There aren't many self-imposed rules I haven't broken in these posts, but one I was doing pretty well on was not reviewing anything that could categorically be described as a series, because once I stray into reviewing series, there really will be no end to this insanity. And I was convinced that none of what we have here fell into that category, until well after I'd committed to discussing them. I was certain Nightwalker was a pair of OVAs stitched together and that Metal Fighter Miku was a direct-to-video release - and it seems I was wrong on both fronts. There goes another rule!
Here, then, is what was intended to be a look at four longer OVAs and now, well, isn't that. So let's chuck that last sacred cow out the window and see what we make of Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective, Legend of the Dragon Kings, Metal Fighter Miku, and Key the Metal Idol...
Here, then, is what was intended to be a look at four longer OVAs and now, well, isn't that. So let's chuck that last sacred cow out the window and see what we make of Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective, Legend of the Dragon Kings, Metal Fighter Miku, and Key the Metal Idol...
If you were given the task of summing up a noirish detective show where the detective happens to be a vampire in nineties Tokyo, you couldn't do a better job than the credits sequence of Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective, and particularly it's terrific intro theme, Gessekai by the prolific Buck-Tick, which manages to find the perfect balance between PI sleaze and gothic romanticism. It's a heck of an opening, and it's almost unfortunate for Nightwalker, because nothing else it does across the course of its twelve episodes will be nearly so good or nail that tone with such precision.
No, I tell a lie, the incidental music throughout is equally fine. But that's your lot. Which isn't to say it's a bad show, merely that it makes the mistake of promising more than it can deliver. For a start, it's a resolutely under-budgeted affair, and that shows nowhere more than in the animation, which is generally middling and frequently not even that - though only the penultimate episode sinks to being flat-out cheap. The designs are of their time, that time being one with an aesthetic I've never found appealing, and, protagonist Shido aside, none are especially memorable. In general, there's the sense of a show that's never finding its feet, or even knowing what its feet ought to look like, and that's nowhere truer than when a swapping of directors after episode four jarringly pushes everything onto a different track.
Fortunately, it's a positive change. Until then, Nightwalker had been leaning too hard into the Anne Rice clichés for my tastes, albeit with a veneer of more characteristically Japanese clichés to make the proceedings that bit weirder. The basic setup sees pretty, lilac-haired vampire Shido as a sort of detective, though he never does much detecting and gets most of his cases from his government contact Yayoi, who's also generously serving as his personal blood bank. By the beginning of the first episode, they've been joined by teenager Riho, who lost her family to the murderous Nightbreeds (presumably not TM Clive Barker) that Shido and Yayoi hunt, and now acts as Shido's office helper, without having a clue of what he is or how he spends his evenings.
The first four episodes get terribly tangled up in all this, along with an overarching plot regarding Shido's sire Cain and the threat of some major catastrophe called the Golden Dawn that's set to involve Shido intimately, and it's all very familiar, and probably was nearly as much so back in 1998, so that it's a relief when, with the fifth episode, all of that gets jettisoned in favour of a series of monster-of-the-week episodes. What ruined many a show is the salvation of Nightwalker, because they range from good to great, with most toward the upper end. As well, the creators start to make better use of the characters and to recognise that Shido's mysterious past isn't that interesting - such that the proceedings end on a distinctly high note, one that wraps up in a surprisingly satisfying manner. For a series that got off on such a shaky footing, that's a heck of an accomplishment, and enough to make me recommend it if a slightly novel take on the supernatural detective genre sounds like your thing.
I'm not going to pretend Legend of the Dragon Kings is a good anime. It is, in fact, in many ways, quite a spectacularly terrible one. And this is bizarre, given that it somehow managed to get all the way through a run of twelve forty-five minute episodes, when so many great shows got canned after one or two. Yet Legend of the Dragon Kings starts going wrong from its first minute, and within a couple of episodes has gone really wrong, and will subsequently drift into full on train-wreck territory on more than one occasion. And somehow, each time, like a punch-drunk boxer, it staggers onward, wiping blood from its eyes and grunting incoherently and generally being so embarrassing that you wonder if it might not have been better staying down.
It's easy to point at the animation, which begins at about okay, slips quickly, and is full-on risible for much of the show's middle. It's flat and cheap and it's almost incomprehensible that it was made by Kitty Films, a proper studio with respectable work in their catalogue: there are shots, plenty of them, where the impression is of people learning this animation business from scratch and not much caring that somebody might notice. Then again, given how ghastly the designs and the washy yet garish palette are, you can see how it must have been hard to justify going the extra mile. And that extends equally to the direction, which, despite the presence of some provably talented folks, rarely rises beyond half-hearted.
And even if it didn't look ugly, and even if there were firmer hands on the tiller, there'd still be problems. There's something deeply odd about the story of the four Ryudo brothers, a bunch of wealthy orphans who find themselves persecuted by everyone from former war criminals to a secret cabal of American tycoons over a secret so secret that at first even they don't know it: that they're dragons hiding in human form involved in a millennia-spanning conflict. You can absolutely see how that would go, right? The brothers slowly discover their powers and remember their destiny, all the while fending off attacks from their various opponents ... and that's sort of what happens. But mostly what we get is the brothers going to extraordinary lengths to ignore what's occurring and get on with their lives, even after its apparent that they're goddamn super-powered dragons caught up in vast global conspiracies.
And at this point, I guess I have to stop playing games and admit that I sort of loved Legend of the Dragon Kings, and for precisely this reason. Its setup is cliched, but the execution is anything but, and I refuse to believe that was entirely accidental. There's simply too much cynicism and dark humour and weirdness floating around in Akinori Endô's script. I don't know if he was deliberately subverting the genre or just indulging himself, but the result is hypnotic, like a joke that keeps putting off its punchline. Surely the Ryudo brothers are going to begin taking this stuff seriously? Surely they'll use their astonishing powers to, like, help someone or something? No, they're heading home for breakfast, or spending an entire episode blithely trundling around in a tank, or showing off their bicycle stunt skills to the policemen that are trying to kill them for being domestic terrorists. It helps that they're paired off against some frequently ghastly villains, and that Endô sneaks in fascinating stuff about history and politics around the edges of his narrative, but it's still bonkers.
So, to be clear, I'm not saying Legend of the Dragon Kings is good, because in a bunch of ways it absolutely isn't. But did it keep me entertained for the whole of its considerable running time? Oh heck yes it did. It's quite the disaster and you'd be unwise to take it too seriously, though if you really wanted to, there are enough interesting notions and twists on well-worn concepts that the option is there. But more than anything, it's fun, almost despite itself, and surprisingly different from what it appears to be at the outset, even if the surprise is often that nothing remotely sensible happens. The result is like a badly made roller-coaster: you're never sure why you got on or what's around the next corner, and that shaking and rattling is awfully disconcerting, but all the same, it's hard not to be entertained if you're in the appropriate mood.
Visiting the debut works of genius creators hoping to find a spark of that selfsame genius is always a dicey business, and so it proves with Akiyuki Shinbo, who among a frequently impressive CV would go on to mastermind Puella Magi Madoka Magica, one of the finest anime shows of the twenty-first century. But from the off, it's apparent that Shinbo's first work as director, the thirteen episode sports sci-fi comedy Metal Fighter Miku ain't no Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Moreover, some of its problems are deeply embedded. The concept seems a fine place to start: in a future 2061 that's functionally the same as the (then) present, the most popular sport in Japan is Neo Pro-Wrestling, which is the same as normal wrestling except in powered armour and with no obvious rules. Neo Pro-Wrestling doesn't make a shred of sense, and the show deals with this alternately by digging deep into the minutiae of it, trying to tease out some semblance of logic, and throwing its hands in the air with a huff of despair. Perhaps an even bigger deal, our hero Miku - or rather, Pretty Miku, if we're going by Neo Pro-Wrestling handles - isn't a very interesting protagonist. There's no reason why, of the four members of her team, that she should take the spotlight, and this is also something the show seems vaguely aware of. In fact, the more complex cast members are all on the sidelines, though they steadily come into focus as the episodes go by: main antagonist Sapphire is particularly engaging, and her arc a good deal more fulfilling.
Of course, anime being anime, a silly premise and a somewhat boring protagonist are hardly the end of the world. Unfortunately, a lack of production values is just as major an issue. Outside of an intro that features some genuinely terrific animation, Metal Fighter Miku languishes somewhere between quite cheap and very cheap, and there's a spell past the halfway point where things go right to hell; you never appreciate details like shading until they're suddenly not there. Even the fights, which you might expect to be a highlight in a show about futuristic wrestling, don't get much of a visual boost. At least things pick up toward the climax, and there are catchy opening and end themes to keep things ticking along, but you can tell the budget wasn't there for an entire thirteen episodes.
So is Metal Fighter Miku basically garbage? No, it isn't. At its worst, it's pleasant to be around, with an appealing cast and enough of a sense of its own absurdity to keep it likeable. Personally, I found myself watching it as a shallow treat before I went to bed after a tough day, and in that role of anime comfort food, it fit perfectly. And while Shinbo didn't exactly hit the ground running, there are flashes of brilliance if you look for them, along with a healthy dose of style and surrealism. I have no idea, for example, why a camel named Juliet suddenly became a significant character, or why the hell anyone thought a bout in a ring five hundred feet above the ground was a good idea, but those elements give the show a much-needed jolt that pushes it toward a goofy, messy kind of pleasure. While there are undoubtedly better brands of pleasure to be had from more deserving works, it's sufficient to make Metal Fighter Miku a fun waste of time for what it is.
If there's one sub-genre of anime I prize over any other, it's those experimental titles that we've hardly encountered here, largely because the really genre-busting stuff needs a few episodes to play with. This is certainly true of Key the Metal Idol, which demands quite a bit of your time, and even manages to do that in unorthodox fashion: the show consists of thirteen regular-length episodes followed by two ninety-minute features. But then, that's Key all over: it's clear from the beginning that writer / director Satō has a specific story to tell and that he'll get there no matter the cost. And in fairness, when you have such an awesomely weird premise as this, you'd better try and do it justice. Essentially, it's there in the title: Key is a robot who wants to be human, and a message from her murdered creator informs her that the only way to succeed in that goal is to find herself thirty thousand followers: thirty thousand people who believe in her with the whole of their hearts. So what better route to mass adulation, if you happen to be a teenage Japanese girl, or a robot who very much resembles one, than to become a music idol?
Or that might not be the story at all. It's no spoiler to say that Key is quick to make us wonder if its protagonist isn't just a messed-up girl whose grandfather sent her off on a horrifying wild goose chase. Then there's the dodgy corporation hovering around the edges, who definitely do have robots at their disposal, though their patently evil director Jinsaku Ajo is less bothered about manufacturing murder-bots than he is with harassing Key for reasons unknown and fostering the career of existing idol Miho, who rapidly becomes the focus of Key's own adulation. And that's not even touching on the religious cult that want Key to be their messiah - she does seem to have the requisite supernatural powers - or Key's small circle of friends, who mostly want the best for her but don't always know what that entails.
There are obvious ways this setup could go, and the opportunity for satirising a music industry that demands almost inhuman levels of commitment is right there on the surface. I wouldn't suggest that Key doesn't do that, but it's to the show's credit that it never feels as if it's taking the obvious route even when it skirts obvious conclusions. Indeed, having reached the end and had some time to mull over the experience, I'd say that's Key's most distinctive feature: it's absolutely it's own thing, even when that thing is somewhat difficult or off-putting. Actually, it feels more than happy to embrace its awkwardness, which stretches down to the level of music, character design, and animation.
If I was being harsh, I'd suggest that I'm not sure all of this adds up to the sum of its parts or is delivered in the best possible way. Above all, it's hard not to notice how the first of the two films grinds to a halt while it makes clear everything that's previously been ambiguous, most of which the astute viewer will have figured out for themselves anyway; I actually liked the approach, and goodness knows there's no shortage of anime that's happy to obfuscate crucial plot details, but it remains a peculiar choice. And while Satō has quite the eye for distinctive compositions, he opts for a colour palette so muted that, in the original Pioneer release, it's sometimes hard to recognise how nice the animation frequently is.
However, to return to my earlier point, if there's one thing that's absolutely true of Key the Metal Idol, it's that it's resolutely its own creature, and every aspect, even those that don't altogether work, plays into that. There isn't enough plot to justify such an expansive running time, yet the show exploits that space well to build its dreamy, inhuman atmosphere, and the same goes for the animation that takes more concentration than should really be necessary to appreciate, and particularly for the marvellous but discomforting score: so much of Key feels subtly off, yet that offness is vital to its personality. And just as impressively, once you get into its unusual rhythm, the show manages to be fun in ways you don't necessarily expect from this kind of self-consciously cultish narrative. Key the Metal Idol is a flawed, difficult tale about a flawed, difficult character, but if you're interested in the sort of anime that's willing to challenge rather than pander, you owe it to yourself to track it down.
-oOo-
It possibly didn't come over here, but I pretty much loved all four of these shows. Well, maybe not Nightwalker, though I enjoyed it a fair bit once it got past its rocky start; but the other three, I really did dig. And possibly this is yet another reason I ought to be steering clear of series, I'm clearly even less discerning than I am with regular vintage anime! Though Key the Metal Idol truly is a classic, and one that deserves to be more widely seen, so at the very least I feel good about recommending that.
Next up: actually, I've no idea! But we'll find out soon, I'm determined to start clearing the enormous backlog of these posts I've accumulated while my proper work's relatively quiet...
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