Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 81

Doing eighties posts in a series about nineties anime is all well and good (I mean, it's not, it's dumb and I should never have started it, but that horse has well and truly bolted) but it's a bit unspecific, isn't it?  Like, what if we could have a post that only reviewed titles made in either 1981 or 1986?  Wouldn't that be something?

Well, whether or not it would, that's apparently what the fates have handed us, in the shape of Sea Prince and the Fire Child, Voltron: Fleet of Doom, Ai City, and Space Warrior Baldios: The Movie...

Sea Prince and the Fire Child, 1981, dir: Masami Hata

For what's unquestionably intended to be a children's film, Sea Prince and the Fire Child is awfully concerned with sex and death.  And not just any sex; this is that rare children's film that decides that what youngsters are eager to learn about is the heady notion of incest.  It's right there from the beginning, as we discover that the goddess of fire and the god of water, who happen to be brother and sister, used to be decidedly intimate until Argon, Lord of the Winds, wrenched them apart with a few well-placed rumours.  Soon they've isolated themselves, one on the land and one in the sea, with their two kingdoms divided by a rift of enmity that no-one dares cross.  That is, until the sea god's son Syrius happens to stumble across the fire goddess's daughter Malta and the pair fall instantly in lust - quite explicitly so for what, let's reiterate, is very definitely a film intended for children.  If you've been following along so far, it's perhaps occurred to you that Syrius and Malta are also quite possibly brother and sister.

From there, events proceed much as you might expect, if what you were expecting was a kiddified Romeo and Juliet with Verona replaced by a world of mythological anthropomorphism and adorable sea creatures.  And frankly, it's difficult to know what to do with any of this, especially once things get very dark indeed toward the final third.  I suppose it's the training of a Western filmic mindset, but you don't expect to encounter a kids' film that has characters who might well be siblings waking up together in what looks to be an awfully post-coital fashion, or cutesy side characters meeting violent deaths, or events so apocalyptic that for one lengthy section the sun literally turns black.  Even armed with the knowledge that Japanese culture is less inclined to mollycoddle kids than Western culture, the whole business is fairly bewildering.

It's also weirdly irrelevant to the process of actually watching Sea Prince and the Fire Child, for the simple reason that the movie is absolutely gorgeous.  I often find myself making comparisons with Disney, and here's its unavoidable; but where generally that means taking into account the relative differences in budget, this time there's no such requirement.  Sea Prince and the Fire Child is up there with all but the very finest Disney titles in terms of craft, with a smoothness and detail of animation that you almost never see in anime.  Granted, that comes at a minor cost; while the character animation is phenomenal and the backgrounds are lush, there's frequently the impression that the one is floating across the other rather than interacting with it.  Also, while the leads are perfectly fine, there's the odd character design that's fairly hideous, harking back to Japanese kiddy 'toons at their worst.

Nevertheless, for all its trivial imperfections, Sea Prince and the Fire Child is stunning.  One sequence is up there with anything I've seen in either Eastern or Western animation, and the general standard is astonishingly high.  This can't mask the film's wider problems, it's true, and those problems are fairly substantial: in particular, there's the fact that Syrius and Malta really are just horny teenagers, and it's tough to view this as some grand love story, or to argue that even if it was, their desire to be together warrants the chaos that ensues.  In general, also, it falls into that age-old trap of being too adult for children and too childish for adults; indeed, I'd struggle to point to any work that tumbles into that valley quite so eagerly.  And all of this definitely matters, how could it not?  Only, it matters less that you'd think it ought to, because that animation is so good, and the film so committed to what it's doing.  I don't know that I ever quite got past the weirdness, and I've a high tolerance in that direction, but I was also rarely less than enthralled by this wild, mad, beautiful, wholly unclassifiable film.

Voltron: Fleet of Doom, 1986, dir: Franklin Cofod

Voltron the series was, not uniquely in the American cartoon landscape, a mashing together of multiple and unrelated anime shows, in this case Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV.  I confess a certain basic antipathy to it on those grounds: ripping up anime and mashing it awkwardly into the restrictions of a US kids' cartoon seems to me a basically obnoxious thing to do, even if similar acts of bastardisation did provide me with the odd fond childhood memory.  At any rate, Voltron's twisted genesis would lead to one of the more bizarre instances of the practise in 1986, when its "creators" World Event Productions realised the only way they'd ever be able to get the two Voltrons together - that is, Dairugger and GoLion - was to invest in some brand new footage to tie up the loose ends of their usual cobbled-together nonsense.  And thus was born Fleet of Doom, the TV special that might generously be described as the one and only Voltron movie.

It's possible to imagine how something not terrible might arise out of such a Frankensteinian act of creation, but, having seen a bit of the Voltron show(s) via the two episodes offered up on AnimeWork's release, it's hard to conceive of it happening under the Voltron name.  There's the voice acting, for a start, which varies from blandly flat to nails-down-a-black-board excruciating.  However, the finest of casts would have floundered over the lines they're expected to come out with.  And writer Stan Oliver's script for Fleet of Doom surpasses even the expected levels of trite silliness you'd expect from a cheap kids' science-fiction show, by setting itself the rule that nothing can occur unless a character describes it in detail.  As an example, there's a lengthy sequence in which the main protagonist for the purposes of the special, the thrillingly named Keith, is trapped in a dream reality, and drawing his pistol, he's shocked to see it turn into a snake, a shock he expresses by saying something along the lines of "What's this?  My gun's turned into a snake."  It's hard to imagine how any child old enough to string words together wouldn't feel patronised by dialogue that considers them too stupid to use their own eyes.

While this is ruinous, it's not as though the basic foundations are all that terrific.  I don't mean Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV - the poached footage is generally fine, though more so in the case of the latter than the former - but it couldn't be more obvious that what we're watching is two separate episodes from two separate shows mangled together without a shred of grace.  The Dairugger team get the worst of it; less than twelve hours later, I can't remember the most basic details of their plotline, if they had one at all.  And indeed the Beast King GoLion scenes are inherently decent, with that aforementioned dream reality chucking up some weird and grotesque imagery, even if it's always deflated by Keith mouth-breathing something like "Boy howdy, that sure is weird and grotesque!"  But it's self-evident that none of it fits together, and the attempts to make it do so range from the hilarious - one team having flashbacks to the japes they had with their companions before they found themselves in two different shows, er, universes - to the embarrassing.  Distressingly, it's the big action climax that's the point of this mess that fares worst: the awesome battle that finds the Voltrons standing together to defeat a foe neither could handle alone consists solely of key frames without inbetweening - which is to say, it's a slide show.  And not an especially well-drawn slideshow, either.  Also, if we're being petty (and I guess I'm already well past that point!) I certainly got the sense that the film's big bad was within the capacities of just one Voltron.

You might ask what the point is in wasting so much vitriol on a TV special from a thirty-five year old cartoon, and obviously there isn't much of a one, except that it's fun to rant sometimes.  The reviews on Amazon suggest that many people out there get a nostalgic kick from Fleet of Doom, and I guess that if non-critically recreating your childhood experiences is your bag, you might too.  But for everyone else, Voltron: Fleet of Doom is pretty much garbage, managing to sabotage itself out of the sort of light-hearted pleasure you might expect from a well-loved cartoon property by being fundamentally incompetent in every way.

 

Ai City, 1986, dir: Kōichi Mashimo

Had you wanted to pitch an eighties anime film to me, you couldn't have come up with anything much more persuasive than "It's what Kōichi Mashimo made directly before Dirty Pair: Project Eden, and kind of the same thing, only more so."  Project Eden's glorious excesses of style, colour, character, music, and everything else it's possible to offer up in excess have steadily grown in my estimation to become one of my personal highlights from the decade; there's simply nothing else like it.

Except, of course, there is.  Because a year prior, Mashimo had a trial run of just how far it was possible or sensible to push the envelope of anime stylisation, in the shape of one Ai City.  And though he was developing an established manga property, there's the definite sense that he was working under fewer constraints: all that keeps Project Eden close to being a conventional narrative object is that it has to vaguely conform to what we expect from the Dirty Pair and their universe, whereas with Ai City, there's the impression from the beginning of a narrative being flung together at high velocity and according to no known rules.  People switch sides at the drop of a hat, enormous concepts are hurled in with startling casualness, vital backstory is presented in what amounts to dream sequences, and the beginning, middle, and end are all focused around radically different circumstances and situations.

It helps somewhat that there are no particularly unfamiliar elements here, excepting perhaps the gloriously silly conceit whereby the battling psychics that make up most of the core cast have a digital readout on their foreheads displaying a number representing the level of their power at any given moment.  But otherwise, if you've seen much anime, even if it's only a certain movie called Akira that would arrive soon after this, the essential ingredients won't surprise you.  However, almost every detail and scene, taken on its own terms, is basically nuts, so those recognisable ideas soon become lifebelts in a very stormy sea.  And all of this narrative excess is encapsulated in Mashimo's gloriously over the top fever dream of a style, with a colour palette that borders on the expressionistic and a constant vibe of animators experimenting for no real reason other than that they can.  If it wasn't so exciting, it would be slightly obnoxious, and if we're being honest, by the midway point it's already a bit much.  But even if a spot of reining in would have produced a traditionally better film, it's hard to be offended: there's always something thrilling or dizzying or weird around the next corner, and there are plenty of movies out there that resemble the conventional version of Ai City, but there's only one Ai City.

Whether that's an argument for you watching it depends on what you come to anime for in the first place.  If ninety delirious minutes of neon-and-primary-coloured delirium with a story that's like watching Akira while on mushrooms sounds at all appealing, you absolutely need to track it down - and while it's only ever received an Italian DVD release, there's an excellent fansub on Youtube, so doing so isn't difficult.  If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who isn't terribly bothered about animation for its own sake and likes to spend more than five minutes of an hour-and-a-half-long movie feeling you know what's going on, it's safe to say you can skip this.  But if that's the case, I feel a bit bad for you, because if you're willing to meet it halfway, Ai City is a hell of an experience.

Space Warrior Baldios: The Movie, 1981, dir: Kentarō Haneda

It's unfortunate that the element of Space Warrior Baldios that it takes its name from is also the only aspect it does tremendously badly.  Baldios, you see, is the giant combining robot that plays almost no part in the movie, but was probably a meaningful component of the TV series that this is both a recap of and a conclusion to, what with the series being canned before it could reach its end.  Anyway, Baldios the robot is crap, a clunky design indistinguishable from many a giant combining robot in many a giant robot show, even its transformation sequence is woefully uninspired, and the few scenes containing it are utterly generic takes on one of the most tapped-out subgenres in eighties anime.

I'd love to say that everything else about Space Warrior Baldios: The Movie is great, and I very nearly could, but we'd better just concede as well that it looks pretty crummy for the most part.  I don't know how much this is new footage and how much it's combed together from the show, but rare are the moments that you feel you're watching something that belongs anywhere near a cinema.  Thankfully, Baldios aside, the design work is solid, and unlike Baldios, the animation is never distractingly poor, it's just never much of an asset.

Phew!  Now that's out of the way, we can get around to how excellent Space Warrior Baldios is - assuming you can get past the above, and the inevitable datedness of a movie that's almost four decades old.  That's noticeable in the animation, and it's very noticeable indeed in the giant robot bits, but when Baldios is doing what it's great at - being an enormously bleak slice of science-fiction coupled with an equally bleak doomed romance - it's hard to fault.  Its story begins straightforwardly enough, at least by early eighties SF anime standards, as our hero Marin gets on the wrong side of the fascistic Gattler, who's decided the solution to his planet's environmental catastrophe is to find a replacement, and announces this by having Marin's scientist father, who's on the verge of a far less militant solution, brutally assassinated.  Marin takes his revenge on the killer, and in so doing incurs the wrath of the man's sister, Afrodia, even though you could cut the instantaneous sexual tension between them with a knife.  Gattler sets off to invade a new world, which of course turns out to be Earth, Marin inadvertently gets there first and teams up with the locals, and Afrodia vigorously stamps down on every hint of her personality or morality in her determination to be a good officer for the invaders and ultimately to punish the man who took her brother's life, while ignoring the fact that he had a clear justification for doing so and that she desperately wants to jump his bones.

But all of that's only the first ten minutes or so, and to say more would ruin some ingenious and frequently gut-wrenching storytelling, along with an enormously satisfying and well-handled twist.  I'm afraid this is one of those titles where you'll just have to take my word: if you can look past the dated, TV-level visuals and the occasional drifts into being a juvenile robot show, you'll find one of the best narratives in all of eighties science fiction, anime or no.  That is, if you're watching the Japanese version; I haven't tried the heavily cut US adaptation, but I understand it to be much poorer and dumber.  Stick with the original, though, and you'll be in for a rare treat, a bold and brutal fable that takes its superficially familiar ingredients to fascinating and unexpected places.

-oOo-

I feel like that might have been the strongest of these eighties posts, for all that Voltron was unutterable garbage and not even really anime in the traditional sense and certainly drags the selection down pretty hard.  Ignore that blip, though, and we have three titles that come awfully close to being classics, and in that satisfying way of missing out through being too weird, experimental, or crushingly sombre to quite fit in to the usual categories.

As is probably obvious by now, I'm really starting to appreciate the eighties stuff, and so let's have a grateful nod in the direction of Discotek Media, who are responsible for both the Sea Prince and the Fire Child and Baldios releases, and in general have done wonders with bringing these older titles over to the West - even if they're atrocious at keeping them in print.  But hey, nobody's perfect!

Next time, though, we'll be back in the right decade, and back to the usual randomosity...

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 80

I've already covered the Dragon Ball movies - and been surprised by how much I liked them on the whole - but that was just dipping a toe into this leviathan of a series.  Even ignoring TV specials, follow-up Dragon Ball Z would go on to produce over fifteen feature films of its own, and wouldn't you know it but the vast majority of those came out in the nineties.  Which means I still have me plenty of Dragon Ball reviewing to do, despite my strong suspicion that the best is already behind me.

Anyway, here's where we begin to find out, by way of Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone, Dragon Ball Z: The World's Strongest, Dragon Ball Z: Tree of Might, and Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug...

Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone, 1989, dir: Daisuke Nishio

I went into this first Dragon Ball Z movie with certain negative preconceptions, and I'd say it bore them out to the tune of about eighty percent: I was expecting some of the clunkiest character designs in anime and lots of mindless fighting, and that was largely what I got.  Thank goodness, then, for that other twenty percent, which was appealing enough to keep the experience on the right side of horrible.

Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone feels made for fans of the series in a way none of the four Dragon Ball movies did.  There's enough information given that you can basically follow everything that happens and appreciate broadly who everyone is without a recourse to Wikipedia, but you sure do need to be paying attention, which seems against the spirit of what's evidently supposed to be a brief burst of mindless entertainment.  But then, that brevity is half the problem: Dead Zone doesn't even quite make it to forty-five minutes, and though there's hardly a lot of plot, what there is gets flung at the viewer so rapidly that it routinely loses all impact.  There are ingredients here that certainly ought to have a bit of weight - a major villain uniting the dragon balls and using them for nefarious ends, what appears to be a battle for literal godhood, and a climax featuring the titular dead zone, which must be important for the film to be named after it - and yet most of them flit by in a couple of minutes, as the movie hurtles onto the next thing.

I'd recount the story in more detail, but it hardly seems worth the effort.  There's that big bad, who's undermined from the off by having the preposterous name of Garlic Jr, and as part of his fiendish plan, he sort of accidentally kidnaps Goku's annoying son Gohan, and rather than do the sensible thing and chalk it up to bad luck, Goku feels the need to intercede, with the eventual aid of various other characters who just sort of blunder into the film.  There's much fighting against Garlic Jr's three hench-monsters, all of whom look so crap that I can't bring myself to think about them, before a final showdown against Garlic Jr himself, who also looks quite crap.  Seriously, am I the only person who hates how these characters look?  They're like fan art of Lord of the Rings orcs drawn by a teenager who grew up reading nothing except Rob Liefeld comics.

But I said there was a twenty percent I had more time for, and I guess, in the interests of unbiased reviewing, I ought to finish with that.  The designs may be trashy and the colours garish, but the backgrounds are mostly lovely, and I like Nishio enough as a director to concede that, outside of the rather listless fights, there are two or three really terrific sequences here, where he's evidently amusing himself by pushing things in directions that are outrageously trippy and / or apocalyptic.  For example, Gohan redeems himself slightly by stopping the proceedings dead for a couple of minutes to deliver a drunken musical number that's the high point of the film, and later there's some hellish imagery that's legitimately interesting.  And, again perhaps due to Nishio, who presumably knew how to get Dragon Ball right better than anyone, there's a breezy energy that keeps the whole business on the right side of watchable.  That's faint praise, I know, but it's all I can stretch to; there's not a lot here for the first movie in such a mammoth series, and what there is could do with a more engaging style and a good fifteen minutes more of running time.

Dragon Ball Z: The World's Strongest, 1990, dir: Daisuke Nishio

If, as I fear, these Dragon Ball Z movies are merely going to be a series of ever-escalating fight sequences, then The World's Strongest is how I'd like to see them go about it: this second film is a leap above Dead Zone in every way I can think of.  It helps significantly that the running time has been stretched to just shy of an hour, allowing for some breathing room and what plot there is to develop at a reasonable pace.  Watching it only emphasised the extent to which Dead Zone muted its impact by barrelling through what should have been major moments.  Here, similar scenes unfold at a reasonable speed and so feel as though they actually have meaning.  It's not like The World's Strongest hangs around or anything, but it has the space it needs to do the material justice.

Probably an even bigger deal, though, is that the villains are interesting, and not burdened with names that ought to be restricted to culinary ingredients.  Here again, every aspect, from the voice acting to the designs to the manner in which they're introduced, is that bit more successful.  And even their disposable underlings are much better, bringing quirks to the table that turn the fights from slapping matches into strategic puzzles.  It's a little thing on the face of it, but it immediately gives the action - of which there's still an inordinate amount - a degree of tension and intrigue that was sorely lacking in Dead Zone, not to mention lending each confrontation a distinctive flavour.

And I realise I'm once again onto the third paragraph and haven't mentioned the story, but in honesty, it's the one element that's barely improved.  There are villains, one of them's the still-living brain of a genius scientist who wants the body of the world's strongest fighter to really round out his CV, and after a mix-up in which they mistakenly abduct Master Roshi, they settle on Goku, who's more than up for a scrap.  The only reason I'm trotting this out at all is so that you can hopefully see how a mad scientist brain in a jar and his only slightly less deranged assistant would make for fun antagonists.  And that's perhaps the crucial point: The World's Strongest is fun.  Even when it's dealing with events that theoretically should be quite serious, it keeps its tongue close to its cheek, and while I'm missing the out-and-out wackiness of the Dragon Ball films, this makes for an acceptable substitute, especially once it gets into its final third and the battle stretches to the sort of preposterously epic proportions only anime can deliver.

Oh, and the visuals are another major leap.  The World's Strongest looks rather fine, all told, with routinely gorgeous backdrops, smooth animation, and, if I'm not mistaken, some tweaks to the design aesthetic that push it back fractionally in the softer, rounder direction of Dragon Ball.  Or maybe I'm simply getting used to them?  At any rate, there's nothing to complain about on the technical side.  All in all, the sole significant problem - and problem, in this context, is an especially relative term, since I get that lots of people adore this series - is that the narrative is no more than an engine to keep the action flowing.  Since that's what it apparently means to be a Dragon Ball Z movie, I guess we're back with what I said at the start: if this is the basic shape of what these things are going to be, The World's Strongest is close to the best version of that template I can imagine.

Dragon Ball Z: Tree of Might, 1990, dir: Daisuke Nishio

It's surely not possible that these movies are just going to keep improving, yet here we are on number three and it's possibly the best so far, not a small feat when The World's Strongest was already a standout.  And okay, maybe Tree of Might doesn't precisely better it, though that argument could certainly be made, but it's every bit as good.  What makes the difference, I think, is that it's the first Dragon Ball Z entry to crack an hour (and indeed, the first Dragon Ball film to full stop) and that extra running time, though it only amounts to a handful of minutes in the case of The World's Strongest, makes all the difference.  It allows for a pacing that's almost leisurely in places, and thus builds up the conflict in a weighty, meaningful fashion, so that when the inevitable fighting comes, we're well aware of both the stakes and the rationale behind it.  Moreover, that conflict is, in itself, a big leap up from what we've seen thus far, with a villain whose links to Goku and Goku's mysterious past make him feel that bit more significant, and a world-ending catastrophe that's unusual and interesting and genuinely dreadful enough that it seems to matter.

I won't spoil any of that - except to say that apocalypse by tree isn't something I've personally come across before - because it's probably best arrived at without much foreknowledge.  And also because, truth be told, there's yet again not a great deal of plot here, and it still ultimately amounts to the usual "there's a super-strong baddie with a bunch of hench-folks and Goku and his friends have to fight them" template that I struggle to imagine a Dragon Ball Z movie breaking away from.  Tree of Might is just built on better foundations than something like Dead Zone, and also a whole lot better made.  These things have never looked shoddy, but this is still a leap forward; it's often spectacular, and in ways I wouldn't have anticipated Dragon Ball Z bothering with.  In particular, the broad palette of intensely vibrant colours and the way certain scenes restrict that palette for effect is more sophisticated than anything we've encountered so far.  And the animation isn't far behind.  There are some stunning sequences, many of them involving the titular tree, and roots growing and twisting and thrashing in a destructive fashion that would make Akira proud.  It really is a treat for the eyeballs, and cinema-worthy in a fashion that the franchise has only flirted with before.

Of course, great animation is mere eye candy without great direction, and while I've never had cause to fault Daisuke Nishio, this is a definite high point.  The breathing room of the extra running time and the evidently lavish budget allow for a level of artistry beyond the deft, slick film-making he's previously exhibited, and there's room for things like actual themes that don't revolve around people punching each other: maybe there's nothing inherently profound about how he explores different aspects of nature throughout the film or keeps cutting back to locations and motifs to convey the wider impact of events, but it's fine storytelling all the same.  Indeed, the biggest surprise here is that we have a Dragon Ball film that almost totally eschews the light-hearted adventure and comedy that were the bulk of what I'd been enjoying up to this point, and still kept me entranced for the space of an hour.  Between this and The World's Strongest, I struggle to conceive of how the franchise can better itself going forward, or even keep up such a level of quality, but I'm beginning to dare hope I might be wrong.

Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug, 1991, dir: Mitsuo Hashimoto

For the first twenty minutes or so of Lord Slug, I continued to toy with the unlikely conviction that these things really might keep getting better.  The opening is good enough to warrant such mad optimism, for numerous reasons.  One is that, for the first time in a while, we get a scene that returns us to the goofiness which made the original Dragon Ball films so appealing, with a song and dance routine (of all things!) that's a hilariously joyful note to get things moving on.  (That it later turns out to be in there for legitimate plot reasons spoils it only slightly.)  Then the actual conflict kicks off, and its a belter, with some outstandingly economic storytelling hurling us into another crisis that feels suitably major and presenting an antagonist who's appropriately powerful and dangerous.  Moreover, all this is wrapped up in some sterling animation: the aesthetic seems to have drifted back into a more traditional Dragon Ball mode, with everything becoming very soft and round and simple, and that scaling down not only makes Lord Slug easy on the eyes, it allows for some striking sequences.  In particular, the inevitable destruction really looks the part, and helps to sell the notion that we're witnessing truly world-threatening events.

The threat this time comes from the titular Lord Slug, another alien invader, but one who wastes all of about three minutes in subjugating the Earth, and manages to kill a couple of his own underlings in the process, not to mention gathering the dragon balls and restoring his youth, so there's not much doubt he means business.  Nevertheless, it's a disappointment when the setup has to give way to the traditional Dragon Ball Z third act, if we can call something that takes up fifty percent of the film a third act.  There's lots and lots of fighting, and it's pretty good fighting, with enough wrinkles to avoid the feeling that super-powerful people are taking it in turns to shoot super-powers at each other, and the ultimate battle - spoiler warning for people who can't predict a Dragon Ball Z plot! - between Goku and Lord Slug is suitably epic, so there's no arguing the movie doesn't do a perfectly acceptable job of what it sets out to accomplish.  It's only that what its aiming for has been done three times already in three preceding films, and we're at the point where I for one am ready for something even slightly different.

Moreover, at around fifty minutes, Lord Slug bucks the steady trend by which these films were getting longer with each entry, and that doesn't do it any favours either; when epicness is such a crucial component of their makeup, that extra few minutes can make all the difference, as Tree of Might amply proved.  This seems like a step back in the Dead Zone direction, even if in every other meaningful way it's an improvement on that wonky beginning.  And here it's worth a nod to director Mitsuo Hashimoto, who picks up the reins so smoothly from Daisuke Nishio that I honestly wouldn't have noticed the change had I not known in advance.  There's no question that he delivers a thoroughly solid Dragon Ball Z movie; it's just a shame its beginning offers more than it can deliver, and that the two previous entries showed that the franchise is capable of more than solidness.

-oOo-

So that went better than I expected - which is weird, in a way, because it also went more or less exactly the way I expected.  Probably it helps to go at these things with your eyes open, and for me, I'm sure it helps too that I'm enough of an animation nerd to enjoy well-made films even when they're very much not to my personal tastes.  I mean, I do sort of get the appeal here - except for those character designs, which I'm just about at the point of finding tolerable - but I also don't understand why the fandom and the creators couldn't get together and arrange for a bit of variety.  Like, what if every fourth Dragon Ball Z film had an actual story?  Would that be such a disaster?

Oh well.  Given that I watched these four in a box set and two of the four movies were pretty great and only one was actively poor, I at least feel I got my money's worth.  And the knowledge that there are another nine entries to go?  I guess I'll manage somehow...

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 79

Fun as it was to be snarky about the Saint Seiya movies last time around, my favourite posts are always the ones that throw a bunch of thoroughly random titles together.  After all, a lot of the joy for me with vintage anime is its variety and its willingness to rush down some very weird rabbit holes.  So, for example, while we have two attempts here to put a new coat of paint on decades-old franchises, there's a world of difference between how 8 Man After and New Cutey Honey choose to go about it.  And with the second half of The Guyver and a real treat of a standalone OVA series that you've almost certainly never heard of, that gives us 8 Man After, The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor, Volume 2, Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko, and New Cutey Honey...

8 Man After, 1992, dir: Yoriyasu Kogawa

In fairness to 8 Man After, its most damning flaw isn't at all its fault.  The reason it comes across as a half-hearted Robocop rip-off isn't that it's half-heartedly ripping off Robocop.  The truth is that the 8 Man franchise got to the whole law-enforcer-brought-back-as-a-cyborg-to-fight-crime subgenre some twenty years and change before Paul Verhoeven's iconic movie; indeed, the title refers to the fact that the show's hero constitutes an entire eighth precinct all by himself.  None of this, it should be noted, changes the fact that 8 Man After seems like a half-hearted Robocop rip-off, it just makes me feel worse for pointing it out.

The OVA is essentially standalone, though it harks back to the show in numerous ways.  Not the least of these is that it carries over the female lead, Sachiko, who's still faintly sad and bitter about how she was abandoned by the original protagonist once she discovered he was a shape-shifting robot with nifty superspeed powers.  However, our actual hero this time around is embittered detective Hazama, who encounters Sachiko as he's pursuing the trail of some stolen cyborgisation technology on behalf of its creator, who in turn fears that it's behind the recent rash of thugs with horribly violent mechanical attachments and a tendency to fly into drug-fuelled rages.

The first episode lays this all out rather well, and it's odd in a way that - spoiler, I guess! - the moment Hazama becomes the new 8 Man, the proceedings begin to fall apart.  The problem is partly that, with the vaguely intriguing setup out of the way, there's nothing especially interesting to hang onto; not the characters, not the animation, not the plot beats, and not the action, all of which are decidedly rote.  But couple that with the predictability of an OVA that simply has nothing going on you won't have seen done better elsewhere, both within and without of anime, and its tough to maintain any enthusiasm.

Ultimately, 8 Man After feels like what I suspect it was: an opportunistic attempt to revive a classic franchise that had suddenly become current again, or at least could be made so with some hefty alterations.  The logic is plain to see: make 8 Man all dark and gritty and immediately you have something that fits comfortably alongside the likes of Robocop or the many anime that were getting mileage from the concepts of killer cyborgs and runaway robotics.  And that logic might even have been sound were the execution not so lacklustre and - let's face it! - the character design not so goofy and ill-fitted for that sort of narrative.  There are glimpses of a more successful version, one more noirish that sticks with the detective elements, maybe, and that finds ways to incorporate the leftover sixties silliness rather that plastering over it with copious bloodshed.  Nevertheless, that's not what 8 Man After ends up providing, and what's here is functional enough but hugely uninspired.

The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor, Volume 2, 1992, dir's: Masahiro Ōtani, Naoto Hashimoto

The first three episodes of the second volume of the Guyver OVA look like hot garbage.  I realise that isn't a terribly technical term, but it's absolute the correct one: this is some shockingly ugly animation right here.  I mean, literally ugly in the sense that it's unpleasant to watch, what with the persistent impression that no-one on the staff quite knew how to draw things like faces or bodies, but also ugly in the more routine ways that bad animation is bad: there's nowhere near enough inbetweening, leading to stuttering visuals that provide only the crudest sense of motion, and that motion often looks as though it was crafted by artists who were going off their best guesses as to how people and objects ought to move.  I remember complimenting the first volume of The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor for the extent to which, even when there were evident dips in the budget, they never marred the overall experience.  Here, there's no end of marring: the impression is that everyone involved discovered that their funding had been cut in half the day before shooting began and figured they might as well give up rather than embarrass themselves by trying.  Though, while nobody's up to anything noticeably impressive, I'm inclined to put the bulk of the blame on director Masahiro Ōtani, since there's the definite sense that the problems started at the top and filtered down.

But the main reason I lean toward blaming Ōtani is that, the minute his replacement Naoto Hashimoto steps up to bat with the fourth episode, things improve so dramatically that it practically gives you whiplash.  Until that point, The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor hasn't exactly been a chore, except of course for how ghastly and primitive it all looks.  The content is still strong, and you can't make a show about organic armoured suits fighting hideous monsters and not deliver the occasional cool moment.  It feels cheap and frustrating after the consistent goodness of the first volume, but it's not what you'd call awful.  However, Hashimoto's arrival is a breath of fresh air in every conceivable way.  What clued me in to the change of directors was partly how much the character designs alter, entirely for the better, but mostly that, out of nowhere, interesting things begin happening on the level of animation.  Everything gets a bit stretchier and squashier and more fluid, a touch distorted even, in a manner that's perfectly fitted to the weirdness of the material.  And once you've spotted that, it's hard to miss how suddenly shot choices begin to make sense, how compositions have got more ingenious - how much the medium is suddenly an asset to be exploited rather than a burden.

And here we are on the last paragraph and I've said nothing about the story of this second volume.  Perhaps that's down to the fact that it left me with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth.  While this back half of the OVA wraps up some of the threads from the first part and most of the new ones it introduces, it stops a long way short of a conclusive ending; actually, it's less satisfying on that front than part one, which was quite open about the fact that there was plenty more story to come.  Heck, it doesn't even manage to deal with the major new villain it introduces or its own most significant plot twist, leaving the definite sense that there was more planned that for whatever reason (personally I blame Ōtani!) never came to pass.  The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor being what it is - i.e. a whole bunch of nifty, horribly violent fights - that's hardly crippling, and perhaps I was naive to expect any different from an adaptation of a gigantically long-running manga.  Still, that and the general shoddiness of three of its episodes makes this closing volume a lot harder to be enthusiastic about than the first.

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko, 1996, dir: Akiyuki Shinbo

Obviously, only hardened anime nerds care much about who released a given title, let alone the often complex histories of those distributors.  Nevertheless, sometimes it's instructive to understand what a publisher was about, and for me that's definitely the case with The Right Stuf International.  The company still exists, owning the excellent Nozomi among other branches, and even still releases vintage titles, but in its original incarnation it was a weird creature indeed.  Mostly, Right Stuf focused on series, and when it bothered itself with shorter standalone titles, they were almost invariably hentai, with only a tiny handful of exceptions.  And when I say "tiny handful", we're talking half a dozen at most.  Magic User's Club, Assemble Insert, and Aria were in there, all of which I've had positive things to say about here, and so was our present subject, Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko.

The point that I'm long-windedly leading up to is that Right Stuf may not have released much in the way of shorter titles, but what they did put out was pretty great, and also pretty unconventional.  Of the three titles we've already covered here, only Aria was likely to be much of a commercial success, the other two are far too odd and distinctive.  And that's certainly the niche Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko falls into.

That's not altogether apparent in the first episode, which is the weakest of the six (these actually form two OVAs of three parts each; the second arrived a year after.)  The premise is as ingenious as it is nonsensical: in the far-distant future, all trade conflicts are settled through the medium of small-scale, non-lethal space battles, and the Earth team has hit on the unorthodox tactic of recruiting its pilots from the twentieth century Japanese school system, presumably having seen enough of those ancient historical documents known as "anime" to appreciate that nobody pilots death machines better than teenage Japanese girls.  Anyway, the show never tries to grapple with this absurd setup, though the trade dispute element will prove more central.  But as far as teenage pilots go, all we need to know is that the understaffed Earth team aren't faring well against their nemeses the Red Snappers, and that that's all set to change with the the arrival of their somewhat obnoxious new recruit Yohko Yamamoto.

If Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko has problems, they figure highly in this introductory episode: the setup is ridiculous and our protagonist isn't very likeable, at least not until we've had a chance to warm to her.  But both those issues are a good deal less noticeable by the second episode, and after that they pretty much dissolve.  Equally, there's not much in the way of an arc plot, but it's impossible to miss when the standalone stories are as excellent as these, and when everything is delivered with such panache.  It's tempting to lay Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko's success in the lap of Akiyuki Shinbo, knowing he'd go on to make the masterful Puella Magi Madoka Magica and that, even without that, he'd still have a heck of a CV.  And throwing credit in Shinbo's direction definitely isn't unfair: by the last couple of episodes, the show is operating at quite a dazzling level of raw style, to a point where it's hard to remember you're supposed to be watching a dumb sci-fi comedy show; episode five plays out like a pop-art version of Frankenstein and the last part reminded me of nothing more than Revolutionary Girl Utena.  But really, after that slightly shaky start, there's no element that isn't a triumph, and certainly nobody on the animation team is failing to carry their weight.

I guess that, stripped to its essentials, and perhaps ignoring quite how weird its setup is, Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko is an awful lot like an awful lot of other shorter anime titles.  But what sets it apart, and what presumably made it seem like a neat fit for Right Stuf's tiny library of quirky, brilliant releases, is all in the execution.  What we get is effectively six marvellous short tales delivered with a ton of style, wit, and originality, and all in all one of the finer OVAs I've come across.

New Cutey Honey, 1994, dir: Yasuchika Nagaoka

I'm inclined to say that I don't get the appeal of Go Nagai, but it's not like it's hard to get: he wrote comics full of crazy violence and gratuitous nudity, it ain't rocket science.  So maybe what I mean is that I don't get how Nagai seems to have such an enduring reputation when that - along maybe with a certain entertaining interconnectedness between his various franchises and an unrepentant desire to shock - seems to be about all he has going for him.  That's not to say I've hated every adaptation of his work; I kind of adored Devilman for its freakish excesses, and Kekko Kamen amused me even while I wouldn't pretend for a second that it was any good.  Granted, Violence Jack I despised with every cell of my body, but that still adds up to a reasonable track record.  It's just not the sort of track record that justifies any sort of status as a legend of the industry, that's all.

New Cutey Honey wasn't the show to change my mind, but perhaps it was the one that finally made me appreciate why there's still so much fondness for Nagai when what he was doing was mostly crass and dumb.  New Cutey Honey is crass and dumb, but it also flirts with genius, and often at the same time.  The concept is this: in a dark futuristic world ruled by gangsters, monsters, and monsters who are also gangsters, Cosplay City cries out for a saviour, and she arrives in the shape of Cutey Honey, an android with the ability to assume any form, as long as said form is that of an attractive woman with implausibly large breasts.  (Granted there are exceptions, but it's a fair rule of thumb.)  This being Go Nagai, Honey transforms by shouting "Cutey flash!", at which point her clothes dissolve into shreds, she spends a couple of seconds being very naked indeed, and then her new costumed identity kind of wraps itself around her.

And for all the flaws of New Cutey Honey, which certainly extend well beyond the fact that it frequently feels like nothing except an excuse to show off her ample bosom, Honey herself is rather wonderful as character concepts go.  She's tough yet kind, charming and witty yet often oddly innocent, and generally feels more like a living, breathing person than you could possibly hope for when the entire concept is that she's an android assuming identities at will.  Maybe the credit for that ought to go to actress Michiko Neya, maybe a little of it should be thrown in Nagai's direction, and certainly it helps that the routinely splendid animation and design work sells the fact that all these diverse incarnations are one and the same person.  At any rate, however many times you find yourself looking at Honey's honey flash, she somehow never seems to be reduced to the oversimplified male fantasy that you'd assume would be almost inevitable given a concept such as this.

Sad to say, everything that's going on around Honey herself is never quite so strong.  That this is two OVAs, one with a loose arc plot and the second with various baddies of the week, doesn't help; there are no especially weak episodes, but it also never particularly goes anywhere, and the supporting cast and villains are entertaining caricatures rather than well-developed characters.  For that matter, even within a brief eight episodes, there are details that are impossible to square with each other, and in general it feels as though the show is making itself up as it goes along and switching directions on a whim.  Yet though such problems seem quite significant when you're trying to talk about it in retrospect, they're less of a bother in the moment; while you're watching, New Cutey Honey shares the giddy, poppy charm of its surprisingly complex heroine, and manages to be quite the unexpected delight.

-oOo-

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko and New Cutey Honey are the obvious standouts here, but there's nothing that was altogether without merit.  Reviewing The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor in two parts just because that was how Manga happened to release it back in the day was perhaps a bit unfair, and certainly did it no favours; three weaker episodes out of twelve is less damning than three out of six, after all, and I'd certainly recommend it overall, despite the dip in quality.  As for 8 Man After, I'm torn between thinking I was a bit harsh on it and thinking that actually no I wasn't, because it really was fairly boring.  At any rate, it wasn't awful, and getting through one of these posts with no awful titles always feels like a win.

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 78

 Not so long ago, I was looking at El-Hazard, a franchise that failed to stand the test of time or even survive the nineties, and here, by way of contrast, we have one that's proved totally indefatigable, with its most recent incarnation appearing only last year.  There's a truly staggering amount of Saint Seiya out there, but fortunately for our purposes, all we need concern ourselves with are the four short films released in a mad burst between 1987 and 1989.  Which leaves us with: Saint Seiya: Evil Goddess Eris, Saint Seiya: The Heated Battle of the Gods, Saint Seiya: Legend of Crimson Youth, and Saint Seiya: Warriors of the Final Holy Battle...

Saint Seiya: Evil Goddess Eris, 1987, dir: Kōzō Morishita

There's always the worry with coming to a major franchise via its spin-off films that you'll end up adrift in a sea of ongoing plot and pre-established characters, or at the least that you'll miss out on some of the more significant subtleties.  But the first Saint Seiya movie, Evil Goddess Eris, puts those concerns to rest in no time at all.  First up, it's kind enough to provide a potted history of its concept, in which the reincarnated goddess Athena is protected by five young men with various powers granted to them by mystical garments known as Cloths.  And second, it really hasn't any plot.

I mean that literally, though perhaps not wholly as a criticism.  What Evil Goddess Eris has to offer is a setup, or perhaps just an excuse for an almighty scrap.  It goes something like this: a meteor falls from the sky, but it's actually the golden apple of Greek mythology and possessed by Eris, goddess of strife, who decides, not unreasonably, that she'd much rather reincarnate herself using Athena's life-force than spend the rest of her days as an apple.  And since it's a safe bet that Athena's gang of super-powered guardians might not be down with this plan, she brings along some muscle, in the form of the Ghost Saints, who are ... well, you know, the ghosts of former Saints.

That sounds quite busy, doesn't it?  But honestly, it's whooshed through in the space of five minutes, and from there on, it's all about the scrapping.  The good Saints and bad Saints even do that thing where they pair off one on one, so that what we get isn't one big action sequence but a string of smaller ones that the film bounces between.  If it wasn't for the gloss of Greek mythology, it would be indistinguishable from a million similar shows.  Then again, when you've only forty-five minutes to fill and you're eager to keep things friendly for new viewers, is that such a bad thing?

Well, yes and no.  Given how much plot I've seen anime movies burn through in this kind of short running time, there's certainly a lack of ambition to Evil Goddess Eris.  However, what saved it for me - and I must stress, might not save it for you - is that it looks pretty fine.  Not so much the character animation maybe, I never quite warmed to the designs and even then it's mid-tier work, but the backgrounds are gorgeous, digging deep into the mythology that the narrative is barely skirting around.  The artists conclude, quite rightly, that if you chuck in enough crumbling columns, you'll end up with the tone of awesome ancientness that this material needs to come across as the epic battle of good versus evil the writers have barely bothered to sketch in.  And when those columns are routinely being blown apart by some sterling effects work, or are crumbling in lavishly detailed scenes of destruction, it's hard to be bothered by how conspicuously absent the story is.

Then again, however prettily you dress up forty-five minutes of fight scenes, the result is still going to be forty-five minutes of fight scenes, and it's not like they're even particularly great fight scenes; there's a jot more sophistication here that the usual special-move tennis, but not much.  So while Evil Goddess Eris was an enjoyable enough introduction to the franchise, and a perfectly passable way to spend three quarters of an hour, I do hope we get something a bit more substantial next time.

Saint Seiya: The Heated Battle of the Gods, 1988, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

It seems a mere sentence ago that I was saying how I'd like the second Saint Seiya film to have more meat on its bones than the first, so colour me disappointed that The Heated Battle of the Gods is to all intents and purposes Evil Goddess Eris with the serial numbers filed off.  And as we reach the halfway point in my Saint Seiya marathon, I find myself wondering, with a degree of trepidation, whether this was simply the formula the series followed and which the movies were obliged to follow in turn.  Is it too much to hope for a Saint Seiya episode that isn't one lengthy fight against imaginatively powered foes and a big boss who has evil intentions for Athena's earthly avatar that effectively mean she does next to nothing for the better part of forty-five minutes?

And yes, it's genuinely that similar.  Really, the only meaningful change is that of setting, which actually manages to be enough to ensure that The Heated Battle of the Gods is fractionally more interesting than its predecessor.  Eris wasn't a memorable villain and the Greek-styled locations, pretty though they were, never gelled into a coherent place the way the sequel's Asgard does.  It's both beautifully painted and intelligently designed and presented, so that by the end we have a real sense of the geography, which in turn feeds back in some interesting thematic ways.  It's a fine bit of place as character, basically, which is useful given that the flesh and blood characters (and indeed, the character animation) are considerably less striking.  In general, the visuals are perhaps a fraction better this time around, and the effects work continues to impress - the opening scene, set against a backdrop of the northern lights, is especially ingenious - but then it's surely a good job given how much of the heavy lifting they're required to do.

That aside, mention is due to Seiji Yokoyama's splendid score.  He was around for Evil Goddess Eris, too, but I don't recall anything standing out the way the main themes here do.  The one that really stuck with me sounds more French than Norse, but it's hugely effective, and its not as though this series seems terribly concerned with adhering to anything approximating world mythology.  Which is a shame, incidentally, because, aside from greater depth and an actual plot, that's one thing that could have nudged The Heated Battle of the Gods from good to great: as engaging as the Norse setting is, it feels that the film flirts with it rather than digging into it and taking advantage of its larger-than-life inhabitants.  Nevertheless, make no mistake, this is a good film for much the same reasons the first was, and assuming you're open to the basic notion of watching colourful characters fight for three quarters of an hour.  If this genuinely turns out to be all Saint Seiya has to provide, I guess we ought to be glad it's done well.  Still, though, maybe just maybe we could have a spot of actual story next time around?

Saint Seiya: Legend of Crimson Youth, 1988, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

Fool me once, Saint Seiya, and that's on you.  Fool me twice and ... no actually, that's still on you.  It wasn't unreasonable to suppose that, with an extra thirty minutes of running time pushing it up to somewhere near a full-blown, non-anime feature length, Legend of Crimson Youth would be the first of these things to have a bit of proper content.  I mean, you can't spin out a fight scene for seventy-fives minutes, now, can you?

"Ha!" laughs the Saint Seiya franchise, "I can and I will!"  Because not only does Legend of Crimson Youth not have a plot, it has precisely the same non-plot as both its predecessors: a divine baddie turns up with a bunch of lackeys and incapacitates Athena / Saori, who then has to be rescued via a series of one-on-one fights that our heroes pretty much lose, but somehow actually win, often by apparently just deciding they're going to, so that they can get around to dealing with the big bad.  To say the formula is starting to feel tired is to downplay how it's less a formula, more a cut and paste job.  And Legend of Crimson Youth makes this that bit more annoying by actually offering up a few ideas that would have made for a solid story with, like, themes and stuff.  Our antagonist for this one is Athena's brother, which immediately sets up tensions that make him a more resonant threat, and his mission to destroy the world on divine orders is both larger scale and more personal than what we've seen before: for the first time, the notion that we're dealing with gods walking among men actually seems significant rather than an excuse for amusing superpowers to be flung around.

None of this goes anywhere - it's actually quite amazing how little it goes anywhere! - but it does, if nothing else, provide a fraction more edge to the goings-on, and an excuse for some fine imagery: this time around, poor Athena has literally been cast down into the underworld, and if there's one thing Saint Seiya is good at, it's finding cool ways to visualise the settings of classical literature.  In general, Legend of Crimson Youth is a marked visual step up from its predecessors, neither of which were remotely slouching.  But here we get everything that was working previously - that is, the gorgeous backgrounds and sterling effects work - and the one relative weakness, the spotty character animation, is finally raised to the level everything else is operating at.  It's a splendid-looking film, even by the standards of a series that has consistently set the bar high.  And if series regular Yokoyama's score isn't up to anything as interesting as in The Heated Battle of the Gods, it's still a top tier effort.

So where does that leave us?  On the one hand, you'd think Legend of Crimson Youth would be the best Saint Seiya movie yet, on the grounds that it's both the longest and the prettiest, and since being pretty is the sole level on which these things are really succeeding, that's got to count for something.  However, the extra half hour doesn't benefit proceedings much - weirdly, this feels exactly as long as the last two - and it's the least new-viewer friendly, in that it's evidently tying in directly to the show in ways that frequently left me conscious I was missing a certain amount of significance.  As such, I don't know that I can recommend it any more or any less: seventy-five minutes of neat fights and dodgy mythology dressed up in mostly splendid animation isn't something to turn your nose up at, but it's clear this franchise could do so much more if it would only step away from its formula even marginally.

Saint Seiya: Warriors of the Final Holy Battle, 1989, dir: Masayuki Akehi

Four films in and I've officially run out of interesting ways to say that these things are all basically identical.  Then again, perhaps that's for the best, since the creators also seem to have run out of any will to try and hide the fact.  Warriors of the Final Holy Battle couldn't hew much more closely to the formula that's become so overly familiar by now if it tried.  Actually, I'm not certain it isn't trying; surely you can't keep making the same movie over and over again without some sort of conscious effort?

Anyway, if nothing else, this makes for an easy review: Warriors of the Final Holy Battle is Evil Goddess Eris and its two successors, only this time the main antagonist is Lucifer and his henchmen are fallen angels.  Not that you'd know the difference if the characters themselves didn't make a point of stressing it, and it's quite the accomplishment to make a figure with the sheer mythic presence of Lucifer seem so thoroughly generic.  He doesn't remotely look like any traditional representation, and short of one mention of Jesus, there's almost nothing here that grounds him in Christian mythology.  He's another bad guy, leading another bunch of other bad guys, and the fight plays out much as the last three have: it looks as though the Saints are guaranteed to lose until, for no particular reason, they don't.  Indeed, with no need to concentrate on a plot that wasn't there, I couldn't help noticing how even minor details are precisely the same in every one of these.  There's the character who reliably gets saved by his older brother, and always seems surprised, when you'd think he'd be counting on it by now; there's the way the big boss is invariably at the top of an elevated structure the Saints have to battle up.  Why anyone imagined that changing this formula in the slightest would be so ruinous that it had to be avoided at all costs, I can't say, but that seems to have been the prime motivation in the making of Warriors of the Final Holy Battle: stick to what works, even when sticking so damn hard has already robbed it of all impact.

However, there is one change, and it's not for the good: it may to some extent have been to do with my interest slipping, but I definitely got the impression the animation was a notch down from the high standards I'd grown used to.  There are a few flat-out bad shots, the characters are back to looking decidedly wonky, and the standout moments that might distract from all that are seldom to be found.  How much of this is director Akehi's fault I can't say, but there's little sense of directorial presence.  Here as elsewhere, the word that springs most to mind is "perfunctory".

I suppose that, if you were to watch Warriors of the Final Holy Battle in isolation - which would be a weird thing to do, but someone conceivably might - it would be a tolerable waste of forty-five minutes.  Nothing about it could legitimately be described as bad, though lots of it is decidedly lacklustre.  But the truth is that you're likely to come at this fourth film on the back of the preceding three, as I have, and viewed in that context, it's without doubt the weakest, most disposable entry in a series that apparently had all of one idea and was more than willing to flog it to death.

-oOo-

Wait, hold on, this isn't even a nineties franchise, is it?  I didn't remotely have to put myself through this nonsense!  Oh well.  I don't altogether regret my time with Saint Seiya, though I certainly won't be seeking out any more of it.  Still, all these movies were decent enough, and if you didn't watch all four in close succession as I did, you might even call them pretty good.  I mean, I wouldn't, but you might.  If you're not in the business of obsessively reviewing every bit of anime released in or around the nineties, I'd hesitantly recommend sampling one of them, and I'd make that one The Heated Battle of the Gods.  Though I suppose an advantage of them all being functionally identical is that you can't go too wrong, whatever you pick!

Next time around: hopefully four releases that I can tell the difference between...

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