In keeping with my efforts to ensure that these randomly assembled review posts are as randomly random as possible, this one's all sorts of random. We've got a CG-enhanced sci-fi thriller, social satire posing as a show about wealthy teenage girls investigating their own attempted murder, weird horror featuring cat people fighting tentacle monsters, and a light-hearted, somewhat surreal college drama. Which is to say, we have Blue Submarine No. 6, Debutante Detective Corps, Dark Cat, and Welcome to Green Wood...
Blue Submarine No. 6, 1998-2000, dir: Mahiro Maeda
I'm inclined to believe that, were it not for a couple of factors, I wouldn't need to be telling you how terrific
Blue Submarine No. 6 is, because it would be among that handful of widely regarded classics from the era that most everyone with a passing interest in anime has heard of. The first of those factors is its OVA format, a type of release that was never quite so acceptable in the West, and was surely made less so in this instance by distributor
Bandai, who insisted on releasing four thirty-minute episodes on four separate disks.* And the second reason, which ties into why
Bandai presumably reckoned they'd get away with such naked exploitativeness, is that
Blue Submarine No. 6 was brought to life with what at the time was a fairly radical approach, combining extensive, cutting edge CG with hand-drawn animation.
I say fairly radical; obviously, the notion of mixing CG with traditional animation was nothing new at this point. But with Blue Submarine No. 6, studio Gonzo pushed the approach as far as the technologies available to them in 1998 would allow. (Remember, this was the year Pixar put out their second release, A Bug's Life, a film precisely no-one remembers for its timeless aesthetic qualities.) What Gonzo were after went beyond what 1995's Ghost in the Shell had done and what anime in general was steadily growing comfortable with, using computer technologies to bolster aspects that hand-drawn animation tended to struggle with but generally keeping it fairly discreet. No, this was to be a true hybrid, such that you couldn't hope to miss the CG elements, be they water or vehicles or even certain creatures.
The problem here, and I'm sure you're well ahead of me, is that CG from over two decades ago, however astounding it might once have been, now looks horrifyingly dated. And taking that into account, it's a wonder Blue Submarine No. 6 holds up as well as it does. It helps that the traditional animation is superlative, and that the unusually realistic designs feel much more the product of the twenty-first century, but once you get past the fact that you're looking at CG from a whole other millennium, even that fares respectably for the most part, with the occasional shot that's still impressive today. It's easy to suppose that if they'd just gone with the old-fashioned approach, this would have been a visual masterpiece, but then the CG is employed judiciously enough that probably nothing like this could have been accomplished on a rational budget. It really was a bold attempt at marrying the best of what old and new animation technologies had to offer and accomplishing what neither could alone, and on its own terms, that hybridisation works well. It's impossible to ignore, and it may be what robbed Blue Submarine No. 6 of a classic status it thoroughly deserves, but that's not to say it's not good - and in its day, it must have been downright mind-blowing.
And here we are, three paragraphs deep, and I haven't even told you what Blue Submarine No. 6 is. Suffice to say that it begins as a novel kind of alien invasion picture - novel because the aliens are actually modified animals given human-like intelligence and the setting is an Earth that's mostly underwater, among numerous other reasons - and develops into something much smarter, an eco-fable that has the decency not to be patronising or preachy and that doesn't stint on the thrilling action which characterises the first episode. Admittedly, there's nothing here we haven't seen elsewhere, though I'd wager most of its ideas felt fresher at the time, if we put aside how liberally it borrows from The Island of Doctor Moreau; but the particular combination of elements is enough to produce an unusually thoughtful slice of science fiction. The writing's top notch, as is the direction, as is the perfect-in-its-incongruity jazz score, and really, everything else. Get past the once great, still pretty okay CG and there's not much to find fault with here, and an enormous amount to admire.
Debutante Detective Corps, 1996, dir: Akiyuki Shinbo
It's a lot to ask of a thirty-minute OVA that it be both a breezy comedy and an incisive critique of capitalism, but Debutante Detective Corps certainly pulls that off, and hats off to it for doing so. Its central joke is basically, "Isn't it funny how rich people automatically assume they're great at everything, and that that's why they're rich, and isn't it also funny how nobody dares tell them the truth and that, however badly they screw up, they can always buy themselves out of whatever trouble they've brewed? But isn't that also kind of not funny at all, and actually quite appalling; but hey, what can you do except laugh, right?" And to me anyway, this seems an altogether wholesome message in the year of our billionaire overlords 2020.
The ostensible form of this socialist screed is a show about five outrageously superwealthy high school girls. How outrageously superwealthy? Well, at one point it's suggested that their combined worth is equal to that of the rest of Japan combined, at which one of them points out that, no, it's rather the entire GDP of Japan. So, you know, pretty damn superwealthy. At any rate, after the five of them arrive at school in increasingly outlandish and disruptive ways, we learn that they've been marked for death, and they immediately find themselves placed under police protection. But for what do they need police protection, when they're not only staggeringly rich and beautiful but geniuses in their particular hobbies as well? And since one of those hobbies involves being a master of disguise, it's not long before they've tricked their way out of the police's misguided effort to protect their lives and into the sights of their would-be murderers.
Obviously, you don't need to be chuckling along at the social critique to have fun with this; many an anime title has wrung laughs out of protagonists who aren't half as able as they deludedly imagine themselves to be. Still, I think it helps, and perhaps explains why Debutante Detective Corps has a fairly dreadful reputation in the West. Take it on face value and it's silly and intermittently amusing but a lot like a lot of other titles: the animation is perfectly capable and the music is cheerfully upbeat and the voice cast do a good job of establishing their one-note characters in the bare minimum of time - and Akiyuki Shinbo is a terrific enough director to handle something this straightforward with the peppy energy it requires - but nevertheless, this is hardly reinventing the anime wheel.
All of which is to say that, though I thoroughly enjoyed it, half of that was down to how I enjoy watching supercilious rich people being mocked, even when that mocking is for the most part almost affectionately gentle. If that's not up your alley - or, if you somehow manage to miss the satire altogether, as most critics appear to have rushed to do - then there's not enough left to warrant seeking this out. I mean, it's a thirty-minute OVA that's all but impossible to find (except on VHS, oddly, that being how I watched it) and even the version on Youtube is missing English subtitles, so unless you understand Japanese or read French, that seeking is quite the job. All the same, if this amounts to the lone voice in the wilderness saying "Hey, Debutante Detective Corps really isn't that bad!" then my work here is done. And since I exchanged my labours for no material compensation, I reckon that both Marx and the makers of Debutante Detective Corps would approve.
Insomuch as there's a consensus on Dark Cat, a title nobody much cared about when it first came out and that certainly no one remembers now, the conclusion is that it's irredeemable garbage. And given that this was an attempt by ailing film studio Nikkatsu, known for making soft porn "pinku" movies and a couple of years away from going altogether bust, to break into the anime market by imitating the unpleasant likes of UrotsukidÅji: Legend of the Overfiend, it's hard to imagine the consensus would be off base on this one.
And yet, based on the prelude that constitutes the first three or so minutes of its fifty-minute running time, I was all ready to fight Dark Cat's corner tooth and nail. That opening is a perfect little horror vignette, alternately melancholy and creepy, and with one flat-out freaky image that's thoroughly skin-crawling. Plus, the animation is more than respectable, and Suzuki's direction is tight and intuitive, getting maximum impact from what we have to assume wasn't a grand budget.
Of course things go downhill from there, how could they not? But the funny thing is, everything that worked keeps on working, to a greater or lesser extent. Suzuki can't save the material, an enormous mess that tries to mix moody, character-driven horror with gross-out body horror with wacky supernatural shenanigans and does so by alternating between them apparently at random; but his direction frequently bring out something of value. The character stuff is terribly thin on paper, but quite a few scenes land thanks to his surehandedness, and even the stuff that fails isn't the disaster it might have been. And the animation remains unexpectedly decent, with a surprising degree of detail and shading and some thoroughly lovely backgrounds - though you'd have to think the fact that no one on the staff had the faintest clue what cats look like might have come up in a meeting at some point. The score, too, is better than you might hope, frequently backing up Suzuki's attempts to conjure a bit of genuine mood. (Admittedly, the end credits track sounds like it was recorded three rooms away on a broken microphone.)
You might notice that I've got most of the way to the end of the review and said nothing about the plot, and ... look, I'm trying to find positives, okay? Actually, there
is the seed of a decent narrative here, and whenever
Dark Cat remembers where its focus ought to lie - shape-changing feline brothers Hyoi and Ryoi are trying to get to the bottom of the evil force that's gripped a school, and particularly to protect student Aimi Koenji, whom Hyoi has already encountered in his cat form - it's reliably effective. But as often, the script is off on a mad tangent, with the brothers battling their former mentor, who's supposedly a cat but looks more like
Baron Greenback, or with Ryoi getting healed by a magic tree, or ... well, you get the idea. I assume this is because the makers felt obliged to cram in as much as they could from the manga this was based on, but it's disastrous, because none of the wider narrative makes a shred of sense and all it does is suck energy from the aspects that are just about working.
And with all of that, I did quite like Dark Cat; certainly I've seen worse short horror OVAs, though admittedly the bar is perilously low on that front. Still, it's not crap, which you'd have every right to suppose it would be given its heritage. There's frequently the sense that nobody involved altogether knew what they were doing - at regular points, frames jolt slightly to one side, a mistake so basic that I can't say I've ever seen it happen before - and yet it's also apparent that the goal was never to make tossed-off garbage. Like I say, Suzuki really does seem to have tried to do what he could with the material, and genuine love went into the animation and artwork, more so than I've seen in some more high profile titles. So while the consensus is right, and there's certainly not much reason to waste your time with Dark Cat, there's also just enough here that I wish I could mount a proper defence.
A useful place to start would be telling you what Here Is Green Wood is, but even reaching that point isn't altogether straightforward. A synopsis of the first episode gets us so far: Teenager Kazuya Hasekawa makes a late start enrolling at Ryokuto Academy, having spent time in hospital for reasons that may or may not relate to how the woman he's in love married his brother before he could let her know his feelings, only to find himself assigned to the notorious Green Wood dormitory, a dumping ground for eccentrics. In short order, he meets his neighbours-to-be Mitsuru and Shinobu, and they introduce him to the person he'll be lodging with, Shun, who we're originally led to believe is a girl passing as a boy and turns out to be a boy who looks and acts like a girl - a topic, by the way, that the show handles with a welcome gentleness and lightness of touch. Anyway, Kazuya steadily gets past his obsession with his now-sister-in-law, and steadily warms up to Mitsuru, Shinobu, and Shun, and from there on, the four friends have various wacky adventures together.
Except when they don't. The thing is, it's easy to make Here is Green Wood sound like a Japanese Animal House or similar US frat movie, and it's fair to say that's a part of what it's gunning for, yet for long stretches it's not that at all. Heck, three of the six episodes really aren't that funny, and I don't think it's accidental. The first is mostly character setup with a smattering of comedy, and the double-parter that wraps things up is full-on romance, and ultimately what Here is Green Wood feels most like is an anthology show, one that uses its setting and cast as a jumping-off point to tell a diverse set of stories that don't even feel the need to belong to the same genre. So of the middle three episodes, one's a ghost story, one's a gangster movie, and the third - and best - finds the gang roped into making a short fantasy film, which we alternately watch being made and see in its finished form. It's here, by the way, where director Mochizuki, who you'd be forgiven for not expecting too much of based on a mostly workmanlike CV, gets to cut loose, pulling out imaginative but silly shots of the sort you'd expect a student filmmaker to fling around, and generally getting up to enough interesting things that you wish he'd had more opportunities to show off than he did.** And the same goes for the playful score, and especially so for the animation and artwork, which mostly pass as functional and of their time until you pay closer attention, at which point you might notice that they're actually pretty polished and special.
Which, I think, is as good a summing up of Here is Green Wood as any. It's the kind of show that sneaks up on you, confident enough in its material and cast that it doesn't feel the need to set out its wares all at once. It was toward the middle of the third episode that I began to grasp how good it was, and from there, I was enraptured; it's fair to say it gets better as it goes along, though perhaps that has as much to do with how we gradually get to know the characters, and how Kazuya grows up a bit, having been fairly obnoxious throughout the first episode. It's also the sort of title that I'm sure passed most people by at the time, and which is all but forgotten now; but at the same time, it's an exemplar of so much of what I love about the anime of the nineties. Many a film and show has claimed to be full of lovable eccentrics, but Here is Green Wood is the rare one that legitimately embraces its characters and lets them be who they are, while not forgetting to tell witty, ingenuous, well-crafted stories around them.
-oOo-
Damn, this was a good batch! Or, wait, was it? I'm literally the only person anywhere with a nice word to say about Dark Cat, so I guess that was probably terrible. And the same maybe goes for Debutante Detective Corps, though there I feel I'm on stronger ground, given that not a single review even seems to have picked up on its social commentary, despite how it uses the first seconds of its short running time to have totally unrelated characters comment on how much it sucks to be poor! At any rate, I definitely got something out of each of them, and Blue Submarine No. 6 is awfully close to being a stone-cold classic, and I don't know that Here is Green Wood is that far off either, albeit in a slightly less obvious fashion, so that's some pretty high highlights. Yeah, I reckon we did okay this time around.
Next: excitingly, it's up for grabs, in that I've about run out of finished posts at last, but have lots of nearly finished ones. So the possibilities are practically endless! ***
* Thankfully, it's since been brought back on both DVD and blu-ray, though even those are a bit tricky to lay hands on these days.
** Mochizuki's CV is fascinatingly all over the place, from Ocean Waves, the Studio Ghibli movie everyone tends to forget about, to the superb My Dear Marie, to forgettable but competent titles like Dirty Pair Flash and Eight Clouds Rising.
*** "Practically endless", in this context, meaning "about five."
Blue Submarine No. 6, 1998-2000, dir: Mahiro Maeda
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