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