I'm now more or less caught up with the backlog of these posts, which feels like about the most productive thing I've accomplished in 2020, though I hope to goodness it isn't really. At any rate, I'd hoped to have the mess I'd created for myself back under control before Christmas, and it's certainly before Christmas, so I'm happy to call that a win.
As for what we're looking at, we're back with whatever I happened to grab off the shelf, with the trawl through the Black Jack OVA series drawing close to its sad and inevitable end, a popular favourite that's somehow passed me by until now, an early Manga Video release that's taken me forever to hunt down*, and a bit of an oddity to close things out on. Which makes for, Black Jack: Trauma, Kimagure Orange Road OVA (Disk 1), Bounty Dog, and Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason...
I won't reiterate at length what I've said elsewhere about the Black Jack OVA series. It should be enough to note that it's one of the very highest high points of nineties anime, combining terrific storytelling with some superlative animation, and both in the hands of a director capable of real greatness doing perhaps the finest work of his career. With six of the ten episodes reviewed, it's become more a matter of rating them comparatively, since none are anywhere near to bad, or even to mediocrity, and I struggle to imagine at this point that there are any major disappointments ahead.
Black Jack: Trauma is most definitely not a disappointment. Returning after a two year gap, the show delivers one of its finer episodes, and also one that eschews the formula these things hew to more often than not, whereby super-surgeon Black Jack is recruited to investigate some bizarre and faintly supernatural medical anomaly that would defy the skill and knowledge of lesser mortals. There's a bit of that here, in that the jumping-off point involves Black Jack being sent into a civil-war-stricken country to treat the granddaughter of a gangster, a little girl suffering with a rare heart disorder. However, there's nothing fantastical about her condition - if you've been following along with the series, this is quite a shocking development in itself! - and the real drama is reserved for the second half, when Black Jack and the girl are back in America and caught up in medical complications of an entirely different nature.
To go into more detail than that would spoil the fun, if fun is really the word for a particularly cerebral, downbeat episode that only really brightens up for some comic interludes with Black Jack's pint-sized assistant Pinoko. Suffice to say that the conflicts centre around Black Jack's outsider status as an unlicensed surgeon, not to mention his often mercenary approach to who he will or won't treat. The character has a tendency to be something of a cipher, so it's rewarding to have a story that humanises him and delves into his morality and motivations, especially since it manages to do so without going so far as to dint the good doctor's mystique. Here toward the middle of the series, it feels like just the right step, as does the noticeable shift in tone and content. Black Jack's formula is of the rare sort that's unlikely to ever grow tired, and given how easy it would be to rely on, it's commendable that the makers were prepared to take chances on diversions like this.
Unfortunately, the ending is a mild letdown, simply because the central conflict is resolved too effortlessly and thus feels rather pat, though a neat little epilogue does a lot to redeem it. It's a small misstep in the scheme of things, but one that would have been helped greatly by U.S. Manga Corp's sticking to handling this part as they did the preceding six. This was the first of their releases to offer up a mere single episode, and not only was that a crummy move, it leaves us with a disk that's both exceptionally hard to find and was poor value for money even at its original price. Take that together with how much it benefits from having seen the preceding episodes and I suppose Trauma is unlikely to be anyone's first port of call, which is a shame, because its bold attempt to do something different with a franchise that's already plenty different to begin with is a rare treat.
It's telling, I think, that the blurb on the back of AnimEigo's Kimagure Orange Road OVA releases does a better job of summing up its concept and stakes than any of the four episodes presented on this first disk. Of course, it's not unreasonable for an OVA to assume a degree of audience familiarity, and arguably it's my bad for supposing this would be as standalone as something like the Oh! My Goddess OVA. But maybe it's not unreasonable, either, to assume that after watching four episodes of something, you'd have a clear sense of what, for example, the protagonist's convenient magical powers actually entailed, or which of the two female leads he was perpetually hanging around with was the one he's most interested in.
So forgive me if my own summation is a bit wobbly, but here goes: high-schooler Kyosuke is part of a cursed family - cursed, in this context, apparently meaning much the same as super-powered - and while he's sort of dating a girl named Hikaru, or at any rate she seems to believe so, he's also in love with her best friend Madoka, though he can't tell her or do anything about it for ... reasons, I guess?
Mind you, it's perfectly possible that most of the above won't have much bearing on any given episode. The first, a giddy bit of fluff in which Kyosuke spends most of his time body-swapped into a goldfish, is the clear winner, probably because it balances the various elements most gracefully: there's a solid little story, some humour, a hint of romance, some supernatural shenanigans, and a dash of perving at naked women, which judging by that cover art and the remaining episodes, certainly seems to have been a meaningful component of the Kimagure Orange Road formula. The second, conversely, is definitely the worst, and not only because its setup boils down to, "Boy, lesbians are scary, huh?" Although, yeah, mainly that. The third is a run-of-the-mill ghost story of the sort that's padded out a thousand anime series, though it's a solid stab at that tried and tested subgenre. And the fourth is, for some reason, a gritty kidnapping thriller set in Hawaii, which if nothing else had the merit of taking me by surprise. If there's a twist, it's that Kyosuke has powers that could easily resolve the situation, but can't use them because presumably keeping them a secret is more important than his friends' lives or something.
Now, I get that Kimagure Orange Road was hugely influential, and I'm not saying I can't see why: the ingredients are familiar, no doubt in part because they were imitated ad nauseam, but that's not to say they're bad ingredients. Love triangles can be good, and families with wacky magical powers can be good, and the show definitely looks nice, even if its aesthetic has dated it more than many a title from the back end of the eighties. Heck, there's even the occasional spot of experimentation on the animation front, and I'm always in favour of that. But, at the risk of being a jerk about a much-loved classic, the passage of three decades hasn't been kind; there just isn't a lot of meat on these bones compared with many of the shows that were huge at the time. Compared with something like the ever-spinning web of characters and gags that was Ranma 1/2, there are only really two ideas on offer here, and this first half of the OVA series routinely gets distracted from both of them.
Do you hate the colour yellow? Then there's a fair chance you'll hate Bounty Dog, too. Certainly contemporary reviewers seem to have fixated on the unusual choices that went into its colour scheme to an inordinate degree. It's undoubtedly novel: most scenes err toward being monochromatic, with often yellow dominating and then a splash of red, blue, or green in there as well. Then again, some shots are predominantly red, too, and there's a clear codification that justifies all this, with each primary colour being pinned to one or two associations and / or settings. But yellow most of all, and most straightforwardly: Bounty Dog, you see, is set on the moon, and somewhere along the line, the decision was evidently made that if you lived on the moon, everything would be very yellow all the time. And not just any yellow, either: a faintly nauseating, acidic shade that does a fine job of replicating the look of crummy electrical lighting, and an equally fine job of making its locations seem unpleasant and wrong and built by humans under less than ideal circumstances.
Was this, as those reviewers back in the nineties tended to suggest, a cost-cutting measure? Perhaps so. But personally I'd argue for a world in which all cost-cutting measures were so bold. Via one simple decision, the makers of Bounty Dog accomplished what many arguably better works have tried and failed to nail: they really do sell the notion that these events are happening on a sphere that isn't Earth and in a time that's not our own. Also, if the goal was to keep a limited budget for where it would be most productive, then job done: the animation is routinely terrific, with an unusually realistic and detailed aesthetic, some decidedly slick action, and particularly lovely mechanical designs, which the credits attribute to the legendary manga creator Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame, though the internet is hazy on the fact. I'm inclined to believe them, though: this both looks and feels like Shirow had a hand in it, or at at any rate was an influence. And speaking of influences, I'd be amazed if director Negishi wasn't thinking of Mamoru Oshii at least a little: the closest analogue I could think of while watching was his early OVA series Dallos, but there are definite notes of Patlabor too.
If there's a reason Bounty Dog isn't on a par with any of those real or potential influences, it's the story: not that it's bad but that it's beyond what a two-episode OVA can do justice to. There are interesting ideas here, and if none are desperately fresh, the particular combination and the manner in which we're brought to them is fairly exciting. But with under an hour to play with, Negishi is obliged to hit the ground running and rarely let the pace slip, and it does the material no favours. At points, it feels positively schizophrenic, flinging up ideas that seem decidedly mystical and then revising them in science-fictional terms before we've had a chance to get our heads around them in the first place. Even having watched carefully, I'm still not certain where that line ought to be drawn and what was the real nature of the threat our three heroes were facing. And perhaps needless to say, fifty-five minutes doesn't give us much opportunity to get to know them as characters, either, even with so small a central cast.
All told, though, I liked Bounty Dog quite a bit. Not all its decisions pay off, but there's a definite sense that they were all actual decisions. As much as it's reminiscent of other works from the period, it's also very much its own thing, and every element feels as though it's been thought through with unusual specificity and care. There is, for an example, a vehicle called the manslave that our protagonist drives, and not only does it not look precisely like anything you've seen, it looks as though it was built for a real purpose that would make total sense in this setting. In short, where Bounty Dog fails narratively, it's by offering too much rather than little; for all that I got to the end with plenty of questions, I don't doubt they were questions the creators could have answered given a few more minutes of running time. At three episodes, I suspect this might have become a minor personal favourite. At two, it still has plenty to offer, and I already look forward to revisiting it.
One of the many rules I've tried to stick to with these reviews, not always successfully, is to avoid reviewing TV series, on the grounds that there are too many of them and they're largely too hard to find now. However, I'm making an exception for the title that AnimeWorks released as Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason because, while it's actually the first five episodes of the show Fortune Quest L, it's all that would ever be released in the West. So for our purposes, and since I went to the trouble of picking it up, let's pretend it was simply a five episode OVA, shall we?
The funny thing is, there's not a lot of reason not to. Those five episodes form a complete arc that sets the table for further adventures, but does a perfectly fine job of wrapping up its own story. The show - the sequel to an earlier manga which itself had an OVA - is an exceedingly gentle pastiche of fantasy tropes, somewhat in the line of Slayers or Maze if you scrubbed out all the sex and innuendo and rounded off any sharp edges. It follows a party of young adventures, of whom our focal point is the wonderfully named Pastel G. King, a cartographer with no sense of direction who keeps them funded by writing up their exploits as fiction. Indeed, were this the sort of role-playing campaign it's nodding heavily toward, their party would last about five minutes: the other members include a fighter, a thief, a wizard who's both an elf and a small child and never does any actual magic, and a baby dragon named Shiro that's effectively a house pet.
It's Shiro who becomes the centre of these episodes, as, after some shenanigans with a kidnapping that don't amount to much, the friends find themselves press-ganged into a quest to - wait for it! - journey to Terrason, where the crooked town mayor of the local village hopes to have a wish granted by the dragon rumoured to reside there. And since Shiro's a dragon too, everyone's happy to assume that there's a fair chance he'll end up meeting one of his parents; I guess dragons aren't especially common in this world, because otherwise that seems pretty dragonist. Whatever the case, it's enough motivation for them to brave the various dangers along the way, including some bizarre fairies and a giant monster centipede.
Writing it out like that reminds me of how thin the narrative is, but then Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason is much more interested in incident than plot. Really, that's the only level on which pretending it's an OVA falls down; it's a bit too slight to watch in one go, and I definitely found my concentration waning by degrees. It doesn't help that there's not much else to hold the attention: the animation is resolutely functional, the designs are uninspired and sometimes thoroughly shonky, and the music is mostly just okay, with the exception of a lovely closing theme that's an odd fit for the show. What's most surprising, maybe, is how little any of that dints the moderate pleasures to be had in watching Fortune Quest: Journey to Terrason: its major virtue is how nice it is to be around, both in terms of the characters and its general ethos; in so much as there's a theme, it's that it's good to have friends and good friends should be valued and hung onto. And in fairness, it's often amusing and has its share of entertaining ideas, so it's never remotely a chore to be around. Which I guess can't be regarded as a recommendation, but in the crowded subgenre of anime fantasy comedy, I've definitely seen worse.
-oOo-
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