If you were watching anime or reading manga in the eighties and nineties, you were bound to come across the works of Rumiko Takahashi sooner or later: if Urusei Yatsura didn't do it, then Ranma 1/2 or Maison Ikkoku would get you. Takahashi's most famous works were staggeringly successful, and practically inescapable.
But they were far from being all that she produced, and in the eighties, four of her shorter titles were given the OVA treatment, to be released under the collective banner of the Rumik World series. Sad to say, the only Western release those four OVAs would get was on VHS, from Manga Video in the UK and U.S. Manga Corps in the US. But is that to say they didn't deserve to make it onto DVD, or were there darker forces at work? Since I was curious enough to track them down and to dig out my old video player especially, let's find out, with a deep dive into the Rumik World and Fire Tripper, Laughing Target, Maris the Wondergirl, and Mermaid Forest...
Fire Tripper belongs to a particularly rarefied subgenre: what we might call time-travel romance, for want of a better term*. In feudal Japan, an infant girl escapes a bandit attack and her burning home by spontaneously vanishing, only to reappear in the modern day. The next we see of her, she's been adopted by the kindly pair who found her, renamed Suzuko, and has grown to be a teenager - at which point, a gas explosion casts her and the young boy, Shu, that she's looking after back in time once more, separating them and stranding her in the past. Before she can find her feet, Suzuko is rescued from a rape attempt by a young fighter, Shukumaru, who takes her back to his village and treats her with a modicum of kindness, enough so that she's not wholly put off when he starts talking about marriage. As for Shu, his T-shirt turns up mysteriously in the village, but there's no sign of the lad himself, for all that Suzuko devotes herself to hunting for him and Shukumaru grudgingly agrees to aid her.
For this to work, it needs to get two things right, the time travel shenanigans and the romance that ensues from them. So the fact that neither entirely lands is definitely a flaw. The former, I'd say, fares better, in that at least it's entertainingly convoluted. Obviously there's more going on here than we're immediately made privy to, and much of the pleasure to be had with Fire Tripper (and this tiny subgenre in general) is in seeing how its plot unwinds and comes to make some measure of sense. So, that of the two big twists along the way, one's so obvious that I had to assume I was meant to have got ahead of it and the other's only marginally harder to preempt is certainly another problem. Arguably worse, though, is the lack of any wider explanation: that Suzuko jumps between two time periods when her life is in danger from fire or explosions is presented as an irrefutable fact, and we'd just better deal with it, because Fire Tripper isn't wasting one iota of its running time on trying to justify it.
The romance, though, is considerably worse. At any rate, the version of the romance imposed by Manga's dub is worse; it's certainly possible that this would play better in its native Japanese. It's not a horrible dub, the intent is evidently to be true to the material and I'm always in favour of that, but neither of the leads seems terribly concerned with making us like their characters, and a romance between two unlikable people is tough to be on side with. Then again, since neither has a lot in the way of personality, or much room to develop in a plot that necessarily requires them to be swept from event to event, it's maybe the case that this could never have functioned as its needs to.
If I wanted to go on grumbling, I could mention some wholly run-of-the-mill animation and Takahashi's flavourless direction, which never does much to elevate the material. But here at the end, I'd rather acknowledge that, for all that I don't think Fire Tripper succeeds as it was intended to, it's not altogether a washout. You can only screw up a setup like this so far, because so long as the plot is sufficiently ingenious - and this one is, just about - there's pleasure to be had in seeing how the pieces slot together. Since the narrative is basically a puzzle we watch solving itself over the course of forty-five minutes, the flat romance and even the predictable twists are less of a problem that they'd otherwise be. Though there are much better such puzzle-box narratives out there (for my money, 2014's Predestination perfects the form to an unbeatable degree) they're also thin enough on the ground that a decent but flawed example remains enough of a curio to waste your time on.
Maris the Wondergirl, 1986, dir: Kazuyoshi Katayama, Motosuke Takahashi
Read the synopses of the other three episodes and it seems fairly clear what these Rumik World OVAs are going to be: fantastical Twilight Zone-esque stories with some sort of central supernatural gimmick and a twisty sting in their tails. So it's quite the surprise when Maris the Wondergirl comes along and throws all that out the window. Okay, arguably it does contain a gimmick of sorts: its core idea is that our hero Maris, being from the now-extinct planet of Thanatos, has the strength of six regular people, which she has to keep in check via a special harness lest her uncontrollable power destroy whatever happens to be near. And, thinking about it, I suppose there's even a twist ending of sorts, though it's more by way of a gag than anything. Because, and this is perhaps the biggest change from its fellows, more even than the shift from fantasy set in a reasonable approximation of the real world to a bonkers science-fictional universe: Maris the Wondergirl is a comedy.
A part of why this feels odd, I think, is that comedy is very much what Rumiko Takahashi is and was known for, and I'd decided based on no real evidence that the intention of these Rumik World episodes was to present another side of her oeuvre. Then again, this is a different brand of comedy than either Urusei Yatsura or Ranma 1/2, a little less goofy and a lot more dark, or at any rate more willing to watch its protagonist suffer. As we meet her, Maris is having a decidedly crappy time of it, and most of her problems boil down to her annoying super-strength: working as a space cop of sorts, we quickly learn that she routinely does so much damage on her missions that she's incapable of turning a profit. And even if that weren't the case, that her father and mother are respectively a drunk and a shopaholic, and also have a tendency to break everything in sight and then phone their daughter to beg for cash, means that the odds are against her ever getting into the black.
This all looks like it could change when Maris is offered the job of rescuing a captured billionaire. All she needs to do, aside from the actual rescuing part, is ensure that he falls madly in love with her and marries her on the spot. So off she sets, with only her partner Murphy for backup - Murphy, being, by the way, a nine-tailed fox that in the English version gets a broad Irish accent that's somehow the most perfect bit of dubbing I've ever encountered. And as to why Maris is partnered with a creature out of Japanese folklore, that isn't something Maris the Wondergirl ever feels inclined to explain, much as it's happy to leave a good portion of its world-building unexplained, in favour of taking every opportunity to chase after jokes or simply opportunities for general weirdness.
This is absolutely the right decision, and not only for Maris the Wondergirl as comedy but for Maris the Wondergirl as science-fiction too. It's thoroughly great at the former: it's awfully nasty to poor Maris, but surreal enough that it never feels nasty, and there are some genuinely excellent gags along the way, right from the beginning and the narrator's stentorian assurance that what we're about to watch is not a true story. But at the same time, there's enough to the plot and setting that they don't just come across as a delivery mechanism for jokes; indeed, the background here feels much more thought through that in Fire Tripper. And while we're comparing, the animation and music are both a marked improvement, with some engaging pop interludes and Maris in particular benefiting from terrific character work. All of which means that, while I don't know that Maris the Wondergirl is necessarily a great Rumik World entry, seeming as it does too fundamentally different from the rest, in its own right it's a gem, one of the most charming and witty comic OVAs I've encountered.
If Fire Tripper had a single advantage, it was that it was dabbling in a very exclusive subgenre, puzzle-box time-travel romances not being exactly ten a penny. So that Laughing Target goes to the opposite extreme, opting for the sort of supernatural horror that you can barely move for in the anime world without stumbling over, and that it keeps one of Fire Tripper's significant weaknesses - that being director Takahashi, who put in such a lacklustre showing there - doesn't bode well.
So it's both a surprise and a relief that it ends up being the better title in almost every way. For a start, while the core elements are thoroughly routine, Laughing Target comes to them via an awfully nice angle. Yuzuru Shiga was pledged at a young age to marry his cousin Azusa, but in the years since, he's thought little of her, and by the time we meet him as a teenager, he's well established in a relationship with his classmate Satomi. So it's quite the disruption for both of them that, following the death of her mother, Azusa is coming to live with Yuzuru, and that she definitely hasn't forgotten that childhood promise, and indeed seems to have been planning her entire life around it. And much as that's bound to be a problem, it's a considerably bigger problem given that Azusa seems both a touch crazy and possessed of supernatural powers, surely related to an opening scene we witnessed in which she strayed into a mysterious other realm.
The reason this works so well is that everyone is basically sympathetic. Of course Yuzuru doesn't want to honour a promise he made when he was six years old, and of course Satomi doesn't want to give up her boyfriend so he can marry a relative he barely knows, but we're given enough insight into Azusa and the events that formed her that we can also understand why she's determined to see this through. She's as much a victim as the couple she's preying on, if not more so. And from a horror perspective, a situation where you're more or less rooting for everyone has considerable advantages. We don't want to see Azusu harmed any more than we do Yuzuru or Satomi - thanks to a solid dub, they're all easy to be on side with - and so the ever-increasing violence between them is that bit more discomforting.
This is helped by a far stronger performance by Takahashi, or perhaps by the fact that he's just better suited to the material: the expository stuff is still quite pedestrian, but he's an unexpectedly dab hand at laying on the creepiness, and while there's nothing here you could genuinely call scary, Laughing Target does a respectable job of getting under your skin on more than one occasion. Indeed, the flashback in which we learn how Azusa first manifested her powers is a genuinely effective piece of horror film-making, both in how visually striking it is and in how it shunts us through a number of troubling emotions, mixing a heady combination of alarm at what might happen to Azusa, disgust for the solution she arrives at, and sadness as we come to comprehend how this event shaped the present.
There is, in short, a good little horror film here, with a fine setup and some scenes that really land. But it's also not hard to see how it could have been improved. As with Fire Tripper, while we get enough answers that the result feels like a coherent narrative, there are plenty of questions left over, and some of those would definitely have been opportunities to tie everything together more neatly. In particular, Yuzuru and Azusa's family connection ends up feeling like a plot device, when surely there was more to be done with the hints that this all stems from some generations-old curse. Three quarters of the way through this series and I'm starting to suspect Takahashi was better at coming up with neat ideas than thinking them all the way through, but then again, these ideas are at least genuinely neat, and Fire Tripper does a respectable job of nailing the execution too.
It was Mermaid Forest that initially brought to me to this OVA series: of all of them, it's the title that's managed to sustain something of a reputation for itself, and it's often spoken highly of when Takahashi's work crops up. And yeah, I can definitely see why ... while maybe not the most distinctive of the four Rumik World entries, it's an exceedingly well-formed example of what it is.
Which is a vampire story, in essence, though part of why it feels so fresh is that it comes at that particular set of tropes from an appealingly different direction. Three of its main characters (four if we count a dog) are immortal, and one is very definitely surviving by dosing herself with human blood, though we're led to suppose that until the beginning proper of this story - that is, excepting a couple of important prologues - the blood has all been from corpses supplied by the village doctor, who's madly, unwisely in love with her. Towa, you see, was cured of a potentially fatal childhood illness by her sister Sawa, but at quite the cost: she was only saved by drinking the blood of a mermaid, and in Japanese folklore, consuming a mermaid's flesh grants the gift-stroke-curse of immortality. In Towa's case, it's also stuck her with a mutated arm that leaves her in incessant pain and constantly threatens to get out of control. Quite how human blood is staving this off is slightly unclear, but it does, albeit with diminishing results. And while Towa is convinced that a permanent cure could be arrived at if her sister would just let on where she got that cup of mermaid juice from, she's soon wondering about other solutions when two more immortals wind up in her home.
The mermaid element, so vital to the story, does a great deal to spice up well-worn ideas, and makes for an enticing combination, at once familiar and surprising. The result is a plot you can see the shape of from early on, but that still succeeds in throwing curve balls as it goes along: Mermaid Forest certainly has the most satisfying twist of these four titles, and the one that does most to retroactively reshape the material. It's never, it has to be said, remotely scary, and though there's a fair bit of blood and guts and the odd gross moment, it's rarely that horrifying either: quite where the 18 rating came from is anyone's guess. All else aside, though the animation's perfectly decent and director Mizutani does a competent job of keeping the narrative flowing, there's not sufficient flare to properly get under your skin; in those terms, Laughing Target was the better work of horror. But Mermaid Forest feels like the superior title in other ways, perhaps because it's based not on a short story but one section of a longer work. That definitely comes over, in largely good ways: there's a sense of scale that touches, albeit lightly, on what it might mean to live forever and how that experience might twist a mind or set it free.
Sadly, there's one aspect of Mermaid Forest that's as weak as anything in this series, and that's the dub: it has moments of abject terribleness, and none of the cast remotely shine, though the actress voicing Towa does seem to get to grips with her character by around the halfway point, thus mitigating the worst of the damage. It's a shame, though, and as with many of these dubs, goodness knows what Manga were thinking letting this crap out the door. But thankfully the material is sturdy enough to ride it out. The odds were against this being my favourite entry with Maris the Wondergirl in the mix, and I'd say Laughing Target about ties it, but nevertheless, Mermaid Forest does fine work in taking one of horror's oldest concepts and making it feel new, and that's enough to earn its enduring reputation.
-oOo-
* Though weirdly, a subgenre that anime has explored quite a bit, with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time being another obvious example.
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