Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 111

This one set out to be a sexy anime special, because, as we've long since established, there's a fair old bit of vintage anime that, while not out-and-out hentai, was still happy to include a splash of gratuitous titillation to spice up the proceedings.  But somewhere along the way, the post seems to have morphed into something that's harder to pin down and arguably more interesting: the connecting thread here is that, whether through cuts for the Western market or marketing approaches or choices made by the original creative teams, all four titles here censor or downplay or otherwise get a bit tricksy with their sexual content.  But rather than try and explain what I mean by that here, we may as well roll straight into the reviews and take a look at Fencer of Minerva: The Emergence, Variable Geo, Sins of the Sisters, and Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time...

Fencer of Minerva: The Emergence, 1994, dir's: Takahiro Okao, Osamu Sekita

I haven't forgotten how I've said multiple times that I wouldn't start reviewing hentai here, but the problem is, what happens when someone goes out of their way to put out a hentai title in a way that downplays its hentai-ness as much as possible?  Not that that's precisely what U.S. Manga Corps did with Fencer of Minerva, the amount of semi-nudity and chains on the cover is definitely a tip-off, but what they did apparently do is trim some of the sexy stuff to secure a lower rating and then describe the result, rather duplicitously, as "action / adventure" rather than, you know, soft porn.

In fairness to them, whichever way you come at this first volume of Fencer of Minerva, it's going to end up feeling like a surprisingly elaborate fantasy adventure that has to keep putting on the brakes every ten minutes for a sex scene, and since the two strands don't always gel, there's sense in marketing it as one or the other rather than trying to express how schizophrenic it actually is.  For the first two episodes, anyway, this also has the curious side effect that you can just about watch the show as a decent slice of high fantasy and about tune out the sexy stuff.  Not that I've anything against that in theory, but - apparently drawing heavily on a series of books by author John Norman known as the Gorean Saga - Fencer of Minerva is extremely focused on male-dominated bondage and female submission, to the point where those ideas are baked deep into its world-building, with a culture that essentially seems to have replaced marriage with sex slavery in which it's always the women who end up enslaved.  Since it's aiming to be more erotic than horrifying, Fencer of Minerva wraps itself in knots dressing most of this up as consensual, and so, for instance, as much as our protagonist Diana might seem unhappy about being whipped, the men doing the whipping are quick to point out that she's actually clearly turned on by it.  Which, I don't know, maybe is persuasive if you're determined not to think about it, but given the pains Fencer of Minerva goes to in crafting a world where female subjugation is the norm, it's tough not to reach the conclusion that, for all that Diana routinely ends up consenting after the fact in some form or another, her consent is meaningless in a culture where the roles available to women apparently boil down to princess or sex slave, with the princess jobs particularly hard to come by.

The flipside of this is that, while it makes the hentai aspects off-putting unless you're on their wavelength, it doesn't harm the adventure fantasy side of things all that much.  A version of Fencer of Minerva less committed to its core concept would actually be worse, I think; for the first two episodes, the sense is more of having this society plonked in front of us to make of what we will than of being expected to blindly accept it, especially given that said society clearly isn't functioning awfully well: this we learn in the opening scene, when a bloody coup separates our protagonists, Shou the son of the murdered king and Diana the daughter of his usurper.  By the time fate chucks them back together years later, the land is on the verge of revolt, and it's that turmoil which drives the action as much as Diana's discovery that just maybe she'd quite like being a slave so long as Shou happens to be her master.

Sadly, the political shenanigans go out the window for the third episode, which dispenses with most everything but the sex and really does seem determined to persuade us that sexual slavery is a great lifestyle choice that any woman would be mad to turn down.  And here I ought to mention that Fencer of Minerva isn't in any way well animated or pleasant to the eye, barring the odd nice background, and so even if the soft-porn parts worked on their own merits, they still wouldn't work, so that an episode with nothing else going for it is basically an episode with nothing going for it whatsoever.  Oh, except for the music, I guess, that's unexpectedly great, with gorgeous opening and closing themes that appear to have blundered in from some much better anime.  Given how that still leaves us with two episodes I found mildly engaging versus one I had no time for, I feel like I'm still just about recommending this if it sounds like it might be your thing, but that last part is definitely a bigger than usual caveat.

Variable Geo, 1996, dir: Tooru Yoshida

As a way of getting us to a point where you might have some sense of what Variable Geo is like, I'm going to have a crack at describing the first five minutes, though I'm not sure I'm up to the task, so bear with me.  We open on a young woman we'll later learn to be named Yuka Takeuchi, and as we meet her, Yuka's stressing out because it's raining and she's running late for her waitressing job.  However, barely has she arrived and begun to be scolded by her manager but she spies another woman standing in the street who evidently has business with her.  That business turns out to be challenging her to a fight, something Yuka seems wholly unsurprised by.  Little turnstile posts pop out of the ground and they both insert the special cards they have - this, I stress, is happening in a previously crowded road in the middle of Tokyo! - and, lo and behold, the ground opens and a wrestling ring rushes up from some unfathomable subterranean depth.  At which point, every screen in the city cuts to the unfolding match, including that of the mayor, who seems terribly pleased that a Variable Geo bout is about to kick off and terribly unconcerned that it's brought the capital of Japan to a standstill.

Reading over that, what I doubt I've conveyed is how odd and hallucinatory the intro of Variable Geo - and the rest of it too for that matter, but we'll come to that - feels.  Variable Geo the anime, you perhaps won't be astonished to hear, is an adaptation of a fighting game, from that period when fighting games were absolutely everywhere and apparently every single one got an anime adaptation.  The Variable Geo series' gimmick - because this was also the period when fighting games were having to resort to increasingly showy gimmicks to stand out from the pack - was that all the characters were women, and waitresses, and rather than, like, having their spine torn out or something, the punishment for the losers was that they were stripped naked and / or sexually abused.

While we might dearly wish otherwise, Variable Geo the three episode OVA takes all that and recreates it faithfully.  Or ... I dunno, maybe faithfully isn't the word.  It's definitely the case that the losers have their clothes torn off, either relatively voluntarily or else by whoever's to hand, and obviously this is gross and exploitative, but what makes it especially weird is that Variable Geo seems to understand and acknowledge that fact, and so we're left with exploitation in which the cast keep calling the show - and by implication, the game - out on its dodgy antics.  Oh, there are the occasional characters who are quite down with getting naked, but there are plenty more who let us see how miserable and humiliated they are, injecting a measure of humanity into what, on the page, clearly ought to be tacky smut.  

What I'm trying and probably failing to get at here is that Variable Geo is both much better than it ought to be and much, much stranger.  It's like a bunch of very smart, capable people sat down and genuinely tried to make a solid anime adaptation of a game that sounds unbelievably unpleasant based on its Wikipedia description without altogether chucking away their integrity or creativity.  That means keeping the horribly exploitative aspects but twisting them into something openly uncomfortable, and it means adapting a plot that doesn't make one whit of sense by massaging it down into manageably nonsensical chunks, and it means a quite dizzying lack of internal logic: as far as I could figure out, Variable Geo fights are wrestling matches happening solely between waitresses, except when they involve ninjas or corporate CEOs, and also you can use weapons or magical powers or cybernetic enhancements if you like, and you can have other people fight on your behalf or bring along a gang, and quite why nobody has thought of just nuking their opponent from orbit is anyone's guess.

Perhaps most shockingly, and for a rare change, having a creative team who actively appear to give a damn means a fighting game adaptation that actually has some pretty good fights, which more than anything suggests that director Yoshida hadn't the faintest clue what his job was here.  Indeed, the animation as a whole is respectable in a way the source material could never hope to be, to the extent of somehow redeeming some theoretically godawful character designs.  And while I hate myself a little for having enjoyed Variable Geo as much as I did, that being a heck of a lot, I also can't but love its creators for taking something that, by any imaginable metric, should have been terrible and arriving at one of the most vibrant, amusing, exciting, and bonkers fighting game adaptations you could hope for.

Sins of the Sisters, 1994, dir: Yorifusa Yamaguchi

As a way into how aggressively baffling Sins of the Sisters is, we might pause to note that what it really ought to be called is St. Michaela Academy II, or maybe St. Michaela School Travels II, or to give it its Japanese title, Sei Michaela Gakuen Hyouryuuki, but what's really important is that it's a sequel to a previous OVA from four years earlier.  And sure, passing off sequels as original stories is bound to cause a measure of puzzlement, but the truth is that Sins of the Sisters trips over itself in assuming we haven't seen part one and need all the salient facts repeated, so that's not really the problem here, except in so much as it requires the dumping of quite a lot of exposition to bring us to the point where this particular tale can get rolling.

But nope, for all that that may be part of the issue, it's certainly not the heart of it.  Rather, the issue is that the story Sins of the Sisters sets out to tell is positively demented from top to bottom.  I'd try for a summary, but doing it justice would require more words then I'd normally write for an entire one of these posts, and I doubt anyone would be much wiser by the end.  But let's see if we can't set out the crucial points: we open on the bitter close of the  Children's Crusade, a real historical event you'd better be at least vaguely familiar with if you're going to be on Sins of the Sisters' wavelength even slightly, at the point when young Hans, leader of the youthful would-be crusaders, realises that he and his fellows have been betrayed and sold into slavery by the pope.  Rather than take this lying down, Hans denounces god, commits suicide, and travels hundreds of years into the future, where he reincarnates as teenaged schoolgirl Aiko and teams up with the other students of St. Michaela Academy to overthrow all the world's religions and governments and usher in a utopic golden age of peace, and ... oh hell, this is already sounding like the ravings of a lunatic and, so far as I could tell, I'm not even up to the stuff that wasn't just a recap!

Suffice to say that this sequel sees the survivors of the first OVA, largely without Aiko / Hans, who's recovering from the injuries they sustained in part one, setting out to avert the historical tragedy that set off this whole mess in the first place, even though doing so would presumably reset everything to the way it was.  Anyway, our intrepid band of warrior schoolgirls find themselves accompanied by a woman / ghost / murderous hermaphrodite whose lover died in, I think, the unaltered timeline, and they're trying to ensure that Hans dies just as he historically did, possibly, and argh trying to make sense of any of this is making my brain bleed.  Which is hardly surprising given that I spent most of Sins of the Sisters in delirious awe at how badly it was mangling history, logic, and the most basic rules of narrative construction; really, from the opening scene and the first mention of the Children's Crusade, I knew I was in for something truly and awesomely special.  But however historically dubious that was, it barely prepared me for the point when the youthful crusaders find themselves reinforced by a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls in modern-day uniforms and barely blink an eyelid, though I'm fairly certain the average French person in the thirteenth century hadn't the faintest clue Japan existed.

But cataloguing every mad moment in Sins of the Sisters is a fool's game when it consists of almost nothing except mad moments.  And I haven't even touched on how this demented fantasy time travel historical thriller is also, and maybe even primarily, a work of pornography.  Fairly softcore pornography, granted, but given that all the characters are children or teenagers, it's hard to see who U.S. Manga Corps thought they were kidding with their claim that "all characters depicted in sexual conduct or in the nude are aged 19 or over" ... there's a brief but disturbing rape scene that alone gives the lie to that.  Yet getting prudish about Sins of the Sisters is equally a fool's game, if only because the person who comes to a simplistically animated fantasy time travel historical thriller in search of erotic thrills deserves our pity more than our censure.

Or am I just making excuses?  As is probably clear by now, I adored every mad minute of Sins of the Sisters, and I'd have forgiven it quite a lot simply for how it offered me ninety-some minutes of not knowing what the hell craziness it was going to pull out of its crazy hat next.  And speaking of hats, let me take mine off in the direction of director Yorifusa Yamaguchi, who deserves all the praise in the world for meeting some very obvious budgetary restraints by indulging his most outlandish creative instincts, regardless of whether they were necessarily "good" or not.  One example should suffice: in that opening scene, as the child crusaders hurl themselves into the ocean, they're represented not as individuals but as identical amorphous humanoid shapes, with Hans the only recognisable human among them: it's so obviously a cost-cutting measure, and it looks sort of rubbish, yet it's also damned effective in a strange and abstract way.  Which, for a particular sort of viewer, might well sum up Sins of the Sisters: it's clearly very bad indeed on many, many levels, and at the same time it's so far from anything you're likely to have come across and so stubborn in treating its absurd material with stony-faced seriousness that it's hard not to love it a little simply for going against all the rules of what conventional storytelling is meant to look like.

Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time, 1998, dir: Hiromichi Matano

Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is something of an exception here in that it contains no sexual content whatsoever bar a bit of semi-nudity and some none-too-subtle implication, but I'd argue that it earns its right to be a part of this post, because what ADV presented as a largely sex-free fantasy tale was anything but in its original incarnation.  It is, in fact, an adaptation of the hentai RPG video game franchise Dragon Knight, and specifically of Dragon Knight 4, so far as I can tell.  But the funny thing is, the cut version of Dragon Knight is so great that it's impossible to imagine how it would be improved by jamming in sex scenes, and having unearthed the removed footage online, I can confirm that it brings bugger all to the table, except in so much as moderately well-animated sex scenes can be enjoyed on their own merits.  But given that one of them makes our protagonist a rapist and all of them together make him kind of slutty in ways the plot badly needs him not to be, I'm comfortable in proposing that the ADV version is actually an across-the-board improvement.

That Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is going to be something special becomes apparent in its opening scene, which quickly sets out its irresistibly neat premise.  We meet our hero Kakeru in a subterranean cell, where he informs us he's been for a very long time indeed, and what we glimpse of the world above suggests it's gone straight to hell in that time.  But Kakeru's freedom is at hand: a guard who enters his cell reveals herself to be the dark-elf Marlene in disguise and she has a means of sending him back through time, in an attempt to set right what went so badly wrong the last time.  There's a pretty enormous catch, though: Kakeru will be there in disguise, helping his former self, and if young Kakeru should discover who his mentor is, adult Kakeru will vanish from existence.  Moreover, with the long-imprisoned Kakeru's memory on the distinctly flaky side, the most help Marleen can offer him is that he needs to convince her past self of something vital and that, if he should succeed, he'll be able to save his childhood love Natasha, his failure to do so being about the only thing that cuts through his mental fog.

Those first five minutes are near to flawless, using the sort of stylised mood that only animation can generate and a pair of strong performances to hook us into the world, and though there'll be dips along the way - especially where that animation is concerned, care of some exceedingly evident budgetary constraints - there's never a moment with Kakeru and Marlene on screen together that isn't hypnotic.  Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is arguably quite bad at a lot of things, such as keeping track of a large cast of minor characters who presumably mattered more in the game and making any sense whatsoever of its wider conflict, which until the last episode is engaged with hardly at all, but the developing central relationship and that marvellous premise are a charge of narrative energy that's never absent for very long.  I suppose that "go back in time to save your past self" isn't the most original idea ever, but "go back in time to save your past self when you can't remember what went wrong the first time and are also rapidly coming to suspect that you may have been stuck in this loop basically forever" is a heck of a lot more so.  And arguably it makes those storytelling flaws far less relevant: future-Kakeru is barely engaged with most of his companions because by this point they're mere doomed pawns in a conflict that's been played out far too many times, and even that conflict isn't as important as the tiny opportunities along the way to nudge events onto a new and potentially better path.

I'm nervous of overselling Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time, because there absolutely are problems.  As I said, the budget just isn't there for something this ambitious, and though director Matano and his team do a sterling job of getting every last yen onto the screen and thus making the stuff that matters sing, that still leaves an awful lot of obvious corner-cutting, not to mention some deeply uninspired character work; to pick on the most egregious example, I couldn't decide whether I found it more galling or charming that Marleen is to all intents and purposes a copy and paste of Pirotess from Record of Lodoss War.  And yet the central setup is so, so good, and it's apparent that Matano knew that and flung everything at making what needed to work work, and for me it absolutely did, more so than I could  have imagined had you pitched me a four episode OVA adaptation of a hentai RPG video game.  Ultimately, its failings are easy to turn a blind eye to, whereas if, like me, you're theoretically a fan of fantasy but deeply tired of seeing the same clichés endlessly trotted out, its uncommon virtues make for a real treasure that's among very best titles of its type.

-oOo-

Obviously something's gone terribly wrong here, because the last time I did one of the these sexy anime posts, I'm pretty certain the conclusion wasn't "most of this stuff is great and you should absolutely keep an eye out for it."  The clear exception, of course, is Fencer of Minerva, and even that managed to be pretty solid for a couple of episodes care of a few novel ideas.  As for the rest, though?  Well, Sins of the Sisters is probably terrible - no, it's definitely terrible - but nothing would betray the spirit of Drowning in Nineties Anime more than failing to recommend something that delightfully insane, and Variable Geo somehow manages against all the odds to be legitimately good, and Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is a new favourite.  Go figure!

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 110

There's not much to say by way of an introduction this time around, except that this isn't the "sexy" vintage anime special I vaguely promised last time.  But curb your disappointment!  No doubt we'll get to that soon enough, and in the meantime, there's plenty of the usual randomness to go around: we've got comedy sci-fi, we've got gross-out horror, we've got giant robots, and to top things off, we've a spot of supernatural-tinged medical drama.  Or to be more specific, we have Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, Urotsukidōji III: The Return of the Overfiend, Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, and Black Jack: Biohazard...

Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, 1996, dir: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

What the heck happened to the Birdy the Mighty OVA series?  Of all the vintage anime lost to time, its vanishment is one of the hardest to comprehend.  Here's a show that was put together by the ever-reliable studio Madhouse and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, perhaps the most consistently great director of the late eighties and early nineties whose name wasn't Hayao Miyazaki, capping off a spell of work that included the likes of Demon City, Cyber City Oedo 808, and Ninja Scroll, and found him both near the top of his game and pulling out some brand new tricks.  And all of that skill and ambition was in the service of an irresistible premise, whereby bad-ass space cop Birdy Cephon Altera finds herself stuck sharing a body with aimless teenager Tsutomu Senkawa and now has to accomplish all her usual space cop business while existing on a time-share arrangement and trying not to trash Tsutomu's life too much.  It's a strong enough idea, replete with obvious opportunities for humour, pathos, and buckets of action, that the Birdy the Mighty franchise would be revived a decade later and given the full-length TV show treatment under the title of Birdy the Mighty: Decode.

Yet here we are with Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, first volume of U.S. Manga Corp's two-volume release, and does anyone remember it at all?  I'm guessing the answer is no.  And it may be that we've already inadvertently touched on the reason why, in that U.S. Manga Corp were often not great at pushing their titles or releasing them in a fashion likely to get them into the hands of punters, and it looks as though, in this case, something went very wrong indeed.  Volume one, Double Trouble, has been tough to find for years; volume two, Final Force, is one of the rarest vintage anime titles out there, and there was never a collected edition or reissue.

To be blunt, it very much seems like the Birdy the Mighty OVA got screwed over by its distributor.  Because, assuming the second half doesn't mess things up horribly, it's a real gem.  Not an especially deep or complex one, to be sure, and it makes the odd misstep - primarily some dumb comedy centred around Tsutomu's family that goes nowhere and a grating closing theme that's hardly a good note to end on - but, like its protagonist, when it hits, it hits hard.  With Kawajiri at the helm, it should come as no surprise that the action is unusually imaginative and well-conceived, and since there's tons of action, that's justification for a watch in and of itself.  However, while the concept may be relatively shallow, what's been built around it is unexpectedly satisfying; we barely learn the first thing about Birdy's job or about Birdy herself, but some excellent design choices and subtle world-building nevertheless give the sense of a whole universe ticking away just off the edges of the screen.  And Birdy, too, is rather more nuanced than you might be led to expect by her spray-on costume, as is Tsutomu once he gets past his initial shock at being killed and resurrected as one half of a comedy buddy-cop pairing sharing the same body.  Their interactions have a genuine charm, and it's a credit to the creators that they largely steer away from the sort of easy "he's a guy in a body that's got boobs!!!" nonsense that would have been such an obvious route to go down back in 1996.

I suppose none of this really makes for an all-time classic; aside from the great action and the mostly excellent animation, there's nothing truly standout or memorable to Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, and you could argue that the series would go on to do a better job of developing the idea all those years later, though personally I find the swift dashes of world-building here more compelling than the somewhat overly thought-out attempts there.  But be that as it may, Double Trouble is a fine take on a fine concept, a funny, thrilling, gorgeous seventy minutes of awesome sci-fi action goodness.  Add in the fact that it's not as though Decode is exactly readily available these days, and it's fair to say that, however you look at it, the world has much less Birdy the Mighty in it than it ought to.

Urotsukidōji III: The Return of the Overfiend, 1992, dir: Hideki Takayama

First, a disclaimer: the version of the third Urotsukidōji OVA I watched was the one released by Kiseki Films, which was heavily censored and, judging by the disparities in the episode running times, presumably heavily cut.  And second, a confession: despite being open about how I found them to be largely devoid of value either as art or entertainment, I rewatched both the previous OVA series by way of prep work for diving into this one.  Though, to be honest, that had as much to do with it being suggested to me a while back that I'd been unduly harsh on the original Urotsukidōji, Legend of the Overfiend.  In retrospect, maybe I was a touch; returning to it with a ton more vintage anime under my belt, I definitely found it less shocking, if not much less unpleasant.  But better?  I dunno.  What struck me on a rewatch was that it was at least trying to tell a grand and mythic tale of cosmic horror, even if it also felt the need to stop at regular intervals to show off a bit of demon rape or other ghastliness.  One criticism I definitely stand by is that neither of the first two OVAs had anywhere near enough story to fill their running times and so were left with middles where scarcely anything happens, and one piece of praise I equally stand by is that both have unexpectedly decent third acts, where the otherwise often iffy animation pulls itself together and the narrative actually hits that grand, mythic cosmic horror note and for a brief few minutes I could see what some folks find to love here.

What's weird about Urotsukidōji III, then - I mean, aside from the run-of-the-mill Urotsukidōji weirdness - is that it has neither the greatest fault nor the greatest virtue of its predecessors and thus manages to be a bit ... well, I guess you can't fairly call something with this much rape and bloodshed and freaky scenes of people transforming into insect women and robotic spider monsters "boring", but nonetheless, that was the word I was heading toward.  The animation is never anything truly special and frequently outright poor, sinking to downright laughable at points in a manner that feels like the result more of a lack of time than a lack of money, though I'm sure the latter was a factor.  And as for the plot, well, that's absolutely stuffed to bursting, or even past the point of bursting, since it definitely feels like there's at least one two many storylines and maybe half a dozen too many significant characters in play.

This leaves me somewhat torn, the more so because, maybe simply by virtue of having a lot of plates spinning at any one time, Urotsukidōji III seems as though it has a lower quota of sexual violence than parts one and two, though it's possible there's just as much and it feels less soul-crushing for being spread over a gobsmacking three-hour running time.  Don't get me wrong, this third entry still has a horrible attitude toward practically all its female cast, and there are a couple of scenes that are startlingly repellent, even if the shonky animation robs them of some impact.  In particular, the character of Alector feels like if 4chan gained sentience and set out to write the most misogynistic character it could imagine, and even if everything else in Urotsukidōji III was a model of progressive attitudes toward women, I'd still hate it a little for her arc.  All the same, and maybe this is just the weariness brought on by watching three of these things relatively back to back, but I couldn't summon a lot of anger this time around.

Partly that's because Urotsukidōji III never has the relationship with reality that its predecessors did, being set in the post-apocalyptic hellscape that's all that remains after the events of the first series.  It's fair to say that, where until now the franchise was horror-fantasy, here that balance has flipped and what we have is primarily a work of fantasy larded up with some occasional, albeit extreme, horror.  And while I sort of admired its determination to follow up on the narrative that had been handed to it - one of the most truly shocking elements of the Urotsukidōji series is the extent to which it does tell one vast, consistent tale, for all that surely nobody came to these things looking for that - the setup it was given simply isn't that interesting.  Plus, it requires Urotsukidōji III to effectively reboot the entire affair, with only a couple of recurring characters getting much to do and lots of new ones to be introduced, which, yes, means that this time we do get more than enough plot but also means that everything feels enormously busy without offering much that could be called entertaining.  There's no one to root for and certainly no one to like and none of the various conflicts have clear or meaningful stakes, devolving as they largely do into "who'll win in the battle between this horrible person and this horrible person?"

Look, I didn't hate this one, so there's that.  However, aside from the odd cool moment of body horror, I also can't think of a reason to recommend that anyone might want to watch it, which, as much as I don't personally have a damn bit of time for either of them, was at least true of Legend of the Overfiend and Legend of the Demon Womb.  If you're the person whose existence I'm highly doubtful of that got to the end of those two desperately eager to see where this convoluted but not really that complex or clever mythology was heading, you should absolutely give this entry a go, because boy does it want to give you all the answers it can possibly come up with.  As for everyone else?  Much as this is probably the entry I least disliked, that's far from being a recommendation.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, 1996 - 1999, dir's: Takeyuki Kanda, Umanosuke Iida

The 08th MS Team, the OVA series that ran across four years toward the tail end of the nineties, doesn't get off to the strongest of starts.  Or, no, that's a fib; its first episode is a miniature space-opera masterpiece and as strong a start as you might hope for, it's only in the immediate aftermath of that superlative beginning that things tails off a little.  And even here I wonder if I'm being unfair, because the truth is that the show sets itself up for certain preconceptions - essentially a Gundam take on the Vietnam conflict - that it's only sporadically interested in fulfilling.  In the first half, that becomes a niggling frustration, because, come on, 'Dam in the 'Nam is one hell of pitch and who wouldn't want to watch that?  Here's a franchise, after all, that's routinely at its best when it's hewing close to real-world issues while dressing them up with just enough sci-fi pizzazz to soften their harshest blows.

As it turns out, what The 08th MS Team is actually far more interested in being throughout its first half is Gundam's take on The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, the comedic TV show from three years earlier that pitched its titular lackadaisical hero against the horrors of war and the frustrations of military bureaucracy and on the face of it seems more like a parody of what Gundam's about than a model it remotely ought to be adapting.  Yet our hero, Ensign Shiro Amada, has an awful lot of DNA in common with Tylor: he's an optimistic sort who's as likely to break rules on a whim as he is to follow orders, he has a pacifist streak a mile long that makes him an even weirder fit for the world of Gundam, and there's an inherent niceness to the character, bordering on goofiness, that doesn't exactly fill his newly assigned subordinates with faith.  Not that they're any more on the ball, with the four-person team split evenly between grouchy professionals with severe personality disorders and idiots even less fitted to a warzone than their new commander, in the shape of wannabe music star Eledore Massis and whiny kid Michel Ninorich, who seems to spend at least ten minutes out of each of the first six episodes writing to his transparently disinterested girlfriend BB.

No doubt I'm not making this sound like a terribly strong foundation for what I'd better hastily point out may be my new favourite Gundam entry, but before I go into why none of these issues matter more than slightly, let's also pause to note that there's even the odd bit of dubious animation in that first half, which is all the more shocking because, with an OVA budget applied to Sunrise's flagship franchise, The 08th MS Team spends far more time being an extremely special work of animation indeed.  And now I'm done with criticising, firstly because what feels like a somewhat aimless and meandering opening half is actually a fine grounding for what's to come and secondly because the back end of The 08th MS Team is so near to flawless that it could have got away with bigger missteps and still been comfortably a classic.  That's in part because once the show has its ducks in a row, it utilises them marvellously, with an emotive central romance and the traditional Gundam stuff, here revolving around a Zeon superweapon that becomes a bête noire for enemies and allies alike, feeding off each other in satisfying ways and building toward a climax that - well, I haven't seen enough Gundam to say this is as good as the franchise can deliver, but if there's anything better out there than the two-parter that rounds out this particular tale, then please do tell me, because I'll be tripping over myself to seek it out.

Strong as the character stuff and the plot and the drama all become after that ever-so-slightly shaky beginning, however, they're not the core reason The 08th MS Team ends up being quite so splendid.  No, that's because here we have a Gundam show that puts its giant robots to brilliant use and has the budget to back that up.  I don't recall ever seeing giant robot battles done quite this well, and I certainly can't think of an example - okay, one that isn't Patlabor - where they felt so real and solid and believable.  That, actually, is where the jungle setting pays off most, far more so than in evoking memories of real-world conflicts: jungles, it turns out, are the perfect location for making enormous machines look and act like enormous machines in a convincing manner, the sort that get dirty and damaged and rusty and stuck and need to be repaired under far-from-ideal circumstances.  Sure, space battles may be easier to animate, but they rarely get close to this level of physicality*, and as one of the people who likes their real-robot shows to treat the realness as more than a veneer, that determination to present these enormous mechanical beasts as tangible, weighty, breakable objects would have been enough to win it some love.  Put that together with basically everything else going right for a healthy span of episodes and dress it up with production values that, bar the briefest dip, are toward the upper limits of what the nineties had to offer, and you have something that's truly top-tier, enough so that an interest in or foreknowledge of Gundam should by no means be considered a prerequisite to watching.

Black Jack: Biohazard, 2000, dir: Osamu Dezaki

I'd planned to skip over this last volume of the Black Jack OVA series, since it falls just out of our nineties purview, but also because I'd only seen it with some hilariously dodgy subtitles care of a Malaysian copy, and how can you possibly write a fair review on that basis?  In truth, I'd given up much hope of finding the U.S. Manga Corps version, possibly the rarest in their never exactly easy to lay hands on set, so lucky me that one turned up at a sensible price and lucky Drowning in Nineties Anime too, because wrong decade or not, it would have been nuts to leave this best of all vintage OVA series incomplete.

There, I said it!  Oh, there was certainly better anime produced during the nineties, but was anything quite so consistent as these Black Jack OVAs?  The worst episodes were very good and the best were damn near masterpieces, but what's really striking is the across-the-board consistency, regardless of individual highs and lows; sure, the early animation is shakier than the superlative later work, and sure sometimes the plots get a little too bogged down in weird contrivances, and yet both animation and writing - and absolutely everything else, really - keeps to an unusually high baseline across all ten parts.  Which is a long-winded way of saying that, yes, Biohazard - or The Sinking Woman, to give it its non-U.S. Manga Corps-imposed title - is splendid stuff.  It's not my favourite episode, I don't think, but I could be easily persuaded that its the best.  And though it's not an ending in any meaningful sense, it's a fine send-off, if you impose an arc onto these OVAs that was perhaps never fully intended and view them as an exploration of a genius surgeon who's tried very hard indeed to cut himself off from all human feeling and to see the body and its countless ailments in purely intellectual terms and finds himself constantly reminded that life isn't that simple, for better and for worse.

Biohazard, then, finds the titular character at his most human and vulnerable, and at his least mercenary, and perhaps it's no coincidence that - a slight spoiler, but if anything in the opening minutes leads you to expect a happy ending, that's more on you than me - here Black Jack is also at his most ineffectual.  It's not so much that this episode succumbs to the failing we've seen elsewhere whereby the plot just kind of happens around him, but that the problem he encounters, which begins with a seaside community poisoned by pollution and steadily narrows to the case of a particular patient, is too vast to be solved by one person or perhaps to be solved at all.  By the same measure, there's an argument to be made (and the show sure seems to be making it) that for once Black Jack simply lacks the necessary skills: sometimes, a genius surgeon isn't what you need, or anyway, not a genius surgeon who'd make for a lousy psychiatrist.

So it's downbeat stuff, but not horribly oppressive; Black Jack's pint-sized assistant Pinoko is solidly utilised and given a couple of well-outlined side characters to bounce her comedy shtick off, and there's just enough of that to keep the tone from drifting into suicide-fuel territory, though thankfully no more.  Also, aside from the usual graphic scenes of operations, it's not really horror and barely even fantasy, though there's a bit of aptly chosen mythology laced through in a way you could choose to read in that direction if you wanted to.  At its heart, though, this is a tale of very human evils, and human evils of that especially ugly, mundane sort where probably most of the participants were merely doing their jobs and covering their backs, one told with both furious indignation and a somewhat numbed pragmatism, since we already join the grim events well beyond the point where most of the damage is done and the only story that's left is of what can be salvaged.  It's not exactly fun times, then, but it's wise and sad and thought-provoking and made with marvellous craft, and that seems a fair trade-off to me.

-oOo-

It's been a while since we had three absolute stunners on a par with Birdy the Mighty, The 08th MS Team, and Black Jack: Biohazard, and while Urotsukidōji III drags the average down something fierce, there's a small part of me that's glad to have finally seen it and generally glad to have given the Urotsukidōji franchise the second chance that it probably didn't really deserve.  Mind you, we do have one more chapter to go, so that opinion may very well change...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* I say rarely because, for all that I haven't seen all that much Gundam, I have seen the excellent Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, which manages to figure out many of the inherent problems with robot space fights.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 109

No themes or gimmicks this time, just regular old run-of-the-mill normality, which of course, by Drowning in Nineties Anime standards, means a baffling and unrelated array of titles that I happened to pick off the shelf.  But then, where else can you read about giant lady-bots, terrible fighting game adaptations, fantasy romance, and Japanese literature all together in one place?  This time around, it's Ariel, Samurai Shodown, Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play - OVA 2, and Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Izu Dancer, The Dancing Girl, A Ghost Story...

ARIEL, 1989 - 1991, dir: Junichi Watanabe

There are basically two problems with ARIEL, and I'm not convinced either of them are problems at all.  First up, there's the fact that, like many an OVA adapted from other media - in this case, a long-running series of light novels - it's unapologetic about the fact that it's only presenting a chunk of a bigger story.  Indeed, it brazenly advertises that detail by opening with a lengthy recap and then calling its first episode number four, which the subtitles amusingly change to a one, presumably hoping to sneak by those who can't read roman numerals.  And then problem number two is that the show seems determined to have its cake and eat it, by being a supposedly comedic mecha science-fiction show that frequently ditches the comedy elements altogether, regardless of how much of its premise is so silly that you'd think a straight interpretation would be practically impossible.

Like I say, problems that may or may not be problems depending on your personal mileage.  Certainly, contemporary reviewers had little time for ARIEL, so presumably there were plenty of other people it didn't work for.  Me, I pretty much adored it, and I'd argue that both those issues could as easily be viewed as virtues.  I mean, the middle-of-the-plot thing is so trivial as to be barely noticeable once you get over the panic of thinking you've somehow missed a trio of episodes just by pressing play.  The stories presented here, of which there are three, one running across a pair of half-hour episodes and the others getting somewhat longer episodes to themselves, are all comfortably standalone while benefitting from being watched together, and the only actual annoyance is the presence of a character, alien vigilante Saber Starblast, who's so underdeveloped as to end up feeling like a deus ex machina - though since this is clearly meant as a joke, it's not a very annoying annoyance.

As for cake and the eating thereof, I never did get that saying, and ARIEL isn't the first anime to present a premise too ridiculous to take seriously and then do so anyway.  That setup sees three teenage sisters piloting the titular robot, mostly unwillingly, at the behest of their mad scientist grandfather Doctor Kishida.  In a tortured backronym for the ages, its name stands for All-Round Intercept and Escort Lady, and it's basically your common-or-garden planet-defending giant robot except for how it looks like Kishida's dead love and fights in an enormous leotard.  And if you get to wondering how much said leotard must have cost the Japanese taxpayer, then be warned, it's hardly Kishida's most frivolous bit of cash-burning, which makes it all the more amusing that our alien invaders of the day, led by the unfortunate Hauser, are not only subcontractors for the actual antagonists but subcontractors working on a shoestring budget so tight that the ship's accountant is a prominent character.

There's obviously plenty of room for absurdity in all this, but ARIEL, for the most part, isn't about absurdity.  Its humour is of the exceedingly dry variety, and I wonder if that, more than anything, is what flummoxed reviewers at the time.  At any rate, come to the show on its own terms rather than grumbling about how it's ignoring your preconceptions and there's plenty to love.  The animation varies enormously between parts, but it's always solid and often excellent, the more so because the design work is consistent and ARIEL has some splendid designs, to the extent that even a leotard-wearing robot ends up seeming far cooler than it has any right to.  The characters are one-note but charming and the focus on their private lives over their roles in a global conflict reaps surprising dividends, most effectively in the third episode, in which the youngest of the three siblings is torn between a blind date and her robot-piloting duties.  The bombastic ARIEL theme that pops up for that selfsame episode is an utter joy, as is the way each episode gets its own wildly different theme and credits sequence; in general, there's the sense that the show is constantly reinventing itself across its brief length, and that's most evident with the last episode, a legitimately great bit of sci-fi disaster movie drama that's played mostly straight despite also being where many of its best gags bear fruit.  All in all, while I get how this one must have stuck out like a sore thumb upon release, I'd argue that the years have been exceedingly kind to it, making its oddities seem less like flaws and more like charming quirks.  It sucks, then, that it's become one of the most hard-to-find titles out there ... some days it's tough being a vintage anime fan!

Samurai Shodown, 1994, dir: Hiroshi Ishiodori

How little anyone at ADV could have cared less about their release of beat-em-up adaptation Samurai Shodown becomes apparent approximately one second into the film, when a couple of frames of the original Japanese title card are visible before the English language one cuts in.  It's a trivial error, for sure, but also a staggeringly amateurish one, and it's symptomatic of a title that was transparently pushed out the door with nary a thought in the hope that enough people would buy it on the strength of the brand that it might make a little easy cash.  Similarly, there's the way all the blood has been recoloured silver, presumably to sneak a lower rating, except on the couple of occasions where it hasn't, and the lack of subtitles, and unsurprisingly there's the wretchedness of the dub that is thus foisted upon us, with no-one making a shred of effort to pretend they're not just reading out their lines, with the narrow exceptions of Tiffany Grant's passable French accent as Charlotte and Marcy Rae as the traitorous villain Amakusa, who's as bad as anyone else but at least seems to have been trying.

It's hard to blame the cast for not investing in their barely one-dimensional characters, and it's hard to blame ADV for not mustering more enthusiasm, but it's easy to blame them for releasing this crap in the first place.  And again, that crapness is all Samurai Shodown has to offer is evident from its opening seconds, in which our first exposure to the resolutely lousy animation is an earthquake simulated by jolting the images around a bit, and our introduction to the plot is a brief sequence that serves no narrative purpose whatsoever, since its every moment will be recapped later, before the film lurches with a screech and a 'one hundred years later' text card into the actual setting and story.  At which point we get our first insight into how downright stupid Samurai Shodown intends to be, when we meet the reincarnations of the cast members who we saw die in the initial scene, and they're wearing exactly the same costumes.  I don't claim to be any sort of expert, but surely that isn't how reincarnation works?

Granted, that's a level of dumb that many a fighting game adaptation has aspired to, and nobody comes to these things seeking elaborate, challenging plots or even basic logic and storytelling.*  But I'd wager that the one thing everyone does agree a fighting game adaptation should include is some half-decent fighting, and given that Samurai Shodown seems averse to action of any sort, presumably because it costs money to animate, it's hard to imagine the viewer so undiscriminating that they could find any meaningful pleasure here.  Imagine, for example, that they'd be satisfied simply with seeing their favourite characters in anime form and they'd still be in for a crushing disappointment, since only two of them get anything meaningful to do, and that's being generous in the case of the aforementioned Charlotte, whose role boils down to "the one who's a woman that actually gets to talk sometimes."

I always strive to come up with a positive or two, and all the more so for releases that I went to far too much trouble in tracking down, but truly, I've got nothing here.  Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture (for which, by the way, read "actually a TV special", because of course) is bad at everything.  Well, I guess the music's okay, if by okay we mean thoroughly generic, but that's a low bar to trip over.  Other than that, nothing comes close: as a fighting game adaptation, this fluffs the basics, and as a work of storytelling in its own right, it manages to be both hackneyed and incoherent, sputtering its way through a plot that's been told a thousand times and still failing to summon the least bit of lucidity or momentum.  Then, because merely releasing such hapless garbage wasn't enough, ADV felt the need to rob us of whatever minuscule pleasure there might have been in hearing a tale set in historical Japan told with actual Japanese actors and to strip the bloodshed from a film in which a bit of energetic bloodshed might have been a tiny saving grace, and, judging by the footage in the Japanese closing credits that never shows up in the actual movie, perhaps even to hack out a few scenes, though what possible motivation there could have been to cut down a film that barely makes it past an hour is hard to say - except, perhaps, for a small act of mercy on the unfortunate souls suckered into buying this turd.

Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play - OVA 2, 1997 - 1998, dir: Hajime Kamegaki

That the second Fushigi Yûgi OVA, known as Reflections, is an across-the-board improvement on the first comes as good news but isn't much of an accomplishment, and anyway, the odds were always solid that having twice the episode count would allow it to step away from the muddled, breathless storytelling on offer there.  That Reflections succeeds enough to redeem that first entry by making its developments seem like both an exciting leaping off point and a crucial part of the wider Fushigi Yûgi epic is considerably more of an achievement, and not one I saw coming.  But what's really surprising is that it can pull that off and still feel like such a tough recommendation to anyone besides those who are already on board with the show.

Or perhaps that shouldn't be surprising, given that this was the final chapter** in a very long-running story, and we should simply be thankful that it's watchable and accessible in all the ways the first OVA refused to be.  Three episodes of that and I couldn't have told you the most basic details about more than a couple of the characters; thirty minutes into Reflections' chunky three-hours-and-change running time and I had a fair grasp of everyone's role and personality, I knew what new threat our heroes were facing, I understood the stakes, I'd chuckled at a few well-peppered-in jokes and a silly post-credits gag roll, and I was engaged enough that I hoped everything would work out for the best.  And sure, that has the air of damning with faint praise, but it oughtn't to be taken that way: it requires real craft to reintroduce a large cast and set up a new conflict and actually make it all feel consequential in the space of half an hour while at the same time keeping the tone light enough that it never descends into portentousness.

I nearly used the word "economical" there, and it wouldn't have been unfounded, but while it covers many of Reflections finer points, it would also be to ignore its flaws and the main reason the OVA is a tough recommendation to non-fans.  It attempts a lot, is the thing, and most of that's good and lots of it is great, and there's a basically splendid story here with a heck of a twist toward the end, one that packs a real wallop and sets us up for a genuinely emotive, heartfelt climax.  But Reflections isn't content with that, nor with sequelling Memories, nor with providing what I suspect is a rather better ending to the show's epic drama than the show itself did.  No, it also wants to dig deeper into some of the core characters, and so the bulk of the episodes pull double duty, or even triple duty, telling their own discreet tales while the main plot ticks away on the sidelines while also nudging various other threads forward that will pay off in later episodes.  And as much as I commend the writing for its boldness and there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, it's a sad fact that it's hard not to be a touch bored in places without having spent dozens of episodes around this cast.

Here, I suspect, I'm effectively criticising Reflections for doing its job well, if we accept that its main functions were to reward dedicated viewers and as a grand send-off for a long-running TV show.  It's unfair to expect it to manage all that and still stay friendly to new viewers, yet it's frustrating how close it comes; I enjoyed my time with it and was wowed by its successes, even as I frequently found my attention wandering.  A more just criticism would be to point out that higher production values would have gone a long way toward keeping me engaged, since there's not much in Reflections that's visually exciting or impressive, though the soundtrack is at least reliably strong.  But in honesty, any measure of criticism feels harsh in the face of a really impressive piece of work, and I only wish I could say that this exceeds its inherent limitations.  Which, clearly it kind of does or I wouldn't be bothered as much as I am!  Okay, I guess we've got us a hesitant recommendation, in that if you're down for some romantic fantasy adventure and can't be bothered to wade through the TV series, there's still enough here to warrant your time - and if you have watched the series, needless to say, you'd be mad to pass this by.

Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Izu Dancer, The Dancing Girl, A Ghost Story, 1986, dir's: Katsumi Takasuka, Noboru Ishiguro, Isamu Kumada

This last volume of U.S. Manga Corps' Animated Classics of Japanese Literature series - that is, last from our point of view, I've no clue what order they were released in - breaks from tradition in a couple of crucial ways.  First up, it contains three stories, each of twenty-two minutes or so, where the other volumes included one two-parter followed by a standalone tale; and secondly, it's the first set where I didn't once feel like the animation was at least something of a liability.

That's not to say the budget's magically ballooned; no doubt these three stories were put together relatively on the cheap.  But all of them pull off extremely well what the series as a whole was reliably good at, which was marrying style to content in a manner that smooths over any budgetary constraints.  And often that style was kept purposefully simple, but here, that's only really the case with the first of our three episodes, The Izu Dancer, and the slightly crude character designs there are offset by some beautifully painted backgrounds in a way that ideally suits the material, a gentle travelogue of historic Japan doubling as a romance of sorts.  In common with more than one episode of the show that was obliged to get the job done in barely over twenty minutes, it feels rather insubstantial and ends abruptly, and also in common with those other episodes, that apparent insubstantiality and abruptness leaves you pondering what you might have missed.  Sure enough, there's more to chew on in retrospect, in this case mostly to do with the differences in what the events we've witnessed meant to the two protagonists and how much that relates to the extreme divide in social class that separates them.

Which is also true of The Dancing Girl, and indeed, as with the other volumes, the pairing seems deliberate.  At first glance, it might also seem a bit too obvious, in that on paper the stories are largely identical, following well-off young men in their relationships with impoverished women who both happen to be dancers.  However, The Dancing Girl plays out very differently from The Izu Dancer and its Berlin setting only further underlines the changes, as does the shift to a somewhat harder, more contemporary art style.  Ultimately, both of them are strong stories with their own distinct - if broadly adjacent - themes, and placing them back to back turns out to be an inspired move.

It's probably for the best, though, that the final episode goes in a wholly dissimilar direction.  Last up, we have what the English release calls A Ghost Story, and which is better served by the name given to it by Wikipedia, Hoichi the Earless.  At any rate, it's the likeliest to be familiar territory for fans of Japanese film, since the same tale makes up the third segment of the classic anthology art-horror movie Kwaidan.  And, though it's hard to quantify a series that I've mostly loved from start to finish, I'm tempted to call this the strongest single entry of the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, if only for one reason: it's the first where the animation is not only not a detriment but an unabashed asset.  A Ghost Story is frankly gorgeous, with some truly lovely backgrounds along the way, and moreover the strong visuals play a big part in pushing its superficially predictable tale toward being, if not actually scary, then definitely creepy and unsettling.

Going in, I wondered whether the lack of a two-parter would hurt this volume, and I guess the answer is no, since it may well be my favourite of the four.  Then again, I'd hate to be forced to choose between them; that I've always hedged my bets a bit in recommending these Animated Classics of Japanese Literature releases is no representation of my personal feelings.  As with the other three, unless you're fairly interested in both vintage animation and Japanese literature, there's not going to be much of interest here, though anyone who's familiar with Kwaidan might be glad of the opportunity to see one of its best parts adapted in a different medium.  Still, of everything I've reviewed here that's highly unlikely to see a rerelease and so more or less lost to posterity, this is the one that breaks my heart the most, and if I really could only save the one volume, I reckon this would be it.

-oOo-

Since there's only the one title here that you're likely to be able to find outside of Youtube, that being the Fushigi Yûgi OVAs, this feels like a good place to mention an exciting fact that I don't recall having touched on in depth yet.  Well, exciting for me anyway, your mileage may vary when I tell you that I recently discovered that distributor Media Blasters have risen from the dead, or perhaps from a long nap, but are at any rate reissuing a lot of their old titles and putting out some new ones to boot.  Now, it's fair to say that Media Blasters released their share of junk, but they were also responsible for some utter gems - the likes of Shamanic Princess, Here is Green Wood, Fight! Iczer One, Jungle Emperor Leo, and Master of Mosquiton, to name a few - and even many of their iffier titles are interesting enough to be worth a look.  Plus, they're bringing out vintage anime at eminently sensible prices and often on blu-ray; Doomed Megalopolis is headed that way in a couple of months, and that really is exciting news.  And they're a cool little company with a clear enthusiasm for the titles they distribute and so well worth supporting.

Next time ... well, I seem to have been watching a lot of sexy anime of late, or probably that ought to be "sexy", but at any rate, there's definitely a themed special in the works.

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* If they did, no doubt more people would agree with me that Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge is far and away the best fighting game adaptation ever made.

** For the three years it took the third and so-far actually final OVA, Fushigi Yûgi: Eikoden, to come out, anyway.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 108

Not so long ago, I was surprised at how I was still able to fill a post with entries from major franchises, even with over four hundred reviews behind us, and that's truer than ever here, with the added caveat that, for these particular major franchises, it's definitely not going to happen again.  Here we say our final farewell to some of the giants of vintage anime, with the last entries that fall within my strict-except-when-I-break-it no TV shows rule for four of anime's leviathans.  We've got the last of the many Lupin the Third films from the nineties, the second and last OVA spin-off from Tenchi Muyo!, and the last of Patlabor, along with, at time of writing, the last of the available City Hunter specials.  Granted, there's a chance the one movie to never receive an English-language release, The Death of Vicious Criminal Saeba Ryo, will yet see the light of day, since Discotek claimed the rights to all things City Hunter a couple of years back - but hey, that's the future!

So as of right now, let's say our goodbyes courtesy of City Hunter: Million Dollar Conspiracy, Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, Patlabor OVA Series 2: The New Files, and Lupin the Third: Farewell to Nostradamus...

City Hunter: Million Dollar Conspiracy, 1990, dir: Kenji Kodama

City Hunter: Million Dollar Conspiracy is, I would say, the best-animated slice of City Hunter I've come across, including the OVA released in the US as The Motion Picture and the TV show itself, which was surprisingly lavish and easily beats out some of the lesser offshoots.  From what I've seen of the most recent (and actually cinema-ready) movie, that probably tops it, but let's not get into comparing anime from two decades into the twenty-first century with anime from a decade before the end of the twentieth, eh?  Though even if we did, Million Dollar Conspiracy would still look pretty fine, so it's not as though the comparison's a wholly unfavourable one.  And since I'm a sucker for great animation, the odds were always high that I'd be on side with it.

On the other hand, I've been known to severely dislike City Hunter on occasions, and though I'm coming to wonder if I might have been a touch harsh in the past, nevertheless, there's no denying that I'm not entirely on its wavelength.  So it gladdens me to say that Million Dollar Conspiracy does nothing to squander the goodwill it gains from looking really damn good.  The story is fairly boilerplate stuff - Ryô is hired by a beautiful woman for the princely sum of a million dollars to protect her from the mob, but he's much more interested in getting into her pants, and it's transparently obvious that there's more going on than she's admitting - but it's boilerplate done well, or at least as well as a somewhat restrictive formula allows.  Ryô's lechery stays on the right side of funny rather than tipping over into "but seriously, this guy needs to be in prison" territory as the series is wont to at its worst, the plot's just twisty enough to keep the pace up for forty-five minutes, and perhaps most to the point, there's lots of strong action, buoyed by the high production values and culminating in a climax that gets good mileage out of a fun gimmick for its main antagonist.

None of this, needless to say, reinvents any wheels, and if Million Dollar Conspiracy is a great City Hunter film, that arguably only makes it a good film overall.  That would be more of a problem had ADV not seen fit to pair it with the similarly short and equally good Bay City Wars, which we covered back in post number hundred and six.  Add to that the bonus of an excellent episode from the show and this was, at the time, a rather terrific release.  Now that it's harder to get hold of, obviously that's not quite as true, but if you're into City Hunter, this is certainly a must-have, and if you're looking to give the franchise a try, I reckon it's an even more sensible place to start that City Hunter: The Motion Picture, for all that that's a touch better than either of the two films taken separately.

Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, 1995 - 1997, dir's: Kazuyuki Hirokawa, Takeshi Aoki, Yasuhito Kikuchi

First of all, let us note that this isn't the same Magical Girl Pretty Sammy who appeared in the Tenchi Muyo!  Mihoshi Special and nor, as far as I could tell, the one who'd go on to appear in the TV show Sasami: Magical Girls Club, though the other TV show in which she appeared, Magical Project S, does seem to be a sequel, despite mostly running consecutively with this OVA.  Man, vintage anime franchises could be alarmingly complicated!  After all, this is already an alternate universe reimagining of a character first encountered in a comedy spin-off of the original Tenchi Muyo! OVA series, though according to Wikipedia, the whole notion was born in yet another side story outside of the world of animation, in one of those voice dramas that were such a big part of the culture at the time in Japan and barely made the slightest dent upon the Western anime scene.

In a sense, none of this baggage matters in terms of whether you're likely to enjoy Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, and in a sense it may well matter a great deal.  Which is to say, the show doesn't really have much to do with Tenchi Muyo!, despite dragging all of its core cast over and repurposing them around a tale that now centres on the ten-year-old Sasami and her adventures as a pawn in a high-stakes game of magical kingdom sibling rivalry.  For the entirety of the first episode, this struck me as a substantial missed opportunity, in that a magical girl story happening off in the fringes of the Tenchi-verse is on the face of it a more appealing proposition than one that just has characters broadly similar to those characters who have to be laboriously set up over the course of forty minutes.  Frankly, that first episode, which feels as though it ought to be hitting the ground running and instead wades laboriously through a sea of less-than-thrilling setup, isn't a strong start.

Inevitably, the show picks up once that's out the way, with a pair of episodes that are free to do their own thing.  And while the things they opt to do with that freedom aren't mind-blowing, they're enough to provide a measure of fun.  This is truest by some way of episode two, by far the silliest of the three and the one that most feels as though it's having a laugh with the whole magical girl concept instead of parodying it by more or less just being it.  Pretty Sammy squares off against a villain who's essentially Bill Gates, the main MacGuffin is a karaoke CD, and for the most part, we get the sort of random silliness you'd expect of something where the concept involved taking a minor character from a well-known franchise and making them a magical girl for the hell of it.  Whereas the third episode, while still entertaining, starts to take this whole business too seriously and generally assumes we're invested in these characters simply because we've been hanging around them for an hour and a half, which seems a lot to ask when most of them are just the cast of Tenchi Muyo! stripped to their core traits.

So it's not great, that much is probably obvious.  The animation is below the standards set by basically everything in the Tenchi-verse up to this point, with a frequent habit of looking cheap and slightly slapdash, the music is amusing but nowhere near enough so to be a selling point, and what occurs to me now as it didn't when I was watching, this more than anything feels like a pilot for Magical Project S, for all that Magical Project S came out at the same time as two of these episodes.  Since I haven't seen Magical Project S, I've no idea if that potentially makes it a worthwhile time investment, but coming at it solely from the direction of someone who's fond of Tenchi Muyo!, I can't say this particularly obscure offshoot - now the least available of all the Western releases - is worth the effort of hunting down.  It's a pleasant and very gentle pastiche of magical girl shows that frequently forgets the pastiche part, and there are more than a few of those out there that aren't so astoundingly hard to find.

Patlabor OVA Series 2: The New Files, 1990 - 1992, dir's: Kazunori Ito, Michiko Yokote, Hibari Arisu, Mamoru Oshii, Naoyuki Yoshinaga, Yutaka Izubuchi

Given that Patlabor would be high on my top-ten list of favourite anime franchises, it's taken me a bewilderingly long time to get to this second OVA series, for reasons that probably boil down to worrying that it couldn't possibly be as good as the first OVA series or the movies, so why not quit while I was ahead?  Well, the joke's on me, or past me anyway; The New Files is most definitely up to the standard of The Early Days, and if it doesn't quite reach the unassailable bar that is the movies, that's only because it's attempting such radically different things that the comparison is meaningless.

Mind you, none of this is apparent from the first four episodes, which are a direct continuation of an arc from the TV series and the closest I've ever seen Patlabor come to the sort of genre fare it superficially resembles and so determinedly tends to avoid being.  Heck, there are actual giant robot fights, ones that go on for more than a minute or two, and what's most bizarre to the viewer who's used to Patlabor stories that merrily sideline action for just about anything else they can lay their hands on, they're fairly involved, exciting giant robot fights.  So while those opening episodes aren't what any self-respecting fan would come to the show for, it's not like they're bad or anything; in fact, they're a perfectly solid take on some thoroughly generic material, as an evil arms manufacturing company of the sort you could barely step outdoors without running into back in the days of nineties anime demonstrates their latest weapon of war by setting it against the forces of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Special Vehicle Section and their "patrol labour" mobile suits.

An uninspired start, then, but hardly a ruinous one.  Heck, it's even a nice palette cleanser to be reminded of what Patlabor generally isn't before you get into some of the very best of what Patlabor is.  But then, what truly sets the franchise apart from pretty much all its contemporaries and just about anything similar is its versatility, and I don't know that that's ever had a better workout than here.  While it's fair to say the bulk of the episodes fall somewhere amid the loose category of slice-of-life drama and most contain at least some measure of comedy, beyond that it's anyone's guess what you'll get once the opening credits have rolled.  It might be an Ultraman spoof or a Dungeons and Dragons pastiche.  It might be melancholy, romantic, or surreal, it might be serious or hilarious, and in the case of a couple of the finest episodes, it might superficially not contain much of anything.  Patlabor can mine depths of empathy over the mild misery of a tooth ache, can turn a petty dispute among the Special Vehicle Section's support staff into an hilarious all-out war, and perhaps most to the point, is as capable of generating fine human drama from its wonderful, always surprisingly layered cast as any anime show you might care to name.

If there are grounds for complaint, barring that not-so-wonderful opening quartet, they're all quite tiny, and none relate to the production values, which are top notch and comfortably ahead of most of what was happening back in the early nineties: not up to the films, for sure, but better than the already respectable first OVA series.  I do have a niggling sense that the balance leans slightly too far toward humour and that it would have been nice to have something similar to and on a par with the superlative two-part "The SV2's Longest Day" from The Early Days.  But that feels petty to say, because the humour is largely terrific and it's reasonable to suppose that the TV series these episodes were spinning off from did its share of those sorts of serious tales, whereas the delightful randomness here could only really be fitted into OVAs.  Maybe a broader range of stories would have pushed The New Files that bit closer to perfection, and maybe they'd have upset its delicate balance, but whatever the case, this is tremendous stuff.  Granted, it's probably not the place to start with Patlabor, relying as it does on a degree of familiarity, but once you've got your foot in the door, it's absolutely not to be missed.

Lupin the Third: Farewell to Nostradamus, 1995, dir's: Shun'ya Itô, Takeshi Shirato

If you were to claim Farewell to Nostradamus was the best Lupin the Third film, I wouldn't agree with you - given that Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro exists, that debate is essentially null and void - but nor would I argue terribly hard.  It gets an awful lot right and nothing conspicuously wrong, but more than that, there's just so much of it.  And with Lupin being one of those rare franchises where busyness is generally a virtue, Farewell to Nostradamus's extremely busy plot does it plenty of favours.  It's a cavalcade of stuff flung at you for the better part of a hundred minutes, and since most of the stuff is at least good and much of it is great, it's hard not to be entertained and downright impossible to be bored.  For sure, there are a handful of Lupin entries that aspire to be more than mere entertainment, but for the most part, that's what the franchise aims for and frequently does so well, and perhaps nowhere else does it succeed quite so reliably as here.

However, what keeps it away from the top spot for me is how all that being always good and often great comes at the expense of doing anything truly radical.  The plot is the biggest victim: in being a superb mechanism for the delivery of delightful action moments and zippy comedy, it fails to produce much in the way of interesting ideas or to capitalise on the ones it has.  One of its more promising elements is the McGuffin of the week, a previously-thought-missing book of Nostradamus's prophecies which billionaire presidential wannabe Douglas has, sect leader Rhisley claims to have, and Fujiko Mine is chasing, meaning that soon Lupin and his other allies are after it too.  A book of prophecies is a novel prize for Lupin to be seeking, so it's disappointing that the film barely cares about its contents, except to make some easy jabs at those who beguile others with made-up secrets and the suckers who fall for their schtick.  Better deployed is the ludicrous city-sized skyscraper Douglas operates out of, containing the real book of prophecies in its impregnable-but-obviously-not-really vault on the top floor: it's a prime location for some crazy Lupin goodness, and thankfully the movie doesn't squander that one.

Amid the basic treasure-hunt setup, there are no end of familiar elements: a kidnapping subplot, an island prison escape, a cult with ulterior motives, numerous helicopter chases, an entire second McGuffin, and even a jot of amnesia for Fujiko.  To be fair, they pass by at such a rate that there's never a point where the film feels especially familiar, but there's also not a point where any of this feels fresh, though some of the finer bursts of action inside Douglas's preposterous skyscraper come the closest, including a particularly awesome climax.  With that in mind, and given that this is one of the rare handful of actual cinematic releases rather than one of the myriad TV movies, it should come as no surprise that the animation is reliably impressive.  But Farewell to Nostradamus is also kind of clumsy in odd moments, with some overly evident labour-saving, and the designs for the core cast are as archetypal as can be: pleasingly so, it has to be said, with a slight ramping up of their cartoonishness that fits nicely with the light-hearted tone, and yet they do nothing to stick in the memory.

This is all nit-picking, true, and its the sort of nit-picking that only a film of so high a calibre could leave itself open to, but still, there's something ever-so-slightly frustrating about a Lupin the Third film which flirts so hard with greatness.  I'm not the first to note that what makes Castle of Cagliostro a flawed Lupin movie is what pushes it toward true masterpiece status: it bends the formula and its characters far enough that they come close to breaking and in so doing gets to go places the franchise generally can't.  Farewell to Nostradamus is absolutely not that, and indeed it couldn't push the envelope much less than it does, but damn does it make marvellous use of that envelope.  So if it's not the best of the series, it's probably the one I'd point a potential convert to, in the confidence that they'd be guaranteed a ton of fun and come away with a deep love of all things Lupin the Third.

-oOo-

Well, that was an unexpectedly traumatic set of goodbyes!  Three out of four of our titles here are comfortably amid the highest echelons of their respective franchises, and if Magical Girl Pretty Sammy is the lowest point of the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs, it's still perfectly fine and a reminder of how high that particular bar is.  And okay so hopefully we'll get to that last City Hunter entry one of these days, and on the Lupin front there's still The Fuma Conspiracy from the eighties to look at should I ever manage to find a cheap copy, but still, this feels like kind of a momentous post.  All things must inevitably end one day, and Drowning in Nineties Anime is no exception!

But thankfully we're a ways off that point yet.  Next up ... er, I don't know yet, except that *sniff* it definitely won't involve City Hunter, Patlabor, Lupin the Third, or Tenchi Muyo.

  

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