This time around, we have a couple of trends continuing, as I work my way steadily through the three volumes of ADV's Crying Freeman releases and the various Lupin the Third movies I've been eagerly laying my hands on. Add to that a couple of newbies, including a title I've been grudgingly meaning to get to practically since this whole exercise began, and the results look a lot like Angel Cop, Crying Freeman: A Taste of Revenge, Lupin the Third: Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty, and Maps...
I confess, I bought Angel Cop more out of a sense of duty than anything else. It's one of a tiny handful of the early Manga Video releases I hadn't seen, and also one of the most notorious. Watching five minutes from the first episode was enough to push it even further down my list of priorities; the combination of animation that was truly horrible in places and outrageous gore hardly seemed a winner. Then there was the disclaimer that Eastern Star tacked on, washing their hands in advance of a title that's famous for basically one thing all these decades later: to the routine failings shared by many of the more conspicuously nasty shows coming out of Japan in this period, Angel Cop adds a sprinkling of antisemitism, making its villains a cabal of evil Jews straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Given that Eastern Star also include an essay on the topic, it's easy to suppose they released this for some pretty sleazy reasons: there's something awfully tacky about their position of "this is deeply offensive and we don't condone it, but hey, if you really want to watch it!" And to pile insult on injury, this has to be the worst print they've issued, and if you told me it was precisely the same crummy print Manga put out all those years ago, I wouldn't doubt you.
After all that, I'm obviously not going to turn around and tell you that just maybe you ought to find a place in your life for Angel Cop, but ... okay, I'm going to do precisely that. Is it vile and offensive? Yeah, it really is, brewing a heady cocktail of ultra-nationalism and xenophobia that's only saved from true ugliness by being muddled and hard to parse. The thing is, Angel Cop hates everyone and anyone. This should make it dreadful, and perhaps does, but there's something oddly egalitarian about the way it refuses to vindicate anybody. Its villains are frequently more sympathetic than its heroes, who are largely monsters; one of the most unpleasant sequences is a torture scene that we can't possibly be expected to be on side with, yet it's enacted by what are ostensibly the good guys. Insomuch as it's possible to have sympathies with the characters, it becomes a matter of switching them on the fly depending on who's least wrong at any given moment.
That's still arguably not a reason to give up three hours of your time, so how about this? Angel Cop has some terrific action. Oh, not in the first episode, perhaps, that really is ugly and shoddy, but the animators largely sort themselves out after that, and there's some real talent operating here. But where the action succeeds, it's more at a conceptual level. Sometimes that means a three-way battle in an apartment building where our loyalties keep shifting as the situation goes from bad to worse; sometimes it means giving the entire back third up to an epic cyborg-versus-psychic-monster-lady showdown. In general, it feels like a compendium of much of what was succeeding at the time, with a trace of Patlabor here and a hint of Bubblegum Crisis there and a dash of Harmagedon-style psychic warfare to top it all off. And though the fashion in which it takes all of this tremendously seriously arguably makes its nastiest elements all the scuzzier, it also provides a grittiness that pushes the violence past the point of easy shock value into genuinely shocking territory. Beyond the midpoint, there are character deaths that really got to me, far more so than ones in many a notionally better title.
Also, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that Angel Cop has one of the best end themes anywhere in pre-twentieth-century anime, a barnstorming musical panic attack that elevates the material just by existing. Honestly, I like that tune so much that I'd have given this a hesitant thumbs up even if it had been precisely as bad as I feared it would be. Heck, I'm still not sure it isn't, and you absolutely need to go in with your eyes open: it's unpleasant in ways that only a tiny handful of anime titles that made it to the US and Europe are, and that bit worse for propagating some utterly shameful views. But if you have any affection for the sort of dark, violent anime that was such a big part of the medium's migration to the West, the fact is that Angel Cop delivers better than most. Just for goodness' sake opt for the new subtitles over the burning garbage heap of a dub Manga vomited out, unless you're determined to push your viewing experience into laughably awful territory.
This second volume of Crying Freeman doesn't have to put up with me making comparisons to its Western live-action adaptation, as I did with the first, since we're well beyond the material covered in the movie. And this is a good thing, because it's becoming increasingly apparent that Crying Freeman the anime needs all the help it can get. Among the many factors not doing it any favours is ADV's original insistence on releasing it over three disks, despite there being no reasonable way of breaking the material up like that. That's all the more apparent with this second volume, because it contains the back end of the story begun halfway through the previous volume and then an episode with a different director and noticeably different style that also makes subtle changes to the format. Until that point, multiple storylines have been bundled into each episode, and that's particularly evident with episode three, which simply moves onto a whole 'nother plot at the halfway mark. Mind you, this actually proves somewhat to its benefit, in that - despite having watched it less than twenty-four hours ago - I can barely remember the first half, in which the titular Freeman squares off against an African terrorist organisation. Whereas the back end, where female lead Emu Hino (now named Hǔ Qīng-Lán for reasons) gets to occupy the spotlight for a while, at least takes the material in a different direction.
Of course, this being Crying Freeman, occupying the spotlight largely means being naked a lot, so maybe it's not all that different. And, look, I've nothing against nudity, but here it makes a breathtaking lack of sense, unless you accept that this is a subtly different universe in which women have unanimously decided that fighting with their clothes on would be plain crazy. Anyway, if that was the extent of the show's horrible attitude to women, I'd be more inclined to give it a pass; episode four opens with a particularly nasty sequence in which a female character is raped and almost murdered that left a sour note throughout what was otherwise the strongest episode yet. Yamauchi isn't a very good director, as his predecessor Nishio wasn't a very good director, but he does bring a greater sense of style that lends much-needed energy. I mean, I don't know that it's good style, but it's something.
Unfortunately, Yamauchi and his team also make the bewildering decision to try even harder to replicate the highly detailed look of the manga this was sourced from. Or rather, that would be a sensible decision if they had the budget to pull it off, but what we instead get is a show that's exactly as cheap-looking as always, but with the addition of complex shading of a sort that's entirely impossible to animate, resulting in visuals that are intermittently great in stills and routinely dreadful in motion. Still, thanks to the aforementioned focus on a single plot for the full fifty minutes, and ignoring as much as possible what an unpleasant note it opens on, episode four marks a slight step in a positive direction.
Indeed, I'd be lying if I said there's nothing to enjoy here. The Crying Freeman universe has a kind of insular weirdness that's sort of appealing, at least while you're watching. Much of what happens makes no objective sense, and lots of it is unpleasant, juvenile, silly, or all three, but those qualities stand out less in the moment. Beneath the tacky animation and the horribly elevator-music score, you can see how this heightened narrative of sex and violence could function, and presumably did in the manga. As such, while it isn't good in any meaningful way, it has a certain hypnotic charm - and a twisted part of me is eager to see what madness the third and final volume has to offer.
I've been so rude about poor Osamu Dezaki in previous posts that it seems hypocritical to turn around and say that he's far and away my favourite Lupin director - yes, even over Hayao Myazaki! - and yet there it is: based on what I've seen, no-one understood the character more or made better use of the formulaic elements that compose the Lupin universe. His approach is now what I expect a Lupin film to be: regular bursts of manic action, slapstick comedy, preposterous technology, multiple plot strands that combine by the end, a varied set of locations, and a MacGuffin of a treasure for everyone to chase after that probably won't end up in our hero's hands by the end.
And here we are with Dezaki's first take on the series, and all those elements are firmly in place, though that isn't to say Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty is precisely business as usual. Its twists include some deeply strange villains modelled on the Freemasons (and not very subtly, since they're called the Three Masons!), a shift in setting to the USA that, given how rooted Lupin is in both Japanese and European culture, feels surprisingly natural, and, least appealingly, the addition of a child character who almost seems intended as some sort of young sidekick. Actually, thinking about it, the plot really is sheer lunacy even by Lupin standards, with highlights including the theft of the entire Statue of Liberty, the subsequent hiding of said statue with what appears to be toilet paper, a bonkers sequence in which Fujiko gets possessed, and an excellent climax as Lupin and the gang square off against the cultists and their giant supercomputer.
That aside, it's very much what you'd hope for as far as these TV specials go, which is to say, pretty impressive. Perhaps you can't quite mistake them for cinema releases, but they're not far off, and while I'm complimenting Dezaki, he does have a knack for stretching a budget. There's some marvellous, complicated action, including a noteworthy run-in with an armoured truck in the first third, a real sense of place and scale that makes the most of the shift to the US, and, here as in the other Lupin movies, Dezaki's many stylistic ticks feel like an asset rather than the annoyance I've found them to be elsewhere. Visuals-wise, the only drawback is a couple of ghastly character designs, the worst of which belongs to aforementioned precocious child genius Michael, who not only feels as if he's wandered in from a much worse film but looks as if he has as well. As flaws go, he's a relatively negligible one, in part because his role turns out to be less intrusive than initially seems like it might be the case and in part because there are narrative reasons for his presence that pay off rewardingly. Still, he makes some early scenes grating, and surely nobody comes to Lupin for grating child characters.
In the end, I'm finding these Dezaki movies to be much of a much, and I wouldn't pretend that any of them are masterpieces in their own right; objectively, none are on a par with Miyasaki's wonderful Castle of Cagliostro. On the other hand, the giddy frivolousness and anything-goes vibe that keeps them clear of classic status is what makes them work tremendously well as Lupin films: Dezaki nailed the tone for this character and his supporting cast, and that tone is immensely fun, even as it never rises to being deep or meaningful. Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty isn't my favourite, the annoying Michael sees to that, but it's definitely memorable, staying within the bounds of an entertaining formula while offering enough tweaks and weird asides to feel very much its own thing.
One of the harsh realisations you come to as a fan of anime, particularly of older anime, is that sometimes this stuff just isn't meant for you. Oh, not in any kind of exclusionist cultural sense; rather, it's often the case that anime is adapted from a manga or novel, and frequently the goal is not to make new converts but to please existing fans, by giving them a glimpse, however brief, of how a story they love would look in motion.
And so it is with Maps, which couldn't race through its space opera tale much faster if its tail was on fire. This is frustrating indeed, because the ingredients are terrific: by the time the alien pirate who's approached our hero Gen to explain that he's the lost descendent of a race of intergalactic mapmakers drops in off-handedly that she's the living incarnation of the city-sized, angelic spaceship she arrived in, I was fully on board with its excitingly crazy universe. But at the same time, therein lies the problem: you can't hurl ideas like that at the viewer at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and expect them to keep up. Or rather, you can, but it doesn't take long for the process to grow wearing. We don't just come to science-fiction to be presented with concepts, after all, we expect them to be articulated via engaging characters and embedded in intriguing plots.
Not that Maps entirely fails to do that. Gen himself is awesomely dull and his girlfriend Hoshimi plays so little part that you wonder why they included her, and even Lipmira the pirate who's also a sentient spaceship is a bit of a cipher once you get past her fantastic character concept and solid design. But once the busy setup of the first episode is over, we do get some villains and side characters who brighten the proceedings, and indeed the second episode, probably the best of the four, tells a perfectly enjoyable and reasonably self-contained story. It's easy to imagine this being genuinely special at perhaps twice its current length, with more time to build the world and cast and simply to take the pedal off the metal occasionally, and to avoid situations like the jarring revelation at the start of the second episode that an entire year has gone by.
That, though, isn't what we get. What we get is a breakneck tour of what was probably a really cool manga, and one that's definitely good enough to give us that sense of how cool the thing we're not getting would be, but rarely works in and of itself. There's simply too much and too big of a story here for under two hours, and there's rarely a point where that isn't apparent. Nor is there enough flair to the telling that we can easily miss that flaw: Nishizawa wrangles some strong moments from his material, but generally his handling is fairly conventional, down to some annoyingly intrusive fan service and a general sense that this should all feel much bigger and weightier than it does. And, despite a title card that feels the need to claim the show has "high quality animation", the animation is actually more in the region of respectable, with some striking imagery but also plenty of evidence of budgetary restraints. That's fine for what Maps was probably intended to be: a taster of a bigger narrative and a reward to its fans. But here we are, two-and-a-half decades later, and sadly all that means is a title that can't quite stand on its own feet.
-oOo-
Ultimately that was quite a surprising batch. I absolutely didn't expect to rate Angel Cop so highly - I'm still not altogether certain I should have, even putting aside its least savoury aspects - and this middle chunk of Crying Freeman was at any rate better than I'd have anticipated given how extremely rough around the edges the first was. Whereas Maps I'd been quite hopeful for, perhaps for no other reason than that it was terribly obscure and I tend to count that as a virtue when it comes to anime. Indeed, only Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty was more or less what I'd hoped it would be, and how bizarre is it that Osamu Dezaki has become the guy I rely on for a quality watch? Very bizarre indeed, that's how.
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