The posts where I randomly talk about whatever happens to come off the to-watch shelf have been getting increasingly uncommon of late, but to make up for it, this is about as random as it could get: a couple of very different flavours of sci-fi, a bit of raunchy comedy, and is this the first straight-up romance anime that I've covered? I think it might be.
Put all that together and we have: Golden Boy, Megazone 23 Part 2: Please Give Me Your Secret, Marriage, and Harlock Saga...
Marriage, 1995, dir: Kazuhiro Ozawa
It's hard to know what to make of the 1995 OVA Marriage. Even pinning down precisely what it is hasn't been as easy as I'd have hoped, and though the most plausible suggestion I've come across is that it's an adaptation of one of those dating simulator games that are such an untranslatable feature of the Japanese cultural landscape, I'm not altogether sure that's the case. It certainly has to be the epitome of AnimeWorks' fetish for releasing anything they could lay their hands on, though who they were imagining the target audience to be is anyone's guess. Oh, I totally see an argument for bringing romance anime over, and that's kind of what I was expecting this to be. But, based largely on this release and its reviews, it seems fair to say that, at least in 1995, what counted as romantic in Japan was very much not what counted as romantic in the US or Europe. Because Marriage is hella unromantic. It's actually kind of forcibly anti-romantic for the most part, in its headlong focus on a single goal at the exclusion of all else. And you can guess what that goal is, right? It's there in the title.
What we have amounts to two short stories. At the time, I thought that many of the cast of twenty-something career women and their male friends and co-workers carried over from one to the other, but having read the back of the box, they're apparently different people who just look the same. Anyway, in the first, the group try and find a match for the shy Shizuka, by any and all means necessary, and the result is a moderately charming insight into the life of Japanese career women in the mid-nineties, along with the arcane mysteries of the dating scene they put themselves though. The characters are shallow, but they're deftly portrayed, and though she's subjected to a tooth-grittingly ghastly date at one point, there's the sense that things are going to work out okay for Shizuka. But then comes along episode two - with a different writer, notably - and boy does everything just explode into a horrible mess. In this one, the clones of the cast from part one are four sisters trying to fix up their fifth sibling, Kiyomi, the only one not yet to tie the knot. And wouldn't you know it, even as the topic gets raised, a suitor arrives, in the shape of Mikimaro, who's been hankering after Kiyomi in secret for goodness knows how long. Well, what can the sisters do except school him on how best to propose?
The correct answer is anything, because Mikimaro is a creepy little sod without a single redeeming feature, and the closest he comes to displaying an actual personality is when he loses his temper at Kiyomi for not taking him seriously, a genuinely shocking moment that couldn't ring many more alarm bells if it tried. Add to that the fact that Kiyomi is clearly hung up on her philandering ex, and her seemingly overwhelming indifference to Mikimaro, and the strong implication that she has no real interest in getting married full stop, and the result is excruciating, not to mention impossible to parse as entertainment. Surely we're not supposed to be on man-child Mikimaro's side? Surely our role as audience members isn't to will Kiyomi into this miserable union? Who the hell knows? But it's an agonising experience, all right.
What that means is one episode that's vaguely interesting on the level of cultural insight, though certainly not as romance, and one episode that's actively uncomfortable on any level whatsoever. And neither of them has anything remotely exciting happening on the level of animation or design, though they look fine as these things go, and certainly neither impresses with their achingly bland music. So unless you're researching dating practices in nineties Japan, or obsessively picking up AnimeWorks' bewildering catalogue so that you can be snarky about it on your blog, it's tough to say why anyone might consider tracking this one down. I won't pretend it wasn't a little fascinating, but then so are car crashes, and you probably oughtn't to spend money to watch one of those.
Harlock Saga, 1999, dir: Yoshio Takeuchi
It makes me a touch sad that, with the occasional exception, I can't quite fall in love with the works of Leiji Matsumoto, because I feel like I should. And that's truer of Harlock Saga than most of what I've come across, which has all the virtues of the better entries - the grand scope, the dizzy romanticism, the treatment of absolutely preposterous notions with such straight-faced solemnity that you can't but buy into them - and adds a whole extra layer of ludicrous ambition. For Harlock Saga, you see, is not just any Matsumoto story, but an adaptation of Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first part of his vast musical drama Der Ring des Nibelungen.
That right: it's Wagner dressed up as space opera. And if you're anything like me, and even if you don't like Wagner - do people like Wagner these days? - it's awfully hard not to get excited about the sheer, crazy aspiration of that prospect. Not only that, but if anyone in the world of manga and anime was likely to be a solid fit for a science-fictional Wagner adaptation, it would surely be Matsumoto, whose Harlock universe operates in precisely that sort of mythic register, where everything and everyone is larger than life and the fates of entire galaxies rest on the shoulders of a stoic few. Indeed, there's an argument to be made that the Harlock-verse actually works better with an injection of Wagner, since it means that the material is firing on all the same cylinders as the general atmosphere.
And that's not mentioning the production standards. Aside from the odd bit of misjudged CG work, this is as good looking as any Matsumoto adaptation, and he's a writer who invariably seems to get the deluxe treatment. That CG aside, there's nothing that would place it at the back end of the 1990's; indeed, a faithful adherence to Matsumoto's distinctive aesthetic gives it such an air of timelessness that it could easily have been made ten or even twenty years earlier. Probably the animation was computer-assisted to a greater or lesser degree, but it certainly looks hand drawn, and wonderfully so. There are no end of elaborate shots, all pulled off with considerable flourish, and the animators rise to the challenge of conjuring the scale and majesty that's integral to such a story. Though arguably even better is Kaoru Wada's score, which draws extensively on Wagner's influence without lifting directly - the exception, perhaps inevitably, being an appearance of that most famous of pieces, Ride of the Valkyries. At any rate, pair that music and those images together and the results are frequently magical.
So what's the problem? The problem is exactly the same one I've had with every Harlock story I've come across: Matsumoto has no time for those aspects of storytelling that everyone else considers to be more or less essential. Want even a hint of character development? Not a chance! Heck, for the most part, the cast of Harlock Saga don't even do anything, and that's truest of Harlock himself, who effectively stands around being inscrutable until he's required to act, for all of about thirty seconds, in the last of the show's six episodes. As outrageously epic as the proceedings may be, on a minute by minute basis, they're hollow, a tale of puppets that could never be mistaken for living, breathing people. Truth be told, that's less bothersome here than elsewhere - it's Wagner, for crying out loud, it's not like we really need relatable, dynamic characters - and for that reason, I'd rate this that bit higher than other Matsumoto adaptations I've come across. Still, it's a shame, because as special as Harlock Saga undoubtedly is, it wouldn't have taken a lot to nudge it into genuine masterpiece territory.
-oOo-
Unsurprisingly, the results were just as random as the choice of titles: Harlock Saga and Megazone Part 2 are both pretty splendid, though with obvious flaws, Golden Boy bounces between good and dreadful, and Marriage ... well, the first episode was okay, I guess? Then again, the second episode is among the most painful things I've ever sat through, so overall it's pretty damn wretched.
Next time around: we're heading back to the eighties again without a hint of shame, because I'm not really pretending anymore that I'm keeping this Sisyphean lunacy to a single decade!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
Put all that together and we have: Golden Boy, Megazone 23 Part 2: Please Give Me Your Secret, Marriage, and Harlock Saga...
Golden
Boy, 1995, dir: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Here's what happens in the first episode of the six part OVA Golden Boy: twenty-five-year-old Kintaro begs his way into a job at a software development firm staffed entirely by women, then proceeds to screw up repeatedly while behaving like a massive sex pest. (He has a particular fondness for rubbing himself on toilets.) He somehow manages to get away with this behaviour for a few weeks, until a particularly catastrophic mistake sees the studio's latest project deleted and him unceremoniously fired. But there's a twist! While Kintaro was giving every impression of being useless, he was actually learning everything the women around him knew, and he single-handedly rewrites the software, only in a fraction of the time and better! Needless to say, his former boss deeply regrets firing the young genius, but too late, he's already moved on - because, as will become apparent from the subsequent episodes, Kintaro's basically the Littlest Hobo if the Littlest Hobo was a colossal pervert instead of, you know, a dog.
What's galling - I mean, other than the entire concept! - is that when Golden Boy isn't embracing this formula, it's much, much better and often legitimately funny. I mean, I guess there are people who find watching a guy rubbing himself on a toilet funny, what with humour being subjective and everything, so perhaps what I mean is that it's legitimately clever and novel in its humour: when the stentorian announcer who closes off each episode first reveals the secret behind Kintaro's weird lifestyle, for instance, it's a truly excellent gag. And the better episodes stray far enough from the core idea of "Kintaro behaves like a letch, then is better than women at everything" to become genuinely entertaining stories in their own right. For the most part, also, Golden Boy gets better as it goes along, and the last two episodes are comfortably the best. For that matter, when Kintaro isn't being a jerk who literally can't see women as human beings, he's kind of a decent guy, one with a sound work ethic and a fascinating outlook: he roams the land taking job after job because he sees life as an opportunity to learn as much as possible.
Ultimately, though, what made it tough for me to dislike Golden Boy the way I felt I was going to based on the first episode is that it looks terrific. I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the best-looking OVAs I've encountered, and there are scenes that wouldn't embarrass themselves in a feature from the time; a bike versus motorbike race in the penultimate episode is a tremendous sequence, not to mention a comic high point, and the opening credits are a sterling piece of animation in their own right. Indeed, there's a real sense of love for the medium, as evidenced by the final episode, which is set in an anime studio and manages to wrap up proceedings on a far less sour note than the one they began on. The result is a show that I flat-out hated at points, but also one that I can see why there's so much affection for out there. I found too much of it obnoxious to go that far, but if ecchi humour is your thing, there are reasons why Golden Boy is considered a paragon of that subgenre.
What's galling - I mean, other than the entire concept! - is that when Golden Boy isn't embracing this formula, it's much, much better and often legitimately funny. I mean, I guess there are people who find watching a guy rubbing himself on a toilet funny, what with humour being subjective and everything, so perhaps what I mean is that it's legitimately clever and novel in its humour: when the stentorian announcer who closes off each episode first reveals the secret behind Kintaro's weird lifestyle, for instance, it's a truly excellent gag. And the better episodes stray far enough from the core idea of "Kintaro behaves like a letch, then is better than women at everything" to become genuinely entertaining stories in their own right. For the most part, also, Golden Boy gets better as it goes along, and the last two episodes are comfortably the best. For that matter, when Kintaro isn't being a jerk who literally can't see women as human beings, he's kind of a decent guy, one with a sound work ethic and a fascinating outlook: he roams the land taking job after job because he sees life as an opportunity to learn as much as possible.
Ultimately, though, what made it tough for me to dislike Golden Boy the way I felt I was going to based on the first episode is that it looks terrific. I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the best-looking OVAs I've encountered, and there are scenes that wouldn't embarrass themselves in a feature from the time; a bike versus motorbike race in the penultimate episode is a tremendous sequence, not to mention a comic high point, and the opening credits are a sterling piece of animation in their own right. Indeed, there's a real sense of love for the medium, as evidenced by the final episode, which is set in an anime studio and manages to wrap up proceedings on a far less sour note than the one they began on. The result is a show that I flat-out hated at points, but also one that I can see why there's so much affection for out there. I found too much of it obnoxious to go that far, but if ecchi humour is your thing, there are reasons why Golden Boy is considered a paragon of that subgenre.
Megazone 23 Part 2: Please Give Me Your Secret, 1986, dir: Ichirô Itano
If you haven't seen the original Megazone 23 in roughly the last ten minutes, this second part is assuredly not for you. It couldn't make less effort to fill in vital back story or to avoid chucking the viewer in at the deep end and then not much caring whether they swim. However, if you have seen Megazone 23 recently, you might find yourself equally as confused; months have elapsed since its ambiguous finale with little explanation, and perhaps more crucially, all of the character designs have changed, as indeed has the entire aesthetic, replacing its softer, curvier, cartoonier look with something a good deal busier and grittier.
And that's Megazone 23: Part 2 all over, really. I genuinely get the impression it considers itself a faithful sequel: the actual part 2 that it claims to be, and so effectively the second half of a single entity. Plot-wise that makes a considerable amount of sense; we're watching the same characters in broadly the same scenario, and all the dangling threads left over by Megazone 23's very open ending are picked up and dealt with to at least some degree. So it's surprising how tonally at odds it manages to feel. It's hard to fault the creators for that decision: our protagonist, Shogo Yahagi, is a very different person in very different circumstances to the cheerful, naive hero of the first part, and he can't unlearn that movie's twists. But it doesn't altogether explain how much darker everything has suddenly got, let alone how violent. I'm not easily shocked, but, in part because the first movie was so relatively tame, I was taken aback by how gory this second entry got in places: one sequence in particular is downright nasty. And for that matter, there's a sex scene that makes the one in Megazone 23, and indeed those in ninety-nine percent of anime that isn't actual hentai, look awfully timid.
Then there's the animation - and I hardly know what to say about the animation. I don't doubt for a second that it cost a lot of money, because it's littered with the sorts of ambitious shots that don't come cheap, and the level of detail is overwhelming in places, to an extent that I've seen almost nowhere else in anime. It's tremendously busy work, and tremendously show-offy, and at the same time, it's frequently a little bit terrible. Countless shots are subtly but distinctively off in a manner that you wouldn't expect from experienced animators, as though everyone was so caught up in the ambition of what they were doing that they never entirely got around to finishing anything.
Taken all together, it really is befuddling: it feels like a sequel made by people who were given all the resources they could need on the back of a successful first entry, and were determined to do it justice and to make its fans happy and to draw its narrative to a satisfactory conclusion, and at the same time didn't really like it very much and secretly wanted to chuck the lot out the window and do their own thing. Really, Megazone 23: Part 2 is closer to what would have happened if Akira had continued in the vein of its opening twenty minutes for its entire length, only with the plot of Megazone 23 intruding every so often. And as much as I've probably made this sound terrible, the truth is that I found it exhilarating, and in many ways exactly the sequel I'd have hoped would follow the fun, imaginative, but ever-so-slightly lacklustre first entry. Megazone 23: Part 2 is nuts, and a mess, and for every moment of brilliance, there's a shot that's totally wonky or an element that doesn't work, but by damn its not short of energy or risk-taking or moments of visual brilliance.
And that's Megazone 23: Part 2 all over, really. I genuinely get the impression it considers itself a faithful sequel: the actual part 2 that it claims to be, and so effectively the second half of a single entity. Plot-wise that makes a considerable amount of sense; we're watching the same characters in broadly the same scenario, and all the dangling threads left over by Megazone 23's very open ending are picked up and dealt with to at least some degree. So it's surprising how tonally at odds it manages to feel. It's hard to fault the creators for that decision: our protagonist, Shogo Yahagi, is a very different person in very different circumstances to the cheerful, naive hero of the first part, and he can't unlearn that movie's twists. But it doesn't altogether explain how much darker everything has suddenly got, let alone how violent. I'm not easily shocked, but, in part because the first movie was so relatively tame, I was taken aback by how gory this second entry got in places: one sequence in particular is downright nasty. And for that matter, there's a sex scene that makes the one in Megazone 23, and indeed those in ninety-nine percent of anime that isn't actual hentai, look awfully timid.
Then there's the animation - and I hardly know what to say about the animation. I don't doubt for a second that it cost a lot of money, because it's littered with the sorts of ambitious shots that don't come cheap, and the level of detail is overwhelming in places, to an extent that I've seen almost nowhere else in anime. It's tremendously busy work, and tremendously show-offy, and at the same time, it's frequently a little bit terrible. Countless shots are subtly but distinctively off in a manner that you wouldn't expect from experienced animators, as though everyone was so caught up in the ambition of what they were doing that they never entirely got around to finishing anything.
Taken all together, it really is befuddling: it feels like a sequel made by people who were given all the resources they could need on the back of a successful first entry, and were determined to do it justice and to make its fans happy and to draw its narrative to a satisfactory conclusion, and at the same time didn't really like it very much and secretly wanted to chuck the lot out the window and do their own thing. Really, Megazone 23: Part 2 is closer to what would have happened if Akira had continued in the vein of its opening twenty minutes for its entire length, only with the plot of Megazone 23 intruding every so often. And as much as I've probably made this sound terrible, the truth is that I found it exhilarating, and in many ways exactly the sequel I'd have hoped would follow the fun, imaginative, but ever-so-slightly lacklustre first entry. Megazone 23: Part 2 is nuts, and a mess, and for every moment of brilliance, there's a shot that's totally wonky or an element that doesn't work, but by damn its not short of energy or risk-taking or moments of visual brilliance.
It's hard to know what to make of the 1995 OVA Marriage. Even pinning down precisely what it is hasn't been as easy as I'd have hoped, and though the most plausible suggestion I've come across is that it's an adaptation of one of those dating simulator games that are such an untranslatable feature of the Japanese cultural landscape, I'm not altogether sure that's the case. It certainly has to be the epitome of AnimeWorks' fetish for releasing anything they could lay their hands on, though who they were imagining the target audience to be is anyone's guess. Oh, I totally see an argument for bringing romance anime over, and that's kind of what I was expecting this to be. But, based largely on this release and its reviews, it seems fair to say that, at least in 1995, what counted as romantic in Japan was very much not what counted as romantic in the US or Europe. Because Marriage is hella unromantic. It's actually kind of forcibly anti-romantic for the most part, in its headlong focus on a single goal at the exclusion of all else. And you can guess what that goal is, right? It's there in the title.
What we have amounts to two short stories. At the time, I thought that many of the cast of twenty-something career women and their male friends and co-workers carried over from one to the other, but having read the back of the box, they're apparently different people who just look the same. Anyway, in the first, the group try and find a match for the shy Shizuka, by any and all means necessary, and the result is a moderately charming insight into the life of Japanese career women in the mid-nineties, along with the arcane mysteries of the dating scene they put themselves though. The characters are shallow, but they're deftly portrayed, and though she's subjected to a tooth-grittingly ghastly date at one point, there's the sense that things are going to work out okay for Shizuka. But then comes along episode two - with a different writer, notably - and boy does everything just explode into a horrible mess. In this one, the clones of the cast from part one are four sisters trying to fix up their fifth sibling, Kiyomi, the only one not yet to tie the knot. And wouldn't you know it, even as the topic gets raised, a suitor arrives, in the shape of Mikimaro, who's been hankering after Kiyomi in secret for goodness knows how long. Well, what can the sisters do except school him on how best to propose?
The correct answer is anything, because Mikimaro is a creepy little sod without a single redeeming feature, and the closest he comes to displaying an actual personality is when he loses his temper at Kiyomi for not taking him seriously, a genuinely shocking moment that couldn't ring many more alarm bells if it tried. Add to that the fact that Kiyomi is clearly hung up on her philandering ex, and her seemingly overwhelming indifference to Mikimaro, and the strong implication that she has no real interest in getting married full stop, and the result is excruciating, not to mention impossible to parse as entertainment. Surely we're not supposed to be on man-child Mikimaro's side? Surely our role as audience members isn't to will Kiyomi into this miserable union? Who the hell knows? But it's an agonising experience, all right.
What that means is one episode that's vaguely interesting on the level of cultural insight, though certainly not as romance, and one episode that's actively uncomfortable on any level whatsoever. And neither of them has anything remotely exciting happening on the level of animation or design, though they look fine as these things go, and certainly neither impresses with their achingly bland music. So unless you're researching dating practices in nineties Japan, or obsessively picking up AnimeWorks' bewildering catalogue so that you can be snarky about it on your blog, it's tough to say why anyone might consider tracking this one down. I won't pretend it wasn't a little fascinating, but then so are car crashes, and you probably oughtn't to spend money to watch one of those.
It makes me a touch sad that, with the occasional exception, I can't quite fall in love with the works of Leiji Matsumoto, because I feel like I should. And that's truer of Harlock Saga than most of what I've come across, which has all the virtues of the better entries - the grand scope, the dizzy romanticism, the treatment of absolutely preposterous notions with such straight-faced solemnity that you can't but buy into them - and adds a whole extra layer of ludicrous ambition. For Harlock Saga, you see, is not just any Matsumoto story, but an adaptation of Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first part of his vast musical drama Der Ring des Nibelungen.
That right: it's Wagner dressed up as space opera. And if you're anything like me, and even if you don't like Wagner - do people like Wagner these days? - it's awfully hard not to get excited about the sheer, crazy aspiration of that prospect. Not only that, but if anyone in the world of manga and anime was likely to be a solid fit for a science-fictional Wagner adaptation, it would surely be Matsumoto, whose Harlock universe operates in precisely that sort of mythic register, where everything and everyone is larger than life and the fates of entire galaxies rest on the shoulders of a stoic few. Indeed, there's an argument to be made that the Harlock-verse actually works better with an injection of Wagner, since it means that the material is firing on all the same cylinders as the general atmosphere.
And that's not mentioning the production standards. Aside from the odd bit of misjudged CG work, this is as good looking as any Matsumoto adaptation, and he's a writer who invariably seems to get the deluxe treatment. That CG aside, there's nothing that would place it at the back end of the 1990's; indeed, a faithful adherence to Matsumoto's distinctive aesthetic gives it such an air of timelessness that it could easily have been made ten or even twenty years earlier. Probably the animation was computer-assisted to a greater or lesser degree, but it certainly looks hand drawn, and wonderfully so. There are no end of elaborate shots, all pulled off with considerable flourish, and the animators rise to the challenge of conjuring the scale and majesty that's integral to such a story. Though arguably even better is Kaoru Wada's score, which draws extensively on Wagner's influence without lifting directly - the exception, perhaps inevitably, being an appearance of that most famous of pieces, Ride of the Valkyries. At any rate, pair that music and those images together and the results are frequently magical.
So what's the problem? The problem is exactly the same one I've had with every Harlock story I've come across: Matsumoto has no time for those aspects of storytelling that everyone else considers to be more or less essential. Want even a hint of character development? Not a chance! Heck, for the most part, the cast of Harlock Saga don't even do anything, and that's truest of Harlock himself, who effectively stands around being inscrutable until he's required to act, for all of about thirty seconds, in the last of the show's six episodes. As outrageously epic as the proceedings may be, on a minute by minute basis, they're hollow, a tale of puppets that could never be mistaken for living, breathing people. Truth be told, that's less bothersome here than elsewhere - it's Wagner, for crying out loud, it's not like we really need relatable, dynamic characters - and for that reason, I'd rate this that bit higher than other Matsumoto adaptations I've come across. Still, it's a shame, because as special as Harlock Saga undoubtedly is, it wouldn't have taken a lot to nudge it into genuine masterpiece territory.
-oOo-
Unsurprisingly, the results were just as random as the choice of titles: Harlock Saga and Megazone Part 2 are both pretty splendid, though with obvious flaws, Golden Boy bounces between good and dreadful, and Marriage ... well, the first episode was okay, I guess? Then again, the second episode is among the most painful things I've ever sat through, so overall it's pretty damn wretched.
Next time around: we're heading back to the eighties again without a hint of shame, because I'm not really pretending anymore that I'm keeping this Sisyphean lunacy to a single decade!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
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