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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment