Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 84

Is it possible to watch too much Dragon Ball Z?  Because I definitely feel like I've been watching too much Dragon Ball Z.  And I can't altogether blame that on the fact that I was intending to review it here: truth be told, these things are kind of compulsive.  In so much as I get the appeal - which, as you'll see, I still do and don't in roughly equal measure - that's definitely the level on which I most feel I've synced minds with the fandom.  The franchise undeniably has a junkfoody appeal, and especially these movies, which tend to be short and easily digestible and full of sugary fun.  Late at night after a long day, it's easy to turn to them in favour of the more demanding disks on the to-watch shelf.

And I realise that introduction was closer to criticism than praise, so I guess it's time to address the question of just what I made of this second batch (you can find the first four films here.)  This time, let's have a prod at Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, Dragon Ball Z: Return of Cooler, Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13! and Dragon Ball Z: Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan...

Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, 1991, dir: Mitsuo Hashimoto

It's taken five movies, or eight if we count the original Dragon Ball, but here, finally, we reach the point where Dragon Ball Z becomes everything I'd initially expected and feared it to be.  The plot is this: An alien villain named Cooler turns up, there's a fight, then another fight, the end.  And I'd love to say I'm exaggerating for effect, but no, aside from a brief introduction to set up said villain and a short, mildly comedic interlude and a fetch quest in the middle where young Gohan sets out to find medicine for his father that's probably the best sequence the film offers up, I'm entirely doing it justice.

And, like, they're not even particularly interesting fights!  If there's a core problem here, it's that everyone involved seems thoroughly checked out, as though they've already lost interest in adhering to such an inflexible formula.  So Cooler has the usual Dragon Ball hench-villains, but they're the dullest bunch yet, and if you'd told me they were reused designs from earlier films, I wouldn't have blinked an eye.  As for Cooler himself, aside from a final stage that's somewhat different from the general Dragon Ball aesthetic, he's enormously dull, from his motives - avenging his brother, apparently a significant antagonist in the TV show - to his power set to his dialogue.  We're told repeatedly that he's more than a match for Goku, and Goku takes a nasty injury early on to hammer home this point, but there's never a second where you feel any real sense of threat or danger.

I praised director Mitsuo Hashimoto the last time we saw him, at the helm of Lord Slug, but here he seems as disengaged as everyone else.  And okay, my praise only went as far as commending his impression of series regular Daisuke Nishio, but that's still more than he manages on his second attempt.  It's journeyman work, with only the occasional shot injecting any kind of energy.  There are no dreadful choices or anything like that, but he's certainly not elevating the lacklustre material.  And the animation is very much on the same level, which is a level noticeably below what the last three movies were managing; it's stilted and TV-like and full of trivial but noticeable flaws.  To pick on one example that bugged me unduly, there's a point where Gohan has to climb a tower, and it's obvious that his movements aren't lining up with the background, as though he's Spiderman or something.  It's the sort of laziness that hasn't any right to make it into a major franchise movie.

But then, I suspect that's the crux of the problem.  If the Dragon Ball Z films haven't exactly felt as though they were the work of creators with a burning desire to express their deeply held visions, they at least had a fair degree of artistry and a sense that everyone involved cared about their craft.  Cooler's Revenge feels like product, banged out to a demanding schedule.  Of course, I'm conscious that I'm not the intended audience here, and obviously the fact that Dragon Ball Z is still going strong suggests that there are many people who want nothing more than what this has to deliver, even when that's only twenty minutes of uninspired action padded with a few scenes of nothing much.  For me, though, the thought that this is what the series was happy to sink to, and the possibility that there might be more of the same to come, isn't exactly encouraging.

Dragon Ball Z: Return of Cooler, 1992, dir: Daisuke Nishio

Given that Cooler's Revenge was comfortably my least favourite Dragon Ball Z film so far, you can imagine my enthusiasm to discover that said antagonist was back for another round, despite a very terminal ending the last time we saw him.  And wouldn't you know it?  Cooler, or rather his inclusion in a movie that would work a damn sight better with an original enemy in his place, is by far the weakest element.  As much as I've learned to expect a certain amount of ludicrous improbability from this franchise, the explanation for his presence really does stretch credulity past its limits, and in completely unnecessary fashion.  There's simply no reason to have him back, and its not as though he was that memorable in the first place.

Fortunately, Cooler isn't ruinous.  Unlike in the last film, there's enough happening around him that he's not the drain he was there.  It helps a great deal that we finally get the odd element that feels fresh and different in a series that seemed all too eager to grow stale as fast as it could.  Though we've had plenty of alien incursions, Return of Cooler is the first of these to take place away from Earth, and that, among other things, gives it a bit of proper sci-fi flair that we haven't seen for quite a while.  It helps, too, that Daisuke Nishio is back in the director's chair: while he isn't up to anything majorly thrilling (and if he was, the pedestrian animation would undermine it anyway) Nishio can at least be relied on to find the right tone for these movies, along with the right balance and pace.  There's enough humour and exposition and spectacle here to avoid the perennial Dragon Ball Z trap of feeling like nothing except over-the-top fighting.  Plus, the over-the-top fighting is actually mostly enjoyable, with an ingenious scrap against a mob of robots and Cooler's new form posing some unexpected problems that provide the sense of threat that was so lacking last time.

With all of that, it's easy to imagine a version of Return of Cooler that really succeeded, and rose to the top tier of what these movies are capable of.  Only, it would have to not be called Return of Cooler, because, as much as the new version of that villain on offer is pretty neat and in all ways an improvement, they divert the film in needless ways that do it no favours.  Without drifting too far into spoilers, we eventually learn that Cooler is allied with a second baddie, the gigantic planet-sized computer intelligence we saw attacking another planet in the excellent opening sequence, and once the details of that are in the open, it's tough to see how not keeping the focus on an omnivorous gestalt supercomputer wouldn't have made more sense that resurrecting a tedious lizard dude.

But, I dunno, twenty-four hours later and I'm not sure it's quite as big a deal as I took it to be at the time.  Cooler's presence is undoubtedly stupid, but if you can get past that, there's a fair bit of pleasure to be had.  As I say, Nishio's up to some solid work, the concept feels fresh, the action is relatively strong, and the series' regular composer Shunsuke Kikuchi delivers a particularly present and engaging score.  Given my personal biases, it's perhaps the case at this point that I'd recommend any Dragon Ball Z entry that strayed from being a big old tedious fight, but anyway, I enjoyed this a good bit more than I expected to.

Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13!, 1992, dir: Daisuke Nishio

I always try to find positives, so here are some positives.  Daisuke Nishio was a talented director who brought a certain warm, appealing tone to his copious Dragon Ball work, and was probably incapable of making a genuinely bad movie in this franchise.  Wherever he's present, you're guaranteed a few cracking scenes and some superlative moments of animation.  And Super Android 13! contains one of the best, in the shape of the introduction of two of its villains, a sequence that finds them marching through a busy city centre, oblivious to anything in their way, swatting aside anyone who interferes, and tracking down Goku with unwavering intent, in a manner that's both legitimately threatening and quirky fun at the same time, despite those being two tonal registers that clearly oughtn't to go together.

And with that, I'm out of positives.  This was Nishio's second Dragon Ball Z movie to be released in 1992, after the unusually strong Return of Cooler, and the lack of inspiration is palpable.  Actually, make that the lack of anything; even by the standards of a series that seems comfortable with substituting gigantic fights for actual narrative, this is a decidedly empty piece of spectacle.  More so than any other entry, it boils down entirely to the formula of: some enemies turn up, everyone fights, Goku unleashes a super-special move, Goku wins.  The enemies aren't interesting - one gets a slightly wacky design, but the other two are so bland that it balances out - and the fight isn't at all remarkable and the climax is more or less exactly the same as the climax of at least one more of these, so it's not even like Goku's whipping out a power or an evolution or a whatever that we've never seen before.  For crying out loud, not only is it empty spectacle, it's recycled empty spectacle!

I can't even find it in myself to be annoyed by Super Android 13!; it is, after all, not outstandingly bad in any meaningful sense.  Other than its lack of plot or originality - and okay, those aren't trivial issues, but they're far from new or crippling problems where Dragon Ball Z is concerned - there's not much that's flagrantly wrong.  Actually, the comic relief is dreadfully lame, and given that Dragon Ball Z is capable of delivering perfectly respectable comic relief, especially with Nishio at the helm, that's frustrating; it wouldn't have saved the film, but it would have provided something to remember it by.  And being unmemorable is more of a sin than would usually be the case, because this nonentity would be Nishio's last movie contribution to the series he made such an enormous contribution to, and it's without doubt his worst, and indeed probably the most perfunctory Dragon Ball Z film so far.

Dragon Ball Z: Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan, 1993, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

Watching Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan made me realise just how low I've set the bar here, or rather, to what extent I've had to make up a whole new bar to accommodate this series: more than once during its genuinely feature-length running time did I think, "Wow, this is actually like a proper movie!"  It has a plot of sorts.  It has characterisation and character arcs.  It has rising action, and indeed, its big action climax doesn't even get started until halfway to the end.  Also, and in no way coincidentally, it's pretty good.

That plot doesn't bear much probing, but then, we don't need Shakespearean levels of scene-setting here, what we need is sufficient context that the fisticuffs have some stakes and a genuine sense of threat once they arrive.  And this Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan does markedly well, digging into the normally tedious background of Goku's Saiyan heritage and conjuring up a real demon of an antagonist to pit him and the gang against.  Broly is actually quite dull when you get down to it, motivated by not much more than an unexplained grudge and an innate desire to do evil, but paired with a manipulative father and tarted up with Saiyan lore - and drawn as the Incredible Hulk's whiter, nastier cousin - he serves the film's purposes just fine.  And crucially, this is the first bit of Dragon Ball Z in recent memory where I believed, however superficially, that our heroes might not win, or even might not survive.  Broly may be a dumb, undermotivated lunk, but he's scary, and a significant step up in the franchise's endlessly escalating power level one-upmanship.

Director Yamauchi, who also helmed my two favourite Saint Seiya movies, is clearly a dab hand at this sort of business.  He keeps the early sections pacey and engaging and the comic interludes peppy and on the right side of irritating, but he knows his job is to deliver one hell of an action climax and that much he certainly accomplishes.  There's an argument to be made that it goes on too long, especially when the fight is so one-sided for most of its length, but it remains a proper spectacle.  A lot of that can be chalked up to some intermittently stunning animation; in the early setup scenes, it's mostly at the level of getting the job done, but that's hard to begrudge once it becomes clear that the animators were saving their energy and budget for where they could show off to best effect.  This is the first bit of Dragon Ball Z that's genuinely wowed me on occasions: a comet that's established to be terribly important to the plot and then isn't is at least a gobsmacking bit of craft, but there are plenty of wow moments along the way, usually involving destruction on an epic scale.  It's easy to get these god-level battles wrong, but Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan mostly nails it, by retaining just enough of a human element but also by being so routinely thrilling that it's hard not to be drawn in.

Going back to my opening point, whether all this adds up to a good film in any wider sense is questionable, but then it's fair to say that judging Dragon Ball by the usual rules of film-making is a fool's errand.  On its own terms, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan does everything the series requires and does all of it well, while having enough meat on its bones to function as a proper narrative.  Given how often Broly would be brought back - we'll be encountering him twice more in these nineties movies alone - it's obvious this entry had quite the impact, and for once, it's easy to see why.

-oOo-

I guess what's strange here, other than how I'm devoting such a lot of energy to a franchise that's absolutely not to my tastes, is how many of these I've finding positive things to say about.  Cooler's Revenge and Super Android 13! were functional on their own terms and fairly dire in the context of the wider series, but that's two movies out of four that fulfilled my worst expectations, leaving two that took those expectations and managed to more or less turn them around.  So, going back to my original point, I do sort of get the appeal: when all the stars align, and the balance of comedy and crazy spectacle and cartoon violence is on track, and the direction and animation are up to task, these movies can be a lot of fun.

Nevertheless - that's quite enough Dragon Ball Z for the moment!

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 83

We're in largely familiar territory this week, as I continue to pick my way through the Black Jack and Lupin franchises, and get to another Leiji Matsumoto adaptation, the third in the Galaxy Express 999 series that I've turned a blind eye to before now, since I've so far managed to avoid going back as far as the seventies in these nineties anime posts.  (Okay, so Adieu Galaxy Express 999 was 1981, so we might see that here one of these days, especially since it's pretty great.)  However, last up we have a random fighting game adaptation, and if ever there was a category with the potential to go badly wrong, it's that.  But then, one of the great things about nineties anime is how often it manages to surprise you!

So what surprises await among Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy, Black Jack: Infection, Lupin the Third: Dead or Alive, and Art of Fighting, eh...?

Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy, 1998, dir: Kônosuke Uda

I won't say the issue with Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy is that it's an unnecessary sequel, because the world of anime is full of great unnecessary sequels, and indeed the original Galaxy Express already had quite a splendid one, in the shape of 1981's Adieu, Galaxy Express 999.  Also, frankly, it's not like the Galaxy Express universe is one of neatly tied off plotlines; Leiji Matsumoto's hallucinatory tales of a bizarre future in which no-one finds travelling the galaxy in a steam train remotely weird are primarily constructed out of diversions and loose ends, and there's no reason you couldn't keep spinning new stories in such a limitless, logic-unbounded galaxy for precisely as long as you wanted to.

Which is all well and good if you're Matsumoto, who wrote the manga that Eternal Fantasy draws on, but not so much if you're the poor soul with fifty-five minutes of movie in which to try and encapsulate that manga.  There's big problem number one: not to suggest that you couldn't make a great space opera in under an hour, nor even that you couldn't make a great adaptation of a Leiji Matsumoto space opera, but you'd need a vastly more focused script than what's on offer here, which takes half its running time to begin making clear its stakes or conflicts and only really finishes doing so five minutes from the end.  That end being big problem number two: it isn't much of one, because there was supposed to be a sequel to this sequel, which never materialised.

What we have, then, is an unnecessary story that doesn't really build on its predecessors, and instead sets up a new scenario that it promptly does very little with because it ends just as it's finished starting.  And I guess you can't blame the creative team for that, since presumably they genuinely believed the follow-up would happen, and that the dawdling pace and introductions of characters that serve no purpose and the enormously frustrating cliffhanger ending were all for the greater good.  Nevertheless, there's not blaming and there's suggesting the results are a success, and sadly, there we cannot go.  Eternal Fantasy simply doesn't work as is, bar the odd scene.  It's well made - actually, very well made indeed, excepting some CGI shots that don't function as they need to - and given that its flaws are similar to the flaws of its predecessors, I'm ready to believe that whatever this was originally conceived as would have wound up being pretty marvellous.  For that matter, there's undeniable appeal in seeing such iconic characters tricked out in some of the finest animation 1998 had to offer, and I'm too much the animation nerd to turn my nose up completely.  But in the form it exists, Eternal Fantasy is useless as an entry point to the franchise, and even existing fans may find themselves frustrated both by how it does no favours to its predecessors and how it fails to tell a meaningful narrative of its own.

Black Jack: Infection, 1993, dir's: Osamu Dezaki, Fumihiro Yoshimura

By necessity more than choice, I've been reviewing these Black Jack releases out of order; they're not easy to lay hands on, to say the least!  But here we are, finally, at the beginning.  And while what's on offer would be surpassed by later entries, it's a fine start all the same, and one that benefits greatly from U.S. Manga Corps not being the cheapskates they'd rapidly become: two episodes of about fifty minutes each makes the effort of tracking it down feel that bit more worthwhile, especially given the remarkable quality control that went into this show.

To take them in order: first up we get Iceberg, Chimaera Man, the tale of a billionaire with an agonising disease that's only eased by drinking outrageous quantities of water, his philandering wife, and the irate villagers of the island on which he's built his preposterously large home.  Of the two, this feels much more what I've come to regard as a typical Black Jack story, insomuch as you can apply that word to something so reliably weird.  Black Jack broodingly investigates, subplots are established that will end up helping to unravel the central mystery, and not an immense amount of anything really happens, though there's so much atmosphere and menace to go around that it never feels slow.  Between the sea that surrounds the island and the rain that perpetually lashes it and the central medical conundrum, water's the crucial element here, and Dezaki seizes on the opportunity to go all in on exploring every interesting way you can animate said substance, be it waves or whirlpools or puddling sweat.  It's visually thrilling stuff, and right from the beginning the animation quality is unusually high, even if it can't quite match what latter episodes would offer.

(A brief side note: both episodes credit Dezaki for storyboarding only and Fumihiro Yoshimura as director, yet not many directors have such a distinctive approach as Dezaki and his fingerprints are on every scene.  So who did what?  I can't say, but this show was so clearly Dezaki's baby that I'm comfortable referring to him as the director, even if he was more of an incredibly hands-on producer.)

On to episode two, A Funeral, The Procession Game, and it's perhaps not quite so strong.  This one, in which a random event during a trivial stopover between jobs finds our hero becoming entangled in the affairs of a group of four unlucky schoolgirls, very much doesn't feel like a traditional slice of Black Jack drama.  And that's to its benefit, in that it's positive to see a departure from a formula that can feel rather visible, but has the unfortunate side effect of making the mechanistic fashion in which these narratives unfold too apparent: it's especially unclear how the various pieces will eventually fit together or why we ought to care.  Still, the ending, when we get there, is worth the trip, and its breaks from tradition give it extra clout.  It doesn't, however, fare quite so well on the visual front, and Dezaki (or Yoshimura imitating Dezaki?) leans too hard into the favourite Dezaki trick of freezing on painted stills of significant images, to the extent that the style sometimes works against the material rather than for it.

Putting all of that together, I suppose we're left with a comparatively weak entry in an extraordinarily strong series.  But, especially given that we get two episodes, that feels like splitting hairs: even if neither of these are absolutely top-tier Black Jack, they remain thoroughly impressive by any usual standard.  Plus, they gain a lot from being paired, since their approaches are so different.  So while this might not be the most indispensable of U.S. Manga Corps releases, that's not to say Black Jack: Infection isn't pretty damn indispensable.

Lupin the Third: Dead or Alive, 1996, dir's: Monkey Punch, Jun Kawagoe

So it's the mid-nineties and you're about to release a new theatrical entry in the immensely long-running Lupin the Third series, but you feel like maybe something extra wouldn't hurt this time around, perhaps to set it apart from the many TV specials you've been churning out.  What could be better than getting original series creator Monkey Punch - aka Kazuhiko Katō - on board to direct?  That's a great idea, right?

Well, yes and no.  But mostly no.

For a start, Monkey Punch is only credited as head director, co-directing with Jun Kawagoe, and maybe he was just being modest in interviews when he said he largely sat back and let the younger man, who'd been working in the anime industry for some years by this point, do the heavy lifting, but you suspect not.  And with that, you have to wonder how much of the script was his doing, and how much that of co-writer Hiroshi Sakakibara, especially given what a not terribly inspired or exciting script it is.  And once you've got to that point, you might as well ask yourself if Monkey Punch's involvement was much more than a gimmick to spice up an otherwise run-of-the-mill piece of Lupin media.

Harsh?  Maybe.  But the most striking quality of Dead or Alive is how much it feels like an awful lot of other Lupin entries.  Being a cinematic feature, it of course looks better than most, and certainly someone, be it Monkey Punch or the team around him, were bringing a good amount of visual flair to the proceedings: on a scene-by-scene basis, it's undoubtedly well directed.  Really, the plot is the problem, and even then, it's mostly only a problem because it feels so familiar: Lupin and the gang are on an island to steal a well-protected treasure, but find themselves drawn into the local political maelstrom, which has been especially ugly since a certain General Headhunter took it upon himself to seize control.  There's nothing intrinsically wrong there, other that unoriginality, but where it tends to fall down is in finding ways to combine the Lupin material with the wider narrative, with the threads more jockeying for position than playing off each other.  The film largely figures this out by the end, but until then, there are points where a definite aimlessness creeps into its brisk running time.

I don't want to suggest the thing isn't good; if you hadn't see much Lupin, the plot would certainly feel fresher, it's fine on its own merits, there's some terrific action, and aside from the occasionally languid pace, it does nothing you could categorically say was wrong.  Plus, for those of us who are fans of bumbling cop Zenigata, it's nice to see him get to be cool for a change*, just as it's nice that Fujiko, while underused, is at least not reduced to a treacherous pair of breasts as in certain Lupin entries we could point a finger at.  And I don't want to imply that you shouldn't watch a perfectly fine Lupin film if you're on side with the franchise; for that matter, this would make a satisfying starting point to see what all the fuss is about.  It's just that, if you stick the legendary Monkey Punch's name on an entry, and a cinematic one no less, you'd expect it to be something hellaciously special, and for all its relative virtues, Dead or Alive ain't that.

Art of Fighting, 1993, dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi

It's to the great credit of Art of Fighting that, rather than do the obvious things that adaptations of beat-em-up video games tended to do, it opts instead to be a nineties action buddy movie.  I mean, the nineties bit probably wasn't a conscious choice, but the action buddy movie?  That's what saves Art of Fighting from being lousy and pushes it into the dizzy heights of worth a watch.  And since we're in the realm of fighting game adaptations, that's not such measly praise as it might sound.

We join our heroes, martial arts instructor Ryu and wealthy sleaze Robert, as the former is in the middle of trying to catch a lost cat in the hope that the reward money will keep the lights on for another day or two.  Somehow this leads the two fiscally mismatched friends to break into a stranger's apartment and witness their brutal end at the hands of gangsters working for the notorious Mr Big, who gets the misguided impression that the pair are in possession of the diamond the murdered man was hiding.  Following traditional villain logic, Mr Big decides that kidnapping Ryu's sister Yuri is the quickest route to recovering the treasure, and that leaves Ryu and Robert stuck with not only rescuing the ineffective Yuri but also seeking the missing diamond by way of collateral.

So buddy movie boilerplate, basically, but Fukutomi, who in the same year directed the Battle Angel Alita adaptation, knew his way around putting together a short film like this, and he keeps things breathlessly light and breezy.  Ryu and Robert are likeable to be around, as is the police inspector who's also on the diamond's trail, and the villains are distinctive enough to make an impression.  On the technical side, the animation is respectable, rising to pretty good during the many action sequences, and though the character designs are a bit shonky, the backgrounds, mostly cityscapes, are noticeably lovely.  Sure, I realise nobody comes to a fighting game adaptation for nicely drawn buildings, but they lend a touch of class to a film that's urgently in need of one.  So, for that matter, does the playful, jazzy score, which - like the entire movie, come to think of it - very much has the feel of being based in somebody who's never been to America's impression of what the country's like.  Indeed, what this reminded me of more than anything was the Jackie Chan vehicle Rumble in the Bronx, while in anime terms there are definite shades of Riding Bean.

It's all very dumb and insubstantial, but in mostly good ways, focusing its energies in productive directions that don't stretch a TV movie budget past its limits.  And still, all of that would only give it a bare passing grade but for the last five minutes, and the glorious Bruce Springsteen-but-in-Japanese end theme, which nails the perfect note to wrap up the preceding three quarters of an hour on.  Okay, so Art of Fighting isn't what you could honestly call exceptional, and obviously it would be crazy to track it down when there are a million better titles out there, but it kept my thoroughly amused throughout its brief running time, and for that I can only commend it.

-oOo-

I guess I've been on a run of good stuff lately, because that seems like a disappointing batch, and yet there was a time when I'd have been glad of a post where nothing was worse than okay.  Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy and Dead or Alive certainly weren't wholly successful, but neither could justly be described as bad.  Though the flip side is that, by any reasonable definition, Art of Fighting couldn't be called good, for all that I enjoyed it.  At least Black Jack continues to be a reliable presence, and it saddens me that I've nearly run out of those and that the last couple of disks I need to complete my collection are horrifyingly hard to find.  Come on, world, it's time for that blu-ray release I keep asking for.  You know it makes sense!

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

* Though his design is tremendously off this time around, with a chin so cleft that it looks like some sort of alien sex organ.  In general, the designs aren't a strength in Dead or Alive, which is a weird failing given who was ostensibly at the helm.

Not Us in Nightmare, and Other News (or the Annoying Lack Thereof)

 If you're a regular reader of the blog and have been getting frustrated with the fact that for weeks now I've been posting endless anime reviews and nothing in the way of writing news then, believe me, I share that frustration.  And the fact of the matter is that there should be news: about the fourth Black River book, Graduate or Die, which is finished and ready and yet not out for reasons I'm not privy to, and about a novella that's similarly done and dusted, and about another major project with Digital Fiction that's seemingly in limbo, if not somewhere worse.  I hope those are all still happening.  I hope they'll all be happening really damn soon.  But I don't know for a fact, because I don't have that information.  I mean, I guess that's 2020, right?  Whatever else this year has been, it most definitely hasn't been the year when things went to plan.  And obviously, the minute I have some solid and meaningful information to share, I'll be doing just that.

Fortunately, I do have another major project nearing completion, and it's immensely exiting, and by "nearing completion" I mean "pretty much just waiting for a cover" - but the other thing it's waiting for is an official announcement from the publisher, and while I sort of have permission to discuss it, I figure it'd be nicer for everyone if I hold off until they're comfortable letting the cat out of the bag.  So for the minute I'll just reiterate what I've already cryptically said: it's a genre and topic unlike anything I've attempted to cover before, but a subject matter unusually close to my heart, and it's with one of my absolutely favourite publishers, who I'm very excited indeed to be involved with.

But there is a single concrete bit of good and announce-able news, and that's my real reason for finally getting around to a proper post: in what's turned out to be a mostly crummy year for short fiction (and, let's face it, everything) one of the few legitimately brilliant things to happen was selling my story Not Us to splendid horror 'zine Nightmare.  This is my third piece there, and my shortest at a trim 3000 words, and I'm not going to say it's my best because realistically that's probably Great Black Wave, but it's definitely one of the better horror stories I've written.  I mean, if it is a horror story; I suspect it's one of those pieces that very much gives back what you bring to it, and I'm curious to see what the response will be.  At any rate, I'm always grateful when I manage to sell something this thorny and hard to categorise.

If you just want to read Not Us then - well, that's cool and all, you're certainly allowed to, but you'd be missing out on some good stuff.  Nevertheless, if you really do, you can find it at the link here, along with a podcast version read by Stefan Rudnicki.  Oh, and there's an interview with me, too, where I talk about the story a bit, but mostly ramble at excessive length about movies and comics and whatever else came into my head.  Really, though, the thing to do would be to buy the entirety of issue 97, because that way you'll also get three more stories, in the shape of Furtherest by Kaaron Warren, The Monkey Trap by Adam-Troy Castro, and The Secret Of Flight by A.C. Wise.  And needless to say, you'd also be supporting a fantastic horror fiction venue that entirely deserves to be supported.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 82

Woah, this one's really all over the place!  Rare is the collection of four reviews that manages to bring together medical horror, a high-fantasy video game adaptation sequel, a comedy about female fighter pilots, and a couple of classical literature adaptations.  I don't know that bundling together such an unconnected bunch of stuff is remotely good reviewing practise, but it's certainly a nice insight into the sheer scope of nineties anime.

This time around, then: Black Jack: Mutation, Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: Botchan and Student Days, Ys 2: Castle in the Heavens, and 801 T.T.S Airbats...

Black Jack: Mutation, 2000, dir: Osamu Dezaki

The conclusion I've come to with director Osamu Dezaki is that he wasn't one to stretch an inadequate budget or rescue an irredeemable script.  Given too few or the wrong resources, he was capable of some dire hackwork.  But the flip side is that, presented with a stellar budget and top-tier material, he could do wonders.  And with the Black Jack OVA series, he reliably had both.  Osamu Tezuka's fantastical, horror-tinged medical drama is an inspired concept, and it's evident that Tezuka Productions were determined to do it justice.  This ninth OVA features some gloriously slick and detailed animation, and Dezaki seizes on the opportunity thereby offered to crank his style up all the way to eleven.  At his worst, Dezaki lazily relies on a handful of showy tricks, but at his best - and here he's absolutely there - he deploys a startling range of techniques and ideas that all serve to enhance the material.  Whether it's ingenious split-screen shots or fish-eyed lenses or dutch angles or his regular favourites such as cutting to a painted still, Mutation is a fascinating visual experience, given extra energy by the question of what Dezaki might pull out of his hat next.

With all of that in mind, I hope you'll see that, when I say the narrative isn't quite up to the production it's wrapped in, that's not much of a criticism.  It's a fine story, as all these Black Jack episodes I've seen so far have been, but it has its issues.  One is the inevitability of a major twist: as wizard unlicensed surgeon Black Jack is called in by a wealthy heir with what appears to be a sentient tumour, a separate thread details a police investigation into two apparently unlinked cases connected by the fact that the suspects, who can't possibly be the same person, nevertheless have matching fingerprints.  The knowledge that these threads must eventually tie together makes it nigh impossible not to figure out the rough shape of that big twist, and it's hard to see how that could have been avoided.  But Mutation sidesteps the issue in neat ways, and very much seems to accept that we're bound to get ahead of it, so it's not the problem it might have been.  The same goes for the role of Black Jack himself, which is fairly insignificant to the proceedings; if he's more spectator than protagonist this time around, it's not a game wrecker.  Aside from the superlative animation and Dezaki's stylistic smoke and mirrors, Mutation papers over the cracks by encouraging us to concentrate on its characters, even the most minor of which are richly drawn in both senses.  Indeed, the best sequence finds Black Jack and his assistant Pinoko (who's a delightful presence this time around) getting caught up in a night's drinking with the somewhat hostile cop who's stuck investigating the B-plot.

It's maddening to be saying this about a series that's out of print and enormously hard to come by, but the Black Jack OVAs are some of the best anime ever created, a deep, rich, profoundly weird show buoyed by excellent technical values and an intermittently brilliant director firing on all cylinders.  It's hard to rank them, and of course I haven't seen them all yet, but Mutation is definitely a strong entry.  It has some narrative issues, but it handles them well, and in any case, they pale before the bravura direction and tremendous animation on display - not to mention some legitimately unnerving body horror that makes this more gut-wrenching that many a more openly gory title.

Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: Botchan and Student Days, 1986 / 1987, dir: Eisuke Kondo / Akiko Matsushima

I'm sure I've expressed my admiration in the past for how Central Park Media - generally referred to around these parts by the name of their genre label U.S. Manga Corps - were willing to release just about anything into the American anime market, regardless of whether it had any reasonable chance of selling.  Commercially it made zero sense, yet it brought across titles no other distributor would have thought to touch, and suggests that their slogan of "world peace through shared popular culture" was more than mere wordplay.  And nowhere is that more evident than in the case of Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, the title under which they imported some nine episodes of the long-running show Sumitomo Seimei Seishun Anime Zenshū.  Clearly, these were never going to set the market on fire, but what could be truer to their self-imposed mandate?

Given that the Wikipedia entry offers scant context, it's hard to tell precisely what these were intended to be.  You'd assume the target was younger viewers, and that's certainly what the Japanese title suggests, yet neither of the works on offer are exactly kiddie-friendly.  The two-part Botchan, which follows the lightly comical adventures of an arrogant young teacher trapped in a post at a school out in the boondocks and getting on the wrong side of students and teachers alike leans more in that direction, but even then, its humour is of a gentle brand, arising mostly from how the teacher narrates his own adventures and thus is blind to failings we can't help noticing.  As for Student Days, its tale of a student convinced that passing the entrance exam for his favoured university will win him the heart of the girl he's fallen for opts more for gentle melancholy, before it gets very melancholic indeed in its last five minutes.  Particularly bookish teenagers aside, it's tough to see either appealing to a youthful audience, but then perhaps that's me revealing my ignorance of Japanese culture and this stuff was the Pokemon of the eighties, who can say?

I think not, though, judging by the production standards.  They're certainly not terrible; the fact that different directors were brought in to give each story a look that matched its material attests to a genuine intent to treat these works with respect, and Botchan and Student Days have a markedly different design aesthetic to them.  Actually, those designs are frequently the best thing that either piece has going for it on an artistic level, and that's especially true of Botchan, where some of the character work is particularly appealing.  For that matter, the backgrounds are generally pretty nice and the animation is, if not detailed, at least fairly smooth.  There's the inescapable sense of material that's more eager to be educational than entertaining - and for some reason, neither director seems to have a clue how to make good use of the boxy 4:3 TV ratio - but, by the same measure, there's enough artistry at play that the animation is always more of an asset than a diversion.

And here I am, four paragraphs in, and ignoring the elephant in the room.  What possible interest can there be for the average Western viewer in a nineties release of an eighties Japanese TV show adapting classic Japanese literature?  The honest answer has to be not much at all.  Unless you're wanting to dip a toe into those waters and are happy to use animation as an entry point, there's not going to be anything here for you; neither story is so compelling or well presented that it transcends the limitations of what it is.  With that in mind, while I commend Central Park Media with all my heart for putting something like this out, I do wish they'd been a bit more sensible about it, and also a bit more generous.  Because while I'd recommend this to anyone with a serious interest - Botchan is a real pleasure and Student Days makes for a satisfying accompaniment - it's a recommendation that's all the harder to make when the total running time isn't much over an hour.

Ys 2: Castle in the Heavens, 1992, dir: Takashi Watanabe

It seems necessary to start by saying that Ys 2 is better in every way than its parent title, the seven-part OVA series that preceded it by three years, but that's also not a helpful statement: lots of mediocre anime is better than the original Ys, a show that started poorly and managed to end up at just about acceptable.  But perhaps the important takeaway there is the every way part: it's astonishing how much Castle in the Heavens succeeds in improving on every single aspect.  And while there are things it merely does well, for reasons that obviously have a lot to do with budget, there isn't one element that's notably weak in the manner that basically all of Ys was.

That starts at the level of story.  Ys was faintly charming but mostly obnoxious in its determination to be as much as possible a direct adaptation of a game that apparently didn't have a ton of plot to make use of.  Ys 2 does away with that, and my impression is that it sequels the anime more than the first game; based on Wikipedia and guesswork, I'd say that its faithfulness extends to borrowing a few concepts from Ys II the game.  At any rate, it has a proper plot, and one that feels closer in tone to something like Dark Souls than the twee, fetch-quest-focused high fantasy of the original.  Our hero Adol - a somewhat less boyish and more troubled figure than last time around - finds himself in a new land with some deeply screwed up circumstances, which get all the more screwed up as it becomes apparent that most everyone is fine with the status quo, even when it involves routine sacrifices to keep the local monsters who've declared themselves gods on side.  One of the few noteworthy aspects of Ys was its gentle commentary on blind religious observance, and Ys II brings that back while kicking the "gentle" part to the wall: it's downright savage in its condemnation of those who put convenient beliefs over inconvenient facts.  One particularly impressive sequence sees Adol trying to convince the locals that the sea of clouds beneath their floating homeland will soon break to reveal the outside world they deny the very existence of, while they impatiently insist that he's lying, preferring to kill him and keep on living an illusion rather than waiting a minute to make sure.  On the whole, the narrative is a definite virtue, with a great deal crammed into two hours, including strong characterisation, proper stakes, and a definite sense that anything might happen, no matter how bleak.

All of this is propped up by animation that, under the guidance of director Watanabe, gets a lot out of what presumably wasn't much at all of a budget.  Watanabe opts to keep the camera tucked in close for the most part, sacrificing the epicness that Ys tried and failed at but selling the character beats and providing some legitimately exciting action.  There's nothing really stunning going on here visually, but there's plenty that works well, and no trace of the hackwork that made Ys such a chore.  One example that stuck with me is the moment a character's talking in a rainstorm and the animators go the extra distance to draw the drops pooling and dropping from her chin: it's the sort of attention to detail that brings a scene to life rather than just plonking it out there.  Oh, and the soundtrack is yet another improvement; the one genuinely splendid feature Ys had to offer, its stunning closing theme 'Endless History', has carried over, but the rest of the score is rousing stuff as well.

Really, it's maddening how good Ys 2 is, for a couple of reasons.  First is that it's nigh impossible to get hold of, either on its own or in the "legacy" box set that brought all three disks together.  And second is that I don't know that it stands alone; actually, one of its most remarkable features is the extent to which it builds upon not terribly strong foundations to make a weak three-hour plot into a strong five-hour one, and in so doing crafts a beguiling, weighty mythology.  Which unfortunately means that to get the best from it, you'd have to track down and sit through its largely unsatisfying predecessor.  As much as I enjoyed it - and I really did - I can't honestly claim that it's quite that good.  But it pains me to say so, because it's dreadfully unfair that one of the best dark fantasy titles in that overstuffed subgenre should be doomed to such obscurity as Ys 2: Castle in the Heavens has found itself in.

801 T.T.S Airbats, 1994-1996, dir's: Yūji Moriyama, Junichi Sakata, Tōru Yoshida, Osamu Mikasa, Shin Misawa

Ah, nineties anime, always able to find fresh ways in which to be surprisingly feminist and yet thoroughly sexist at one and the same time!  And rarely is that truer than with the opening episodes of the seven-part OVA series 801 T.T.S. Airbats.  Its setup, about an all-female elite aerobatics team striving to be taken seriously in the misogynistic world of Japan's Air Self-Defence Force, is a solid foundation, and also pleasantly different; these sorts of underdog stories aren't, perhaps, entirely rare, but the real-world setting distinguishes it and adds a certain extra significance.  All of which is for the good, but how does 801 T.T.S. Airbats choose to exploit its interesting, progressive premise?  Why, with a love triangle, that's how, one in which the unit's two dangerously competitive star pilots battle over the affections of nerdy newbie mechanic Takuya Isurugi, despite a series of initial accidents that give them every reason to suppose he's a pervert and an idiot.  (He manages to see them both naked within the space of a minute, while holding a pair of pilfered panties, and sure, it's because he was being chased by a vampire bat, but who's going to believe that?)

In fairness, none of this makes 801 T.T.S. Airbats bad as such, only familiar and far from being the best version of itself.  Those two pilots, goody-goody Miyuki Haneda and snarky, troubled Arisa Mitaka, aren't inherently awful characters, and Takuya isn't such a hopeless goof that we can't sort of see why they might go for him, and if you can get past the fact that surely nobody comes to a show about female pilots struggling to make their mark in a man's world to watch said pilots fighting over some dork, it's all sufficiently well done that the first three episodes - the only ones with a continuous plot - slide by amiably enough.  Plus, the obviously better take on this material is close enough to the surface that you can just about pretend that's what you're watching; at the very least, the makers don't shy from the fact that Miyuki and Arisa are skilled professionals being held back by bigotry, even if they're also held back by how they keep nearly killing each other over a guy who's surely not worth the bother.

That gets us to just under the halfway mark, at which point, 801 T.T.S. Airbats takes a good hard look at itself and concludes that really what it ought to be delivering is a bunch of one-shot episodes that don't necessarily have a heck of a lot to do with female aerobatics pilots and their dubious love lives.  And shockingly, this proves a good decision: the quality leaps immediately, and one of those four episodes is genuinely excellent, for all that a ramen-eating contest is surely the least logical place to take the show imaginable.  But probably everyone had realised by this point that the one major strength here is the characters, and particularly the subsidiary characters, who suddenly start to hog much more of the limelight.

Though we can wish it had found a better angle, probably we needed something broadly akin to the initial story arc to get the setup in place for the remainder to work.  In particular, the last episode, following a totally separate romance between two of those minor characters, already a weird note to end on, would have been utterly bizarre if we hadn't had time to grow fond of them.  That's the sort of show 801 T.T.S. Airbats is, ultimately: the sort that sets you down with a likeable cast and lets you enjoy hanging out with them.  And that's made all the easier by some thoroughly respectable technical values; Airbats is easy on the eyes and often downright impressive, with a lot of that effort geared, as you might expect, toward some thrilling flying sequences.  Really, its all very slick and charming and easy to spend time with, and it's just a shame that's all it is: a bit more ambition, a bit less cleaving to dated conventions, and we might have had a genuinely special title here.

-oOo-

This is a definite personal favourite selection from among the recent posts.  Admittedly it didn't produce any absolute classics, with the proviso that the Black Jack OVAs taken together absolutely warrant that description, but there was a lot that I enjoyed.  Ys 2 was an enormously pleasant surprise, especially given that I'd been hunting a copy forever, since the trailer looked promising, 801 T.T.S. Airbats was an enjoyable way to while away an evening, and Botchan was at least thoroughly different to anything I've seen - not too stunning on its own, maybe, but the kind of thing I'd gladly watch more of given the chance.

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