Here's a major milestone! I'm caught up enough with the enormous backlog of these posts that I actually remember watching these titles! Well, a couple of them anyway ... to further confuse matters, I've been working on multiple posts at once, so I'm pretty sure these don't all date from precisely the same time. Still, progress!
This time around: Crying Freeman: Abduction in Chinatown, Black Jack: Seizure, Amazing Nurse Nanako, and Lupin the 3rd: Dragon of Doom...
As a rule, you don't expect a six-episode OVA series that's barely nosed its way up to mediocrity to suddenly become good in its final third, and the problems that beset Crying Freeman seemed pretty ingrained: an all-over-the-place tone, such an emphasis on sex and violence that it ended up feeling more juvenile than adult, and a budget that left the animators constantly failing to replicate the highly detailed images of the source manga. Yet here we are, and here's the third volume of ADV's annoyingly divided release, and the final pair of episodes are such an improvement that I barely know what to make of it. Though the first thing would be to note that I did director Shigeyasu Yamauchi, who also handled episode four, a huge injustice last time around, when I dismissed his work as stylish but incompetent. That may have been true there, but it isn't here, and the leaps in ability he shows over a scant few years are extraordinary.
Episode five is the first I'd describe as legitimately, consistently well directed, with a flair for visual storytelling that's been largely absent so far. It helps greatly that the crew have finally figured out how to get the look right: gone are the experiments in impractical shading that scuppered the previous part and this time around we have yet another step up in realism, kept within what presumably still wasn't a grand budget by a reliance on still frames that would normally be ruinous, but in Yamauchi's hands is expertly balanced. And all this is in service of a story that engagingly fills a full fifty minutes, though it has to be said that it frequently does so by drifting into being flat-out pornography, something Crying Freeman has always been inclined toward. Still, if you accept that sex and violence are basically what this show's about, at least they're delivered with some real panache.
But then along comes episode six, and if the previous step up in quality was surprising, this one is astonishing. Episode five reached the dizzy heights of pretty good; the final part is superb by any measure. And though the familiar ingredients are there - there's a lot of bloodshed and a lot of nudity, most of it female - there's also a pointed departure from many of the sillier elements that have dragged the series down. It's the most genuinely standalone story thus far, a battle of wits between an ambitious gangster and the Freeman and his 108 Dragons organisation where the latter are kept largely in the background, meaning that what we get feels more akin to a Yakusa picture in the Battles Without Honour and Humanity vein than the usual fare. And it looks stunning: here at the end, Yamauchi has won the show's battle with the manga's practically unadaptable visuals, aided by what appears to be a sizeably increased budget, meaning that, at last, the best stuff isn't relegated to stills. Add to that a fine eye for interesting locations, all beautifully painted, and a grasp of how bodies appear in motion that was desperately needed in the previous volumes, and you have a true visual treat. But most striking is that, though the story feels independent of what's come before, it nevertheless bring events to a satisfying close, making the entire OVA more worthwhile.
Take that all into account, and I find myself with one of my more bizarre recommendations: if Crying Freeman appeals, I really would consider skipping the first two volumes and picking up here, or at least ignoring the middle portion. Of course, it's available on one disk via Eastern Star these days, but since that's also fallen out of print, it's not significantly easier to find than the old releases. Frustratingly, Abduction in Chinatown is hardest to lay hands on, but it's also genuinely excellent and well worth hunting down. It's maddening that it took so much failure to produce so fine a take on the material, and more maddening that we couldn't have had a couple more episodes on a par with these last two, but in the strange world of nineties anime, you take what you can get, and a great ending's better than nothing.
Black Jack: Seizure, 1993, dir: Osamu DezakiThere's no easy way to review the Black Jack OVA series, which U.S. Manga Corps released in drawn-out fashion and under their own titles that have nothing to do with the original episode titles. And even if there was, I probably wouldn't be the person to do it, because the head director was Osamu Dezaki, who I used to consider among my least favourite directors for his weird stylistic excesses and have since developed a certain fondness for, while still having my share of issues.
To further complicate matters, this disk, unlike the majority of those U.S. Manga Corps put out, contains two episodes, and while they're both good, one is notably better than the other. First, and weakest, we have Decoration of Maria and Her Comrades, a tale that finds surgeon-for-hire Black Jack in South America, treating a revolutionary hero on the run from an attempt by the US (it's actually the Federal Unites, but trust me, it's the US) to frame him for fictitious crimes. It's a terrific setup, with a real sense of sweaty desperation and some deft character building across its fifty-minute running time, but it finds Dezaki at his borderline worst, going nuts with his stylistic tics to the point where they start getting in the way of the material. It's almost more frustrating because I'm come to appreciate his very real talents, and it's annoying to see him deploying his grab bag of tricks so clumsily, especially when the passages where he reins it in are so much better. Nonetheless, it's a well-above-par story that suffers only from being told in a sometimes needlessly annoying fashion.
Then we have Anorexia, The Two Dark Doctors, an episode pretty well summed up by its title: a young actress trying to make her break from an early career in pornography is suffering from anorexia so severe that she can't ingest a thing, and Black Jack is called in to save her, but finds himself competing with another black market doctor who offers a more terminal brand of care to patients who've lost all hope. What results is a thoroughly tangled tale with a couple of gigantic red herrings and a climax you couldn't guess in a million years, and yet somehow feels right for the material when it could easily have come across as absurd. And here the direction isn't distracting but a huge asset, and so distinct from the previous episode that I can only assume Dezaki was letting a co-director do much of the heavy lifting; certainly the credits suggest a sharing of authority, though it's not clear where it lies. At any rate, whoever was responsible for what, it's a cracking short film.
Having not been a huge fan of the Black Jack movie, also directed by Dezaki, I hadn't hoped for much from this one, so colour me both impressed and surprised: even if the two episodes here are less than equal, they're both quality work, telling novel, adult tales using a fascinating, unusual protagonist, and doing so with impressively slick animation and a sense of style that varies from the distracting but inventive to the truly excellent. Even if you've no interest in the wider series, as a standalone release this one's well worth searching for.
For the first two of its six episodes, it's impressive what a terrible job Amazing Nurse Nanako does of combining two genres that anime had been gelling with great success throughout the entirety of the nineties. Mostly it's a comedy, insomuch as you can use the word for a show that really only has variations on a single joke, whereby something humiliating and / or unpleasant happens to its ditzy heroine, the titular Nanako, often involving some or all of her clothes coming off. Then, whenever that's not happening, there are a couple more plot lines going on, both telling different angles of a sci-fi narrative and neither making any particular effort to be funny, even by the lowly definition the rest of the running time is gunning for. All of which is to say that Amazing Nurse Nanako gets off to a lousy start.
There are, it turns out, reasons for some of this, and as the plots come into focus around the midway point, those reasons even make a degree of sense; a couple of later twists and turns rely on us not having much idea of how the Nanako elements fit the wider picture. That picture revolves around Nanako's primary tormentor, Dr. Kyogi Ogami, scientific genius and owner of the hospital at which Nanako, despite the title, does no nursing whatsoever. We learn early on that Ogami is experimenting on Nanako herself, for what appear to be malicious reasons, and that this relates to why he's drawn the attention of both a military bigwig and a high-up church official, the former wanting him to investigate an alien life form they've happened upon and the latter after his assistance in bringing Jesus back to life. And yes, you did read that right.
This probably makes Amazing Nurse Nanako more offensive to Christians than it is to people like me who find this brand of fan-service-heavy comedy largely obnoxious, but then again, it's not worth the effort of getting offended by whoever you are. It's sexist and possibly blasphemous - is the notion that the church might use mad science and alien DNA to resurrect the messiah blasphemy? - but the show has its tongue so firmly in its cheek that it's probably better to smile tolerantly and let it get on with what its doing. Maria Yamamoto's weirdly committed performance takes some of the sting out of the sexism by making Nanako into a vaguely relatable human being, and once the show finds its feet enough to decide what its pastiching and what its core concept is, there's a lot more fun to be had, not to mention the makings of a solid story.
Mind you, it's easy to imagine a much better version of Amazing Nurse Nanako, one that doesn't get off to such a rocky start and plays up its best elements instead of indulging in the sort of jokes the sub-genre had mined to death by this point. And while the animation is more respectable than a lot of what was happening in 1999, there's still evidence that the industry was dead set on using computers without quite having figured out how: in particular, the overly dark colouring has the air of something knocked together on a PC because it could be rather than because the results would be aesthetically pleasing. Which I suppose works as a decent metaphor for Amazing Nurse Nanako in general: squint hard and ignore its attempts at self-sabotage and there's definite pleasure to be found here, but it's a shame the makers felt the need to make discovering it such a chore.
Lupin the Third: Dragon of Doom, 1994, dir: Masaharu OkuwakiIf there's one thing that's routinely impressed me about these Lupin TV specials, it's how little they've felt like TV specials. Oh, nobody would be likely to confuse them with cinematic releases, but they certainly tend to inhabit a comfortable middle ground, with sufficient production values and enough creative ingenuity to at least make them entirely worthy of DVD releases all these years later.
Not so Dragon of Doom, which feels like precisely what it is from the beginning, a particularly damning fact when the opening scene is as good as things get: certainly a sequence of our heroes being chased through a city by ninjas is the closest it comes to satisfying action. But even in its better moments, the film has an air of cheapness and unambition, and Okuwaki hasn't the directorial chops to do anything about those shortcomings. Indeed, quite the opposite; his directorial style reeks of TV work, with unimaginative compositions and a tendency to slap everything in the middle of the boxy old 4:3 ratio frame, where we can't hope to miss it. There's not much to get excited about here on the level of animation or visual storytelling, and that's a real blow coming from a franchise that frequently succeeds better than most on both fronts.
Fortunately, the narrative is somewhat stronger, enough anyway that it's possible to imagine a superior movie being built on these bones. It's nice to see a plot making meaningful use of the samurai Goemon and his preternaturally sharp katana Zantetsuken, and a heist from the wreck of the Titanic feels so perfectly Lupin-esque that it's a wonder they never got to it before. But it becomes apparent long before the end that there aren't ninety minutes of ideas here, and too much of the running time gets absorbed in nondescript shenanigans of the sort the series can knock out in its sleep, with the back half flinging those elements about in a fairly random-seeming manner. (Less than twenty-four hours later, I can't remember how this ended, though presumably it did.) Nor does it make use of the characters in remotely interesting fashion, not even Goemon, who gets neglected even more than usual despite a story you'd think had been designed to give him a touch of depth. As is often the case, it's femme fatale Fujiko and bumbling cop Zenigata who fare the worst, with Fujiko reduced to being slutty and double-crossing, as she is in all the lousiest Lupin entries, and Zenigata trapped in unfunny comedy relief hell.
If I had to find a positive, and that's a personal rule for these reviews so I suppose I do, I'd admit that Dragon of Doom is perfectly fine and watchable, since it's a Lupin movie and Lupin movies have to go very far indeed off the rails to lose all appeal whatsoever. (I'm looking at you, The Secret of Twilight Gemini!) It's a functional story told in a functional manner, but within a basically engaging comic universe that contains some rightfully legendary characters. Nevertheless, when there are so many better entries out there, it's hard to see why you'd want to waste time on this one. What no doubt just about did the job for an hour and a half on TV twenty-five years ago fares far less well today.
-oOo-
Who would have thought Crying Freeman would come good at the end, huh? And not just good but really, really good; that last episode is a blinder. And as if that weren't shocking enough, we have another Osamu Dezaki title that I both like and admire - a slight spoiler, but I'm quite a way through the Black Jack OVAs now, and it's a truly superb series. Then again, Amazing Nurse Nanako was rather a disappointment, mainly through squandering some real potential, and Dragon of Doom was comfortably the second worst Lupin entry I've seen. I'm glad it's not the last of this little Lupin marathon I've had going on, because it would have been a sad note to end on.
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