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...?
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.
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.
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.
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!
* 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.
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