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...
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 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.
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.
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...
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