To the long list of things I promised myself I'd never do, because if I did, this whole exercise would go from downright silly to irredeemably ridiculous, then promptly went ahead and did anyway, we can now add picking up titles that were only ever released on VHS. We've had one VHS review already, that being Debutante Detective Corps, but that was only because I couldn't snag the DVD and the tape was cheap. Here, for the first time, we have something that never even made it onto recent media, and also the reason I slipped up in the first place: the 1984 film Lensman, which is both well regarded enough to be of interest and condemned to have never reached any technology more modern than a LaserDisc player.
But was it worth it? You'll see when we get there! Let's take a look at Night on the Galactic Railroad, Golgo 13: The Professional, Lensman, and Lupin the Third: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon...
Night on the Galactic Railroad, 1985, dir: Gisaburo Sugii
Beloved childhood classics don't always translate readily between cultures, nor should we expect them to. After all, these are the sort of stories that get buried deep in a nation's psyche, often in ways that are difficult to comprehend from the outside. And that certainly seems to be true for the works of Kenji Miyazawa, who somehow managed to tell enormously personal, abstract, difficult tales that probed at his brief and often tormented life in a manner that resonated deeply with those who came after him.
Thus, from half a century after his death, we have the film adaptation of his short and oft rewritten but never quite finished novel Night on the Galactic Railroad, which sort of looks like a kids film and sort of behaves like a kids film and yet has no qualms about delving into questions of faith, suffering, and how the heck we're meant to live in the sure knowledge that we're all going to die, perhaps without forewarning or apparent cosmic fairness. This is approached via a series of sequential but not always very connected vignettes, and the story of lonely, hard-working boy (well, boy cat) Giovanni, who a quarter of the way into the film finds himself whisked from his home town by an interstellar train, where he runs into his friend Campanella. From there, the two encounter various other characters, many of whom have stories of their own to tell, and go on a series of...
I was going to say adventures, but that's not really how Night on the Galactic Railroad works. If it was a Western kids' story then sure, we might reasonably expect that. If it were, to pick on a close parallel, something like the sort of children's literature C. S. Lewis wrote, another author trying to thrash out questions of faith and the meaning of existence through the medium of books ostensibly aimed at a young audience, we'd expect the two friends to be a driving force through the narrative, even if that narrative was primarily there to explore bigger issues. But actually, the pair are more of an audience, and very little happens to them in the traditional sense; indeed, the one episode where they're particularly active was invented by screenwriter Minoru Betsuyaku. Mostly we're in classic dream narrative territory: stuff happens, much of it makes no objective sense, but Giovanni and Campanella are content to go with the flow, no matter how odd these events seem to us, the wide-awake audience.
The way Night on the Galactic Railroad pulls this off is partly by successfully conjuring the precise mood of a dream and partly by embedding us in a story that rejects adult baggage and views the world through childish eyes, making intuitive much that would otherwise be strange. And all of this depends primarily on a couple of elements. First and foremost, unsurprisingly, there's the animation, which is soft and simple and quite lovely, and looks like a children's book come to life in the truest sense: not like a series of illustrations but as if we've plunged through those illustrations into the world within. But good as the animation is, I doubt it would work without Haruomi Hosono's sublime score, which ties every element - the dreaminess, the childishness, the religiosity, the grand philosophising - together with alternating subtlety and grandeur. Though thinking about it, even Hosono wouldn't be so effective were it not for some tremendous sound engineering: for example, its impossible to imagine this succeeding half so well without the measured, eerie clacking of wheels and gears that underlies the train journey.
Sadly, none of that's to say that I loved Night on the Galactic Railroad; I think it would be a tough film to truly love, though I'm sure there are many who do. In some ways, it deals in universal themes, and in some ways it does so wonderfully, but it also has a tendency to phrase them in terms of religious faith, which, if you're not religious, can be off-putting. Also, there's the fact that - at the risk of sounding like a philistine! - not a heck of a lot happens and much of what does happen is fairly baffling. This is the kind of film you have to give yourself over to wholly, and if you can't succumb to its hallucinatory atmosphere and keep succumbing, it loses a lot of its effect. But to be clear, you should absolutely put in the effort: I can't say on the back of a single viewing whether Night on the Galactic Railroad is a masterpiece, but it certainly begs the possibility.
Golgo 13: The Professional, 1983, dir: Osamu Dezaki
There's a lot about Golgo 13: The Professional that's plain awful. Top of the list has to be Golgo 13 himself, a hitman so stoic that, whatever the male equivalent of the sexy lamp test is, he'd fail it. In many a scene, you could replace him with, say, a brick or a fence post, and it would have negligible impact on the drama. In fact, some sequences would make more sense, since there are moments when logic dictates that a flesh-and-blood human being would die horribly, rather than appearing intact a minute later as though a building hadn't just exploded around them. And Golgo 13 the character is at his worst when Golgo 13 the film expects us to believe that he's irresistible to women, which is often. In this universe, apparently nothing excites the ladies more than a total lack of personality, and the way to drive them to heights of ecstasy is to lie perfectly immobile and let them get on with whatever they feel like doing. Mind you, this should probably more be regarded as part of a wider issue with the movie's horrible attitudes, which manifests most damningly in a rape scene - heck, more of a rape subplot - that exists primarily so that we grasp that the villains are such unpleasant people that we should be on Golgo 13's side, ignoring the extent to which he does nothing besides kill people for money and have inanimate sex.
Now, I'm inclined to argue that Osamu Dezaki salvages Golgo 13: The Professional, but I honestly don't know if that's the case: I can't be certain his bonkers approach here makes for a better film. What he certainly does do, though, is offer one hell of a distraction. I've commented often on how Dezaki was a fan of ostentatious style to an extent few directors can, or would want to, match, but now I reckon I hadn't seen the half of it. Golgo 13 feels like the work of a man who was handed the script for a seedy hitman thriller and decided his brief was to make a delirious art installation. I doubt there's a shot anywhere that could be described as normal; always there's some weird trick or angle or distortion. And there's never a point where it feels like Dezaki is content with merely propelling the narrative from A to B. There are plenty of scenes that don't work at the level of plot - most of the first third falls hard into that category - and there are plenty of scenes that don't work at the level of visual storytelling, but there's not an instant where it doesn't seem that Dezaki was wholly invested in whatever he was up to.
Then again, like I say, whether what he regarded himself to be doing had much in common with conveying a coherent version of the screenplay handed to him is an unanswerable question. Still, I'm inclined to take his side, given how not terribly special that screenplay is. It has superior moments, like an unlikely hit that takes up the middle portion and a basically sound reason for all the various goings-on that ends on a satisfying twist, but there's also lots of garbage, mostly stemming from the scumminess with which it handles its every female character. Those aren't small failings, nor are they easy to look past; a couple of years back, in the days when I loathed Dezaki for his reliance on weird gimmickry, I doubt I'd have managed it. And while the animation is respectable and sometimes great, even that's not always an asset. In particular, some desperately primitive CG is fine in the weird Bond-style credits sequence but ruinous when it shows up later for a helicopter attack on a building.
All told, I couldn't honestly claim Golgo 13: The Professional is a good film. It gets too much enormously, inexcusably, unnecessarily wrong for that to be the case, and even that weren't true, it would still be a story about a profoundly boring central character. But in Dezaki's hands, subjected to his overdose of raw style, it's certainly something. And now that I'm on-side with Dezaki, I personally enjoyed it far more than I didn't, even if the content often made that more challenging than it needed to be. As eighties anime classics go, it's aged atrociously, and there's plenty better out there. But if its director's mad excesses are now the sole reason to seek this out, they're nonetheless a decent excuse.
You can absolutely see the thinking behind Lensman. By 1984, Star Wars continued to be enormous business, as was trying to imitate it with whatever pulpy sci-fi you could conjure up, and what pulpier sci-fi was there than the writings of E. E. "Doc" Smith? Add to that the fact that A New Hope has some transparent similarities to the books and you had the perfect balance: all the benefits of imitating Star Wars and with the neat get-out of pointing out that actually, no, you were the rip-off merchant, Mr. Lucas, all we're doing is adapting these here novels.
Whether or not that was truly the logic behind their decision-making, what's evident is that Toho were willing to throw some serious money at the thing. It's all there on the screen, and if it wasn't, the presence of some remarkably okay CG effects in 1984 - yeah, eleven years before Toy Story, that 1984 - are a sure testament. All of which begs the question of why you've probably never heard of the movie Lensman and almost certainly never seen a copy.
The answer to that question isn't altogether easy. Or rather, it's very easy indeed - as I mentioned in the introduction, the film never made it to any medium besides VHS and LaserDisc - but the whys and wherefores are trickier. The most convincing theory I've found is that Smith's estate, unimpressed with the liberties taken with the beloved material and possibly also a lack of appropriate royalties, created enough of a fuss that nobody was willing to wade into the legal quagmire to try and salvage the release rights. And that certainly seems plausible, given how much vastly worse eighties anime would find its way onto DVD.
Because, whether we choose to view it as a shonky E. E. Smith adaptation or an unusually solid Star Wars rip-off, Lensman is quite the treat. Its plot is absolutely boilerplate, but boilerplate dressed up with lots of delightful stuff around the edges, as our young hero Kimball Kinnison finds himself orphaned and dragged into an intergalactic war with only a bison man, some sort of pterodactyl person, and a sexy nurse lady to back him up. Oh, and the titular lens, a bit of nifty technology that serves so little point in the plot that they could have exchanged it with any easily carried technomagical doodad and saved themselves a lot of bother. At any rate, the film has a merry time barrelling through various loosely connected incidents for the better part of two hours, from spaceship scraps to drugged-up alien murder slug attacks to disco riots, and looks terrific all the while: the character work has dated slightly badly, and is oddly careless in places, and obviously 1984 CG can't hold a candle to modern CG - though it's awfully charming in its own way - but the backgrounds and effects and the vast bulk of the animation are up there with anything the decade would provide.
Admittedly, Lensman is hardly perfect, and I wouldn't go so far as claiming it to be any kind of lost classic. Appropriately for a Star Wars imitator, its signal weakness is a flat lead character, and Kimball also gets the least inspired design, along with, in the dub Manga put out, the worst vocal performance in an otherwise impressive cast. Then there's the female lead, Clarissa MacDougall, who's introduced as a plucky Katherine Hepburn type before immediately descending into serial damsel-in-distress uselessness; and the back half does rather get lost in enormous action sequences that, while undeniably cool, are less fun than the more involved world-building of the opening scenes. Nevertheless, there's plenty more that succeeds than doesn't, and taken together, the film is pretty much a joy, certainly enough so that its near-total erasure from anime history has be considered a crying shame.
The Legend of the Gold of Babylon does something I've never seen anime attempt before, which is to emulate the loose, slipshod style of the brand of American animation exemplified by the works of Ralph "Fritz the Cat" Bakshi. Now, I for one don't like Bakshi's work much at all, and the last thing I want my anime doing is aping it, but hey, it's certainly different. And for a Lupin story that spends a great deal of its running time in New York, it even makes a degree of sense. Indeed, for the first five minutes, a scene in a monster-themed bar that pushes the franchise's tolerance for out-and-out surrealism about as far as it could go, it looks as though it might be precisely the right choice. Then the film stops dead for an extended, repetitive, deeply dull action sequence with perpetually hopeless cop Zenigata, and decides that what it really ought to be foregrounding is how damn dubious the designs for its black characters are, and suddenly the Bakshi influence starts to feel like a very bad decision indeed.
Fortunately, things largely balance out from there; even the experimental animation style eventually settles into something more comfortably familiar, though certain characters, notably Fujiko, never come close to looking right. At any rate, there are scenes that function brilliantly and scenes that fall flat - though none so much so as that interminable motorbike chase with Zenigata - and scenes that simply get the job done, and maybe the lousy beginning even works to the film's benefit, in that everything thereafter seems better than it might otherwise have. Plus, it's to The Legend of the Gold of Babylon's advantage that it has quite a bit of plot to go around, or at any rate lots of incidents that hang together engagingly enough that it feels like there's a significant plot. It's an enormously busy movie, with far more than its share of ideas and characters and threads to keep track of, and that it cobbles all its elements into something that seems vaguely unified is an achievement in itself.
On the flip side, you don't need the excellent liner notes of Eastern Star's re-release to inform you that this had a troubled gestation - though the revelation that one of its many contributors and potential directors was Mamoru Oshii, of Ghost in the Shell fame, and that he was shoved off the project when the studio deemed his ideas too radical and weird, is downright heart-breaking. Then again, their first choice was for Hayao Miyazaki to return and work the sort of magic he brought to The Castle of Cagliostro, so Oshii would admittedly have made for quite the change of pace.
Plus, if his legacy amounted to contributing the screenplay's more outlandish elements, I fervently hope Oshii wasn't to blame for the ending, which doesn't so much jump the shark as line up a hundred sharks and attempt to break the world shark-jumping record. It's so bewildering that it makes the entire film feel oddly non-canonical, since surely there's no squaring any other Lupin film with this one. And while that's an annoying way to have to digest this, the more so given that some of those better scenes get the formula one hundred percent right, it's maybe the best perspective from which to view The Legend of the Gold of Babylon: it feels, and looks, like a Lupin movie beamed in from some bizarre parallel universe. Given how generic and overstuffed the series would become for lengthy stretches, that's exciting in and of itself, but it would be that bit more so if the results were consistently successful.
-oOo-
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