that I'd cheerfully recommend it to even those like me who are ambivalent about this whole Dragon Ball Z business.

And, oh, hey, I just remembered that the TV specials exist and that I probably need to review them too at some point - and that even with those, I still don't have enough titles for another full post.  Goddammit, Dragon Ball Z!

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 89

I'm now more or less caught up with the backlog of these posts, which feels like about the most productive thing I've accomplished in 2020, though I hope to goodness it isn't really.  At any rate, I'd hoped to have the mess I'd created for myself back under control before Christmas, and it's certainly before Christmas, so I'm happy to call that a win.

As for what we're looking at, we're back with whatever I happened to grab off the shelf, with the trawl through the Black Jack OVA series drawing close to its sad and inevitable end, a popular favourite that's somehow passed me by until now, an early Manga Video release that's taken me forever to hunt down*, and a bit of an oddity to close things out on.  Which makes for, Black Jack: Trauma, Kimagure Orange Road OVA (Disk 1), Bounty Dog, and Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason...

Black Jack: Trauma, 1998, dir: Osamu Dezaki

I won't reiterate at length what I've said elsewhere about the Black Jack OVA series.  It should be enough to note that it's one of the very highest high points of nineties anime, combining terrific storytelling with some superlative animation, and both in the hands of a director capable of real greatness doing perhaps the finest work of his career.  With six of the ten episodes reviewed, it's become more a matter of rating them comparatively, since none are anywhere near to bad, or even to mediocrity, and I struggle to imagine at this point that there are any major disappointments ahead.

Black Jack: Trauma is most definitely not a disappointment.  Returning after a two year gap, the show delivers one of its finer episodes, and also one that eschews the formula these things hew to more often than not, whereby super-surgeon Black Jack is recruited to investigate some bizarre and faintly supernatural medical anomaly that would defy the skill and knowledge of lesser mortals.  There's a bit of that here, in that the jumping-off point involves Black Jack being sent into a civil-war-stricken country to treat the granddaughter of a gangster, a little girl suffering with a rare heart disorder.  However, there's nothing fantastical about her condition - if you've been following along with the series, this is quite a shocking development in itself! - and the real drama is reserved for the second half, when Black Jack and the girl are back in America and caught up in medical complications of an entirely different nature.

To go into more detail than that would spoil the fun, if fun is really the word for a particularly cerebral, downbeat episode that only really brightens up for some comic interludes with Black Jack's pint-sized assistant Pinoko.  Suffice to say that the conflicts centre around Black Jack's outsider status as an unlicensed surgeon, not to mention his often mercenary approach to who he will or won't treat.  The character has a tendency to be something of a cipher, so it's rewarding to have a story that humanises him and delves into his morality and motivations, especially since it manages to do so without going so far as to dint the good doctor's mystique.  Here toward the middle of the series, it feels like just the right step, as does the noticeable shift in tone and content.  Black Jack's formula is of the rare sort that's unlikely to ever grow tired, and given how easy it would be to rely on, it's commendable that the makers were prepared to take chances on diversions like this.

Unfortunately, the ending is a mild letdown, simply because the central conflict is resolved too effortlessly and thus feels rather pat, though a neat little epilogue does a lot to redeem it.  It's a small misstep in the scheme of things, but one that would have been helped greatly by U.S. Manga Corp's sticking to handling this part as they did the preceding six.  This was the first of their releases to offer up a mere single episode, and not only was that a crummy move, it leaves us with a disk that's both exceptionally hard to find and was poor value for money even at its original price.  Take that together with how much it benefits from having seen the preceding episodes and I suppose Trauma is unlikely to be anyone's first port of call, which is a shame, because its bold attempt to do something different with a franchise that's already plenty different to begin with is a rare treat.

Kimagure Orange Road OVA (Disk 1), 1989-1991, dir's: Takeshi Mori, Shigeru Morikawa, Kôichirô Nakamura, Naoyuki Yoshinaga

It's telling, I think, that the blurb on the back of AnimEigo's Kimagure Orange Road OVA releases does a better job of summing up its concept and stakes than any of the four episodes presented on this first disk.  Of course, it's not unreasonable for an OVA to assume a degree of audience familiarity, and arguably it's my bad for supposing this would be as standalone as something like the Oh! My Goddess OVA.  But maybe it's not unreasonable, either, to assume that after watching four episodes of something, you'd have a clear sense of what, for example, the protagonist's convenient magical powers actually entailed, or which of the two female leads he was perpetually hanging around with was the one he's most interested in.

So forgive me if my own summation is a bit wobbly, but here goes: high-schooler Kyosuke is part of a cursed family - cursed, in this context, apparently meaning much the same as super-powered - and while he's sort of dating a girl named Hikaru, or at any rate she seems to believe so, he's also in love with her best friend Madoka, though he can't tell her or do anything about it for ... reasons, I guess?

Mind you, it's perfectly possible that most of the above won't have much bearing on any given episode.  The first, a giddy bit of fluff in which Kyosuke spends most of his time body-swapped into a goldfish, is the clear winner, probably because it balances the various elements most gracefully: there's a solid little story, some humour, a hint of romance, some supernatural shenanigans, and a dash of perving at naked women, which judging by that cover art and the remaining episodes, certainly seems to have been a meaningful component of the Kimagure Orange Road formula.  The second, conversely, is definitely the worst, and not only because its setup boils down to, "Boy, lesbians are scary, huh?"  Although, yeah, mainly that.  The third is a run-of-the-mill ghost story of the sort that's padded out a thousand anime series, though it's a solid stab at that tried and tested subgenre.  And the fourth is, for some reason, a gritty kidnapping thriller set in Hawaii, which if nothing else had the merit of taking me by surprise.  If there's a twist, it's that Kyosuke has powers that could easily resolve the situation, but can't use them because presumably keeping them a secret is more important than his friends' lives or something.

Now, I get that Kimagure Orange Road was hugely influential, and I'm not saying I can't see why: the ingredients are familiar, no doubt in part because they were imitated ad nauseam, but that's not to say they're bad ingredients.  Love triangles can be good, and families with wacky magical powers can be good, and the show definitely looks nice, even if its aesthetic has dated it more than many a title from the back end of the eighties.  Heck, there's even the occasional spot of experimentation on the animation front, and I'm always in favour of that.  But, at the risk of being a jerk about a much-loved classic, the passage of three decades hasn't been kind; there just isn't a lot of meat on these bones compared with many of the shows that were huge at the time.  Compared with something like the ever-spinning web of characters and gags that was Ranma 1/2, there are only really two ideas on offer here, and this first half of the OVA series routinely gets distracted from both of them.

Bounty Dog, 1994, dir: Hiroshi Negishi

Do you hate the colour yellow?  Then there's a fair chance you'll hate Bounty Dog, too.  Certainly contemporary reviewers seem to have fixated on the unusual choices that went into its colour scheme to an inordinate degree.  It's undoubtedly novel: most scenes err toward being monochromatic, with often yellow dominating and then a splash of red, blue, or green in there as well.  Then again, some shots are predominantly red, too, and there's a clear codification that justifies all this, with each primary colour being pinned to one or two associations and / or settings.  But yellow most of all, and most straightforwardly: Bounty Dog, you see, is set on the moon, and somewhere along the line, the decision was evidently made that if you lived on the moon, everything would be very yellow all the time.  And not just any yellow, either: a faintly nauseating, acidic shade that does a fine job of replicating the look of crummy electrical lighting, and an equally fine job of making its locations seem unpleasant and wrong and built by humans under less than ideal circumstances.

Was this, as those reviewers back in the nineties tended to suggest, a cost-cutting measure?  Perhaps so.  But personally I'd argue for a world in which all cost-cutting measures were so bold.  Via one simple decision, the makers of Bounty Dog accomplished what many arguably better works have tried and failed to nail: they really do sell the notion that these events are happening on a sphere that isn't Earth and in a time that's not our own.  Also, if the goal was to keep a limited budget for where it would be most productive, then job done: the animation is routinely terrific, with an unusually realistic and detailed aesthetic, some decidedly slick action, and particularly lovely mechanical designs, which the credits attribute to the legendary manga creator Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame, though the internet is hazy on the fact.  I'm inclined to believe them, though: this both looks and feels like Shirow had a hand in it, or at at any rate was an influence.  And speaking of influences, I'd be amazed if director Negishi wasn't thinking of Mamoru Oshii at least a little: the closest analogue I could think of while watching was his early OVA series Dallos, but there are definite notes of Patlabor too.

If there's a reason Bounty Dog isn't on a par with any of those real or potential influences, it's the story: not that it's bad but that it's beyond what a two-episode OVA can do justice to.  There are interesting ideas here, and if none are desperately fresh, the particular combination and the manner in which we're brought to them is fairly exciting.  But with under an hour to play with, Negishi is obliged to hit the ground running and rarely let the pace slip, and it does the material no favours.  At points, it feels positively schizophrenic, flinging up ideas that seem decidedly mystical and then revising them in science-fictional terms before we've had a chance to get our heads around them in the first place.  Even having watched carefully, I'm still not certain where that line ought to be drawn and what was the real nature of the threat our three heroes were facing.  And perhaps needless to say, fifty-five minutes doesn't give us much opportunity to get to know them as characters, either, even with so small a central cast.

All told, though, I liked Bounty Dog quite a bit.  Not all its decisions pay off, but there's a definite sense that they were all actual decisions.  As much as it's reminiscent of other works from the period, it's also very much its own thing, and every element feels as though it's been thought through with unusual specificity and care.  There is, for an example, a vehicle called the manslave that our protagonist drives, and not only does it not look precisely like anything you've seen, it looks as though it was built for a real purpose that would make total sense in this setting.  In short, where Bounty Dog fails narratively, it's by offering too much rather than little; for all that I got to the end with plenty of questions, I don't doubt they were questions the creators could have answered given a few more minutes of running time.  At three episodes, I suspect this might have become a minor personal favourite.  At two, it still has plenty to offer, and I already look forward to revisiting it.

Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason, 1997, dir: Eiichi Sato

One of the many rules I've tried to stick to with these reviews, not always successfully, is to avoid reviewing TV series, on the grounds that there are too many of them and they're largely too hard to find now.  However, I'm making an exception for the title that AnimeWorks released as Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason because, while it's actually the first five episodes of the show Fortune Quest L, it's all that would ever be released in the West.  So for our purposes, and since I went to the trouble of picking it up, let's pretend it was simply a five episode OVA, shall we?

The funny thing is, there's not a lot of reason not to.  Those five episodes form a complete arc that sets the table for further adventures, but does a perfectly fine job of wrapping up its own story.  The show - the sequel to an earlier manga which itself had an OVA - is an exceedingly gentle pastiche of fantasy tropes, somewhat in the line of Slayers or Maze if you scrubbed out all the sex and innuendo and rounded off any sharp edges.  It follows a party of young adventures, of whom our focal point is the wonderfully named Pastel G. King, a cartographer with no sense of direction who keeps them funded by writing up their exploits as fiction.  Indeed, were this the sort of role-playing campaign it's nodding heavily toward, their party would last about five minutes: the other members include a fighter, a thief, a wizard who's both an elf and a small child and never does any actual magic, and a baby dragon named Shiro that's effectively a house pet.

It's Shiro who becomes the centre of these episodes, as, after some shenanigans with a kidnapping that don't amount to much, the friends find themselves press-ganged into a quest to - wait for it! - journey to Terrason, where the crooked town mayor of the local village hopes to have a wish granted by the dragon rumoured to reside there.  And since Shiro's a dragon too, everyone's happy to assume that there's a fair chance he'll end up meeting one of his parents; I guess dragons aren't especially common in this world, because otherwise that seems pretty dragonist.  Whatever the case, it's enough motivation for them to brave the various dangers along the way, including some bizarre fairies and a giant monster centipede.

Writing it out like that reminds me of how thin the narrative is, but then Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason is much more interested in incident than plot.  Really, that's the only level on which pretending it's an OVA falls down; it's a bit too slight to watch in one go, and I definitely found my concentration waning by degrees.  It doesn't help that there's not much else to hold the attention: the animation is resolutely functional, the designs are uninspired and sometimes thoroughly shonky, and the music is mostly just okay, with the exception of a lovely closing theme that's an odd fit for the show.  What's most surprising, maybe, is how little any of that dints the moderate pleasures to be had in watching Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason: its major virtue is how nice it is to be around, both in terms of the characters and its general ethos; in so much as there's a theme, it's that it's good to have friends and good friends should be valued and hung onto.  And in fairness, it's often amusing and has its share of entertaining ideas, so it's never remotely a chore to be around.  Which I guess can't be regarded as a recommendation, but in the crowded subgenre of anime fantasy comedy, I've definitely seen worse.

-oOo-

I've already watched Bounty Dog again, and it made a good bit more sense, while still feeling like it barrelled through its plot a lot faster than was healthy; nevertheless, it held up well and I feel good about my recommendation, while being faintly puzzled that it's not more fondly remembered.  Do people really hate the colour yellow that badly?  Elsewhere, Black Jack continues to be a strong contender for best OVA series ever, Kimagure Orange Road was quite the disappointment - without actually being especially bad - and Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason fared about as well as five episodes of a TV series that I arbitrarily pretended were a self-contained story could be expected to.

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

* And which I then somehow ended up with two copies of on two different formats.  Anybody in the market for a VHS copy of Bounty Dog?

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 88

If you were watching anime or reading manga in the eighties and nineties, you were bound to come across the works of Rumiko Takahashi sooner or later: if Urusei Yatsura didn't do it, then Ranma 1/2 or Maison Ikkoku would get you.  Takahashi's most famous works were staggeringly successful, and practically inescapable.

But they were far from being all that she produced, and in the eighties, four of her shorter titles were given the OVA treatment, to be released under the collective banner of the Rumik World series.  Sad to say, the only Western release those four OVAs would get was on VHS, from Manga Video in the UK and U.S. Manga Corps in the US.  But is that to say they didn't deserve to make it onto DVD, or were there darker forces at work?  Since I was curious enough to track them down and to dig out my old video player especially, let's find out, with a deep dive into the Rumik World and Fire Tripper, Laughing Target, Maris the Wondergirl, and Mermaid Forest...

Fire Tripper, 1986, dir: Motosuke Takahashi

Fire Tripper belongs to a particularly rarefied subgenre: what we might call time-travel romance, for want of a better term*.  In feudal Japan, an infant girl escapes a bandit attack and her burning home by spontaneously vanishing, only to reappear in the modern day.  The next we see of her, she's been adopted by the kindly pair who found her, renamed Suzuko, and has grown to be a teenager - at which point, a gas explosion casts her and the young boy, Shu, that she's looking after back in time once more, separating them and stranding her in the past.  Before she can find her feet, Suzuko is rescued from a rape attempt by a young fighter, Shukumaru, who takes her back to his village and treats her with a modicum of kindness, enough so that she's not wholly put off when he starts talking about marriage.  As for Shu, his T-shirt turns up mysteriously in the village, but there's no sign of the lad himself, for all that Suzuko devotes herself to hunting for him and Shukumaru grudgingly agrees to aid her.

For this to work, it needs to get two things right, the time travel shenanigans and the romance that ensues from them.  So the fact that neither entirely lands is definitely a flaw.  The former, I'd say, fares better, in that at least it's entertainingly convoluted.  Obviously there's more going on here than we're immediately made privy to, and much of the pleasure to be had with Fire Tripper (and this tiny subgenre in general) is in seeing how its plot unwinds and comes to make some measure of sense.  So, that of the two big twists along the way, one's so obvious that I had to assume I was meant to have got ahead of it and the other's only marginally harder to preempt is certainly another problem.  Arguably worse, though, is the lack of any wider explanation: that Suzuko jumps between two time periods when her life is in danger from fire or explosions is presented as an irrefutable fact, and we'd just better deal with it, because Fire Tripper isn't wasting one iota of its running time on trying to justify it.

The romance, though, is considerably worse.  At any rate, the version of the romance imposed by Manga's dub is worse; it's certainly possible that this would play better in its native Japanese.  It's not a horrible dub, the intent is evidently to be true to the material and I'm always in favour of that, but neither of the leads seems terribly concerned with making us like their characters, and a romance between two unlikable people is tough to be on side with.  Then again, since neither has a lot in the way of personality, or much room to develop in a plot that necessarily requires them to be swept from event to event, it's maybe the case that this could never have functioned as its needs to.

If I wanted to go on grumbling, I could mention some wholly run-of-the-mill animation and Takahashi's flavourless direction, which never does much to elevate the material.  But here at the end, I'd rather acknowledge that, for all that I don't think Fire Tripper succeeds as it was intended to, it's not altogether a washout.  You can only screw up a setup like this so far, because so long as the plot is sufficiently ingenious - and this one is, just about - there's pleasure to be had in seeing how the pieces slot together.  Since the narrative is basically a puzzle we watch solving itself over the course of forty-five minutes, the flat romance and even the predictable twists are less of a problem that they'd otherwise be.  Though there are much better such puzzle-box narratives out there (for my money, 2014's Predestination perfects  the form to an unbeatable degree) they're also thin enough on the ground that a decent but flawed example remains enough of a curio to waste your time on.

Maris the Wondergirl, 1986, dir: Kazuyoshi Katayama, Motosuke Takahashi

Read the synopses of the other three episodes and it seems fairly clear what these Rumik World OVAs are going to be: fantastical Twilight Zone-esque stories with some sort of central supernatural gimmick and a twisty sting in their tails.  So it's quite the surprise when Maris the Wondergirl comes along and throws all that out the window.  Okay, arguably it does contain a gimmick of sorts: its core idea is that our hero Maris, being from the now-extinct planet of Thanatos, has the strength of six regular people, which she has to keep in check via a special harness lest her uncontrollable power destroy whatever happens to be near.  And, thinking about it, I suppose there's even a twist ending of sorts, though it's more by way of a gag than anything.  Because, and this is perhaps the biggest change from its fellows, more even than the shift from fantasy set in a reasonable approximation of the real world to a bonkers science-fictional universe: Maris the Wondergirl is a comedy.

A part of why this feels odd, I think, is that comedy is very much what Rumiko Takahashi is and was known for, and I'd decided based on no real evidence that the intention of these Rumik World episodes was to present another side of her oeuvre.  Then again, this is a different brand of comedy than either Urusei Yatsura or Ranma 1/2, a little less goofy and a lot more dark, or at any rate more willing to watch its protagonist suffer.  As we meet her, Maris is having a decidedly crappy time of it, and most of her problems boil down to her annoying super-strength: working as a space cop of sorts, we quickly learn that she routinely does so much damage on her missions that she's incapable of turning a profit.  And even if that weren't the case, that her father and mother are respectively a drunk and a shopaholic, and also have a tendency to break everything in sight and then phone their daughter to beg for cash, means that the odds are against her ever getting into the black.

This all looks like it could change when Maris is offered the job of rescuing a captured billionaire.  All she needs to do, aside from the actual rescuing part, is ensure that he falls madly in love with her and marries her on the spot.  So off she sets, with only her partner Murphy for backup - Murphy, being, by the way, a nine-tailed fox that in the English version gets a broad Irish accent that's somehow the most perfect bit of dubbing I've ever encountered.  And as to why Maris is partnered with a creature out of Japanese folklore, that isn't something Maris the Wondergirl ever feels inclined to explain, much as it's happy to leave a good portion of its world-building unexplained, in favour of taking every opportunity to chase after jokes or simply opportunities for general weirdness.

This is absolutely the right decision, and not only for Maris the Wondergirl as comedy but for Maris the Wondergirl as science-fiction too.  It's thoroughly great at the former: it's awfully nasty to poor Maris, but surreal enough that it never feels nasty, and there are some genuinely excellent gags along the way, right from the beginning and the narrator's stentorian assurance that what we're about to watch is not a true story.  But at the same time, there's enough to the plot and setting that they don't just come across as a delivery mechanism for jokes; indeed, the background here feels much more thought through that in Fire Tripper.  And while we're comparing, the animation and music are both a marked improvement, with some engaging pop interludes and Maris in particular benefiting from terrific character work.  All of which means that, while I don't know that Maris the Wondergirl is necessarily a great Rumik World entry, seeming as it does too fundamentally different from the rest, in its own right it's a gem, one of the most charming and witty comic OVAs I've encountered.

Laughing Target, 1987, dir: Motosuke Takahashi

If Fire Tripper had a single advantage, it was that it was dabbling in a very exclusive subgenre, puzzle-box time-travel romances not being exactly ten a penny.  So that Laughing Target goes to the opposite extreme, opting for the sort of supernatural horror that you can barely move for in the anime world without stumbling over, and that it keeps one of Fire Tripper's significant weaknesses - that being director Takahashi, who put in such a lacklustre showing there - doesn't bode well.

So it's both a surprise and a relief that it ends up being the better title in almost every way.  For a start, while the core elements are thoroughly routine, Laughing Target comes to them via an awfully nice angle.  Yuzuru Shiga was pledged at a young age to marry his cousin Azusa, but in the years since, he's thought little of her, and by the time we meet him as a teenager, he's well established in a relationship with his classmate Satomi.  So it's quite the disruption for both of them that, following the death of her mother, Azusa is coming to live with Yuzuru, and that she definitely hasn't forgotten that childhood promise, and indeed seems to have been planning her entire life around it.  And much as that's bound to be a problem, it's a considerably bigger problem given that Azusa seems both a touch crazy and possessed of supernatural powers, surely related to an opening scene we witnessed in which she strayed into a mysterious other realm.

The reason this works so well is that everyone is basically sympathetic.  Of course Yuzuru doesn't want to honour a promise he made when he was six years old, and of course Satomi doesn't want to give up her boyfriend so he can marry a relative he barely knows, but we're given enough insight into Azusa and the events that formed her that we can also understand why she's determined to see this through.  She's as much a victim as the couple she's preying on, if not more so.  And from a horror perspective, a situation where you're more or less rooting for everyone has considerable advantages.  We don't want to see Azusu harmed any more than we do Yuzuru or Satomi - thanks to a solid dub, they're all easy to be on side with - and so the ever-increasing violence between them is that bit more discomforting.

This is helped by a far stronger performance by Takahashi, or perhaps by the fact that he's just better suited to the material: the expository stuff is still quite pedestrian, but he's an unexpectedly dab hand at laying on the creepiness, and while there's nothing here you could genuinely call scary, Laughing Target does a respectable job of getting under your skin on more than one occasion.  Indeed, the flashback in which we learn how Azusa first manifested her powers is a genuinely effective piece of horror film-making, both in how visually striking it is and in how it shunts us through a number of troubling emotions, mixing a heady combination of alarm at what might happen to Azusa, disgust for the solution she arrives at, and sadness as we come to comprehend how this event shaped the present.

There is, in short, a good little horror film here, with a fine setup and some scenes that really land.  But it's also not hard to see how it could have been improved.  As with Fire Tripper, while we get enough answers that the result feels like a coherent narrative, there are plenty of questions left over, and some of those would definitely have been opportunities to tie everything together more neatly.  In particular, Yuzuru and Azusa's family connection ends up feeling like a plot device, when surely there was more to be done with the hints that this all stems from some generations-old curse.  Three quarters of the way through this series and I'm starting to suspect Takahashi was better at coming up with neat ideas than thinking them all the way through, but then again, these ideas are at least genuinely neat, and Fire Tripper does a respectable job of nailing the execution too.

Mermaid Forest, 1991, dir: Takaya Mizutani

It was Mermaid Forest that initially brought me to this OVA series: of all of them, it's the title that's managed to sustain something of a reputation for itself, and it's often spoken highly of when Takahashi's work crops up.  And yeah, I can definitely see why; while maybe not the most distinctive of the four Rumik World entries, it's an exceedingly well-formed example of what it is.

Which is a vampire story, in essence, though part of why it feels so fresh is that it comes at that particular set of tropes from an appealingly different direction.  Three of its main characters (four if we count a dog) are immortal, and one is very definitely surviving by dosing herself with human blood, though we're led to suppose that until the beginning proper of this story - that is, excepting a couple of important prologues - the blood has all been from corpses supplied by the village doctor, who's madly, unwisely in love with her.  Towa, you see, was cured of a potentially fatal childhood illness by her sister Sawa, but at quite the cost: she was only saved by drinking the blood of a mermaid, and in Japanese folklore, consuming a mermaid's flesh grants the gift-stroke-curse of immortality.  In Towa's case, it's also stuck her with a mutated arm that leaves her in incessant pain and constantly threatens to get out of control.  Quite how human blood is staving this off is slightly unclear, but it does, albeit with diminishing results.  And while Towa is convinced that a permanent cure could be arrived at if her sister would just let on where she got that cup of mermaid juice from, she's soon wondering about other solutions when two more immortals wind up in her home.

The mermaid element, so vital to the story, does a great deal to spice up well-worn ideas, and makes for an enticing combination, at once familiar and surprising.  The result is a plot you can see the shape of from early on, but that still succeeds in throwing curve balls as it goes along: Mermaid Forest certainly has the most satisfying twist of these four titles, and the one that does most to retroactively reshape the material.  It's never, it has to be said, remotely scary, and though there's a fair bit of blood and guts and the odd gross moment, it's rarely that horrifying either: quite where the 18 rating came from is anyone's guess.  All else aside, though the animation's perfectly decent and director Mizutani does a competent job of keeping the narrative flowing, there's not sufficient flare to properly get under your skin; in those terms, Laughing Target was the better work of horror.  But Mermaid Forest feels like the superior title in other ways, perhaps because it's based not on a short story but one section of a longer work.  That definitely comes over, in largely good ways: there's a sense of scale that touches, albeit lightly, on what it might mean to live forever and how that experience might twist a mind or set it free.

Sadly, there's one aspect of Mermaid Forest that's as weak as anything in this series, and that's the dub: it has moments of abject terribleness, and none of the cast remotely shine, though the actress voicing Towa does seem to get to grips with her character by around the halfway point, thus mitigating the worst of the damage.  It's a shame, though, and as with many of these dubs, goodness knows what Manga were thinking letting this crap out the door.  But thankfully the material is sturdy enough to ride it out.  The odds were against this being my favourite entry with Maris the Wondergirl in the mix, and I'd say Laughing Target about ties it, but nevertheless, Mermaid Forest does fine work in taking one of horror's oldest concepts and making it feel new, and that's enough to earn its enduring reputation.

-oOo-

Whenever I get close to shaking this vintage anime obsession, something wonderful comes along to drag me back in, and recently that's been these four Rumik World titles: individually they're good to great, but taken as a unit, they're a bit of a treasure, and I've thoroughly enjoyed my time with them.  What's more, I find it deeply weird that nobody's ever rescued them on DVD or even blu-ray.  Here as so often, the only solution for most people who fancy giving them a shot is Youtube, which is a shame, though certainly better than their being vanished altogether.  As I say, there's a lot to be gained from watching all four in the order they were released, but failing that, it's definitely worth seeking out the drastically underrated Maris the Wondergirl and the perhaps slightly overrated but still commendable Mermaid Forest.

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

* Though weirdly, a subgenre that anime has explored quite a bit, with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time being another obvious example.

Six Tips For Surviving Novel Writing

 Somewhat to my surprise, I seem to be writing a new novel.  Given my currently not-so-great circumstances, it's hard to say exactly what the point is, but somehow it seems like the most reasonable of a whole bunch of unreasonable options.  At any rate, that's inevitably got me thinking about the process, and the lessons I've learned over the course of doing this more than a dozen times already.  And since I haven't altogether given up on the pretence that this blog is about my writing, I thought sharing some of that might be worthwhile.

This won't be anything so presumptuous as telling anyone how they should go about writing a book, because there are a million ways of doing that and any number of them are right.  (Also, I'm pretty sure I already did that post way back when!)  The most I can offer is a few conclusions I've come to after having tried numerous approaches to a greater or lesser extent, and given how much nearer I am to the beginning than the end of the process - past the 60'000 word mark, but this promises to be substantially heftier than anything else I've done - there's a definite theme here, centred around how to keep moving as it starts to sink in just what an enormous task you've set yourself.  So, with that in mind...

Don't Rush In

Of everything here, I imagine this is the point most likely to be widely ignored, because many people absolutely swear by rushing in, and presumably it works for at least some of them.  And, look, I'm not saying you have to have a detailed plan, though personally I can no longer imagine how I'd go about writing a novel without one, any more than I'd think of waking up one day and thinking "Hmm, maybe I'll climb Everest today" and setting out in my pyjamas.  Still, not everyone's a planner, I get that, and planning isn't necessarily what I'm talking about.  I guess it's more to do with facing up to those points where whatever concept has you so fired up feels that bit too sketchy.  Maybe they'll have sorted themselves out by the time you get to them, but maybe they won't, and confronting them without the stress of weeks of work depending on the results can be a lot easier.  What I've found is that ultimately I tend to reach a point where I know I'm ready to go, and mostly it's a sense that I haven't left any towering brick walls for myself to dash headfirst into at the worst possible moments.

Don't Sacrifice Your Momentum

This one probably depends on whether you've followed the previous suggestion: if you've charged in without much of a plan, chances are that eventually you're going to run out of steam, and when that happens, your best bet may well be to step back for a week or two and figure out where you're heading.  Planning is always going to happen sometime, and if you'd rather do it in the middle than at the start, or in chunks along the way, then each to their own.  But let's assume for the moment that you do have a plan and that it's basically sturdy.  If that's the case, I've come to think the best approach in a first draft is to keep moving forward for as long as it's remotely feasible to do so, and hopefully right through to the end.  If your plot's absolutely crumbling in your fingers then, sure, stop and take a breather, but if your plot's merely wobbling a bit, that ought to be a problem for the next draft.  And while there's a definite appeal to heavily editing alongside your first draft, my conclusion is that it's better to keep that to a minimum.  This time through, I'm experimenting with starting the day by doing a quick polish of yesterday's work, and that's definitely proving positive, but more than that and I suspect I'd just be trashing my confidence and risking skidding to a halt.

Don't Bore Yourself

This is more of a general point, and applies to all writing, no matter the length, but it's also one of the most important conclusions I've reached over the years, so let's include it.  If there's a type of scene you don't like writing, there's a fair chance you won't write it well; if you find action a slog, or dialogue is something you want to hammer through to reach the good stuff, odds are that a reader's bound to notice that lack of engagement.  And the best way to deal with this is to ask yourself what it would take for you to be excited by those sequences.  Would you get more out of writing that dialogue if it was faster and peppier, or maybe if there were more character beats mixed in?  What if you could shift the focus off the mechanical aspects of the action and onto the psychological effects, or vice versa?  If you're feeling disengaged, it's vital to figure out why and even make that work to your advantage, because the alternative is great swathes of novel that you'll return to and be mortified by how visibly the energy levels plummet.

Avoid Feast and Famine

It's awfully tempting to push your luck when you're on a roll.  Some days, the words won't stop coming, and why wouldn't you lean into that?  Well, there's one reason, and that's how easy it is for your reach to exceed your grasp.  I'm sure there are people whose wells never run dry, but for me, what I find is that a run of prolific days will inevitably result in a harsh crash.  Writing is an enormously subconscious-driven task, and your subconscious can only do so much advance work; I have a theory that getting too far ahead of it is a big part of what people refer to as writer's block, a condition I've mostly been fortunate enough to steer clear of.  But whichever way you look at it, novel writing is marathon running, and too many sprints will burn you out in no time.  Add to that how easy it is to make wild mistakes or churn out seriously unpolished prose if you're caught up in mad dashes and it generally makes more sense to keep to a steady pace.

Don't Freak Out

There's nothing quite like the unadulterated panic of getting deep into a major project only to realise you've got something enormously, irreparably wrong.  Or, I guess there is one thing like it, and that's when the same happens on a smaller, less horrifying scale: you're midway through a chapter and it hits you that this is where you ought to have started it, or that character you've spent three pages introducing is just taking up space and serving a purpose your existing cast were more than capable of covering.  If you're anything like me, your first reaction will be to try and fix the problem as quickly and painlessly as possible, and your second reaction, once it's sunk in that quick and painless aren't on the table, is to run around shrieking and then hide under the bed.  And I'm not saying that's a wrong response (okay, obviously it's a terrible response) but there are better options.  And most of them revolve around hanging onto your calm and, if possible, deferring the problem until you've had time to properly digest it.

Don't Ignore the Small Achievements

Writing a novel is a major thing.  It's easy to forget that, when there are so many trillions of books out there, but producing yet one more is still a herculean task.  And if you're planning to wait until the very end before you permit yourself a pat on the back, you're going to be waiting a long time.  Getting a chapter down is a big deal.  Getting ten thousands words in the bag is a big deal.  Heck, these days, making it out of bed and all the way to the computer without collapsing in a sludgy mound of despair is a big deal.  In one sense, novel writing is very much an all or nothing exercise, in that, unless you're both extremely famous and dead, nobody's ever going to be interested in your unfinished opus.  But in another sense, every step along the way counts toward the total, and you're fully justified in allowing yourself a dash of excitement, or even a small reward, at surviving another lap.

-oOo-

Okay, sure, that was more for my benefit than anyone else's.  But while this might be mostly about me reminding myself that I'm near the start of a long road and need to hold the line for a good while longer without letting those brain-goblins devour my frontal cortex, I hope there are one or two other people out there who might find something useful here!

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 87

To the long list of things I promised myself I'd never do, because if I did, this whole exercise would go from downright silly to irredeemably ridiculous, then promptly went ahead and did anyway, we can now add picking up titles that were only ever released on VHS.  We've had one VHS review already, that being Debutante Detective Corps, but that was only because I couldn't snag the DVD and the tape was cheap.  Here, for the first time, we have something that never even made it onto recent media, and also the reason I slipped up in the first place: the 1984 film Lensman, which is both well regarded enough to be of interest and condemned to have never reached any technology more modern than a LaserDisc player.

But was it worth it?  You'll see when we get there!  Let's take a look at Night on the Galactic Railroad, Golgo 13: The Professional, Lensman, and Lupin the Third: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon...

Night on the Galactic Railroad, 1985, dir: Gisaburo Sugii

Beloved childhood classics don't always translate readily between cultures, nor should we expect them to.  After all, these are the sort of stories that get buried deep in a nation's psyche, often in ways that are difficult to comprehend from the outside.  And that certainly seems to be true for the works of Kenji Miyazawa, who somehow managed to tell enormously personal, abstract, difficult tales that probed at his brief and often tormented life in a manner that resonated deeply with those who came after him.

Thus, from half a century after his death, we have the film adaptation of his short and oft rewritten but never quite finished novel Night on the Galactic Railroad, which sort of looks like a kids film and sort of behaves like a kids film and yet has no qualms about delving into questions of faith, suffering, and how the heck we're meant to live in the sure knowledge that we're all going to die, perhaps without forewarning or apparent cosmic fairness.  This is approached via a series of sequential but not always very connected vignettes, and the story of lonely, hard-working boy (well, boy cat) Giovanni, who a quarter of the way into the film finds himself whisked from his home town by an interstellar train, where he runs into his friend Campanella.  From there, the two encounter various other characters, many of whom have stories of their own to tell, and go on a series of...

I was going to say adventures, but that's not really how Night on the Galactic Railroad works.  If it was a Western kids' story then sure, we might reasonably expect that.  If it were, to pick on a close parallel, something like the sort of children's literature C. S. Lewis wrote, another author trying to thrash out questions of faith and the meaning of existence through the medium of books ostensibly aimed at a young audience, we'd expect the two friends to be a driving force through the narrative, even if that narrative was primarily there to explore bigger issues.  But actually, the pair are more of an audience, and very little happens to them in the traditional sense; indeed, the one episode where they're particularly active was invented by screenwriter Minoru Betsuyaku.  Mostly we're in classic dream narrative territory: stuff happens, much of it makes no objective sense, but Giovanni and Campanella are content to go with the flow, no matter how odd these events seem to us, the wide-awake audience.

The way Night on the Galactic Railroad pulls this off is partly by successfully conjuring the precise mood of a dream and partly by embedding us in a story that rejects adult baggage and views the world through childish eyes, making intuitive much that would otherwise be strange.  And all of this depends primarily on a couple of elements.  First and foremost, unsurprisingly, there's the animation, which is soft and simple and quite lovely, and looks like a children's book come to life in the truest sense: not like a series of illustrations but as if we've plunged through those illustrations into the world within.  But good as the animation is, I doubt it would work without Haruomi Hosono's sublime score, which ties every element - the dreaminess, the childishness, the religiosity, the grand philosophising - together with alternating subtlety and grandeur.  Though thinking about it, even Hosono wouldn't be so effective were it not for some tremendous sound engineering: for example, its impossible to imagine this succeeding half so well without the measured, eerie clacking of wheels and gears that underlies the train journey.

Sadly, none of that's to say that I loved Night on the Galactic Railroad; I think it would be a tough film to truly love, though I'm sure there are many who do.  In some ways, it deals in universal themes, and in some ways it does so wonderfully, but it also has a tendency to phrase them in terms of religious faith, which, if you're not religious, can be off-putting.  Also, there's the fact that - at the risk of sounding like a philistine! - not a heck of a lot happens and much of what does happen is fairly baffling.  This is the kind of film you have to give yourself over to wholly, and if you can't succumb to its hallucinatory atmosphere and keep succumbing, it loses a lot of its effect.  But to be clear, you should absolutely put in the effort: I can't say on the back of a single viewing whether Night on the Galactic Railroad is a masterpiece, but it certainly begs the possibility.

Golgo 13: The Professional, 1983, dir: Osamu Dezaki

There's a lot about Golgo 13: The Professional that's plain awful.  Top of the list has to be Golgo 13 himself, a hitman so stoic that, whatever the male equivalent of the sexy lamp test is, he'd fail it.  In many a scene, you could replace him with, say, a brick or a fence post, and it would have negligible impact on the drama.  In fact, some sequences would make more sense, since there are moments when logic dictates that a flesh-and-blood human being would die horribly, rather than appearing intact a minute later as though a building hadn't just exploded around them.  And Golgo 13 the character is at his worst when Golgo 13 the film expects us to believe that he's irresistible to women, which is often.  In this universe, apparently nothing excites the ladies more than a total lack of personality, and the way to drive them to heights of ecstasy is to lie perfectly immobile and let them get on with whatever they feel like doing.  Mind you, this should probably more be regarded as part of a wider issue with the movie's horrible attitudes, which manifests most damningly in a rape scene - heck, more of a rape subplot - that exists primarily so that we grasp that the villains are such unpleasant people that we should be on Golgo 13's side, ignoring the extent to which he does nothing besides kill people for money and have inanimate sex.

Now, I'm inclined to argue that Osamu Dezaki salvages Golgo 13: The Professional, but I honestly don't know if that's the case: I can't be certain his bonkers approach here makes for a better film.  What he certainly does do, though, is offer one hell of a distraction.  I've commented often on how Dezaki was a fan of ostentatious style to an extent few directors can, or would want to, match, but now I reckon I hadn't seen the half of it.  Golgo 13 feels like the work of a man who was handed the script for a seedy hitman thriller and decided his brief was to make a delirious art installation.  I doubt there's a shot anywhere that could be described as normal; always there's some weird trick or angle or distortion.  And there's never a point where it feels like Dezaki is content with merely propelling the narrative from A to B.  There are plenty of scenes that don't work at the level of plot - most of the first third falls hard into that category - and there are plenty of scenes that don't work at the level of visual storytelling, but there's not an instant where it doesn't seem that Dezaki was wholly invested in whatever he was up to.

Then again, like I say, whether what he regarded himself to be doing had much in common with conveying a coherent version of the screenplay handed to him is an unanswerable question.  Still, I'm inclined to take his side, given how not terribly special that screenplay is.  It has superior moments, like an unlikely hit that takes up the middle portion and a basically sound reason for all the various goings-on that ends on a satisfying twist, but there's also lots of garbage, mostly stemming from the scumminess with which it handles its every female character.  Those aren't small failings, nor are they easy to look past; a couple of years back, in the days when I loathed Dezaki for his reliance on weird gimmickry, I doubt I'd have managed it.  And while the animation is respectable and sometimes great, even that's not always an asset.  In particular, some desperately primitive CG is fine in the weird Bond-style credits sequence but ruinous when it shows up later for a helicopter attack on a building.

All told, I couldn't honestly claim Golgo 13: The Professional is a good film.  It gets too much enormously, inexcusably, unnecessarily wrong for that to be the case, and even that weren't true, it would still be a story about a profoundly boring central character.  But in Dezaki's hands, subjected to his overdose of raw style, it's certainly something.  And now that I'm on-side with Dezaki, I personally enjoyed it far more than I didn't, even if the content often made that more challenging than it needed to be.  As eighties anime classics go, it's aged atrociously, and there's plenty better out there.  But if its director's mad excesses are now the sole reason to seek this out, they're nonetheless a decent excuse.

Lensman, 1984, dir: Shûichi Hirokawa, Yoshiaki Kawajiri

You can absolutely see the thinking behind Lensman.  By 1984, Star Wars continued to be enormous business, as was trying to imitate it with whatever pulpy sci-fi you could conjure up, and what pulpier sci-fi was there than the writings of E. E. "Doc" Smith?  Add to that the fact that A New Hope has some transparent similarities to the books and you had the perfect balance: all the benefits of imitating Star Wars and with the neat get-out of pointing out that actually, no, you were the rip-off merchant, Mr. Lucas, all we're doing is adapting these here novels.

Whether or not that was truly the logic behind their decision-making, what's evident is that Toho were willing to throw some serious money at the thing.  It's all there on the screen, and if it wasn't, the presence of some remarkably okay CG effects in 1984 - yeah, eleven years before Toy Story, that 1984 - are a sure testament.  All of which begs the question of why you've probably never heard of the movie Lensman and almost certainly never seen a copy.

The answer to that question isn't altogether easy.  Or rather, it's very easy indeed - as I mentioned in the introduction, the film never made it to any medium besides VHS and LaserDisc - but the whys and wherefores are trickier.  The most convincing theory I've found is that Smith's estate, unimpressed with the liberties taken with the beloved material and possibly also a lack of appropriate royalties, created enough of a fuss that nobody was willing to wade into the legal quagmire to try and salvage the release rights.  And that certainly seems plausible, given how much vastly worse eighties anime would find its way onto DVD.

Because, whether we choose to view it as a shonky E. E. Smith adaptation or an unusually solid Star Wars rip-off, Lensman is quite the treat.  Its plot is absolutely boilerplate, but boilerplate dressed up with lots of delightful stuff around the edges, as our young hero Kimball Kinnison finds himself orphaned and dragged into an intergalactic war with only a bison man, some sort of pterodactyl person, and a sexy nurse lady to back him up.  Oh, and the titular lens, a bit of nifty technology that serves so little point in the plot that they could have exchanged it with any easily carried technomagical doodad and saved themselves a lot of bother.  At any rate, the film has a merry time barrelling through various loosely connected incidents for the better part of two hours, from spaceship scraps to drugged-up alien murder slug attacks to disco riots, and looks terrific all the while: the character work has dated slightly badly, and is oddly careless in places, and obviously 1984 CG can't hold a candle to modern CG - though it's awfully charming in its own way - but the backgrounds and effects and the vast bulk of the animation are up there with anything the decade would provide.

Admittedly, Lensman is hardly perfect, and I wouldn't go so far as claiming it to be any kind of lost classic.  Appropriately for a Star Wars imitator, its signal weakness is a flat lead character, and Kimball also gets the least inspired design, along with, in the dub Manga put out, the worst vocal performance in an otherwise impressive cast.  Then there's the female lead, Clarissa MacDougall, who's introduced as a plucky Katherine Hepburn type before immediately descending into serial damsel-in-distress uselessness; and the back half does rather get lost in enormous action sequences that, while undeniably cool, are less fun than the more involved world-building of the opening scenes.  Nevertheless, there's plenty more that succeeds than doesn't, and taken together, the film is pretty much a joy, certainly enough so that its near-total erasure from anime history has be considered a crying shame.

Lupin the 3rd: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon, 1985, dir's: Seijun Suzuki, Shigetsugu Yoshida

The Legend of the Gold of Babylon does something I've never seen anime attempt before, which is to emulate the loose, slipshod style of the brand of American animation exemplified by the works of Ralph "Fritz the Cat" Bakshi.  Now, I for one don't like Bakshi's work much at all, and the last thing I want my anime doing is aping it, but hey, it's certainly different.  And for a Lupin story that spends a great deal of its running time in New York, it even makes a degree of sense.  Indeed, for the first five minutes, a scene in a monster-themed bar that pushes the franchise's tolerance for out-and-out surrealism about as far as it could go, it looks as though it might be precisely the right choice.  Then the film stops dead for an extended, repetitive, deeply dull action sequence with perpetually hopeless cop Zenigata, and decides that what it really ought to be foregrounding is how damn dubious the designs for its black characters are, and suddenly the Bakshi influence starts to feel like a very bad decision indeed.

Fortunately, things largely balance out from there; even the experimental animation style eventually settles into something more comfortably familiar, though certain characters, notably Fujiko, never come close to looking right.  At any rate, there are scenes that function brilliantly and scenes that fall flat - though none so much so as that interminable motorbike chase with Zenigata - and scenes that simply get the job done, and maybe the lousy beginning even works to the film's benefit, in that everything thereafter seems better than it might otherwise have.  Plus, it's to The Legend of the Gold of Babylon's advantage that it has quite a bit of plot to go around, or at any rate lots of incidents that hang together engagingly enough that it feels like there's a significant plot.  It's an enormously busy movie, with far more than its share of ideas and characters and threads to keep track of, and that it cobbles all its elements into something that seems vaguely unified is an achievement in itself.

On the flip side, you don't need the excellent liner notes of Eastern Star's re-release to inform you that this had a troubled gestation - though the revelation that one of its many contributors and potential directors was Mamoru Oshii, of Ghost in the Shell fame, and that he was shoved off the project when the studio deemed his ideas too radical and weird, is downright heart-breaking.  Then again, their first choice was for Hayao Miyazaki to return and work the sort of magic he brought to The Castle of Cagliostro, so Oshii would admittedly have made for quite the change of pace.

Plus, if his legacy amounted to contributing the screenplay's more outlandish elements, I fervently hope Oshii wasn't to blame for the ending, which doesn't so much jump the shark as line up a hundred sharks and attempt to break the world shark-jumping record.  It's so bewildering that it makes the entire film feel oddly non-canonical, since surely there's no squaring any other Lupin film with this one.  And while that's an annoying way to have to digest this, the more so given that some of those better scenes get the formula one hundred percent right, it's maybe the best perspective from which to view The Legend of the Gold of Babylon: it feels, and looks, like a Lupin movie beamed in from some bizarre parallel universe.  Given how generic and overstuffed the series would become for lengthy stretches, that's exciting in and of itself, but it would be that bit more so if the results were consistently successful.

-oOo-

Do I regret dragging my VHS player out of its retirement in the TV cabinet?  Of course I don't!  I mean, I should, but that would require a lot more self-judgement and common sense than I possess, so right now I'm just excited about the neat finds I've managed to snag at very reasonable prices ... it turns out pretty much no-one wants VHS tapes, who'd have thought it?  We'll certainly be seeing those popping up over the next few posts, so for anyone who comes to this blog for its near-total irrelevancy, that's sure to be a treat!

Whether that'll happen next time, though, I'm not certain, because - shock, horror! - I've exhausted my backlog of finished posts and now just have lots of half-finished ones.  So really, it's anyone's guess, but it's safe to say this might mark the end of the weekly schedule I've been keeping up for a while now.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 86

 Let's talk about sex, shall we?  Or, well, not talk about it, more review some anime about it, but ... wait, what do you mean I already did a sex-themed review post way back in part 43?  That's ... woah, exactly 43 posts ago, isn't it?  That's kind of creepy.  And also means that henceforward, every 43rd post is going to have to be sex-related.

Boy, that went south fast, huh?  I guess we probably ought to just look at some sexy anime, in the shape of Demon Fighter Kocho, Very Private Lesson, Fake, and the Sorcerer Hunters OVA...

Demon Fighter Kocho, 1997, dir: Tôru Yoshida

What's a fair way to go about reviewing an OVA of less than half an hour in length?  It's tempting to say that Demon Fighter Kocho would have been a solid title if there was only more of it, but that doesn't get us far, because what we have is all there is or ever will be.  And to its credit, it crams about as much into its running time as you could possibly ask for, setting up its concept and introducing four characters sufficiently that we have a sense of who they are and what they're about and even finding time to tell a decent little story, with a beginning, middle, and twisty end.  Moreover, it's not as if that story would be improved by being twice as long; it's actually rather satisfying the way Demon Fighter Kocho barrels through its plot without pausing for breath.  It's just that it's tough to come away from what amounts to a single TV episode and feel you've had your money's worth.

Still, let's take that as said and move on, shall we?  What we have here belongs to a familiar subgenre, both in and out of anime: Kocho is a high school student who, as the title informs us, fights demons, as part of her role in an astrology class that clearly should have been shut down years ago, what with how the teacher, Professor Kamo, is a massive sex pest with no qualms about tricking his female students into disrobing.   Also, thinking about it, as far as this OVA is concerned, Kocho doesn't fight demons, she fights ghosts; and this she does with the dubious assistance of her sister Koran, along with fellow student Kosaku, who's also a bit of a perv.  Kocho seemingly lacks any powers, but what she's pretty great at is getting naked, and Kamo and Kosaku are both entirely fine with this, especially given that Koran's also quite willing to reveal all at the drop of a hat.

So you could consider it a much more perverted Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or a slightly more perverted Devil Hunter Yohko, but either way, it's evident the territory we're in and Demon Fighter Kocho does nothing to hide its influences.  Insomuch as it's interested in doing its own thing, that mostly extends to doubling down on the nudity and the general obsession with sex, along with a bit of self-aware fourth wall breaking that's perhaps its biggest saving grace; it's genuinely funny in places, and even when it's not, it has an endearing tone of not taking itself too seriously.  Being able to laugh along with Demon Fighter Kocho does it a lot of favours, because it's never quite good enough that it would get by otherwise.  The animation is resolutely mediocre, with dated computer assists and character designs that look almost half-finished, and only the jaunty score stands out on the artistic side of things.

To finish on a slight diversion, while putting out a less-than-thirty-minute OVA that just barely warrants the effort is very much the kind of thing AnimeWorks had a bad habit of doing, a dash of credit's due for the extras, which are the usual behind the scenes stuff with the US voice cast that tend to pad out these releases, but much longer and much less filtered.  Though I didn't check, I suspect the various bits of footage we get total more than Demon Fighter Kocho itself, and they're an entertaining insight, the more so because the dub cast are actually pretty good and pretty damn funny in their own right.  Obviously those extras don't push the title into must-have territory or anything, but they round out the package nicely, and meant that I came away from Demon Fighter Kocho with a somewhat greater appreciation of its goofy, low-rent charms.

Very Private Lesson, 1998, dir: Hideaki Ôba

It's tough to imagine how the setup for Very Private Lesson was ever going to work: youthful teacher Oraku, in the midst of trying to hit on his crush and fellow teacher Satsuki, runs into the sixteen-year-old Aya, who proceeds to have him drive her home and flirts with him mercilessly.  By the next day, Aya has somehow tracked down his address, and not only has she transferred to the class Oraku teaches, she's decided to move in with him, and Oraku hasn't much choice in the matter because her old man happens to be a Yakusa boss who, as the saying goes, makes him an offer he can't refuse: either get Aya to graduation in one piece or suffer the consequences.

Accepting that there's probably no good way to go about that wholly problematic setup, it's at least not hard to see a less disastrous approach than the one the makers opted for.  What we get is effectively three different takes, which the show bounces between largely at random: the smutty comedy that's the most obvious route, a more sweet-natured character drama that emphasises Oraku and Aya's developing friendship and mutual respect, and - here's the kicker - a violent, social-realist thriller in which Aya is repeatedly under threat of rape and Oraku under threat of horrible violence or even death.

Two of those could, maybe, have fitted together; certainly you could have got a fairly routine nineties anime sex comedy out of the first two in combination, and if it kept a tight rein on the fan service, it might even have been pretty okay.  And for that matter, the thriller stuff, though grim and tasteless, is far from unsalvageable; it's novel, at least, to see an anime of this sort that doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of school life and Japanese society.  But all three together makes for a tone that's often wildly, cringingly dysfunctional.  The show absolutely wants to have its cake and eat it, while never seeming entirely sure what the cake actually consists of: one minute it's leching over Aya in her underwear, the next it's freaking out over the prospect of her falling into the hands of one of the many male characters who openly express an interest in sexually assaulting her.  It shouldn't need saying that that's not a topic you treat lightly, and it's sure as hell not one you cram up against sleazy light comedy.

Really, the only reason I'm wasting this many words on something that's in many ways totally obnoxious is that it isn't wholly awful.  Technically it's pretty competent - the music's particularly solid, but the animation does just fine - and narratively it's not always a train wreck.  Oraku and Aya are both humanised enough that we like them and would like to see them helping each other out, and Aya in particularly strays far enough away from the twin poles of obnoxious male fantasy and obnoxious male nightmare that it feels like there's a personality there that could be more deeply delved into.  The comedy is even funny sometimes, and the thriller aspects are interesting, particularly in how they're willing to explore their ostensible villains and reveal them as more complex than we'd assume.  But seesawing between the two constantly over the course of an OVA that doesn't make it to ninety minutes is a hell of an ask of an audience, and one Very Private Lesson ultimately doesn't warrant.

Fake, 1996, dir: Iku Suzuki

It's fair to say that the anime market has never exactly been overstuffed with shows about gay American cops holidaying in the British countryside, so if there's one thing Fake has going for it, it's novelty.  Though, unlike in the West, it's not the gay part of that equation that really stands out; most anime fans will have at some point encountered the subgenre known as Yaoi, of homoerotic stories aimed at a primarily female audience.  Supplant that to the wilds of England, though, and the result is something decidedly interesting.  It's not really a criticism to say that anime tends to get the UK enormously wrong - I mean, it's not as if Western media hasn't been horribly misrepresenting Japan forever - but it genuinely feels like a bit of research went into Fake, and possibly even an actual visit.  I mean, Peter Rabbit shows up at one point, how's that for veracity!  Granted, so does a tanuki, and you don't see a lot of those gambolling around in English forests, but nobody's perfect.

In fairness, that care for detail is mostly true of the Yaoi aspects as well: you can sort of tell that this was aimed more at women than at gay men, but there's enough depth and complexity to the lead characters that the presentation of their relationship feels more sympathetic than prurient.  This is a good thing given how basically seedy the premise is: the confident and openly gay Dee Laytner has arranged this trip away with the explicit goal of bedding his more closeted partner (in the police sense!) Ryō 'Randy' Maclean, and he's certainly not above getting him drunk to do it.  Thankfully, Dee isn't quite as lecherous as the setup paints him to be, and where many a nineties anime character would have barged onward without restraint, he's generally inclined to rein himself in before anything happens to push the certificate up.  This lets Fake have it both ways, by being a raunchy sex comedy that nevertheless doesn't slip up as a character drama and lets us laugh comfortably at situations which could easily have gone the other way, especially given that we're never a hundred percent sure of where Ryō's proclivities tend.

So that's the first half of Fake: Dee hits on Ryō, Ryō demurs, while also playing up to it sufficiently that we can get a few scenes of two guys making out, and it's all pretty involving, mostly because the pace is relaxed enough that we feel we're hanging out with this pair of likeable characters who we'd be quite happy to see wind up together.  But there's a B-plot bubbling away, introduced by a brief flash of bloody murder early on, and inevitably the B-plot has to become the A-plot before all's said and done.  This isn't disastrous, since it's not like the stuff that was working just vanishes, but the murder mystery that dominates the latter half is hardly an asset: it's obvious who the culprit is, since there aren't any other suspects, their motives are nonsensical, and it's utterly implausible that the local police wouldn't have figured out whodunit.  There's some hand-waving about a cover-up perpetrated by the locals, which is downplayed enough that its stupidity isn't too glaring, but in general, all the shift into more traditional cop drama gets us is a relatively fun action sequence to cap things off with.  Oh, and the sight of Peter Rabbit being stabbed, which after those godawful recent movies is enough to earn an extra point.

Put the two halves together and you end up with something that's definitely unusual - "come for the gay romance, stay for the naff murder mystery!" is a tagline no-one used ever - but generally more successful than not.  Ryō and Dee are engaging company, as are most of the supporting cast, technically it's all more good that not, there are some solid laughs, and the thriller elements kick in just as we've had about enough of our two heroes awkwardly flirting.  If those thriller elements had been great, Fake would be an easy recommendation; given that they're only just about functional, it ends up much more in the category of "Take a look if it sounds like your thing."  Still, all credit to AnimeWorks for putting this out there, it's always a treat to come across a title that doesn't feel quite like anything else.

Sorcerer Hunters OVA, 1996, dir: Kōichi Mashimo

I'll say this for the Sorcerer Hunters OVA, it's nice to see an anime that commits so hard to being a sex comedy, instead of tentatively nosing around the concept.  So often anime has a tendency to be simultaneously prudish and exploitative, portraying sex as something basically naughty that men want to do to women - and that needs to be punished, perhaps via giant hammers or lightning attacks - and never going beyond the odd illicit flash of bare breasts or underpants, there to "service" the (implicitly male) fans and often so unrelated to what's going on elsewhere that the plot has to come to a crashing halt to fit the moment in.

Sorcerer Hunters is having none of that.  We've seen practically the entire cast naked by the end of the second scene, and the remainder of the first of these three episodes involves them all trying fiercely to hook up in various combinations.  It's that rare work that concedes that sex is basically a fun activity, one most people want to do, and even goes so far as to admit that sometimes women want to have sex with women and men want to have sex with men and some folks aren't especially picky and all of this is absolutely fine.  Once you get past the sheer busy lecherousness, it's actually kind of refreshing.  Sure, it's not particularly adult - the general theme here is still using sex as a way into a familiar brand of silly comedy, and there's no question that the targeted viewer remains predominantly male - but it's at least flirting with the notion of adultness.

Would that it could have found a way to do this and be a mite funnier!  Don't get me wrong, the Sorcerer Hunters OVA often is quite funny, and I certainly laughed out loud at various occasions over the course of its ninety minute running time.  But it's not hilarious, or consistent, and even that would be fine if there was a bit more plot to hang the gags and the raunchiness off.  Only the middle episode sees any actual sorcerer hunting going on, or has what you could generously call a story, and thinking about it, that probably makes it the weakest of the three; then again, it's not much of a story, so I'm not sure that disproves my argument.  The problem's not ruinous, but compare this with another Sorcerer Hunters spin-off, the two-part Sorcerer on the Rocks, that actually did manage to deliver a relatively involved narrative without sacrificing the humour, and it feels that bit shallower than even its inherently shallow nature calls for.

On the plus side, if we're making that comparison, Sorcerer Hunters does considerably better on the technical side of things, with animation that's in line with what you'd hope for from a mid-nineties OVA of a TV show: there's enough extra spark here to warrant the step up of an independent release, and Mashimo's energetic direction ensures that the plotlessness and inconsistent humour don't matter too much while you're watching, since there's rarely a slow moment in which to nitpick.  Even with all that, I doubt it's going to stick in my memory, but if you fancy a fantasy comedy anime that's not terribly interested in the fantasy side of things but is absolutely obsessed with sex, this might well be for you.

-oOo-

Sex may allegedly sell, but you certainly get the sense from this bunch that it doesn't often make for good anime.  I suppose that only Very Private Lesson was actively bad, though it was bad enough in its worst moments to cast quite the shadow over everything else, and it's not as though anything was good enough to make up for it.  Fake seems to be well-regarded, and I can certainly see why, but the thriller parts were enormously dumb and could have been fixed with annoying ease.  Looking back, I'm almost wondering whether my personal highlight wasn't Demon Fighter Kocho, and that certainly wasn't a sentence I ever dreamed I'd type when I was watching it.  Oh, and as for the Sorcerer Hunters OVA, while it wasn't anything terribly special, it does have the advantage of having been recently re-released along with the series, so at least you can buy the thing for money without too much bother, which makes quite the change for these reviews!

Next: probably another trip back to the eighties, unless I change my mind between now and next week...

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