I suppose that if I planned these better, I'd make an effort to balance weaker titles with better ones, and thus never end up with posts like this one where ... well, you'll see, but this ain't the greatest ever selection. As much as I tend to like them, this may have something to do with the fact that we're back on the shorter titles, with four OVAs that come in at less than an hour apiece. Sometimes that can mean you're in for a masterpiece of concise storytelling of a sort that anime seems uniquely attuned to delivering, and sometimes it means there wasn't the material for anything longer, or that a dodgy distributor is chucking out titles that got canned before they could go anywhere.
And now that your expectations are suitably lowered, let's take a look at Legend of the Last Labyrinth, Time Bokan: Royal Revival, Sword for Truth, and Spirit Warrior: A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms...
Legend of the Last Labyrinth, 1997, dir: Ko Suzuki
It's always best to have a spot of originality, of course, but if we have to be given recycled ideas, it's far better that the creators play straight with us. So it goes with Legend of the Last Labyrinth, also known by the more logical title of Princess Rouge: the creators know their tropes, they know we know those tropes, and they have the decency to lay them out with a minimum of fuss. So when an amnesiac young woman drops on our teenage hero Yūsuke literally out of the sky, it's a safe bet that the two of them are going to fall for each other, perhaps after a spot of initial bickering, and sure enough, five minutes and a cute montage later, that's what's happened. And since she fell out of a magical portal, along with an important-looking trinket, it's fair to assume she'll have powers of her own and some sort of meaningful destiny, facts that have been confirmed before the first episode is done. And when her two sisters arrive, what are the odds that they'll insist on moving in with Yūsuke and making his life hell? We've all seen Oh! My Goddess, right? Or Tenchi Muyo? Or one of the million or so anime that follow the model they helped establish?
The plus side, then, is that Legend of the Last Labyrinth burns through all its necessary setup in the course of barely an episode, which is a handy thing to do when you're a two episode OVA - though you assume the creators didn't realise they were going to get cancelled, because yes, this is yet another of those titles that was released incomplete by the good folks at AnimeWorks. Anyway, it's for the best that they don't squander an hour of everyone's time by setting out ingredients we've seen on plenty of occasions before. However, the negative is that, with everything happening at such a breakneck pace, it's hard to feel particularly engaged. The characters are pleasant, with enough glimmers of characterisation to suggest they might have grown to be genuinely appealing, but how are we supposed to invest in the fates of Yūsuke and Rouge, let alone in the romance between them, when all the scene-setting has been whisked over in the blink of an eye?
There are indications that, had Legend of the Last Labyrinth survived, it would have started to carve its own path. One fun wrinkle, for example, is that the magical kingdom Rouge has arrived from is actually the underworld of mythology; another is a genuinely vindictive baddie who seems to be hated by his own subordinates as much as by anyone. Put that together with some attractive animation - the backgrounds are genuinely lovely, though the frequent reuse of footage so early on feels pretty cheap - and a bouncy end theme, along with the lack of any significant missteps, and it's enough that by the end of the second episode, it's annoying to know there won't ever be more. Annoying, yes, but not exactly heartbreaking; Legend of the Last Labyrinth is a nice show, enough so that it's apparent why AnimeWorks felt justified in chucking it out unfinished, but its eagerness to rush through its familiar aspects to get to the good stuff feels a little tragic when that good stuff would never materialise.
Time Bokan: Royal Revival, 1993, dir: Akira Shigino
Here's the thing: there's no way I can write a fair review of Time Bokan: Royal Revival, a comedy knock-off sequel to a long-running seventies show that I haven't seen, which also references a whole bunch of other shows I haven't seen, and in fact pretty much totally relies on a knowledge of seventies Japanese TV that it would be damn near impossible for me to acquire. So I guess that with the best will in the world (plus the ten minutes I spent researching on Wikipedia) this is still going to be my first openly and unapologetically unfair review.
With that said, the gimmick is this: a remake of the classic anime series Time Bokan is in the works, and since the original had a superfluity of near-identical villains, it's been decided that the only reasonable way to settle on one trio for this relaunch is with a race in their signature vehicles. Or, to put it another way, it's Wacky Races. And I feel like I ought to caveat that somehow, but no, I really can't: it's Wacky Races, but with the bad guys and gals from Time Bokan. Or the first episode is, anyway; the second sees the winners attempting to get up to no good and inadvertently tangling with not only the heroes of Time Bokan itself but those of Gatchaman, Casshern, Speed Racer, and more from legendary production house Tatsunoku.
If all of that was gibberish to you, I can say with absolute certainty that Time Bokan: Royal Revival will be too. And if only some of it was gibberish - I at least could recognise those characters, though I'm not overly familiar with them - then you're still likely to miss out on some sixty or seventy percent of the jokes. With that in mind, I feel a bit guilty for suggesting that, even with the appropriate cultural baggage, they still wouldn't be that funny, and also that, a few extremely specific gags aside, they all boil down to the one brand of humour: everything the villains try is doomed to backfire spectacularly, hurting them more than it does anyone else. There are definitely some laughs here - and it helps that the characters are pretty adorable, like all the best cartoon baddies - but for the average Western viewer, a lot of this will be inscrutable and a lot of what's left will raise a smile more than a guffaw.
With that said, the show looks good, kind of, except that it's devoting an awful lot of energy to emulating the scrappy artistry of anime from two decades earlier, resulting in some above average animation doing a respectable impression of animation that kind of sucks. And the opening and end songs are damn fine villain anthems, with the caveat that the closer goes on for way too long, a complaint I don't recall ever having about an anime theme before. Then again, like I said at the top, Time Bokan: Royal Revival is the point in this grand venture where I have to admit I'm out of my depth, so who knows, maybe that was another joke I didn't get? I'm willing to believe that, if you were in on every last reference, this would be a treat. For everyone else? There's fun to be had, but perhaps no more than two back-to-back episodes of Wacky Races would provide, all told.
Sword for Truth, 1990, dir: Osamu Dezaki
Recently someone tried to convince me that I was underestimating director Osamu Dezaki, and they made such a compelling argument that I was determined to come at my least favourite anime director with fresh eyes. So it's unfortunate that the first new work of his I should encounter is Sword for Truth, a fifty-minute OVA that has all his worst tendencies on display and then some. Certainly, all of Dezaki's weird visual gimmicks are to be found here, among them a gross overuse of speed lines, the stuttering repetition of a brief burst of action three, four, or five times in a row, and - in practically the opening shot! - his bizarre habit of cutting to an internal view of a body, in this case the skeleton of a horse.
That one actually works, in context; it's a creepy note to start on, if nothing else. Indeed, the opening five minutes, in which samurai battle a gigantic white tiger, were decent enough that I almost wondered why Sword for Truth had such a toxic reputation, even among the mostly risible releases that made up Manga's budget Collection range. But by the ten minute mark, I was wondering no more, as Dezaki trotted out the remainder of his recurring bad habits. In particular, he seems to have purposefully sucked the energy out of the endless action sequences, so badly are they handled, and the film treats its women with striking contempt, not so much because of the staggering amounts of nudity and sex as because none of them approach becoming actual characters. Not that the male cast are nuanced, but the way in which both the women we spend any time with fall head over heels in lust with our protagonist for no apparent reason is galling, and that any shred of motivation they might have vanishes the moment they do so actively hurts the material. By far the worst is the swindler that our antihero Sakaki humiliates early on, who then tracks him down to sleep with him, tries to kill him, decides she's in love with him, and vanishes from the plot altogether.
Or maybe she died and I wasn't paying attention. Honestly, it's possible. It's startling how dull a fifty-minute film that consists of almost nothing but sex and violence manages to be. Conceivably, too, she was slated to return in a later episode; the ending leaves enough unresolved that it's obvious there was intended to be one. And this is extra irritating in that the film concludes on the closest it has to a good scene, a moody dialogue exchange that does more to establish a theme than the entirety of what's gone before. Perhaps this is why Dezaki bothers me so: as often as he seems to have turned out hackwork, he evidently wasn't a hack, and the effect is of someone with interesting ideas throwing stuff at the screen because they can't be bothered to think out what might actually work. Never has that been truer than in Sword for Truth, a feature that was never going to be more than a tacky bit of sexed-up, horror-laced exploitation, but in Dezaki's hands, manages to flub even that. I could have forgiven its other sins if it was only fun, but for this kind of material to be boring? That takes real doing.
Spirit Warrior: A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms, 1991, dir: Katsuhito Akiyama
Having now seen all five of the Spirit Warrior short films released between 1988 and 1994, I feel confident in saying that the series adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Not one of them is exceptional, and of this first wave, only the profoundly weird Castle of Illusion stands out in its own right. And I realise that, yes, I've just damned this particular release without saying a word about it, but let's backpedal to my original point, which was that even when these things aren't altogether successful, they're at least intriguing. And one of the reasons for that is that they each approach their source material in such a distinctive manner.
When we last saw Katsuhito Akiyama, it was as the director of the lacklustre opening instalment Revival of Evil, and not only is A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms better, it's a very different beast. Its meandering story of a cursed actress and her role in reviving a centuries-old curse turns out not to be especially complex once all the pieces come together, but it feels more involved than other entries, and relies significantly less on action, in favour of - I was going to say scares, but I guess they're not really that. What we get instead is a handful of atmospheric, gory set pieces, a couple of which are genuinely shocking. On the one hand, that's due to a reliance on the sort of sexualised violence that crops up in so many titles from the period, but on the other, here it feels earned, or at any rate more than window dressing. Indeed, the focus on two abused women left without any reasonable outlets by which to channel their grief and rage is a striking change of direction from a series that has tended to concentrate on its simplistic male heroes and their manly shenanigans. It's exploitation, for sure, but better the kind that grapples with its subject matter, if only because here it provides a resonance that's been missing in other entries.
Where A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms falls down, its because the end point of all this is its most familiar aspect: another of those supernatural battles where people stand around reciting incantations and throwing magical thingummies at each other, and these have never been a strength of the series. This one's particularly unengaging on a visceral level, but makes up for it somewhat with an added layer of emotive character drama; for once we have a baddie worth caring about, and who's even legitimately tragic if you're prepared to fill in some of the gaps that the fifty-minute running time leaves as narrative hints. And though none of this adds up to anything extraordinary, like Spirit Warrior in general, it leaves a better impression than its individual parts entirely earn.
-oOo-
Blimey, that was a washout, wasn't it? I can't even honestly recommend A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms, not unless you have the opportunity to watch it in the company of its four sibling entries in the Spirit Warrior series. (As much as I'd rather not promote international piracy giant Youtube, all five have found their way there and are easy to locate.) In fairness to Time Bokan: Royal Revival, I'm sure that if you'd grown up on the shows it pastiches, there'd be pleasure to be had, and thanks to Sentai Filmworks you can even buy it new for sensible money, which is a rarity for these articles. Actually, and incredibly bizarrely, this is also true of Sword for Truth, but for goodness' sake, don't be tempted! And Legend of the Last Labyrinth has all but vanished from the Earth, a sad but probably not altogether undeserved fate.
Next time around: some better stuff, I promise!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
And now that your expectations are suitably lowered, let's take a look at Legend of the Last Labyrinth, Time Bokan: Royal Revival, Sword for Truth, and Spirit Warrior: A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms...
It's always best to have a spot of originality, of course, but if we have to be given recycled ideas, it's far better that the creators play straight with us. So it goes with Legend of the Last Labyrinth, also known by the more logical title of Princess Rouge: the creators know their tropes, they know we know those tropes, and they have the decency to lay them out with a minimum of fuss. So when an amnesiac young woman drops on our teenage hero Yūsuke literally out of the sky, it's a safe bet that the two of them are going to fall for each other, perhaps after a spot of initial bickering, and sure enough, five minutes and a cute montage later, that's what's happened. And since she fell out of a magical portal, along with an important-looking trinket, it's fair to assume she'll have powers of her own and some sort of meaningful destiny, facts that have been confirmed before the first episode is done. And when her two sisters arrive, what are the odds that they'll insist on moving in with Yūsuke and making his life hell? We've all seen Oh! My Goddess, right? Or Tenchi Muyo? Or one of the million or so anime that follow the model they helped establish?
The plus side, then, is that Legend of the Last Labyrinth burns through all its necessary setup in the course of barely an episode, which is a handy thing to do when you're a two episode OVA - though you assume the creators didn't realise they were going to get cancelled, because yes, this is yet another of those titles that was released incomplete by the good folks at AnimeWorks. Anyway, it's for the best that they don't squander an hour of everyone's time by setting out ingredients we've seen on plenty of occasions before. However, the negative is that, with everything happening at such a breakneck pace, it's hard to feel particularly engaged. The characters are pleasant, with enough glimmers of characterisation to suggest they might have grown to be genuinely appealing, but how are we supposed to invest in the fates of Yūsuke and Rouge, let alone in the romance between them, when all the scene-setting has been whisked over in the blink of an eye?
There are indications that, had Legend of the Last Labyrinth survived, it would have started to carve its own path. One fun wrinkle, for example, is that the magical kingdom Rouge has arrived from is actually the underworld of mythology; another is a genuinely vindictive baddie who seems to be hated by his own subordinates as much as by anyone. Put that together with some attractive animation - the backgrounds are genuinely lovely, though the frequent reuse of footage so early on feels pretty cheap - and a bouncy end theme, along with the lack of any significant missteps, and it's enough that by the end of the second episode, it's annoying to know there won't ever be more. Annoying, yes, but not exactly heartbreaking; Legend of the Last Labyrinth is a nice show, enough so that it's apparent why AnimeWorks felt justified in chucking it out unfinished, but its eagerness to rush through its familiar aspects to get to the good stuff feels a little tragic when that good stuff would never materialise.
Here's the thing: there's no way I can write a fair review of Time Bokan: Royal Revival, a comedy knock-off sequel to a long-running seventies show that I haven't seen, which also references a whole bunch of other shows I haven't seen, and in fact pretty much totally relies on a knowledge of seventies Japanese TV that it would be damn near impossible for me to acquire. So I guess that with the best will in the world (plus the ten minutes I spent researching on Wikipedia) this is still going to be my first openly and unapologetically unfair review.
With that said, the gimmick is this: a remake of the classic anime series Time Bokan is in the works, and since the original had a superfluity of near-identical villains, it's been decided that the only reasonable way to settle on one trio for this relaunch is with a race in their signature vehicles. Or, to put it another way, it's Wacky Races. And I feel like I ought to caveat that somehow, but no, I really can't: it's Wacky Races, but with the bad guys and gals from Time Bokan. Or the first episode is, anyway; the second sees the winners attempting to get up to no good and inadvertently tangling with not only the heroes of Time Bokan itself but those of Gatchaman, Casshern, Speed Racer, and more from legendary production house Tatsunoku.
If all of that was gibberish to you, I can say with absolute certainty that Time Bokan: Royal Revival will be too. And if only some of it was gibberish - I at least could recognise those characters, though I'm not overly familiar with them - then you're still likely to miss out on some sixty or seventy percent of the jokes. With that in mind, I feel a bit guilty for suggesting that, even with the appropriate cultural baggage, they still wouldn't be that funny, and also that, a few extremely specific gags aside, they all boil down to the one brand of humour: everything the villains try is doomed to backfire spectacularly, hurting them more than it does anyone else. There are definitely some laughs here - and it helps that the characters are pretty adorable, like all the best cartoon baddies - but for the average Western viewer, a lot of this will be inscrutable and a lot of what's left will raise a smile more than a guffaw.
With that said, the show looks good, kind of, except that it's devoting an awful lot of energy to emulating the scrappy artistry of anime from two decades earlier, resulting in some above average animation doing a respectable impression of animation that kind of sucks. And the opening and end songs are damn fine villain anthems, with the caveat that the closer goes on for way too long, a complaint I don't recall ever having about an anime theme before. Then again, like I said at the top, Time Bokan: Royal Revival is the point in this grand venture where I have to admit I'm out of my depth, so who knows, maybe that was another joke I didn't get? I'm willing to believe that, if you were in on every last reference, this would be a treat. For everyone else? There's fun to be had, but perhaps no more than two back-to-back episodes of Wacky Races would provide, all told.
Recently someone tried to convince me that I was underestimating director Osamu Dezaki, and they made such a compelling argument that I was determined to come at my least favourite anime director with fresh eyes. So it's unfortunate that the first new work of his I should encounter is Sword for Truth, a fifty-minute OVA that has all his worst tendencies on display and then some. Certainly, all of Dezaki's weird visual gimmicks are to be found here, among them a gross overuse of speed lines, the stuttering repetition of a brief burst of action three, four, or five times in a row, and - in practically the opening shot! - his bizarre habit of cutting to an internal view of a body, in this case the skeleton of a horse.
That one actually works, in context; it's a creepy note to start on, if nothing else. Indeed, the opening five minutes, in which samurai battle a gigantic white tiger, were decent enough that I almost wondered why Sword for Truth had such a toxic reputation, even among the mostly risible releases that made up Manga's budget Collection range. But by the ten minute mark, I was wondering no more, as Dezaki trotted out the remainder of his recurring bad habits. In particular, he seems to have purposefully sucked the energy out of the endless action sequences, so badly are they handled, and the film treats its women with striking contempt, not so much because of the staggering amounts of nudity and sex as because none of them approach becoming actual characters. Not that the male cast are nuanced, but the way in which both the women we spend any time with fall head over heels in lust with our protagonist for no apparent reason is galling, and that any shred of motivation they might have vanishes the moment they do so actively hurts the material. By far the worst is the swindler that our antihero Sakaki humiliates early on, who then tracks him down to sleep with him, tries to kill him, decides she's in love with him, and vanishes from the plot altogether.
Or maybe she died and I wasn't paying attention. Honestly, it's possible. It's startling how dull a fifty-minute film that consists of almost nothing but sex and violence manages to be. Conceivably, too, she was slated to return in a later episode; the ending leaves enough unresolved that it's obvious there was intended to be one. And this is extra irritating in that the film concludes on the closest it has to a good scene, a moody dialogue exchange that does more to establish a theme than the entirety of what's gone before. Perhaps this is why Dezaki bothers me so: as often as he seems to have turned out hackwork, he evidently wasn't a hack, and the effect is of someone with interesting ideas throwing stuff at the screen because they can't be bothered to think out what might actually work. Never has that been truer than in Sword for Truth, a feature that was never going to be more than a tacky bit of sexed-up, horror-laced exploitation, but in Dezaki's hands, manages to flub even that. I could have forgiven its other sins if it was only fun, but for this kind of material to be boring? That takes real doing.
Having now seen all five of the Spirit Warrior short films released between 1988 and 1994, I feel confident in saying that the series adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Not one of them is exceptional, and of this first wave, only the profoundly weird Castle of Illusion stands out in its own right. And I realise that, yes, I've just damned this particular release without saying a word about it, but let's backpedal to my original point, which was that even when these things aren't altogether successful, they're at least intriguing. And one of the reasons for that is that they each approach their source material in such a distinctive manner.
When we last saw Katsuhito Akiyama, it was as the director of the lacklustre opening instalment Revival of Evil, and not only is A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms better, it's a very different beast. Its meandering story of a cursed actress and her role in reviving a centuries-old curse turns out not to be especially complex once all the pieces come together, but it feels more involved than other entries, and relies significantly less on action, in favour of - I was going to say scares, but I guess they're not really that. What we get instead is a handful of atmospheric, gory set pieces, a couple of which are genuinely shocking. On the one hand, that's due to a reliance on the sort of sexualised violence that crops up in so many titles from the period, but on the other, here it feels earned, or at any rate more than window dressing. Indeed, the focus on two abused women left without any reasonable outlets by which to channel their grief and rage is a striking change of direction from a series that has tended to concentrate on its simplistic male heroes and their manly shenanigans. It's exploitation, for sure, but better the kind that grapples with its subject matter, if only because here it provides a resonance that's been missing in other entries.
Where A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms falls down, its because the end point of all this is its most familiar aspect: another of those supernatural battles where people stand around reciting incantations and throwing magical thingummies at each other, and these have never been a strength of the series. This one's particularly unengaging on a visceral level, but makes up for it somewhat with an added layer of emotive character drama; for once we have a baddie worth caring about, and who's even legitimately tragic if you're prepared to fill in some of the gaps that the fifty-minute running time leaves as narrative hints. And though none of this adds up to anything extraordinary, like Spirit Warrior in general, it leaves a better impression than its individual parts entirely earn.
-oOo-
Blimey, that was a washout, wasn't it? I can't even honestly recommend A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms, not unless you have the opportunity to watch it in the company of its four sibling entries in the Spirit Warrior series. (As much as I'd rather not promote international piracy giant Youtube, all five have found their way there and are easy to locate.) In fairness to Time Bokan: Royal Revival, I'm sure that if you'd grown up on the shows it pastiches, there'd be pleasure to be had, and thanks to Sentai Filmworks you can even buy it new for sensible money, which is a rarity for these articles. Actually, and incredibly bizarrely, this is also true of Sword for Truth, but for goodness' sake, don't be tempted! And Legend of the Last Labyrinth has all but vanished from the Earth, a sad but probably not altogether undeserved fate.
Next time around: some better stuff, I promise!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
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