On the one hand, it probably doesn't make much sense to keep splitting off eighties titles into their own posts as I've taken to doing, especially given that they routinely find their way into the nineties posts anyway - and ignoring the obvious point that I shouldn't be covering them in a nineties anime review series full stop! Conversely, one advantage of keeping them separate is that it makes all the more apparent just what seismic changes were occurring by the end of that decade. One common feature every title here has is that it feels like it belongs to a different age in a manner that plenty of releases from only a few years later largely manage to avoid. That's in no way a value judgement; actually, we've got quite a fine line-up for this one. Still, it makes you think and all that.
As for what that line-up consists of, this time around we have Space Adventure Cobra, Gauche the Cellist, Locke the Superman, and Crusher Joe: The Complete OVA Series...
I've been more than critical of director Osamu Dezaki on past occasions, though considerably less so since I came across his Lupin the Third entries, but let me say something thoroughly in his favour while I can: he directs the hell out of Space Adventure Cobra. I mean, I don't know if lots of direction is necessarily the same as good direction, but here the two do sort of line up. Even when nothing terribly exciting is happening, Dezaki's imagination is on overdrive, chucking in innovative techniques and unexpected shots and off-kilter angles and generally going to town with the sort of bravura film-making that only a genuine talent could keep fresh for the span of a hundred minutes. There's pleasure to be had simply in watching what conceit he'll throw up next, and there are a handful of scenes, such as a fight in a room of mirrors, that are among the most visually interesting you'll encounter anywhere in anime from the eighties, probably the best decade for sheer experimentation in anime that there's been. Add to that the fact that the animation is generally stunning and the artwork lovely in its own right, with a bold use of colour and a heft and clarity that you wouldn't necessarily expect to find in early eighties anime, and you have something that's a constant delight for the eyeballs.
That's all to the good, because Space Adventure Cobra's plot is garbage. I've watched the thing twice now, and, even by the standards of early eighties science fiction, this is a barrel of nonsense. It's basically an hour and a half of screenwriter Haruya Yamazaki slowly spelling out a highly contrived set of circumstances involving three space princesses from a roving planet and their big mystical destiny, which ropes in our hero Cobra through reasons just as contrived and even sillier and effectively boils down to that old chestnut of the cosmic power of love. Other than logic, what Yamazaki's script fails most to provide is narrative momentum: events happen, those lead to other events, which are often fights, sometimes the action moves to another planet for a bit, and none of it makes any sense besides that of "this all matters because I've told you it matters."
Like I said, garbage. But garbage with an enjoyable protagonist and a fantastic villain - well, a rather boring villain who looks fantastic and can attack people with his own ribs - and which has one hell of an animation budget put to impressive use in the hands of a director firing on all cylinders. Where does that leave us? If you can lay hands on the blu-ray or even the recent DVD release, then I'd say with a definite recommendation of almost must-see levels, at least if you dig animation enough that you're willing to ignore a risible plot. But if, like me, you're relying on Manga's ancient non-anamorphic DVD, it's hard to be quite so positive, because nothing mutes spectacle like reducing it to a box in the middle of your TV screen. Even then, however, it's worth checking out. Anime so full of bold visual ideas and in love with the medium of animation is rare enough that it ought to be cherished even when it's saddled to such a decrepit non-story as this.
In 1985, Isao Takahata would be among the three founding partners of a certain Studio Ghibli, and would become, alongside Hayao Miyazaki, one of its two key directors and thus one of the two leading figures of Japanese animation for the next couple of decades. But, like Miyazaki, Takahata already had quite the back catalogue even by 1985, and a notable highlight of that is his 1982 adaptation of a short story by the famed and hugely popular (in Japan, anyway) Kenji Miyazawa, titled Sero Hiki no Gōshu and translated for English-speaking audiences as Gauche the Cellist. The concept of that story is so simple that at first glance you might wonder how it stretches to even a sixty-minute runtime: Gauche is the cellist in a professional orchestra, but his inadequate playing is dragging them down, as their conductor makes clear in the opening scene, with a telling off so severe that poor Gauche is in tears by the end of it. But Gauche will get help he'd never have expected, in the shape of four visits from animals - a cat, a cuckoo, a raccoon dog, and a pair of mice - who, each in their own way, teach him a valuable lesson about the hows, whys, and wherefores of music.
It's easy to imagine that obvious fable as, say, a golden-era Disney film. Indeed, it would fit perfectly as a segment of Fantasia. And it's easy, too, to imagine what Miyazaki might have made of the material. Each of those versions could have worked, and could have been lovely and magical and touching, but what makes Takahata's take a truly marvellous thing is the extent to which he refuses the obvious approaches. His Gauche the Cellist avoids being twee or openly message-laden as much as it's possible to imagine any film containing talking animals and made with at least one eye toward an audience of children could be. As would often be the case, his brand of magical realism is tempered by a sort of grouchy pragmatism; in the early running, anyway, Gauche is none too pleased to be receiving these strange visitors, and the cat fares particularly badly at his hands. He's never exactly cruel, but he's not averse to taking out his humiliation on a poor, well-meaning feline by assaulting its eardrums.
The result is quite close to being perfect, perhaps as much so as anything Takahata would go on to make, and with the added advantage that, unlike his masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, it won't leave you as a weeping puddle on the floor. The film does an extraordinary job of keeping its morals and opinions oblique and letting them slide up on the viewer. Often it makes its point simply by presenting beautiful music played beautifully. And always that music is accompanied by deeply appealing animation that mixes gorgeous painted backdrops with exceedingly simple character designs and then combines them in somewhat more complex ways than you might expect, as with a shot that asks the viewer to focus on three planes of simultaneous action at once.
Put it this way, a terrible version of Gauche the Cellist would involve characters spouting on about the ennobling nature of creativity, whereas Takahata, genius that he was, is content to offer up great art and let it percolate, while allowing the film to concentrate on being drily fun or mildly weird or somewhat melancholy or a combination of the three. We're never told explicitly what lessons Gauche has learned, but we see them through the animation and hear them through his eventual playing, and it takes significant confidence in an audience to be that restrained. In particular, a great deal rests on our ability to differentiate between a dreadful playing of a piece of music and an absolutely rapturous version of the same. Takahata would go on to make bigger, better films, and Gauche the Cellist is a sweet, small movie in the grand scheme of things, but I can't imagine any fan of his later work failing to love it - and thanks to a superb Korean edition with English subtitles, it's not even difficult to find.
Let's get the negative out of the way: Locke the Superman is too damn long. Unless you're up to something enormously special, you need quite a bit of plot to fill two whole hours, and Locke the Superman doesn't have much at all. There's a truly glorious ninety minute movie in here, and what we get in its place is a particularly solid one with some impressive high points, but also the constant sense that things should be rattling along a good bit more quickly than they are.
This is most evident in the opening third, which begins by introducing us to the retired psychic warrior Locke as he's recruited from his quiet life of sheep farming by Colonel Yamaki, who's come to the sensible conclusion that only Locke can stand against the burgeoning threat of Lady Kahn, a mysterious figure using ESPers like him for some obviously nefarious ends. And this is a fine, if rather steady, way into the story that immediately grinds to a halt as the movie effectively stops and starts again, to bring on one of those ESPers, Jessica, and let us watch the process whereby she's transformed from innocent school girl to fearsome warrior hellbent on avenging the death of her parents, for which she believes Locke to be responsible. This, too, is fine, and would make for an intriguing opening, except that we've already had an entirely different one. It's a bizarre mistake, since logic and the better part of a century's film-making wisdom say that you cross-cut between the two threads rather than bringing the first to a screeching halt while you laboriously set out the second.
This, unfortunately, is how Locke the Superman goes on, blithely ignoring every opportunity to tell its story by implication or to rush through less crucial developments to get to the good stuff, and it's particularly frustrating because, on a scene-by-scene basis, the film is pretty great. Hiroshi Fukutomi pulls out all the stops to keep things visually enticing, even when that means using some far-too-before-its-time CGI or chucking in a spot of live-action fire. But if that introduces a degree of unintentional silliness, it's generally the case that Locke the Superman is animated very well indeed, with Fukutomi exercising enough imagination and a sure enough sense of composition to keep matters reliably interesting. Heck, a couple of elaborate first person sequences are worth the price of entry alone.
Also, to be clear, it's not that the plot is bad, merely that it routinely takes too long to get where its going. While simple on the surface, the story has plenty of wrinkles. Lady Kahn, though clearly in the wrong, highlights genuine problems with the status quo that Locke finds himself inadvertently defending, and Locke, for all that he seems to regard himself as a pacifist, proves more than willing to get his hands bloody, even when its blood that probably oughtn't to be spilled. Moreover, to its great credit, the film doesn't just flaunt these ideas, it goes a long way toward engaging with them in an unexpected fourth act that's probably its strongest part. With some judicious trimming and careful rearrangement, it's easy to see the shape of a Locke the Superman that would make the leap from good to great, and it's maddening that the creative team failed to recognise that fact - which, mind you, shouldn't be taken as a reason to avoid this if it sounds like it might be your thing.
The last time we met up with Joe and his problem-solver-for-hire band of "crushers", it was with the 1983 movie, and I had some mostly nice things to say about it, with a few definite caveats. And here we are, six years later, with the two nearly hour-long OVAs released together in 1989, and what do you know? I have mostly nice things to say, along with some significant criticisms, at least one of which was also an issue with the movie.
But let's get some positives out there first, eh? Both The Ice Prison and The Ultimate Weapon: Ash look pretty damn good, enough so that they're not far off the level of the film, which was a high level indeed. These are two of the most visually impressive OVAs of a decade that produced a sizeable number of visually impressive OVAs. Aside from a tendency toward static shots that last long enough to be noticeable, there's little to complain about, and the level of craft is enough in itself to keep the material entertaining. If you're partial to the lighter end of eighties sci-fi, the Star Wars school of giant spaceships and odd-looking robots and a total disregard for physics, there's something deeply satisfying about seeing it done out in the trappings of excellent hand-drawn animation, and the painted backdrops alone go a long way toward selling this universe. Its a scruffy, nasty place of cynical totalitarian governments, immoral experiments, and needless warmongering, and that it feels unusually concrete and interconnected is largely down to the quality of the artwork and the coherency of the designs.
This is fortunate because, as with the film, Joe and his crushers simply aren't very interesting protagonists. I can only remember the name of one of them because it's in the title; were it not, I'd be stuck thinking of them as the the one who's the leader, the one who's a girl, the one who's an annoying kid, the one who's a cyborg and grey for some reason, and the one who's a senile robot. Said robot aside, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a single distinguishing trait that any of these characters has. As individuals, they're strikingly dull; as a group they fare better, with a lived-in dynamic that sells the concept that they've been together for a fair amount of time, nonsensical as that seems when their youngest member isn't old enough to drive. Anyway, it's a damn good thing that the supporting characters have more going for them, giving us someone to root for or boo at who has more personality than the average garden fence.
That Joe and his crew are boring is less of an issue with the first OVA, which has enough of a plot that we don't need them to be otherwise. The Ice Prison, which sees the crushers trying to rescue a planetoid full of prisoners at the behest of a government with no end of obvious ulterior motives, is definitely the better of the two; though its broad strokes are predictable, there's enough here to make for an engaging hour. The Ultimate Weapon: Ash loses out by relying on nonstop action that, while impressive, could do with more narrative to prop it up, not to mention heroes that weren't so forgettable. Indeed, to be forgotten was precisely the fate that awaited them, and that's frustrating; there's not enough beautifully animated gritty space opera out there. But it's also understandable, given that there was another franchise from Crusher Joe creator Haruka Takachiho that had mostly the same virtues and corrected its most significant flaw. I'd heartily recommend these OVAs for their combination of grimy SF world building, exciting action, and impressive visuals; but give me a choice between this and the outrageously charismatic Dirty Pair and the latter win every time.
-oOo-
I guess we're mostly in good-but-not-great territory again, aren't we? Though saying that feels somewhat harsh, if only because what Space Adventure Cobra, Locke the Superman, and the Crusher Joe OVAs all have in common is that they look splendid. Still, I'm aware that the average anime viewer doesn't come to the medium for gorgeous animation alone, and the other thing they have in common is some wonky storytelling that lets those visuals down. Of course, the exception to that quibbling is Gauche the Cellist, which is such obviously terrific work from such a noted director that it's bewildering it hasn't been rescued for a Western release. Thank goodness for that Korean edition I mentioned; if you love Ghibli, I highly suggest hopping onto E-bay and grabbing yourself a copy.
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