Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 77

Seventy-seven posts in, and here's another milestone: we have what I think is the last of the titles I recall being really curious to see and missing out on back when this stuff was first arriving in the West.  As much as it probably seems that way, the driving force here has never exactly been nostalgia, in part because I wasn't watching a lot of anime back in the nineties, aside from the usual touchstones of Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Ghibli movies and such; but I have been trying to plug those gaps, as and when I could.  I unconditionally loved the live-action sequel The Guyver: Dark Hero back in the day (I mean, I still kind of do!) and yet I somehow never got around to hunting down the anime.  Well, it took me a while, but I got there.

That aside, the unplanned Lupin and Black Jack marathons trundle on, and we've one of those random standalone titles that seem to be getting harder and harder to find, which gives us The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor, Volume 1, Black Jack: Parasite, Lupin the Third: Voyage to Danger, and Sorcerer on the Rocks...

The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor, Volume 1, 1989, dir: Koichi Ishiguro

I mean this as a compliment, though maybe it won't sound like one: the first volume of The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor does a terrific job of telling three hours' worth of story over the course of three hours.  Okay, yes, that does sound like faint praise, but let's face it, many an anime from the period failed to do that, and it's all the less likely with such an action-heavy title as this, where it's easy for six episodes to devolve into six fights broken up with sufficient setup to clarify whatever plot there is and keep the budget at a manageable level.  Which, now that I describe it, is exactly what this does, so I suppose what I'm really complimenting it on is doing so in a fashion that works.  Within the episodic structure dictated by its material, it nevertheless succeeds in offering features like rising action, meaningful arcs, and late-game plot twists in such a way that we feel we're getting a single coherent tale.

That tale follows teenager Sho, who, along with his best friend Tetsurou, happens to stumble into a very messy set of circumstances involving the evil Chronos Corporation, who've misplaced a suitcase containing three wearable bioweapons - that's to say, Guyvers - and are busy trying to find them using their other, more readily available bioweapons, the monstrous Zoanoids, because if there's one thing Chronos is all about, it's bioweapons.  And wouldn't you know it, who should stumble on said suitcase and get himself bonded with a Guyver unit than young Sho, who soon finds that he'll be spending his day - and indeed, most of the days following - punching gross monsters in the face until they explode.

To return to my original point, you can very much see how that might go if it didn't go well; we've probably all come across the odd anime that closely resembles watching your mate play through a series of video game boss fights.  And in a sense, that's what we're here for.  At heart, The Guyver is a much bloodier version of an older form that's been kicking around in Japanese culture for decades; what we have is absolutely a Super Sentai show in the vein of Might Morphin Power Rangers and its progenitors, and nobody goes to those in search of narrative sophistication, do they?  They go for people in suits punching out monsters.

But what The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor brings to that formula is just enough story, and just enough twistiness and characterisation, to provide a meaningful backbone to the fights and to ensure they escalate nicely, keeping a genuine sense of danger right through to the end.  And, again at the risk of damning with faint praise by comparing with less successful shows, it's a bonus that, though there are definite fluctuations, the designs and technical values feel broadly of a piece across all six episodes.  They're never outright bad, they're rarely amazing, but they're consistent.  And what all this consistency and competence does is let us enjoy the coolness of a teenager in a terrifying sentient suit made of alien flesh getting into startlingly violent fights with a carnival of imaginatively designed monsters without feeling like the whole business is hopelessly dumb and empty.

Black Jack: Parasite, 1999, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Here we are with the eighth episode of the Black Jack OVA series, released on the cusp of the end of the nineties, and for the first time, I find myself incapable of reviewing an Osamu Dezaki-directed title with either open hostility or, as has been getting more and more common, tentative praise.  No, the fact is that his work here is a top-tier piece of visual storytelling, taking an interesting notion and using the medium of animation to bring to the surface its grace notes and reveal its hidden depths.  Heck, I can't even grumble about his grab bag of tricks and stylistic excesses, because here they're deployed to perfection, discreetly enough to be an interesting surprise and so well-timed that they always achieve precisely the effect Dezaki was evidently aiming for.  At one point, for instance, he does that thing he was so fond of whereby the animation stops on a painted still, and it's both such a compelling image and so intuitively placed that it's a little bit heart-stopping.

To all of that lavish praise, I'd add that I'm really beginning to fall in love with these Black Jack OVAs, and it's incredibly galling that they're so tough to find.  It takes a bit of getting your head around their appeal, magical realist medical thrillers not being a particularly busy sub-genre, but when they work, they really work, crafting something outstandingly weird and exciting that hews just close enough to reality to not feel utterly silly, while still going to some distinctly odd places.  Here, in the episode U.S. Manga Corps released under the title of Parasite, for example, we have a schoolboy apparently becoming infected by the massive, possibly sentient tree that protects an isolated village, but also is the favoured local suicide spot.  It's the sort of setup where you can see the broad outlines almost from the get-go, yet the specific turns it takes, along with the profoundly bizarre imagery it presents, add up to something legitimately unique.  And Dezaki finds a perfect tone, balancing the material between wonder and horror, so that we're never certain which way it will tip.  One minute it feels like a Miyazaki homage, the next it's closer to David Cronenberg, and frankly, if you've never been curious as to how a Miyazaki / Cronenberg collaboration might turn out, you're probably reading the wrong reviewer.

What's perhaps most striking for such a relatively short film, though, is that it manages to sneak in some genuinely strong characterisation.  The schoolboy and his brother are pretty boring, it has to be said, and Black Jack is essentially a cipher, but this episode does great things with his assistant Pinoko - though granted they wouldn't make a lot of sense if you weren't familiar with her history.  At any rate, it's nice to see her being put to meaningful use.  The real star, however, is one-off character Armando, who could easily have been nothing but a source of exposition and instead gets a heartrending arc of his own.  He's surely my favourite thing here - though the opening, a gorgeous combination of music and imagery that Dezaki choreographs to perfection, comes a close second.  And actually, there's that phenomenal surgery sequence too, which brings all the latent body horror bubbling into full view.  Oh, and the closing theme is marvellous.  Really, Black Jack: Parasite is so full of good parts that I could sing its praises for twice as many words as I've used here.

Lupin the Third: Voyage to Danger, 1993, dir: Masaaki Ôsumi

With so many Lupin stories out there, it's a sure thing that a sense of repetition will be bound to set in eventually.  To some extent, that's part of the charm: there are elements we can confidently expect to appear, and the basic structure of all things Lupin is largely the same, insomuch as these are nearly always action-comedy heist stories centring around the titular thief and his band of ne'r-do-wells.  But it's frustrating that, for me, the point where familiarity tipped into over-familiarity happened to arrive with the TV special Voyage to Danger, which, for its first few minutes, felt like it was going down a far more surprising route.  Its opening scene sees the dogged Inspector Zenigata surrounding Lupin's latest headquarters, as he's done many a time before, only for him to dismiss the army of policemen who are accompanying him.  Zenigata, it turns out, has been pulled from the case that's been his life's work, and he's here not to arrest Lupin but to drown his sorrows and reveal that a much worse foe is waiting in the wings.  Having grown tired of his incessant failures, Zenigata's superiors have decided to solve their Lupin problem once and for all by hiring a mercenary and making it clear that they don't much care what shape he brings his quarry back in.

If, like me, you're a Zenigata fan, this promises great things, and the early scenes are a joy, delving into the mutual fondness and respect that's always ticking away in the background of the Lupin / Zenigata relationship.  When Lupin decides the best solution for everyone is to involve himself in the case Zenigata's been shunted onto, that of an arms smuggling ring named Shot Shell, and to rip them off in the process because after all he's still the world's greatest thief, it really seems we might be in for a unique take.  So it's disappointing when Zenigata drifts into the background and a more recognisable structure takes over.  There's nothing in Voyage to Danger that could be called bad - indeed, its a perfectly enjoyable spin on the Lupin tropes - but once we clear the opening ten minutes, there's nothing very novel either, and that only becomes truer as things progress.  This isn't helped by the usual problem that tends to infect these films, whereby the middle act gets a bit baggy and mechanical, and though the third act picks up the pace, it does so by diving headlong into Lupin cliché.  Indeed, it would be more shocking if the foolproof plan enacted with a good thirty minutes of plot left didn't go wrong, and if poor, mistreated Fujiko Mine didn't switch sides and shack up with the villain of the week.

What this most feels like is 1997's Island of Assassins, and admittedly it's mean-spirited to blame a film for being ripped off and done better four years later, but nevertheless, its true.  They even share the somewhat more realistic character designs and a shift away from the goofiest extremes in favour of a story somewhat grounded in reality.  That Voyage to Danger doesn't push so hard in that direction, while simultaneously feeling like it wants to and probably ought to, is another minor strike against it, and of course Island of Assassins benefited from a gap in which this sort of mid-budget animation had improved in many small but noticeable ways.  Though with that said, Voyage to Danger is still a strong entry when it comes to the visuals, and another of those Lupin specials that feels close to the point where you could stick it in a cinema and no-one would be terribly aggrieved.

Where does that leave us?  If you haven't seen Island of Assassins, and especially if you're quite new to the world of Lupin in general, I'd say with a clear recommendation: this is by no means a weak entry, and the worst that can be said about it is that it front-loads its best features.  And if you've encountered plenty of Lupin, it's still an enjoyable way to pass ninety minutes, with strong direction, impressive visuals, some nice tweaks on the familiar aesthetic, and enough original ideas to make it feel reasonably distinct, even if not all of them get capitalised on the way you might hope they'd be.

Sorcerer on the Rocks, 1999, dir: Kazuhiro Ozawa

I feel slightly dirty for having enjoyed Sorcerer on the Rocks, and even dirtier for recommending that anyone else might enjoy it.  Its main joke - nearly its only joke - is that the hero is a total and irredeemable bastard.  And while the forms of his bastardy are many and varied, a lot of them involve being obnoxious to his assistant / lackey Gin Fizz, who's following him about in the thankless hope of saving whatever he has that passes for a soul.  Whether it's dragging her around on a chain or forcing her to dance for chump change, our "hero" Shibas Scotch will sink to any depths without a second thought.

Oh, all the characters are named after alcoholic drinks.  It's very much that sort of show.

Anyway, the point I was making is that Sorcerer on the Rocks is deeply obnoxious, and to cap it off, has the budget and running time of roughly two TV episodes, with nothing besides some moderately pleasing character work to recommend it on the level of style.  It feels very much like a pilot that failed to be picked up, whereas in fact it's a spin-off from the show Sorcerer Hunters, which I suppose adds up to much the same.  It's cheap tat, albeit tat made by people who clearly knew what they were about enough to produce respectable work with the odd nice visual detail here or there.

And also, lots of bare breasts.  It's very much that sort of a show, too.

But, as the saying goes, all a comedy has to do is be funny, and Sorcerer on the Rocks is funny.  Like, laugh-out-loud funny on occasions, with just enough of a baseline of mild amusement capped off with half a dozen really solid gags that you get to the end feeling you've had your comedic money's worth.  And also, far more surprisingly, it has a decent story, with quite a startling number of twists and turns for its less than an hour of running time.  Really, that's the aspect that surprised me more than anything: it's a remarkably terse and competent bit of storytelling, and that it manages to do that and not forget to be funny is actually an accomplishment worth celebrating, even if only slightly.

Nevertheless, it's certainly obnoxious, and it certainly does involve a woman being repeatedly humiliated for laughs, most of which really don't land, and it's certainly very inconsequential and not likely to stick in my memory past the end of this week.  So obviously I'm not saying you ought to rush off and find a copy or anything like that.  All the same, if you're truly craving a bit of unusually mean-spirited anime comedy, and the notion of a main character who really is an incurable wretch doesn't put you off, then it would be churlish to pretend I didn't enjoy the brief time I spent with it.

-oOo-

Sorcerer on the Rocks was undoubtedly the low point here, and yet, sad to admit, but weeks after I wrote the review, it actually has stuck in my memory, possibly because I immediately watched it again for some reason.  Anyway, I still wouldn't pretend it's any good or anything, but as low points go, we've surely had lower.  And the rest get a definite thumbs up: Voyage to Danger was a middling Lupin movie, but middling is pretty good where Lupin is concerned, the first Guyver volume was an unexpectedly fine example of the thing that it is, and this week's Black Jack marked the point where I really began to appreciate that I'd stumbled onto something special.  Damn it, how has this not found its way to blu ray yet?

Next time: lots of Saint Seiya movies, for my sins!



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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 76

Some anime franchises seem to be positively indestructible, and we've touched on many of those here, but there are others that were briefly a big deal, only to fade into relative obscurity.  It's one of the latter we're considering this time around, fantasy show El-Hazard, which managed to stretch to three OVAs and a TV series within a brief five years, only to vanish and never return.  What went wrong?   Did El-Hazard suffer a terrible injustice or get what was coming to it?  And why am I reviewing a TV series again when I swore that was the one thing I wouldn't do in these reviews?

The answers await!  Let's take a look at El-Hazard: The Magnificent World, El-Hazard: The Wanderers, El-Hazard The Magnificent World 2, and El-Hazard: The Alternative World...

El-Hazard: The Magnificent World, 1995, dir: Hiroki Hayashi

What's most striking about El-Hazard: The Magnificent World, some twenty-five years on from its original release, is how fresh it feels.  More than almost any anime from the decade I could point to, it's the little details that give away its age rather than the big picture: the colour palette, aspects of the designs, and such.  But not its plot, or its world-building, or its attitudes, heck no; in those terms, it's on par with anything released in the subsequent two decades and change.

Our protagonist is Makoto Mizuhara, who early on encounters a mysterious woman in the basement of his school and finds himself transported, along with his teacher Fujisawa, his self-appointed arch rival Katsuhiko, and Katsuhiko's sister Nanami, to the land of El-Hazard - a fantastical, somewhat Middle East-inspired place of magic and science, poised on the brink of a war that of course our cast find themselves drawn into, with the mean-spirited, slightly mad Katsuhiko particularly eager to take sides.

So far, so half the fantasy stories of the last century or so, and it's in its specifics that El-Hazard the show begins to shine.  A big part of the reason why, it's fair to say, is the presence of Hiroki Hayashi at the helm, the director also responsible for the first Tenchi Muyo OVA, a work that was similarly saved from being hackneyed by an unusual degree of inventiveness.  The Magnificent World, if anything, leans farther in that direction: it's positively bloated with ideas.  And whether it's sentient feline armour or militant bug people or clockwork goddesses or Fujisawa's splendid superpower, which sees him gaining in strength the soberer he gets, there are so many fun notions floating around that the show never seems stale.  Along with that, every character's a distinctive creation, and most are intriguing enough to warrant more screen time than they get, even when they're present basically as a joke.  And in many ways, they belong more to the twenty-first century than the twentieth; Makoto is forced to spend a good portion of the running time disguised as a woman, and there are a couple of openly gay characters, but if the show sometimes finds humour in those aspects, it's never mocking.  Moreover, as with Tenchi, hints of harem anime conventions largely fall apart in the face of how satisfyingly written the female cast are.  Sure, a couple of them have crushes on Makoto, but there's no bitchy rivalry and, thank goodness, not a single cooking contest.

All of that together would undoubtedly make for a decent show, but what pushes El-Hazard: The Magnificent World into the stratosphere is how gorgeous it looks.  It really is at the top end of what an OVA could be in 1995, and many, many scenes would look completely appropriate on a cinema screen: indeed, much of the effects work, the marvellously evocative character designs, and the attention to detail are top notch by any standard.  Because it is an OVA, the best is saved for the opening and closing episodes, the latter of which is particularly stunning, but never does it look remotely sloppy.

So with well-realised characters in an imaginative world wrapped up in some of the finest animation and design work the decade had to offer, we've got to be looking at a classic, right?  Yes, I think we are, but I'd be remiss in not offering up a couple of caveats.  One is that I'm not sure the OVA format does the material many favours; particularly toward the middle, I found myself wanting it to be either less episodic or less focused on its main arc, and it's easy to imagine this same material cut into two feature films and being better for it.  But more importantly, while it's superbly told and laced with brilliant details, it's fair to say that the core story is The Magnificent World's least exciting aspect.  This matters less than you might imagine: a solid story told superlatively is still pretty damn great, and the last forty-five minutes are so near to flawless that it seems petty to complain.  Still, it's enough to keep one of my new favourite shows out of that handful of works I'd call basically perfect.

El-Hazard: The Wanderers, 1995-1996, dir: Katsuhito Akiyama

According to its Wikipedia article, the TV series El-Hazard: The Wanderers is a re-imagining of the Magnificent World OVA, and according to the dates both there and on the IMDB, that's clearly impossible, because they came out at the same time.  But if we assume that, due perhaps to some sort of temporal loop of the sort El-Hazard itself delights in, this is true, it makes a degree of sense.  If there was one criticism that could be applied to The Magnificent World, it's that its structure didn't quite fit its format, leaving aspects feeling rushed or detached from the grander narrative.  And while the running time was sturdy enough for an OVA, you can easily see how the breathing room of twenty-six episodes might address those issues, while allowing the creators to dig deeper into their fascinating cast and world.

So it's a surprise that this isn't at all what El-Hazard: The Wanderers decides to do, and that, if anything, it strips away more than it adds.  Though that isn't apparent for the first couple of episodes, which greatly decompress a beginning that's essentially identical to what we've seen before.  This time, it's a scientific experiment Makota's been preparing that catapults him, Mr. Fujisawa, Nanami, and Katsuhiko to the magical world of El-Hazard, and Katsuhiko's spiteful interference with said experiment that's the catalyst, but we still wind up with Makota and Fujisawa in the land of Roshtaria and Katsuhiko joining that kingdom's enemies, the insectile Bugrom, while Nanami is stuck having her own adventures for a while.

Soon, however, changes become apparent.  Roshtaria's princess Rune Venus is now Makota's primary love interest, and her openly gay sister Fatora has vanished from existence; the whole plot with Makota having to impersonate Fatora is likewise gone.  Indeed, so is anything that might have been considered remotely radical, controversial, or particularly adult about The Magnificent World, to be replaced by an emphasis on light comedy and standalone stories.  Amazingly, The Wanderers somehow manages to have less plot than its predecessor, and what there is can largely be boiled down to "Katsuhiko and the Bugrom make life difficult for the Roshtarians and Makota and his allies repeatedly foil them."  It's late in the game when the Eye of God, so vital to the OVA, shows up, and only toward the very end when anything significant happens in relation to it, and though the principle theme in the first half is of Makoto and Fujisawa trying to get back to Earth, that quest loses steam fairly quickly.

Of course, a TV series not being the OVA it's drawing on isn't a crime, and if none of the changes are improvements, none of them are ruinous either, even if the removal of Fatora and the almost entire straightwashing of her partner Alielle feels depressingly censorious.  This version of Makota is more interesting and proactive, the more comedic take on certain characters, notably Ifurita, frequently pays off, and a lot of the standalone episodes are plenty of fun.  The Wanderers rarely sparkles - all else aside, the thoroughly middling TV animation sees to that - but it's generally pleasant and amusing, the sort of show that's easy to chill to for a fairly mindless twenty-two minutes.  I can't imagine anyone preferring this to The Magnificent World, and I doubt I'll ever return to it as I'm sure I will the OVA, but as an opportunity to hang out with some of the cast at greater length and in more laid-back surroundings, I can't say I resented my time with it.

El-Hazard The Magnificent World 2, 1997, dir: Yoshiaki Iwasaki

You remember those straight-to-video sequels Disney used to bang out with horrifying regularity?  They were calculated to look just enough like proper movies, and indeed like the proper movies they were follow-ups to, that undiscriminating parents would pick them up for their undiscriminating children.  But though the character designs would be basically the same, the animators would be guaranteed to have trouble sticking to them, since they were operating with a fraction of the talent and an even smaller fraction of the budget.  And though occasionally they'd have the virtue of being hilariously weird - Cinderella 3: A Twist in Time, anyone? - they could be guaranteed not to add a damn thing to the movies they were supposed to be expanding on, most of which left no real room for sequels.  The best that could be hoped would be that they didn't actively sabotage their predecessors.

El-Hazard: The Magnificent World 2 is what would happen if Disney had produced a straight-to-video sequel to the original El-Hazard OVA.  From its eye-wateringly crappy animation to its utter lack of inspiration to its failure to enhance a story that was perfectly whole in its own right, no other comparison fits so well.  Anime, after all, has never had quite the cash-in culture that's plagued Western cinema practically since its inception; there's no guarantee that a sequel will be cheaper than the original, or for that matter that it won't merrily chuck out half of what was crucial to the original's success.  Which makes it all the more striking both that The Magnificent World 2 exists - that impossibly lazy title says it all - and that anyone felt it a worthy continuation of one of the most lavish OVAs of the nineties.  Remember how I said there isn't a moment's sloppiness anywhere in The Magnificent World?  Well, here the opposite is true: aside from some decent effects shots and a couple of solid action sequences, there isn't a frame without its flaws.  And sometimes those flaws are appalling and unmissable; it seems no-one on the staff, for example, understood what eyes look like at a distance.  If you ever wanted to teach someone the differences between stunningly realised animation and cheap, shabby animation then - well, go with those Disney straight to video films, I guess, but if none are to hand, this would be the ideal substitute.

The problem, I suspect, was that El-Hazard: The Magnificent World was a little too perfect, leaving no conspicuous threads that begged to be tied up and so no meaningful direction in which a series could develop.  What we get instead is a tale that almost has to trample on the toes of its predecessor, making explicit what was gently implied, digging into aspects of the world-building that were more satisfying left vague, and outright ruining at least three of the characters, either by bringing them back in the most depressing ways imaginable or misrepresenting them so badly that they're unrecognisable.  Even if that weren't the case, its reliance on outrageous coincidence and joyless comedy to get its ducks in a row, in service of a plot that couldn't dive harder into anime tropes if it tried, would make it shockingly lacklustre.  Take this same material wrapped up in this same animation but peel away the El-Hazard brand and it would be middling at best, but try and present it as a meaningful follow-up to one of the finest OVAs of the decade and the result is a hard slap in the face.

El-Hazard: The Alternative World, 1998, dir: Yasuhito Kikuchi

The Alternative World, the final iteration of the El-Hazard franchise, certainly makes a promising initial impression.  There's the sense, wholly absent from the second OVA and only there in part in the TV series, that the creators understood what made the original so successful.  One vital point was that it wasn't so much the world of El-Hazard that was special, more its overt strangeness and the way the viewer was kept at a certain remove; here was a setting that never stopped feeling unfamiliar, and a steady enough stream of concepts and locations was thrown in for that alienation to carry through until the end.  On the other hand, with so much hand-waving and vagueness in regards to the world-building, there was more need than ever for a strong cast to focus on, and The Magnificent World pulled that off too, while both the setting and characters benefited from being brought to life with such top-tier animation.

With The Alternative World, the creative team had sense enough to realise they couldn't pull the same trick twice: especially with the series being a thing by this point, there was little to be done that could bring back the exciting strangeness that made El-Hazard such an appealing setting.  So instead, they cheated: a magical gizmo shunts the core cast, plus a couple of new members, into a new setting, Creteria, with its own distinct and notably more futuristic vibe.  Not only that, they find themselves scattered into small groups that are perfectly suited for everyone to go off and have their own adventures before coming together in time for the finale.  And while none of this looks anywhere near as good as the original OVA, it's a step up from where we've been since: the animation is crisp and polished, and if there aren't a great many wow moments, it's at least comfortable on the eyes.

Sadly, for all that The Alternative World gets off to a good start, that's not quite enough to carry it through to an equally good ending.  Mostly the problem is the tale it's telling, which turns out not to be terribly interesting, and also falls back on rehashing a crucial aspect of the original in a manner that undoes much of the good work in stepping away from El-Hazard in the first place.  That would be less hurtful if it wasn't happening at the expense of the various subplots, which largely fizzle out, having served as a means to show us the sights of Creteria and give a sense of how the place works.  There's a big difference between keeping your cast busy and giving them meaningful plots to advance through, and by its end, The Alternative World has done lots of the former and too little of the latter.

With that said, even if this last gasp of the El-Hazard franchise isn't a perfect return to its lofty beginnings, it's probably the most successful attempt at reproducing them, and so the sequel that feels least dispensable.  There's definite fun to be had in hanging out with these characters again, especially in the first half, when that means watching them come to grips with a new environment and unpredictable challenges, be it Fatora indulging in a castle break-in that feels like Ico played for laughs or Jinnai falling foul of a version of the Bugrom very different to the ones he's accustomed to.  Therefore, even if the best material is bunched in those opening chapters, at least there is good material, and if you're fond enough of the El-Hazard gang to overlook a few wider failings, that's enough to make it worth seeking out.

-oOo-

Sad to say, it's fairly evident why El-Hazard didn't have a longer innings: only the original OVA was truly special.  The TV series was fine and The Alternative World was somewhat better than that, but neither felt like a necessary extension of what had come before, and neither did a good job of opening up the El-Hazard universe in ways that would make the notion of further sequels appealing.

On the plus side for the purposes of this reviewing exercise, at least we have a clear result: The Magnificent World is brilliant and you absolutely ought to try and find a copy, but that's as far as you need to go.  After that, if you're really in love with the characters, The Alternative World is worth a crack: go in with lowered expectations and there's plenty of engaging stuff there.  And just for goodness' sake don't get mixed up and inadvertently watch The Magnificent World 2 instead!

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Writing Ramble: Nothing's Ever Really Finished

 I've been thinking a lot recently about a topic I've often considered over the years, and that I may even have blogged about before now: how there's always room for improvement in writing, however far along your career is and however much you feel you've nailed down a particular piece of work.  Now, that's abundantly not to say you should never let anything go; not putting work out into the world because it's insufficiently perfect is one of the archetypal writer mistakes.  As a wise man once said, if you never get anything a bit wrong, you'll never get to subsequently feel like such a dumbass that you don't make that same mistake ever again.

No, what I'm talking about is more along the lines of returning to work after months or years and really bringing a fresh perspective.  And the reason that's been occupying my thoughts is that I've been spending a lot of my time editing up short fiction.  This began as an attempt to finally start subbing some pieces I've written in recent years and had to step away from to focus on novels - the first of those to see the light being Not Us, coming very soon in Nightmare! - but has since expanded to take in others I've been sending out without success for years and that I felt were too good to give up on.

One such is a story called Compassion Fatigue, which I've long regarded as among my best short work and been baffled and faintly annoyed as to why editors seemed to disagree.  And, look, I'm not going to turn around and say that everyone who turned it down was in the right, exactly - but returning to it certainly was an insight into how I've developed as a writer in the years since I last looked over it.  Yes, the story was good, and probably one of my best, but the execution let it down in ways both big and small.  The theme was obscured in places, where it was evident I'd left in first-draft material that ought to have been excised, attempts to wrong-foot the reader on a crucial plot point were wildly misconceived, and there was enormous repetition and overuse of certain words, something I've become extra sensitive to in recent months.

What was most striking, though, was the amount I cut.  Pro tip: shorter stories are more saleable, and 3000 to 5000 words is a definite sweet spot.  Compassion Fatigue was over 6000, and it didn't take me long to appreciate that there weren't 6000 words of narrative there.  I set out to get it down below the golden 5000 mark, but without much hope, because it was one of my better stories, wasn't it?  And surely I wouldn't have left over a thousand words flopping about when they could have been trimmed with a more judicious edit?  Well, not exactly; there was definitely some killing of darlings to be done to reclaim that lost ground.  And yet it absolutely did turn out to be possible, and more to the point, beneficial.  Some nice lines got sacrificed to the cause, if I do say so, but every one was slowing the pace or repeating points that had already been made or providing detail and texture that wasn't really necessary.  In the end, I broke my target with room to spare, and there was precisely one line I felt genuinely sad to see go, and that got cut simply because other cuts had stranded it between two paragraphs.  These things happen sometimes.

As a commercial exercise, I suspect this is a terrible waste of energy: I'd need a pro sale and then some to pay for all the hours I've poured in, and given that all the pro markets have turned it down, the odds aren't favourable.  But then, with all my major projects handed in and nothing on the horizon - yes, that's as bad news as it sounds, but a topic for another day - I have a certain amount of time to waste, and also an opportunity to decide what matters to me if I can't turn things around in the coming weeks.  Short fiction was always my first love, and I feel less inclined than ever to give up on stories I know in my heart deserve to see some success.  So fingers crossed, right?  Maybe I'll find a good home for Compassion Fatigue one of these days, and if and when that happens, it'll be a damn sight better than it would have been if I hadn't put this extra work in.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 75

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...

Crying Freeman: Abduction in Chinatown, 1992, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

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 Dezaki

There'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.

Amazing Nurse Nanako, 1999, dir: Yasuhiro Kuroda

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 Okuwaki

If 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.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 74

This time around, we have a couple of trends continuing, as I work my way steadily through the three volumes of ADV's Crying Freeman releases and the various Lupin the Third movies I've been eagerly laying my hands on.  Add to that a couple of newbies, including a title I've been grudgingly meaning to get to practically since this whole exercise began, and the results look a lot like Angel Cop, Crying Freeman: A Taste of Revenge, Lupin the Third: Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty, and Maps...

Angel Cop, 1989, dir: Ichirô Itano

I confess, I bought Angel Cop more out of a sense of duty than anything else.  It's one of a tiny handful of the early Manga Video releases I hadn't seen, and also one of the most notorious.  Watching five minutes from the first episode was enough to push it even further down my list of priorities; the combination of animation that was truly horrible in places and outrageous gore hardly seemed a winner.  Then there was the disclaimer that Eastern Star tacked on, washing their hands in advance of a title that's famous for basically one thing all these decades later: to the routine failings shared by many of the more conspicuously nasty shows coming out of Japan in this period, Angel Cop adds a sprinkling of antisemitism, making its villains a cabal of evil Jews straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  Given that Eastern Star also include an essay on the topic, it's easy to suppose they released this for some pretty sleazy reasons: there's something awfully tacky about their position of "this is deeply offensive and we don't condone it, but hey, if you really want to watch it!"  And to pile insult on injury, this has to be the worst print they've issued, and if you told me it was precisely the same crummy print Manga put out all those years ago, I wouldn't doubt you.

After all that, I'm obviously not going to turn around and tell you that just maybe you ought to find a place in your life for Angel Cop, but ... okay, I'm going to do precisely that.  Is it vile and offensive?  Yeah, it really is, brewing a heady cocktail of ultra-nationalism and xenophobia that's only saved from true ugliness by being muddled and hard to parse.  The thing is, Angel Cop hates everyone and anyone.  This should make it dreadful, and perhaps does, but there's something oddly egalitarian about the way it refuses to vindicate anybody.  Its villains are frequently more sympathetic than its heroes, who are largely monsters; one of the most unpleasant sequences is a torture scene that we can't possibly be expected to be on side with, yet it's enacted by what are ostensibly the good guys.  Insomuch as it's possible to have sympathies with the characters, it becomes a matter of switching them on the fly depending on who's least wrong at any given moment.

That's still arguably not a reason to give up three hours of your time, so how about this?  Angel Cop has some terrific action.  Oh, not in the first episode, perhaps, that really is ugly and shoddy, but the animators largely sort themselves out after that, and there's some real talent operating here.  But where the action succeeds, it's more at a conceptual level.  Sometimes that means a three-way battle in an apartment building where our loyalties keep shifting as the situation goes from bad to worse; sometimes it means giving the entire back third up to an epic cyborg-versus-psychic-monster-lady showdown.  In general, it feels like a compendium of much of what was succeeding at the time, with a trace of Patlabor here and a hint of Bubblegum Crisis there and a dash of Harmagedon-style psychic warfare to top it all off.  And though the fashion in which it takes all of this tremendously seriously arguably makes its nastiest elements all the scuzzier, it also provides a grittiness that pushes the violence past the point of easy shock value into genuinely shocking territory.  Beyond the midpoint, there are character deaths that really got to me, far more so than ones in many a notionally better title.

Also, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that Angel Cop has one of the best end themes anywhere in pre-twentieth-century anime, a barnstorming musical panic attack that elevates the material just by existing.  Honestly, I like that tune so much that I'd have given this a hesitant thumbs up even if it had been precisely as bad as I feared it would be.  Heck, I'm still not sure it isn't, and you absolutely need to go in with your eyes open: it's unpleasant in ways that only a tiny handful of anime titles that made it to the US and Europe are, and that bit worse for propagating some utterly shameful views.  But if you have any affection for the sort of dark, violent anime that was such a big part of the medium's migration to the West, the fact is that Angel Cop delivers better than most.  Just for goodness' sake opt for the new subtitles over the burning garbage heap of a dub Manga vomited out, unless you're determined to push your viewing experience into laughably awful territory.

Crying Freeman: A Taste of Revenge, 1990 / 1991, dir's: Daisuke Nishio / Shigeyasu Yamauchi

This second volume of Crying Freeman doesn't have to put up with me making comparisons to its Western live-action adaptation, as I did with the first, since we're well beyond the material covered in the movie.  And this is a good thing, because it's becoming increasingly apparent that Crying Freeman the anime needs all the help it can get.  Among the many factors not doing it any favours is ADV's original insistence on releasing it over three disks, despite there being no reasonable way of breaking the material up like that.  That's all the more apparent with this second volume, because it contains the back end of the story begun halfway through the previous volume and then an episode with a different director and noticeably different style that also makes subtle changes to the format.  Until that point, multiple storylines have been bundled into each episode, and that's particularly evident with episode three, which simply moves onto a whole 'nother plot at the halfway mark.  Mind you, this actually proves somewhat to its benefit, in that - despite having watched it less than twenty-four hours ago - I can barely remember the first half, in which the titular Freeman squares off against an African terrorist organisation.  Whereas the back end, where female lead Emu Hino (now named Hǔ Qīng-Lán for reasons) gets to occupy the spotlight for a while, at least takes the material in a different direction.

Of course, this being Crying Freeman, occupying the spotlight largely means being naked a lot, so maybe it's not all that different.  And, look, I've nothing against nudity, but here it makes a breathtaking lack of sense, unless you accept that this is a subtly different universe in which women have unanimously decided that fighting with their clothes on would be plain crazy.  Anyway, if that was the extent of the show's horrible attitude to women, I'd be more inclined to give it a pass; episode four opens with a particularly nasty sequence in which a female character is raped and almost murdered that left a sour note throughout what was otherwise the strongest episode yet.  Yamauchi isn't a very good director, as his predecessor Nishio wasn't a very good director, but he does bring a greater sense of style that lends much-needed energy.  I mean, I don't know that it's good style, but it's something.

Unfortunately, Yamauchi and his team also make the bewildering decision to try even harder to replicate the highly detailed look of the manga this was sourced from.  Or rather, that would be a sensible decision if they had the budget to pull it off, but what we instead get is a show that's exactly as cheap-looking as always, but with the addition of complex shading of a sort that's entirely impossible to animate, resulting in visuals that are intermittently great in stills and routinely dreadful in motion.  Still, thanks to the aforementioned focus on a single plot for the full fifty minutes, and ignoring as much as possible what an unpleasant note it opens on, episode four marks a slight step in a positive direction.

Indeed, I'd be lying if I said there's nothing to enjoy here.  The Crying Freeman universe has a kind of insular weirdness that's sort of appealing, at least while you're watching.  Much of what happens makes no objective sense, and lots of it is unpleasant, juvenile, silly, or all three, but those qualities stand out less in the moment.  Beneath the tacky animation and the horribly elevator-music score, you can see how this heightened narrative of sex and violence could function, and presumably did in the manga.  As such, while it isn't good in any meaningful way, it has a certain hypnotic charm - and a twisted part of me is eager to see what madness the third and final volume has to offer.

Lupin the Third: Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty, 1989, dir: Osamu Dezaki

I've been so rude about poor Osamu Dezaki in previous posts that it seems hypocritical to turn around and say that he's far and away my favourite Lupin director - yes, even over Hayao Myazaki! - and yet there it is: based on what I've seen, no-one understood the character more or made better use of the formulaic elements that compose the Lupin universe.  His approach is now what I expect a Lupin film to be: regular bursts of manic action, slapstick comedy, preposterous technology, multiple plot strands that combine by the end, a varied set of locations, and a MacGuffin of a treasure for everyone to chase after that probably won't end up in our hero's hands by the end.

And here we are with Dezaki's first take on the series, and all those elements are firmly in place, though that isn't to say Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty is precisely business as usual.  Its twists include some deeply strange villains modelled on the Freemasons (and not very subtly, since they're called the Three Masons!), a shift in setting to the USA that, given how rooted Lupin is in both Japanese and European culture, feels surprisingly natural, and, least appealingly, the addition of a child character who almost seems intended as some sort of young sidekick.  Actually, thinking about it, the plot really is sheer lunacy even by Lupin standards, with highlights including the theft of the entire Statue of Liberty, the subsequent hiding of said statue with what appears to be toilet paper, a bonkers sequence in which Fujiko gets possessed, and an excellent climax as Lupin and the gang square off against the cultists and their giant supercomputer.

That aside, it's very much what you'd hope for as far as these TV specials go, which is to say, pretty impressive.  Perhaps you can't quite mistake them for cinema releases, but they're not far off, and while I'm complimenting Dezaki, he does have a knack for stretching a budget.  There's some marvellous, complicated action, including a noteworthy run-in with an armoured truck in the first third, a real sense of place and scale that makes the most of the shift to the US, and, here as in the other Lupin movies, Dezaki's many stylistic ticks feel like an asset rather than the annoyance I've found them to be elsewhere.  Visuals-wise, the only drawback is a couple of ghastly character designs, the worst of which belongs to aforementioned precocious child genius Michael, who not only feels as if he's wandered in from a much worse film but looks as if he has as well.  As flaws go, he's a relatively negligible one, in part because his role turns out to be less intrusive than initially seems like it might be the case and in part because there are narrative reasons for his presence that pay off rewardingly.  Still, he makes some early scenes grating, and surely nobody comes to Lupin for grating child characters.

In the end, I'm finding these Dezaki movies to be much of a much, and I wouldn't pretend that any of them are masterpieces in their own right; objectively, none are on a par with Miyasaki's wonderful Castle of Cagliostro.  On the other hand, the giddy frivolousness and anything-goes vibe that keeps them clear of classic status is what makes them work tremendously well as Lupin films: Dezaki nailed the tone for this character and his supporting cast, and that tone is immensely fun, even as it never rises to being deep or meaningful.  Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty isn't my favourite, the annoying Michael sees to that, but it's definitely memorable, staying within the bounds of an entertaining formula while offering enough tweaks and weird asides to feel very much its own thing.

Maps, 1994, dir: Susumu Nishizawa

One of the harsh realisations you come to as a fan of anime, particularly of older anime, is that sometimes this stuff just isn't meant for you.  Oh, not in any kind of exclusionist cultural sense; rather, it's often the case that anime is adapted from a manga or novel, and frequently the goal is not to make new converts but to please existing fans, by giving them a glimpse, however brief, of how a story they love would look in motion.

And so it is with Maps, which couldn't race through its space opera tale much faster if its tail was on fire.  This is frustrating indeed, because the ingredients are terrific: by the time the alien pirate who's approached our hero Gen to explain that he's the lost descendent of a race of intergalactic mapmakers drops in off-handedly that she's the living incarnation of the city-sized, angelic spaceship she arrived in, I was fully on board with its excitingly crazy universe.  But at the same time, therein lies the problem: you can't hurl ideas like that at the viewer at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and expect them to keep up.  Or rather, you can, but it doesn't take long for the process to grow wearing.  We don't just come to science-fiction to be presented with concepts, after all, we expect them to be articulated via engaging characters and embedded in intriguing plots.

Not that Maps entirely fails to do that.  Gen himself is awesomely dull and his girlfriend Hoshimi plays so little part that you wonder why they included her, and even Lipmira the pirate who's also a sentient spaceship is a bit of a cipher once you get past her fantastic character concept and solid design.  But once the busy setup of the first episode is over, we do get some villains and side characters who brighten the proceedings, and indeed the second episode, probably the best of the four, tells a perfectly enjoyable and reasonably self-contained story.  It's easy to imagine this being genuinely special at perhaps twice its current length, with more time to build the world and cast and simply to take the pedal off the metal occasionally, and to avoid situations like the jarring revelation at the start of the second episode that an entire year has gone by.

That, though, isn't what we get.  What we get is a breakneck tour of what was probably a really cool manga, and one that's definitely good enough to give us that sense of how cool the thing we're not getting would be, but rarely works in and of itself.  There's simply too much and too big of a story here for under two hours, and there's rarely a point where that isn't apparent.  Nor is there enough flair to the telling that we can easily miss that flaw: Nishizawa wrangles some strong moments from his material, but generally his handling is fairly conventional, down to some annoyingly intrusive fan service and a general sense that this should all feel much bigger and weightier than it does.  And, despite a title card that feels the need to claim the show has "high quality animation", the animation is actually more in the region of respectable, with some striking imagery but also plenty of evidence of budgetary restraints.  That's fine for what Maps was probably intended to be: a taster of a bigger narrative and a reward to its fans.  But here we are, two-and-a-half decades later, and sadly all that means is a title that can't quite stand on its own feet.

-oOo-

Ultimately that was quite a surprising batch.  I absolutely didn't expect to rate Angel Cop so highly - I'm still not altogether certain I should have, even putting aside its least savoury aspects - and this middle chunk of Crying Freeman was at any rate better than I'd have anticipated given how extremely rough around the edges the first was.  Whereas Maps I'd been quite hopeful for, perhaps for no other reason than that it was terribly obscure and I tend to count that as a virtue when it comes to anime.  Indeed, only Bye, Bye, Lady Liberty was more or less what I'd hoped it would be, and how bizarre is it that Osamu Dezaki has become the guy I rely on for a quality watch?  Very bizarre indeed, that's how.

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