Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 73

Having imagined I was back into totally random territory this time around, only now do I notice that there actually is kind of a theme here, or at least some weird coincidences.  We have a couple of titles that contain the word "fight" and feel that it needs backing up with an exclamation mark or two, and a remaining couple that are about hired killers, and as far as names go, they're all seriously violent.

Well, whatever, let's run with it!  Here in the Drowning in Nineties Anime scarily-aggressive-naming-that-may-or-may-not-include-the-word-fight special, we have Fight! Iczer One, Lupin the Third: Island of Assassins, Fight!! Spirit of the Sword, and Crying Freeman: Portrait of a Killer...

Fight! Iczer One, 1985, dir: Toshiki Hirano

There are great movies, and then there are great B-movies, and anime has produced more than its share of both over the years, but I don't know that I could point to a finer example of the latter than Fight! Iczer One.  It's the B-movie par excellence, and particularly the anime B-movie par excellence, doing an abundant amount of stuff and doing it all with such skill and verve and demented commitment that it rarely ceases to impress.

Of course, strictly speaking, it's not actually a movie but an OVA in three parts, but aside from a lengthy plot recap at the opening of the third and longest episode, it flows together so smoothly that it might as well be a film.  Indeed, it's surprising that the re-cut movie version put out in Japan never found its way to an international release; so far as I know, this wasn't given much of a push by publisher AnimeWorks, perhaps because it was old news by the time they got to it.  As such, Fight! Iczer One remains relatively unknown, though it's one of those titles that serious vintage anime nerds mention often in hushed whispers.  And no wonder!  Like I said, it's excellent, but it's also a compendium of just about every trend that was going on in the world of late eighties and nineties Japanese animation, flinging around giant robots and body horror and big-ideas sci-fi and even a few tentacles with cheerful abandon.  The plot that this is in service of is fairly nondescript, but that barely counts as a criticism, because plot would only get in the way of its breakneck pace and heady stylishness.

And it's very stylish indeed, with an aesthetic that at once screams of the late eighties - see our hero Iczer's impossibly garish costume and ginormous hair - and has enough originality to hold up pretty well even today.  In terms of craft, there's much less that says eighties animation rather than nineties, besides the somewhat more rounded character designs; at any rate, it frequently looks stunning, with no end of detail and fluidity and something absolutely eye-popping happening at a rate of roughly once a minute.  Come to think of it, that's often someone's eyes popping out, because Fight! Iczer One spends quite a bit of time being gross, exploitative, and trashy in various combinations, which normally I'd count as a flaw, but here is delivered with a combination of general kind-heartedness for even its most villainous characters and such unadulterated glee that it's impossible to take offence.  In theory, it's all quite dark and nasty, but among the virtues that director Hirano brings is a joyful energy that refuses to let the material sink into grimness when the alternative is more fights, more explosions, more cool shots, more everything.  Underscore that with composer Michiaki Watanabe's delightfully hyper music and the results are compulsive entertainment.

And here we are at the end and I'm conscious that I've not done a very good job of selling Fight! Iczer One, or even of pinning down precisely what it is, in part because it's so all over the place that it's hard to know how to begin summing it up.  Nonetheless, you'll have to trust me on this one; if you've any fondness for horror-tinged science fiction and enjoy good animation, it's tough to see how you wouldn't like it.  Fight! Iczer One is a true lost gem of vintage anime, and like all great B-movies, an example of how bonkers trashiness can become transcendent and thrilling if you throw enough heart and passion and raw talent into the mix.

Lupin the Third: Island of Assassins, 1997, dir: Hiroyuki Yano

More than most franchises, Lupin the Third has a certain flexibility, so that while the average Lupin adventure is likely to be a comedic, frivolous affair with plenty of action, perhaps a bit of sexual innuendo, and not much in the way of weight or substance, none of that's baked into the essential formula.  So it's no wonder that, the late nineties being what they were, someone thought it was time to take one of these many TV specials that were produced over the years in a somewhat grittier, more plot-driven direction.

The surprise, indeed, is how well it works, and also that director Yano found the right degree of restraint that the result still feels essentially like a Lupin entry.  Though certainly the opening few minutes might lead you to believe otherwise, at least once they're done wrong-footing you into expecting everything to be business as usual.  Lupin is heisting as only Lupin can when his arch-nemesis Inspector Zenigata ambushes him with a mob of policemen in tow, claiming Lupin was foolish enough to announce his crime in advice.  But Lupin points out that he'd hardly do that, and in fact he's only here to find out who did, which is about when a bunch of tarantula-tattooed assassins burst in, violently murder a whole lot of people, and shoot poor Zenigata with a Walther P38, Lupin's weapon of choice.

Thankfully, the movie doesn't waste much time in trying to persuade us that Zenigata is genuinely dead, but there are plenty more shocks and twists to come, as Lupin and his consorts head off after the assassins, who come from the titular island of assassins, which happens to be the one-stop shop for hired killers in the world.  Getting in proves easier than getting out, and the greater part of the plot sees Lupin striving to outwit the island's fiendish security systems, while following the lead provided by the Walther P38 and possibly stealing a huge quantity of gold along the way.  All of that adds up to an unusually story-heavy entry with more drastic stakes than usual, and if I've a complaint, it's that more could have been done in that direction: in particular, a setup that finds Lupin forced into the league of assassins with little choice except to comply gets terribly squandered.  And actually, now that I think, that's a symptom of a wider problem: there's scope for a darker take on the Lupin world, and Island of Assassins flirts hard with being that, but I can't help wondering if really digging into the morality of these characters might have yielded even more satisfying results.  Notably, the artwork, though generally pretty fine, suffers from a similar flaw: the character designs never fully reconcile the classic look of our heroes with the more realistic take here, and the result is a number of shots where, splendid though the backgrounds and animation are, faces are somewhat odd and devoid of personality.  The more severe Lupin we get glimpses of is an interesting take, but one the film isn't willing to commit to.

By the same measure, it's possible to imagine this exact same plot but with a touch more of the usual humour and action, and might that version perhaps have been more fun?  I mean, not that Island of Assassins isn't, I'd hate to give that impression.  Its first and last thirds, I would say, are among the best Lupin material I've seen, and if the middle sags slightly, it's probably a necessity brought on by setting up such an intricate final act.  As such, I'd absolutely recommend this if you're a Lupin fan, and perhaps more so if you're not, because it's an excellent thriller in its own right and devoid of a lot of what I used to find so irritating before I warmed to the series.  It's just a mite unsatisfying, that's all, an interesting experiment that might have yielded even more impressive results with a touch more commitment.

Fight!! Spirit of the Sword, 1993, dir: Ryô Yasumura

You have to wonder what AnimeWorks were thinking when they released Fight!! Spirit of the Sword.  The obvious answer would be "money", except that it's hard to imagine a time when the anime market was so undercrowded that people would be rushing out to buy a thirty-minute-long OVA adapting a manga that I'm going to assume never made it to the West, and which I'm further assuming went under a different title - astonishingly, there's no Wikipedia page for Fight!! Spirit of the Sword.  Oh, and yes, you read that correctly, AnimeWorks put out a release that was thirty minutes long including credits.

Now admittedly, that needn't be deathly.  There are a couple of very short films in my collection that I treasure deeply; Cat Soup, for example, is a minor masterpiece despite its brevity.  But Fight!! Spirit of the Sword ain't that.  Instead, it's a wholly average, or perhaps slightly subpar, adaptation of something I suspect wasn't particularly inspired in the first place, and certainly comes across as a lot like a lot of other releases coming out of Japan at the time.  Long story short - or rather, short story shorter! - our hero Yonosuke Hikura is the inheritor of a magical demon-fighting sword that's possessed by a spirit protector named Tsukinojo, who's either a grown woman or a big-eyed chibi version of a grown woman depending on what's happening, and who can't stray more than a few feet away from the jade hilt that the sword springs lightsaber-like from when it's in use.  So it's no good thing when Yonosuke manages to lose the hilt, and therefore Tsukinojo with it, or when both fall into the hands of one of the demons they're meant to be fighting.

Even with that meagre length, it's easy to conceive of a version of Fight!! Spirit of the Sword that felt somewhat worthwhile, but sadly it's not the one the makers opted for.  There are two ruinous mistakes, the first being to cram in way too much backstory and a side plot that goes nowhere, and the second being to make the big fight at the end an extraordinarily dull sequence in which Yonosuke flails at demons that resemble badly animated bursts of wind.  That latter is really what brings the thing to its knees: a good climax would have taken the edge off the slenderness of what's on offer, since what's come before is pleasant enough, and director Yasumura shows a moderate amount of flare that keeps the mediocre animation from becoming a hindrance; heck, there's even one genuinely ingenious shot transition I've never seen done elsewhere, so hats off to him for that.  But when it's all setup to nothing, it's difficult to remember the bits that were mildly engaging.

And here I am, wasting more time reviewing Fight!! Spirit of the Sword than I did watching it, when clearly it's utterly useless and not worth anyone even thinking about tracking down in this day and age.  Well, except for one thing: the fifteen minute mini-documentary with the Japanese voice cast is actually kind of a fun time capsule if you're as obsessive about this stuff as I am, certainly more so than the non-event it's accompanying.  Still, though, even given AnimeWorks' shameless lack of quality control elsewhere, this really is one for the record books, a release so contemptuous of its potential audience that it would take real effort to sink much lower.

Crying Freeman: Portrait of a Killer, 1988, dir: Daisuke Nishio

It's a weird experience to watch an anime you only know from a live-action adaptation, but it's an even weirder one, especially if you're a committed fan of the animation medium, to discover that the live-action version is notably better.  And here I should admit a degree of bias, since I've a long-term fondness for director Christophe Gans' Mark Dacascos-starring 1995 take on the material, and up until Alita Battle Angel appeared, would cheerfully have declared it the best anime adaptation ever made, despite the wholesale manner in which it plays fast and loose with the Japaneseness of the material.  Nevertheless, I'm being as objective as I can, and the fact remains: Crying Freeman the movie is a vastly better interpretation, pilfering what works, discarding what doesn't, and inventing much necessary connective tissue to hold together some whopping narrative gaps.

Both tell essentially the same story, that of Yō Hinomura, a potter forced into the role of assassin, and his romance of sorts with Emu Hino, whom he inadvertently lets witness his bloody work not once but twice and then can't bring himself to do away with like everyone thinks he ought to.  In the anime, this is largely a delivery system for lots of violence and nudity, which would be fine so far as it went, except that the animation is bland and the character designs are overly simple, shooting for the relative realism of the source manga and missing by a mile.  The result is fight scenes that aren't terribly exciting and a couple of sex scenes that are about as titillating as doing the ironing.  (In fairness, this was a failing of Gans' take, too, there's only so much you can do to redeem a sex scene when one of the parties is fully expecting to be murdered straight afterwards and just wants to lose their virginity while they can.)

With all of that together, plus a mismatched and uninspiring score, and then the fact that I've watched this same story told with a great deal more panache, you can imagine how the first fifty-minute-long episode on this, the first of three disks ADV released, didn't blow me away.  So that even though the second episode is objectively worse, and much sillier, and probably quite offensive toward the mentally ill, obese people, women, and maybe the Chinese and Japanese as well, given that all the characters behave idiotically to a greater or lesser degree, I at least got a bit of enjoyment out of how dumb and weird it all was.  Also, we finally get a bit of shading, which makes the animation look somewhat less cheap than it continues to be, so there's that.

Of course, it's unfair to be dismissive of an anime OVA for not being a live-action film that succeeds in part by heavily ripping off the best parts of said anime, and I suppose the reasonable thing to do would be to try and predict how this would play for the viewer new to the story.  But I honestly can't see how it would make much difference.  The OVA version, Portrait of a Killer, simply doesn't work, hammering through its tale at such a pace that it's never clear what anyone's motivations are, least of all the organisation Hinomura is enslaved to, who seem to function as villains or allies based on what the narrative needs at any given moment.  In this version, it's simply a bad story told badly, and ugly to boot, and while that doesn't preclude the odd good scene or cool-in-a-late-eighties-way explosion of violent action, it also doesn't warrant your time.

-oOo-

On a side note, yeah, I know it makes zero sense that two of the titles here are actually from the eighties when I literally just put up a post focusing on eighties titles in isolation.  But remember how I said there that all four felt like they belonged to a different era in a way nineties anime tends not to?  Well, that's not true of Fight! Iczer One, which feels startlingly fresh, and for all its copious flaws, not really true of Crying Freeman either, I guess since there's a certain timeless quality to crummy anime.  Which, by the way, we still have two more disks of to get through, so there's something to look forward to...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Graduate or Die Delayed But Close

For those wondering where the fourth Black River book is, I can only apologise for the unexpectedly lengthy radio silence.  Until quite recently, I didn't know myself where exactly things were at, and it seemed better to stay quiet until I did.  Graduate or Die should have been ready and with the publisher by now, but we had some unfortunate issues with our copy editor, who missed a couple of deadlines and finally handed the book in almost a month late.  Add to that the fact that what they eventually delivered wasn't altogether what they'd been asked to provide, especially when it came to things like brevity and moderation, and the result is that, though the end is very much in sight, it's taking that bit longer to get there than I'd have hoped.

But fear not ... I've nearly made it!  And in fairness, it's always better to get too much feedback than too little, especially when a fair percentage of what was in there was genuinely useful, so at least I'm confident we're putting out this last book in the best state it can be.  Also, the holdups have given me plenty of opportunity to address some other outstanding elements; and so, for example, we have a brilliant introduction by one of the biggest names in modern fantasy to go with those by the lovely folks who helped us out on the first three.  I won't say who just yet, but suffice to say that, if you're into fantasy, there's a good chance they're one of your favourite authors.

As for a release date, my making a guess when the publisher hasn't officially set one is probably too much like tempting fate, especially at the moment, when predicting anything feels like tempting fate.  What I can say with confidence is that everything will be ready at my end by the middle of next month, so as things stand, there's no particular reason Graduate or Die shouldn't be out soon after that.  Fingers crossed, right?  I feel like I've been working on this one for an age, and according to my magical spreadsheet of timekeeping, I have been working on it fairly constantly for the better part of a year, so I'm as eager as anyone to see it out in the world.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 72

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...

Space Adventure Cobra, 1982, dir: Osamu Dezaki

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.

Gauche the Cellist, 1982, dir: Isao Takahata

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.

Locke the Superman, 1984, dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi

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.

Crusher Joe: The Complete OVA Series, 1989, dir's: Toshifumi Takizawa, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

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.

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 71

Obviously these reviews have never been intended to serve much point beyond my own strange amusement, but still, I do try and keep in mind that someone might legitimately come to them advice.  But one of the flaws there is that, more and more over the years, I've stumbled down the collecting rabbit hole.  My original mandate was to focus on titles that were readily available in the UK, but we left that point behind a fair while back, and now it's a vanishing memory.  As such, this time around we get a couple of titles that are on the seriously rare side and one that's of pretty much legendary status.  But what to do, eh?  I somehow found them, and they're wonderful, so I can't not talk about them, can I?

And with that confession out of the way, let's take a look at Devilman: Demon Bird Sirène, Battle Athletes, Sonic Soldier Borgman: Last Battle and Lover's Rain, and Spirit of Wonder: Miss China's Ring...

Devilman: Demon Bird Sirène, 1990, dir: Umanosuke Iida

My main concern coming to this second Devilman OVA wasn't so much that it wouldn't be as good as the first, a lot to ask when Devilman: The Birth was something of a minor classic, but that it wouldn't be as stunningly animated.  Anime often bucks the rule of Western releases that a sequel is usually cheaper, but part one set the bar awfully high.  So it's a relief to be able to say that Demon Bird Sirène looks just as good, if not better.  There's nothing on a par with the two sequences of surrealist fantasy horror that made The Birth stand out, but the return is a higher general proportion of ingenious and ambitious shots.  Put them together and you get two of the most visually impressive OVAs from the brief period around the turn of the eighties that was perhaps the finest flowering of Japanese hand-drawn animation.

So that's the animation nerds taken care of, but what about everyone else?  The Birth not only looked great, it brought enough imagination to bear on its standard "hero confronts evil by becoming it" tale to stand out and threw in plenty of legitimately freakish, nasty horror along the way.  And on those fronts, Demon Bird Sirène doesn't fare quite so well.  There are certainly scenes nearly as unsettling as anything part one had to offer, and its narrative is hardly rote, but both suffer from the fact that, where The Birth had a specific story to tell, Demon Bird Sirène is content to be a middle section.  We learn more about the demons and about our hero Akira, but essentially what's on offer is a series of fights.

But what fights!  All credit to director Iida, it's a remarkable achievement that each of the three showcase battles feels distinct and consequential.  The first is practically a self-contained vignette and opts primarily for psychological horror, but does a fine job of setting the tone for what follows: an inventive haunted house sequence of sorts, and then the coup de grâce, a lengthy, bloody scrap between Devilman and the titular Sirène, a half-naked eagle woman with giant wings sprouting out of her head.  There is, by the way, a heck of a lot of semi-nudity, and indeed total nudity, in this second episode, but Sirène actually makes for a surprisingly sympathetic and interesting antagonist, one with that best of villain traits: she legitimately believes she's in the right, to the point where it's hard not to root for her.

The result is that rare sequel that doesn't disappoint.  Arguably it's up to something less sophisticated than its progenitor, but on the other hand, it does that thing superlatively, and looks (and sounds) terrific in the process.  If I missed those scenes of phantasmagorical fantasy horror that made the original OVA stand out, there were no shortage of compensations and no shortage of fresh stand-out moments: the demon-possessed house attacking its occupants is splendid nightmare fuel, as is pretty much the whole of the prologue.  Ultimately, this short-lived saga amounts to some of the finest action horror to come out of a period that excelled at such stuff, and - considering that the Discotek re-release sticks both episodes on a single disk, along with a radio drama of all things - is a must-watch for fans of the genre.

Battle Athletes, 1997, dir: Kazuhiro Ozawa

My expectations for the six-part OVA Battle Athletes stretched to it being a comedy sci-fi show of the kind that anime frequently does well, but with a sports theme tacked on; and given that I had a fair idea of the basic ingredients going in, I couldn't have been much further from the mark.  Battle Athletes is a sports anime front and centre, and the science fiction, bar one episode, is principally there to get us in place for its central conceit, while what comedy there is comes largely as a side-effect.

But let's get that main concept out of the way.  Via a weirdly elaborate and rather beautifully animated prologue, we're introduced to a far-flung future in which all human endeavour is devoted to sporting prowess and physical perfection and ultimately to the yearly athletic competition that bestows the title of 'Cosmic Beauty' - which seems to only be open to women, though it's altogether impossible to tease out how gender politics are meant to work in this setting.  Anyway, the show finds this state of affairs not horrifyingly fascistic but basically okay so long as everyone behaves themselves, and our protagonist is one Akari Kanzaki, daughter of a previous Cosmic Beauty, who's determined to take the title herself and who we meet as she begins her new life at the University Satellite, school for - well, battle athletes, I guess.

What we get from there is, as you might predict, the story of Akari's quest to become a champion via a series of wacky futuristic events, zero gravity lacrosse and orienteering through a deteriorating abandoned space slingshot and the like.  However, it's actually more about its characters, to the extent that, by the end, that side was informing the sports drama and not the other way around.  Which, as it turns out, is a good thing, because that's far and away its strongest aspect.  All of Battle Athletes' cast are interesting, even if they generally fit into well-worn archetypes; but there are a couple who certainly don't, and chief among them is Akari's roommate Kris Christopher.  It's fair to say that nineties anime doesn't have a lot of openly gay characters, and that when they do appear, they're not always handled with the greatest sensitivity, which makes Kris stand out from the off.  So that she's also a pacifist trainee priestess raised on the moon and studying in the hope of achieving a transcendental encounter with the divine is icing on the cake.  Kris is such a legitimately fascinating character that, as involving as the sports stuff is - and it actually is, despite the eccentric trappings and innately dodgy concept - it was the question of her will-they, won't-they relationship with Akari that held my attention.  More surprising still, Kris is far from being the only LGBT character in the show, and those characters, and the themes surrounding them, are treated positively without feeling remotely preachy or tacked on.

In short, aside from being the fun, sci-fi-tinged sports adventure with a bit of comedy thrown in that I was expecting, Battle Athletes is a tremendously kind-hearted show, one that's eager to accept its characters for who they are and gently nudges the viewer to do likewise.  Combine that with appealing designs, frequently impressive animation, and a rousing score, and you have something legitimately special: a great example of what it appears to be on the surface that comes laden with extra depth for those seeking it, and featuring one of the most singular characters I've encountered in all of this long trawl through a decade's worth of anime.

Sonic Soldier Borgman: Last Battle and Lover's Rain, 1989 / 1990, dir's: Hiroshi Negishi / Kiyoshi Murayama

I'll say this for vintage anime, it certainly throws up its share of interesting reviewing challenges!  Today's case in point is a sly bit of money-grabbing from ADV: a release pairing the two movie sequels that, in close succession, followed the show Sonic Soldier Borgman, which - here's the important bit! - was never released outside of Japan.

Now, admittedly this isn't quite the problem it might be.  The initial film, of around an hour in length, is set firmly after the events of the series, and, as its title of Last Battle suggests, is very much in the business of bringing the protagonists back together for one last continuity-free scrap.  It assumes a degree of foreknowledge, but also does a fair job of reintroducing the cast, making for a relatively standalone affair.  Unfortunately, it's also not terribly interesting in and of itself.  The first half, in which not much happens besides those various introductions, is more successful than the second, in which the gang band together to face off against the new and predictable threat that's arisen, in a lengthy action finale that feels the need to take one of our three heroes out of play for the duration ... in a team of two men and one woman, I bet you can't guess who spends twenty minutes tied to a chair!  The animation is functional if undistinguished, but the designs are both achingly of their time and too garish for the material's tone, and all in all, it's hard to say what ADV saw here that would be so appealing that viewers would ignore how they were essentially watching an epilogue.

Lover's Rain has its own problems, which, impressively, are almost the exact opposite to those in Last Battle.  Despite being made a year later, it's set before the previous film, which is all sorts of confusing if you're watching them in the sequence they appear on the disk.  The main thread here involves two characters getting together who are already a couple (and indeed were in the midst of breaking up!) by the beginning of the previous entry.  For this reason and others, Lover's Rain relies more heavily on a knowledge of the show and calls back more explicitly to what I assume were crucial events and plot threads, including a big bad to be beaten that hasn't much resonance without that wider context.  On the other hand, this second release is more interesting in and of itself, director Murayama brings more sense of style, and the closing scrap is more imaginative and visually stimulating.  However, where Last Battle was spread over a leisurely hour, Lover's Rain lasts for barely over half that, so that by the time it gets going, it's pretty much done.

At the time, I'm sure it's fair to say this had more to recommend it.  Even with a combined running time that's only that of a standard feature, there's a sense of value that comes with getting two "films" together.  But now that it's somewhat hard to track down, their failings are distinctly apparent, and it turns out that being sequels to an impossible-to-see show was barely the half of it.  There's nothing new here, nothing to stand out, and probably there wasn't much more three decades ago, making this the rare title were I'd suggest that getting swallowed by the sands of time was probably the best thing for it.

Spirit of Wonder: Miss China's Ring, 1992, dir: Mitsuru Hongo

I can claim no impartiality when it comes to Spirit of Wonder: the manga, what little of it was released in Europe and the US, is among my favourite things ever.  Primarily it tells the story of Miss China, immigrant owner of the Tenkai restaurant, which she runs alone on an island apparently off the coast of England (though it's named for one in Australia.)  Miss China, as the narrator informs us, has been sole proprietor of Tenkai since she was eighteen, and as though that wasn't difficult enough, has for a tenant lecherous, freeloading genius and all-round mad scientist Professor Breckenridge, a situation that China tolerates, barely, because she's in a tentative relationship with Breckenridge's assistant Jim.

It's an intriguing setup in its own right.  Manga writer Kenji Tsuruta doesn't shy away from the ways in which China's situation is far from ideal; in the book, she's presented as having a less than perfect grasp of English, and that, along with the tribulations of running her own business at a young age, are enough to leave her frequently feeling down and on occasions turning to drink.  (The literal translation of the Japanese title for the story this OVA was taken from is actually "Miss China's Melancholy.")  However, to further complicate matters, the world of Spirit of Wonder isn't quite our own.  Though it's portrayed realistically for the most part, it soon becomes apparent that it's closer to the fiction of Wells and Verne than any reality, and the result is that, absurd as Breckenridge's experiments are, they also have a tendency to work.

So it goes that what starts out as a story about China violently hassling the professor for the latest month's rent and getting suspicious of Jim's relationship with the local flower girl spirals into something much weirder and more fanciful - though what sets Spirit of Wonder apart is that it never lets go of its mundane aspects, preferring genuine human emotions over whimsy and letting notes of real sadness and heart stray in.  The book, if you can find a copy, is something genuinely special, and the anime has the sense not to mess with what doesn't need mending.  Director Hongo and writer Michiru Shimada stick to their material tenaciously, adapting a single story with absolute fidelity; indeed, this must be among the most faithful adaptations in any medium.  Yet Hongo still manages to bring a bit of voice and technique to the telling, despite an obviously modest budget.  There are a handful of noticeably complex shots, deployed with care, and along with a faded colour scheme that's a perfect choice for the material and Tanaka Kôhei's lovely score, there's enough going on to warrant the shift to anime.

I suppose I shouldn't oversell the thing.  It's incredibly slight, and also stretched somewhat thin even with a running time of a little over forty minutes.  For that matter, a later adaptation from 2001 probably does even more justice and is a heck of a lot easier to get hold of - which is to say, not basically impossible.  Spirit of Wonder: Miss China's Ring was an early release from AnimEigo, who no doubt assumed it didn't have a very broad appeal, and they appear to have printed about ten copies.  You can find the dub on YouTube, and it's pretty good except for the total miscasting of China herself, with actress Carrie Savage deciding to play up her Americanness in a manner that couldn't possibly work for the material.  With all of that said, I'd absolutely recommend the later release, Scientific Boys Club, and of course I highly recommend Miss China's Ring if you can somehow lay hands on a copy (it took me a couple of years and a spot of good luck!)  Failing all that, the dub is better than nothing, though it's heartbreaking to think it's the only way most people will experience one of the more delightful OVA's ever made.

-oOo-

This is one of those posts where, reading over it, I immediately want to go back and watch everything again - heck, even Sonic Soldier Borgman, though I'm sure it was as thoroughly mediocre as I've made it out to be!  Spirit of Wonder is a big component of my personal pantheon, Battle Athletes is one of the best OVA series I've come across, and Devilman is a real high point of the flood of horror and dark fantasy titles that were everywhere during the eighties and nineties.  And wouldn't you know it but those latter three are the titles that are hard (or essentially impossible) to find these days.  Ah, the life of a vintage anime collector is a cruel one!  Well, not mine, I guess, since I own them all.  Hmm, I'm not sure what my point is here...

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 70

More randomosity!  And if it seems like these posts are coming ever thicker and faster, it's because a) I have a bit of time on my hands, having cleared the boards of contracted work in the exhausting blur that was the first five months of the year and b) because I have a silly number of them ready at the draft stage and I'm trying to get caught up.  So, with that in mind, let's crack on and have a gander at Gundam-W: Endless Waltz, Silent Möbius The Motion Picture 2, Lupin the 3rd: The Hemingway Papers, and Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie...

Gundam-W: Endless Waltz, 1998, dir: Yasunao Aoki

Is it fair to review the feature film adaptation of a three-part OVA that was in itself the conclusion to a forty-nine episode TV series?  Perhaps not.  Yet Endless Waltz seems to have been made with at least the possibility in mind that someone would watch it without prior experience of Gundam Wing, and that's good enough for me.

Though it has to be said that, in the first third, the flashbacks that are there to introduce a modicum of background for characters the more experienced viewer has been hanging around with for some twenty hours were the most confusing element, and I'm not certain it wouldn't have been easier to keep up if writer Katsuyuki Sumisawa had thrown me in completely at the deep end.  But no, Endless Waltz chooses to function much like a proper, self-contained movie, with a narrator to drop in vital snippets of backstory and those occasional flashbacks and characters who have a habit of discussing their mutual history or making declamatory statements about recent events.  And with all that, it's still an uphill climb, though more because the cast is large for a ninety-minute film and less because the plot is especially complicated, since it isn't.  It is, in fact, very much in line with that of Char's Counterattack, the film that concluded the original Gundam saga, only with five pilots instead of one.  In the aftermath of a major conflict, a year's fragile peace is disrupted by yet another bid to take over the Earth from yet another orbiting colony, with the added wrinkle that everyone was so eager for peace to stick this time that they're unprepared for another round of hostilities, having gone as far as firing their best weapons into the sun.

It soon turns out that a degree of familiarity is actually in Endless Waltz's favour, as is the relatively straightforward narrative.  And after a wobbly first third of catching up with its many characters and shuffling them into place, things pick up considerably and keep picking up, resulting in a climax amply good enough to atone for the rocky beginning.  It's to the film's credit that it finds meaningful and varied threads for everyone and then does a solid job of navigating between them, so that a slender plot feels meatier that it is.  And for what was originally an OVA, the film's a polished bit of a work, with all-round slick animation and some splendid action, let down only by the brief intrusion of dated CG.

For all that, and perhaps because I lacked a history with the series, and despite suitably Gundam-esque themes of how exactly you go about hanging onto peace in a way that doesn't lead to more conflict down the road, I found Endless Waltz a touch lightweight in comparison with my favourite entries.  Maybe it comes down to the sheer number of characters who are teenage boys; for the first time, I felt I very much wasn't the target audience.  And as cool as the climatic twenty minutes are, there's something a bit silly about the themed Gundam suits with their outlandish weapons and accessories that seems out of place in a series often regarded as the quintessence of 'real robot' shows.  As such, while I enjoyed my time with it and would happily recommend that anyone with enough familiarity to get past that uneven first third give it a shot, I'd place this somewhat below my favourite entries.

Silent Möbius The Motion Picture 2, 1992, dir: Yasunori Ide

I've since decided I was slightly harsh on the first Silent Möbius movie, which has nothing really wrong with it besides the fact that there's only so much you can accomplish in an hour, and does a whole lot right in the time it has.  And the same could be said of this second film, which followed a year later and picks up about as directly as is possible from its events.  Or one thread of them, anyway: that first film focused on Katsumi Liqueur of the futuristic anti-demon police force AMP, shifting between a present-day crisis to a flashback that in turn informed those current events, and it's that younger, less kick-ass Katsumi we're back with this time around.

If there's a problem, that's it right there: the character Katsumi will become is a damn sight more interesting than the one she was, and this second film saddles us entirely with the former, meaning that at no point does she kick butt with a talking sword.  By the same measure, there's not a great deal of dramatic tension to be found in the question of whether Katsumi will turn her back on AMP, who are now actively trying to recruit her, and obviously we know she's not about to die.  On the other hand, it's not an inherently bad idea to use her personal history - which a bit of digging on Wikipedia reveals to be chock full of vital Silent Möbius plot stuff - as a way into a wider narrative, and Katsumi's wishywashiness as a protagonist is mitigated by the other AMP members, who are uniformly more appealing.  Thanks to them, we get a couple of exciting bursts of action and a climax that mostly makes up for the steady pace of what's gone before.

Nevertheless, an hour of Katsumi largely being sad and indecisive would be tough going were it not for how downright pretty everything is.  I'm not wholly sold on the character designs, but they're distinctive and slickly animated.  The backgrounds, however, are on a whole different level.  The colour palette is frequently gorgeous, but more than that, there's a technique at play that's so striking it's tricky even to describe, with certain settings reduced to an almost impressionistic level of detail without going so far that we doubt they're real places.  Dreamlike is the word, I suppose, though even that doesn't get to the bottom of it.  At any rate, they're a terrific visualisation of Katsumi's emotional space and particularly her sense of distance from the world around her.

Those backgrounds are the best thing the second Silent Möbius picture has going for it, but it's fair to say that its flaws are, for the most part, circumstantial.  There was obviously meant to be at least one more of these movies, this even ends on a "To be continued..." card, and as the middle act of a story, the second entry would work considerably better than it does as a standalone.  As such, I can't bring myself to be too harsh about it.  There's no reason to seek it out on its own, but if the whole "cyberpunk with demons" setting appeals to you then the two films together are an appealing stab at that concept, and a window into a world so intriguingly presented that you'll likely wish, as I do, that another film or two had been forthcoming.*

Lupin the Third: The Hemingway Papers, 1990, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Who would have thought it would be director Osamu Dezaki that got me over my lack of enthusiasm for the Lupin the Third franchise, and Lupin who got me over my issues with Dezaki?  Yet here we are, and here's the second of the director's Lupin TV movies that I've seen, and I like it nearly as much as The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure, which I liked rather a lot.  Dezaki would polish his approach to these things in the intervening six years, but nevertheless, this, his second stab at the series, is a fine bit of work.  There's no getting around it, the director is an excellent fit, and his stylistic tics - which can be so irritating when he's making, for example, horror - are well suited to the off-the-cuff lunacy that's the world of Monkey Punch's ungentlemanly super-thief.

A big part of what's impressive here is how the film finds ways to keep an entry in so long-running a series feeling fresh.  For most of the first two thirds, we have Lupin operating alone and the rest of the supporting cast off on their own subplots.  Inevitably these bring them all together eventually, but nevertheless, it's a satisfying change of pace, and Lupin - a character I generally only find bearable in short bursts - actually benefits from being the centre of attention.  The plot is in some ways so much boilerplate: there's a treasure that points the way to another much bigger treasure and various interested parties are on its trail.  But again, there are enough twists on the formula to keep things fresh.  Most noticeably, the film confines itself almost entirely to a single setting, an island nation caught in a war between two batches of treasure hunters, paving the way for plenty of Yojimbo / A Fist Full of Dollars style shenanigans as Lupin's regular allies Goemon and Jigen find themselves in the employ of the opposing factions.

Where The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure was exemplified by a couple of huge action set pieces, The Hemingway Papers occupies itself more with incidents, but generally they're fun and there are still standout scenes.  The best is what would normally be the big, show-stopping heist, but here is a jokey slice of cool in the Ocean's 11 mould, as Lupin and Fujiko team up to make the complicated and deadly look preposterously easy.  Nothing else is quite that delightful, but on the other hand, there are more than enough enjoyable moments spread over the ninety-minute run time to keep the pace from dipping, and enough that are really ingenious to make it feel somewhat special.  Like the animation, little in the plot rises above the level of good TV movie territory, yet it's a good TV movie based in a well-established franchise that can be terrific entertainment in the right hands, and - again, who'd have thought it? - Dezaki's hands are definitely that.  It's probably not extraordinary enough to convert the uninitiated, but if you're a Lupin fan, it's certainly one to keep an eye out for.

Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie, 1996, dir: Kazunori Ikegami

It's probably reasonable to say that, assuming you have any preconceptions at all and assuming you know in advance that what distributor ADV called a movie was actually a two-part OVA cobbled together into a single, hour-long entity, the Sonic the Hedgehog animated film is about what you'd expect it to be.  That's to say, there's a flimsy plot involving doctor Robotnik creating an evil robot duplicate of Sonic while also scheming to destroy the world and marry the president's daughter Sara (where he expects to go on their honeymoon is anyone's guess), there are a couple of boss fights, there are sequences that directly ape the video games, and the whole endeavour is stitched together with a spot of comic relief.  Whereas at no point is there the faintest sense of anyone trying to reinvent the wheel, or even of attempting to exceed the limits of their brief in more than the smallest of ways.

So the soundtrack is a bit better than it needs to be, and while the animation is resolutely cheap and TV-esque, some thought has gone into the backgrounds and world-building, making for the odd scene that legitimately feels as though somebody made an effort to imagine how the world of the games might function if it was expanded into three dimensions.  And there's a welcome quirkiness that makes the comedy more charming that irritating; in particular, the relationship between Robotnik and his unknowing wife-to-be is good for a few laughs.  Then again, a lot of what ought to work doesn't fare so well.  Sonic isn't very fun to be around and doesn't actually accomplish much; the film does a dreadful job of explaining why we should care about him or consider him to be so important that he'd be at the president's beck and call and villains would make robot duplicates of him.  And the action is quite duff, limited by the budget animation and, again, by the fact that Sonic can't do a lot except run around.

Which is probably a good point at which to admit that I've never really got Sonic, either the character or the games franchise, and so obviously I'm in no way the target audience here.  I guess that, if I was, I'd have liked this well enough.  As I said above, it does precisely what you'd expect, and does it all reasonably well, though without any real flare.  And I suppose that, given how badly wrong video game adaptations can go, that's not quite such faint praise as it sounds.  At the least, you get the sense that those involved had a degree of affection and respect for the franchise.  But to honest, if you're anything except a hardened fan, it's tough to say that this one's worth the trouble of seeking out.

-oOo-

Coming back to this, I was surprised to realise what a very average selection it is, and also that I was one entry away from a themed post on middling movies in series that were capable of better.  Endless Waltz and The Hemingway Papers are a good-but-not-great Gundam movie and a good-but-not-great Lupin movie, and the second Silent Möbius film suffers from not being quite as strong as the first Silent Möbius movie.  Which only leaves Sonic the Hedgehog, and while I pulled my punches in the actual review because I know a lot of people really like Sonic, it did basically suck!



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* There would be a TV show six years later, and I keep meaning to track it down, but animation-wise, TV anime from 1998 was a long way from feature film animation from 1992, and it looks awfully ugly and cheap by comparison.

The Cover to End All Covers?

I may have mentioned on occasions how in love I am with the cover for my recently released ninth novel To End All Wars.  And really, why wouldn't I be?  Not only is it stunningly painted, it does precisely what a good cover ought to: it gives you all the necessary information to know whether the book inside might be for you.  We have our protagonist, Lieutenant Rafael Forrester, looking thoroughly fed up to be in no man's land amid the battlegrounds of the western front in World War One.  And we have ... something ... plummeting toward the ravaged earth behind him.  Look closely; it's definitely no shell, not with that eerie glow and those scintillating lights and that angle of descent that suggests it's come from awfully high up.  In fact, it's a safe bet that, whatever's happening, whatever Forrester's going to have to confront across the course of the novel, it's not altogether of this world.  But then again, you might notice that, though we can see it, Forrester isn't paying the slightest attention - and that's important too.  If a mysterious glowing light falls in no man's land and there's nobody there to watch, does it make a sound?  Does it exist at all?  Or could it the product of one exhausted soldier's severely damaged mind?

Forrester, the war, that strange light, and the ambiguity of an event to which the only partial witness is a man with good reason to doubt his sanity - that's what To End All Wars is about, in a nutshell, and it's right there in that fantastic cover.  Indeed, the only thing that could have improved it is a quote from one of the finest genre authors currently working, pointing out how thoughtful and atmospheric the book is, and - wait, could that text at the bottom be a blurb from multi-award-winning superstar and all round nice guy Adrian Tchaikovsky?  It could!  Huge thanks to Adrian for reading through To End All Wars at short notice, and for appreciating its virtues, and for summing them up in a way that hopefully with encourage a lot of people who might otherwise have skipped on by it to give my novel a chance.

But none of this is what I'm posting about, except indirectly.  What I'm posting about is to share the news that my lovely cover has made it past the first round in All Author's cover of the month competition, and it would be marvellous if it got a bit further in the rankings.  Or, you know, won, and I got some kind of thrilling prize, like a lifetime supply of peanut butter, or a yacht, or a yacht full of peanut butter.  No, wait, maybe not that one.  At any rate, if you agree with me that To End All Wars has a pretty damn awesome cover, you can throw a vote its way at the link here.