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...
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 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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