Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 68

Despite my abiding love of anime, and especially of anime made before the arbitrary cut-off date of the year 2000, I've avoided the Dragon Ball franchise like the plague.  So you can imagine my horror when I discovered that there were no end of Dragon Ball movies, and if I'm going to review every film and OVA ever released in the West throughout the nineties - yes, this somehow seems to have become my goal! - then I'd have to get to this anime Goliath sooner or later.  However, it wasn't a completist spirit that gave me the final nudge, it was the discovery that Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were different things.  The shocking character designs were primarily what had put me off the latter, but the former looked a good deal more appealing.  If I was going to get to the Dragon Ball-verse sooner or later, this seemed the perfect jumping-on point.

And so it is that we find ourselves looking at Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies, Dragon Ball: Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle, Dragon Ball: Mystical Adventure, and Dragon Ball: The Path to Power...

Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies, 1986, dir: Daisuke Nishio

I don't know what I was expecting from this first Dragon Ball movie, but it's fair to say that it surprised me at every turn.  Certainly, I had no idea it would be such giddy fun, or so lovingly made, or so self-contained: if this were all the Dragon Ball there was or ever would be, it would still be a satisfying piece of work, and who'd dare to anticipate that from the opening cinematic salvo of such a ludicrously bloated franchise?  But it's true, Curse of the Blood Rubies delivers a wholly fulfilling quest narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, engaging characters, a sense of scope and scale, and a bucket load of charm, and it does all that in the space of about fifty minutes.

That story is ... well, I was going to say the tale of Goku, the spiky-haired, staff-wielding little chap who gets centre stage on the cover, but actually, he's fairly peripheral to the goings-on, more a common element than a protagonist.  It's mostly happenstance and the fact that he's in possession of one of the titular dragon balls that finds him dragged into a quest to topple the somewhat evil king Gurumes, who wants all seven of said balls so that he can get a mythical dragon to grant him his one wish, and has been turning the world upside-down in pursuit of that goal.  I say "somewhat evil" because Gurumes is a pitiful figure, driven purely by having lost his pleasure in food and the need for some new delight to satiate him, and there's never a point where foiling him feels like anyone's prime focus, let alone Goku's.  Really, he's just a kid who has some awesome kung-fu skills and doesn't appreciate having his dragon ball stolen, as you wouldn't.

Oh, and he's also Monkey, as in the figure from Chinese mythology Monkey, which is yet another thing that took me by surprise.  I assume this to be an important fact in the wider Dragon Ball universe, but for the purposes of this film, it's simply there: Goku has a tail and an extendable staff and by the end has acquired a cloud to ride about on, and that's that.  But then, this isn't the sort of movie that pauses to let you soak its ideas in, or to ask sensible questions, or, goodness knows, to try and fathom a universe that seems to be a melange of medieval fantasy and high-tech futurism, with monsters and turtle-men and shapeshifters thrown in, in case it all wasn't weird enough.

In truth, it's very weird indeed, and very silly, and it wouldn't have taken a lot for it to have gone off the rails into a mess of randomness and dumb comedy.  It's to the credit of director Nishio that he keeps that from happening, and indeed that he treats the material with a measure of respect and seriousness in all the right places.  For all its weird silliness, Nishio ensures that what we get feels like a proper movie rather than a bit of franchise fluff; the example that stuck with me is the brief sequence that apes a Soviet propaganda film for no discernible reason, except I guess to give us something visually interesting to appreciate.  Actually, Curse of the Blood Rubies has a tendency to look terrific, with some delightfully squashy character animation and backgrounds that do a lot to sell the notion that this is a bizarre variation on the Monkey legend, by incorporating gorgeous imitations of Chinese painted landscapes.  Throw in a solid score with an appealingly anthemic theme tune and there really isn't a lot to pick holes in here.  Short action-comedy titles are something anime tends to be particularly good at, and this is up there with any I've seen.

Dragon Ball: Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle, 1987, dir: Daisuke Nishio

At first glance, Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle seems like a marked step down from the first Dragon Ball movie.  The animation has already slipped to "impressive for TV" standards and the plot is so resolutely trivial that it can't bring itself to mention those dragon balls that the first film - and the naming traditions of the entire series! - led us to believe were such a big deal.  No, this time around, the stakes are no greater than Goku competing with another martial arts student to win the tutelage of turtle-shelled sensai Master Roshi.  Granted, the task he sets them is to rescue a princess from a castle full of monsters, and that might certainly look like stakes if you squinted, but given that the film makes no pretence of caring, it's hard to see why we should.

For all that I may not have made this sound like a good thing, it's honestly kind of amazing how much of a good thing it is.  It turns out that immediately reducing this franchise to a series of absurdist gags and barely linked set pieces was the right direction to choose.  I'd be pushed to summarise the series of events that Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle jumbles together in what we might kindly describe as a plot, but it's sure as hell never boring, and there's something exciting about the sheer nonsensical nature of it all.  To give a single example: at one point, Goku turns into a giant werewolf, apparently because he's hungry, and chases the rest of the cast - everyone being back from the first movie, for no reason other than that they are.  Anyway, Goku turns into a werewolf and chases everybody, though we've never been led to believe that turning into a werewolf was a thing Goku could or would do.  Then someone decides that chopping off his tail should settle him down, and it does, and Goku returns to normal, discovers he no longer has a tail, and pretty much shrugs and gets on with things.  After which, the incident is never referred to again.

Is this canonical?  Is the TV series this eccentric?  I have no clue, but I do know that it's fun and I like it.  And as with Curse of the Blood Rubies, director Nishio is a fine hand to have on the tiller.  I complimented him last time for bringing a degree of gravitas to the proceedings, but he doesn't try that here, and it's for the best; these proceedings couldn't stand it.  Instead, he dives headfirst into the madness, while retaining enough of a keen visual sense to get away from the whole affair feeling like an extended television episode.  Indeed, it's so busy that the relatively short running time seems significantly more substantial than it is.  Which is fortunate, I suppose, because it's hard to imagine anything much less substantial than Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle having the temerity to call itself a movie.  But, you know, we can be fussy about these things, or we can admit that forty-five minutes of funny, engaging stuff happening held together with a fair degree of craftsmanship is a perfectly acceptable way to waste your time.

Dragon Ball: Mystical Adventure, 1988, dir: Kazuhisa Takenouchi

That the third Dragon Ball movie is marginally closer to what I was expecting from this franchise only serves to emphasise the extent to which I had no idea what I was getting into.  The story this time around concerns a fighting tournament that's really a devious ploy to get all of the wish-fulfilling dragon balls together in one place, and if you'd asked me to guess what this series was all about, I imagine that's the sort of summary I'd have thrown together.  I mean, there's fighting, right?  And ... uh, dragon balls?

But yet again, I wildly underestimated the amount of silliness I was in for.  I described that setup as a story above, but it's fairer to call it a jumping-off point, or a nucleus around which lots of loosely connected events play out and an increasingly large cast blunder about their various agendas.  And if I was going to criticise, I'd say that, especially in the first third, that does make for something rather wearing and unfocused.  Daisuke Nishio's entries were random, sure, but they managed not to feel as though they were.  Takenouchi doesn't have that same directorial command, and Mystical Adventure definitely has the failing common to many a similar anime from the period of slipping into "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" storytelling.  Oh, and while I'm grumbling, this is the first of these films that feels more as if it was made for TV than a cinema release.  I don't know if that was actually the case, but it looks cheap, frankly, or at any rate like a respectably well-made TV film.

All of which might suggest my love affair with the franchise is slipping.  But actually, that's the opposite of my reaction to Mystical Adventure.  Because if this is what a cheap, aimless Dragon Ball movie looks like then, hey, count me in for the long haul!  Even if it doesn't gel the way Nishio's entries did, on a scene-by-scene basis it's a delight, a raucous circus that never runs out of energy for a moment.  And with its extreme busyness, it's impossible to believe that everything's crammed into a paltry forty-five minutes; for a third time running, we get the impression of a feature-length film even if we don't get the feature length.  Moreover - and this is yet another thing I wasn't expecting - Mystical Adventure actually follows on in meaningful ways from Curse of the Blood Rubies and Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle, so that, while it's tough to imagine that all of these events are taking place in a coherent universe (or even an incoherent universe!) there's at least the sense that they matter enough to be referred back to.  Thus, while it's comfortably the weakest of the three films so far, there's certainly no justification for skipping an entry that's still a delight on its own merits.

Dragon Ball: The Path to Power, 1996, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

As a rule, it's rarely good news when eight years go by between entries of an anime franchise, especially when were talking in terms of that franchise being resurrected in the mid-to-late nineties, a period in which the instinct seems frequently to have been to plumb the archives for anything that could withstand a gritty reboot, preferably with a comparatively lower budget.  Dragon Ball falls into neither category: its entire goofy appeal rests on how resolutely ungritty it is, and such lightweight material would suffer if you tried to do it on the cheap; even the minor shortcomings of the third film stood out noticeably in that regard.

It's reassuring, then, that The Path to Power feels, at first glance, as though not a day has passed between entries.  What we have here is a retelling of the same tale told in Curse of the Blood Rubies a decade before, and judging by the first few scenes, all that's changed is that this time around we get a version that's more serious about being a full-blown cinematic release.  The characters are the same, the designs are the same, but the animation is a marked advance - a stunning, ingenious opening shot leaves us in no doubt of that - and the running time has swelled by an entire half hour.

Which is nice and all, but it does raise an obvious question.  If you can tell a story perfectly well in fifty minutes, what do you do with that same story given eighty?  Initially, it seems the answer the creators came up with was that you let the material breathe, make it a touch less madcap, and let the characters interact more without the pressure to race on to the next event.  And while Curse of the Blood Rubies' pace was part of its charm, nobody would argue that it was other than a result of cramming the material into whatever space the animation budget would allow, so surely that means a more methodical take with a higher budget and more of a genuinely cinematic feel can only be an improvement?

That's certainly how it seems things will work out for the first half hour or so.  But doubts do start to creep in, and to cut to the chase, there are a couple of reasons I can't quite value The Path to Power as highly as I do Curse of the Blood Rubies.  Both, I think, boil down to the passage of those eight years, and the nature of anime in the mid-nineties, and the course the Dragon Ball franchise itself had taken.  At any rate, once we get past the half-hour mark, the bulk of what makes The Path to Power longer is its copious fight sequences.  They are, to be sure, often extremely good fight sequences - there's a single-take shot that seems to go on for all of about a minute that's the unquestionable animation high point of the entire venture - but they still take up a disproportionate amount of time, especially once we get into the climatic third.  And that demand for so much action feeds directly into the second problem: the villains have become awfully generic.  Goku needs plenty of mooks to beat up, so that's what we get.  Be they in human or robot form, all of them feel as though they've wandered in from a more traditional narrative devoid of the zany world-building that made the earlier entries such a treat.

None of this, obviously, means The Path to Power is bad.  You could make a persuasive case that all it does is make it different, and it's clear there are those who like those differences fine; I get the sense that this is widely regarded as a series high point.  All I can say is, each to their own.  Want a Dragon Ball film with extra action and more of a solidly budgeted movie feel but less imaginative bad guys?  Then this is absolutely for you.  In love with the unpredictable high jinx that characterised the first three entries?  Then you'll still like this, because it's a thoroughly solid, well-made film, it's simply the case that you probably won't prefer it to what's come before.

-oOo-

And there we have it: I'm a Dragon Ball convert.  Oh, not to the extent that I'll be seeking out the series any time soon, but I'm sure these four films will get fondly re-watched one of these days, and I'm feeling marginally more positive about the now-inevitable trawl through Dragon Ball Z's thirteen (shudder!) feature films.  Though with everything else I have to get through, don't be expecting to hear about those any time soon...



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