What's perhaps even more surprising than the fact that I've kept my promise to review some titles that are actually worth watching is that, here on post sixty-six, a substantial two hundred and sixty reviews into our nineties anime drown-a-thon, we're still coming up against some major titles that I've somehow failed to get to before now. Of this batch, I'd say there's only one that's been forgotten by all and sundry; all the rest are fondly remembered by at least someone.
Care to guess which is the odd one out from among Yu Yu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, Video Girl Ai, Jungle Emperor Leo, and 10 Tokyo Warriors...?
Yu Yu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, 1994, dir: Masakatsu IijimaI've grumbled on occasions about these series tie-in movies having not enough in the way of stakes, to the extent that they feel like not much more than extended episodes, and to its credit, Poltergeist Report makes damn certain that's not a concern within its first five minutes - a five minutes in which we basically watch hell freeze over. Okay, it actually gets flooded, but that's still pretty dramatic, right? That there is a movie nailing its colours to the mast and declaring that we're in for some serious action over the next ninety minutes.
And if there's one thing Poltergeist Report is serious about, it's action. Really, that's about all it has going on, and apparently this is a source of contention for fans of the show, who consider this a shallow outcropping that stints on depth and character drama. But hey, I haven't seen the show, so I was just glad I could follow along without the slightest notion of who everyone was. In truth, it couldn't have been easier: the Yu Yu Hakusho film is all too eager to make itself accessible to a new audience. It doesn't go so far as actually introducing anyone or explaining the hows and whys of its world - this is still an anime franchise movie! - but otherwise, it's as accessible as something like this could be. And part of that's down to the fact that, at it's core, it's not much besides a series of imaginatively conceived fight scenes.
It also helps that there's nothing here we haven't encountered elsewhere, even down to quite specific details. The front third sees our heroes trying to defend five elemental shrines that provide mystical protection for the city of Tokyo, and I kept getting distracted by trying to recall all the different places I'd come across that trope. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Because, with a couple of exceptions, Poltergeist Report handles its familiar elements with a ton more flare than they've been presented before. It's a thoroughly lovely looking movie, with great work at every level: the character animation, backgrounds, and effects work are all top notch. But what struck me most was director Iijima's grasp of three dimensions. I don't know that I've seen an anime that so clearly locates its characters in real-feeling spaces, and the use of movement on different axes to give the locations a sense of depth is a hell of trick, one aided by unusually deft editing. Couple that with Yûsuke Honma's remarkable score, which never sticks to a genre for more than a couple of minutes and yet always seems precisely appropriate to what's happening on screen, and you have a film that could coast on its technical virtues alone.
That it doesn't need to is a testament to the strength of the source material. Poltergeist Report could easily have been nothing but empty thrills - presumably, for fans of the show, that's precisely what it is - but if you're unfamiliar with Yu Yu Hakusho, the benefit is a cast and setting with enough specificity and enough of a lived-in feel to get around the lack of plot. As such, though it may be treading familiar ground, with so much going right and so much energy to spare, it still manages to feel fresh, and the result is a treat that I wasn't remotely expecting.
Like many an anime title before it - and specifically like shows such as Oh My Goddess! and My Dear Marie, both of which it closely resembles - Video Girl Ai has the potential to be all sorts of icky. Here's the setup: Yota Moteuchi, despondent over the fact that not only did he inadvertently get the girl he loves to confess her own feelings for someone else but wound up humiliating her in the process, comforts himself with a video tape of the beautiful Ai, who, in a striking opening scene addressed seemingly to the viewer, assures him that it's all going to be okay and she'll be there to make his dreams come true. And this turns out to be meant more literally than you might expect if you'd seen no anime whatsoever, as by some sort of weird science, Ai is sucked Ringu-style from the TV screen and manifests in the real world. The sole problem, if you don't count inherent creepiness as a problem, is that not only does Ai only have a month to make good on her promise before her tape runs out, she's been physically and mentally mucked up by Yota's broken video recorder, with symptoms ranging from a violent temper to unexpected flatchestedness to - wouldn't you know it? - the supposedly impossible ability to fall in love herself.
Perhaps there are countless shows that mine similar themes and end up being all sorts of gross and weird, but that simply don't make it out of Japan? However, based on what I've seen, the country seems to have an almost preternatural ability to take this kind of premise and somehow make it sweet and funny and romantic. It helps that Yota is a decidedly nice guy beneath a slight lack of social skills, and helps more that Ai is quite unlike the dream girl we're initially introduced to. Their relationship is appealing from the off, and at least in the early episodes that lean more into humour, legitimately hilarious in places. Even the supporting cast have unexpected layers, and as the love triangle drifts toward a convoluted love quadrangle, their side dramas are weighty enough to hold their own.
But if there's a reason to track down Video Girl Ai today, nearly three decades on from its original release, it's one of pedigree. That's because it's an early work of a studio then named I.G Tatsunoko, but who'd soon re-brand themselves as Production I.G and go on to be one of the most important and innovative anime studios ever, with the likes of the Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell franchises. More to the present point, they started strong: Video Girl Ai is gorgeous, not only in the sense that it's lushly animated, or that the backgrounds are lavishly painted, or that the character designs are engaging and distinctive, though all those things are true. But in the hands of director Nishikubo, that artistic talent is put to work primarily in service of bringing nuance to the story. There's the way the backgrounds have a certain faded, insubstantial quality, for example, which does a lovely job of capturing that sense of being a love-struck teenager to the point that nothing else in the world feels entirely real, or the unusually realistic designs of the female characters, helping to sell us on the notion that they're actual people with meaningful emotions. In general, both I.G and Nishikubo knock it out of the park, creating not only one of the nicest-looking OVAs I've seen, but one of the best for applying its style in service of its storytelling.
If I had to criticise, my small grumble would be that, probably as a result of squashing a lengthy chunk of the manga into six episodes, the navigation between light-hearted sex comedy and serious romance doesn't go as smoothly as it might, and though both elements are excellent, the comedy is a heck of a lot more fun. Video Girl Ai gets pretty damn dark by its ending, and though it does that as well as it does everything else, it's hard not to miss the earlier fun a little. In general, it's less of a romantic comedy, more of a comedy that turns into a romance, and I guess that might put some people off. For everyone else, a show that's a great comedy that turns into a great romantic drama, looking terrific all the while, should do perfectly well.
Jungle Emperor Leo, 1997, dir: Yoshio TakeuchiI've never had much time for Disney's The Lion King, and I've certainly never considered it the masterpiece many seem to. I'd be lying if I said that had much to do with the widely-held theory that elements of the film were lifted from Osamu Tezuka's manga Jungle Taitei and its subsequent anime adaptations under various titles, though perhaps most recognisably Kimba the White Lion, or the supremely crass way in which Disney responded to those perfectly reasonable allegations. Nevertheless, that knowledge is enough to nix any impulse I might have to reappraise it. At any rate, I offer all this so that, when I say I much preferred Jungle Emperor Leo to The Lion King, you know I'm biased as hell.
With that said, it's bizarre just how much Jungle Emperor Leo feels like a response to the controversy, to The Lion King in particular, and to Disney's canon in general. Take the opening sequence, in which, via some gorgeously lush and kinetic animation, the titular Leo discovers that his mate Lyra has given birth to twin cubs and celebrates by bounding through the jungle, spreading the word to its many denizens. In the light of hindsight, it couldn't feel much more like a shout of "Hey, you know how you ripped off our cultural heritage? Well, here's how that scene would have looked if you'd stuck to the source material." Basically, it's the opening of The Lion King except with more obviously hand-drawn animation and a certain degree of anime stylisation and Tezuka's designs, which are a bit goofy but also charming and vibrant. Oh, and it's fantastic.
From there, Jungle Emperor Leo veers off in some directions that, if you're not familiar with the source material, are likely to come as a surprise. In particular, an early jump to a city - I assumed it to be New York for some reason - introducing a down-on-his-luck swindler named Ham Egg, comes right out of left field. Ham Egg soon finds himself kidnapped by a company that knows, as he doesn't, that the gemstone he's been trying to hock is part of a larger stone that could be a source of limitless energy, and the result is an expedition, with scientist Dr. Moustache and hanger-on Mr Lemonade*, to a certain stretch of jungle we're already familiar with. Oh, and while all that's going on, Leo's son Lune is becoming obsessed with humans thanks to the discovery of a music box, a plot thread that will eventually find him travelling to our world and joining a circus.
You might think that thread would tie back into the main narrative, or indeed that the main narrative would follow a fairly logical course whereby the humans disrespectfully penetrate Leo's home and he's forced to come to terms with their rapacious ways, and yes, that's sort of what happens. But really, there's more just a whole load of stuff going on, loosely connected by the theme of the relationship humankind chooses to have with the natural world and its inhabitants, but which also seems like it's cramming an inordinate amount of Tezuka's manga into a hundred minute run-time regardless of whether it necessarily wants to fit. This might be regarded as a problem, especially if you're the sort who likes nice, tidy stories. For me, it was a ton of fun, and though Lune's plot is dispensable, it's entertaining and gets some of the film's best animation, which is saying a lot given how generally wonderful the movie looks from start to finish.
Going back to my claim in the introduction, it's also the aspect that feels most indebted to Disney: Lune's arc is reminiscent of multiple of their works, including Dumbo, Pinocchio and, most unexpectedly, the engagingly surreal wartime package movies that they knocked out on the cheap. And while all of this may have been my imagination, is it really such a stretch that the Japanese animators, stung by the casual manner in which the beloved company lifted from one of their greatest innovators and then flatly denied it, chose to do a little homaging in return? Whatever the case, if you're an animation nerd, it's one more reason to enjoy Takeuchi's alternately strange, goofy, morbid, and baffling family movie, should you need one. While objectively it might not be The Lion King's equal, it certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, and to be just as as well-loved.
First impressions aren't stacked in favour of 10 Tokyo Warriors. Its opening narration introduces such a heap of cliches that you wonder if the writer lost a bet: Oda Nobunaga, who was actually a demon don't you know, is returning from the dead after four-hundred years and only the ten titular heroes, all of whom have distinctive supernatural powers, can defeat him and save Tokyo, but also in the meantime they have to fight a bunch of other demons for reasons that aren't altogether clear. I swear, that's at least four hackneyed sub-genres of anime all rolled into one! And though unoriginal stories aren't necessarily a problem around these parts, one thing definitely is, and that's subpar animation. From the off, 10 Tokyo Warriors looks cheap, and there was perhaps no worse year for cheap animation than 1999, as the rise of computer assists seemed to temporarily make half the industry forget everything they'd learned in the preceding couple of decades. The result is the sort of show where even fundamentals like walking are off, and the character and monster designs certainly don't do much to redress the balance.
With all of that said, the first three episodes of 10 Tokyo Warriors turned out a lot better than I was expecting. If there's an advantage to such a wildly unoriginal setup, it's that the show can hit the ground running - literally no time is wasted on introducing the characters or their particular crises, all of which are flung at us in media res - and that it can dig a little deeper than some of its influences into the implications of its overly familiar setup. Plus, while it rarely looks better than mediocre (and only ever does thanks to some surprisingly impressive CG and effects work) there's still some neat action on offer, due largely to a greater degree of imagination being applied than is normally the case. Most of the warriors' powers are ones we've seen countless times before, but the uses they're put to and the combinations they're presented in are often ingenious. Indeed, there's a lengthy battle in the third episode against what's effectively a mobile wormhole that's one of the most genuinely thrilling scraps I've seen in a long while. In short, while the animation may not be up to much, the uses it's put to just about redeem it.
Oh, but there's one last problem. 10 Tokyo Warriors is not one but two OVAs, both adapting chunks of what I take to be a long-running manga, and the result is two halves that fail to fit together in all sorts of ways both big and small. The plus side is that the second part looks distinctly better, as you'd expect, since it arrived a couple of years later, and the virtues largely carry over too: the ingenuity, the rapid-fire storytelling, and a rather terrific score, which borrows from a host of genres. However, it's downright frustrating to be informed in voice-over that between episodes three and four, we've somehow missed numerous important events, including the death of one significant character and the introduction of another, and its equally annoying that the second part neither builds off the setup in the first nor gets round to addressing what we've been led to assume is the core conflict: not once does Nobunaga show up outside of the introduction at the very beginning.
I guess, put together, all of that makes 10 Tokyo Warriors somewhat hard to recommend. And yet, I'm going to anyway, for the simple reason that I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its often considerable flaws. Because ultimately, they don't matter a great deal; the imaginative writing and direction make up for the uninspiring animation and that both arcs are satisfying in their own right means the whole two-chunks-of-a-bigger-story thing is less frustrating than it ought to be. Sure, it's no classic, and it's probably not worth hunting for, but should you happen on a cheap copy, it's a genuinely worthwhile find.
-oOo-
That was a pretty marvellous selection, and - to make another somewhat risky promise - I've got enough of those posts finished in draft to say that this is going to be more the standard that the exception for a good while to come. While inevitably I've watched the odd bit of rubbish over the last few months, its been in the minority to an extent that hasn't been consistently true since the early days of these reviews. Why that should be the case, I don't know; it's not like I've been any more discriminating, goodness knows! But it means that there are plenty of reviews of titles that don't completely suck on the horizon...
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* Because, yes, all the evidence suggests that Tezuka named his human characters after whatever he was looking at in that precise moment.
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