The last time I set out to review a bunch of longer OVAs, I got it wrong and ended up with a couple of series sneaking in there, but this time around, there'll be none of that nonsense. Everything here is most definitely an OVA (well, except for the one that wants to be an OAV instead, and who am I to argue?) and I get to keep pretending that, even though I'm reviewing thirteen half-hour episodes that were probably shown on TV at some point or another, I'm absolutely, definitely not reviewing TV shows.
And that categorically-TV-show-free line up consists of: Record of Lodoss War, Ranma 1/2: The OAV Series, Patlabor OVA Series 1, and The Legend of the Dog Warriors: The Hakkenden...
Record of Lodoss War, 1990, dir: Akinori NagaokaThe worst thing about Record of Lodoss War is that it puts its best foot forward, and in so doing, sets a standard it will have trouble sticking to and on occasions will stray very far from indeed. The first of its thirteen episodes couldn't be more of a mission statement, establishing from the opening moments that we're in the realms of classic-style, unashamedly trope-filled epic fantasy: our protagonists are a party of adventurers that feel precisely as though they've been rolled up minutes before by a group of gamers for whom originality was the most trivial of concerns, and the twenty-some minutes of plot finds them navigating a dungeon so that they can fight their way past - yeah, you guessed it! - a dragon. A red dragon, no less.
And the thing is, it's pretty terrific. Anyway, if you have any fondness at all for this brand of fantasy it is. In its lack of irony and subversiveness, there's a deep appeal to Record of Lodoss War, and the reason the franchise has endured so successfully is because, however you feel about what it's doing, it does that thing tremendously well. Nowhere is that truer than in this first episode, which, partly due to a basic richness to its world and characters and partly due to some tremendously strong animation and Mitsuo Hagita's magnificent score, manages to be a minor masterpiece in its own right.
It's hard to forget an opening that strong, and of course Record of Lodoss War doesn't want us to, if only because we'll immediately be flashing back to earlier events for quite a while. However, it also doesn't have anything like the budget to keep up this visual standard for thirteen episodes, and at its lowest points, the memory of how good the show looked in its glory days is more galling than inspiring. By the middle stretch, which includes a major battle that doesn't feel remotely major and a two-episode-long scrap against a dragon that scarcely moves, it's tough not to be disappointed. And it's almost made worse by the fact that there's always the lovely opening and closing sequences to show off precisely the tone of brazenly romantic high fantasy the show's striving for, and always that score of Hagita's, and always the character designs, which nail the balance between archetypes and individuals with a sense of inner life.
That middle section comes dangerously near to being a slog, and its where Record of Lodoss War's other weaknesses become most apparent. For one, it's not the easiest thing to keep up with: the story may not be what anyone would call complex, but it's a challenge to remember who in its large cast is where, and why, and who's meant to be important at any given moment. But more harmful is that the character we reliably return to is the young swordsman Parn, and Parn is an annoying idiot with a habit of starting fights he can't win. Even worse, he manages to undermine the single best character, high-elf sorcerer Deedlit, who spends an inordinate amount of time mooning over him and yelling his name as he screws up yet again, rather than being the awesome kick-ass sorcerer she's been shown to be.
Parn, it has to be said, never quite redeems himself, though he comes close. But the show as a whole absolutely does, and its final run of episodes is near enough to being on a par with that fine opening that it's easy to forget how far it strayed. And for me anyway, it was the successes that stuck with me rather than the flaws, in part becomes the ending does such a solid job of bringing everything and everyone together and making the results shine with all the money saved by the earlier scrimping. If every moment of Record of Lodoss War was as lavishly brilliant as its best episodes, we'd be looking at a classic for the ages, and what we get instead is more of a minor classic with some conspicuous faults, but that's still enough to place it among the finest epic fantasy adaptations I've come across.
Ranma 1/2 OAV Series, 1993 - 1996, dir: Junji NishimuraIt's hard to imagine a better series of OVA episodes than the twelve Ranma 1/2 received between 1993 and 1996*. They range from good to excellent, with the majority in the latter category. More impressively yet, there's almost no sense of repetition, or reuse of ideas, or even of unoriginality, and given how many a good anime show has fallen back on clichés like the Christmas episode and the hot springs episode, that's remarkable. I mean, the Ranma 1/2 OAV Series actually includes both of those, but they're brilliant and refuse to go to obvious, well-mined places. The latter, for example, actually busies itself with female lead Akane swapping bodies with a vengeful doll, which is about as far from your usual hot springs episode as it's possible to get.
And, for me anyway, this was all a little weird, because Ranma 1/2 had been largely in the shadow of Rumiko Takahashi's other enormously famous creation, Urusei Yatsura, a show I'd gained a much better impression of. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that Urusei Yatsura got far superior movies than Ranma 1/2 did: I've quite a bit of fondness for The Battle of Nekonron, China! and some at least for Nihao My Concubine, but neither is in the same league as something like the classic Beautiful Dreamer, and both give the unfair sense of a show that could do with more in the way of ideas.
Now my theory is that Ranma 1/2 just wasn't a good fit for a feature-length running time - and its noteworthy that Urusei Yatsura, which stretched so well to films, delivered a rather lacklustre set of OVAs. The latter, with its enormous cast and expansive setting, had big places to go, but Ranma 1/2 is more small-scale and domestic, centring as it does on a single household. On the other hand, it has that bit more going on beneath the surface, and I think the reason these OVAs succeed is that there's such a range of humour and so many interlocking sets of jokes. Ranma and Akane's fractious relationship is a solid foundation, and the number of amusing side characters who are eager to split them up for selfish reasons adds another layer, and all of that would work well enough even without the central gimmick of half the cast being shapeshifters of one sort or another. A lesser creator would have got as far as Ranma's gender-swapping and called it a day, but here that's one gag among a panoply of others, and often the joy of watching comes from how all those levels of humour, some clever, some dumb, some acerbic, some sweet, play off each other.
And here I am, analysing comedy, which is a fool's game and something I'm hopelessly underqualified to do, when what really matters is that the Ranma 1/2 OAV Series flat out nails it. Moreover, most entries are sufficiently well plotted that they'd be engaging even if they weren't so amusing, and the technical standards are always as good as is needed, stretching to big action scenes or neat character beats and never giving the impression that anything's been scaled down to a budget. Oh, and the music's splendid too, which should hardly be a surprise by this point. Really, these episodes are a joy from start to finish, and their sole limitation is that it helps to go in with a degree of knowledge about the franchise. But hey, a read of the first manga volume, or else a watch of the first film and five minutes on Wikipedia, will get you up to speed, and you'll be amply rewarded for the time investment.
The tricky part in reviewing the first Patlabor OVA series is that it's essentially two shows in one. The first is a relatively-standard-for-the-time take on a relatively novel concept: it's a giant robot show that would much rather hang around with the folks who use said giant robots, in this case the Patlabor police squad, the eccentric bunch responsible for combating the new forms of crime that have grown out of society's increasing dependence on towering robotic "labors". Amid a sizeable cast, the primary protagonists are Noa, who's so attached to the labor she's named Alphonse that the opening theme is a love song from her to it, and Asuma, son of a wealthy industrialist, who's patently just along for the ride. And the plots across the first four episodes are for the most part as nonchalant and goofy as the characters, drifting between cop show action and such casual weirdness as a ghost story and a pastiche of kaiju movies. Even the art style has a certain laid-back looseness to it, and in general there's the impression of a property that's unwilling to take itself too seriously.
Then along come the fifth and sixth episodes, the two-parter that is "The SV2's Longest Day", and everything changes. Some of that's fairly subtle, like the way the focus shifts toward the unit's captains Goto and Nagumo, and thus immediately becomes that bit more mature simply by having protagonists who are older than anime tends to favour; some of it's hard to miss, like how abruptly the show decides to become a political drama that hardly includes the Patlabor police squad for its first half and only lets them near their labors for a minute or two at the end. And I think it's fair to assume this shift in focus is down to director Oshii, who set out in something akin to the mode of his earlier work on the light-hearted Urusei Yatsura and by the midpoint was evidently itching to push in a new direction, one he'd follow in profoundly productive ways. "The SV2's Longest Day" is quite literally a demo for his two Patlabor movies, both of which are masterpieces, and the second of which is essentially a feature-length retread of his work here. And if anything, that new perspective is even more apparent in the final episode, which - despite a change of directors, with Naoyuki Yoshinaga taking the helm - picks up on what the previous two did and runs with it magnificently.
The first half of Patlabor: Early Days is good, there's no doubt about it: the animation is maybe a touch too cartoony for the concept, and there's a vague sense of identity crisis, as you'd expect with a show that has the cast chasing down terrorists one minute and battling a Godzilla knock-off the next. But it's certainly pleasurable, and if that had been all there was on offer, I'd still have had positive things to say. Moreover, I'm not certain the OVA as a whole would benefit from having those opening episodes match up with what the show would morph into: that chilled, amiable lead-in lets us acclimatise to the world and the characters before things get serious. Still, it's the final three episodes that have really stood the test of time, and which edge Patlabor: Early Days from good to excellent: if Oshii and his collaborators would go on to achieve even greater successes with similar material, that doesn't erase what they accomplished here, and the depth, intelligence, artistry, and real-world significance they brought to what could so easily have been just another series about big robots.
We're so used to animation, and film in general, having a consistent style, that when something comes along and throws that principle out the window, it's fairly gobsmacking. I could show you stills from the thirteen part OVA series** The Hakkenden that you'd swear were from different shows, and I could even pick them from the same episode, and indeed from consecutive scenes. How you'd respond to that would probably come down to what you're after from anime in general, because if all you want is a storytelling medium, it arguably gets in the way more than it helps; but if you're a fan of animation in its own right, this is a rare treat, a showcase for top-tier craftspeople indulging themselves in ways the format simply doesn't normally allow. There's certainly a narrative function, and once you get past the strangeness, the way the style lines up with the content comes to seem pretty intuitive, growing loose or detailed or painterly or grotesque according to demands of mood and tone. But there's also an impression that this was a purposeful attempt to let talented artists do their thing, and given some of the talent involved, that's a resoundingly sensible choice. After all, the show would be an early opportunity for both Masaaki Yuasa and Kenji Kamiyama, two of the finest directors currently working in the medium, and while you can spot their presence if you look for it, the general level is so excellent that they barely stand out.
If the variations in style were no more than a chance to show off some fine animation and add some tonal emphasis, you'd hear no complaints from me, but it soon becomes apparent that all of this experimentation is ideally suited to a show with such an enormous cast and scope and range, and such striking variations in genre. The Hakkenden's pseudohistorical tale of eight brothers born, due to a hugely misjudged promise, from the union of Princess Fuse and her family's pet dog, merges the epic and the intimate and has no problem with leaping from samurai action to serious drama to graphic supernatural horror, all the while expecting us to keep up with eight protagonists and countless supporting characters across multiple locations and a span of years. The source material, Kyokutei Bakin's nineteenth century epic, is considered the longest novel in classic Japanese literature, and adapting that into thirteen episodes was a preposterously ambitious undertaking, but The Hakkenden does a splendid job of marrying the wider story with an emphasis on detail, pouring everything into individual scenes without forgetting their purpose in the overarching narrative.
Nevertheless, I'd be lying if I said I found it easy to follow: for the Western viewer with only a passing knowledge of Japanese history, and most of that gleaned from films and anime, there's a lot to keep track of, all the more so when entire episodes skip back to fill in side stories or move onto new topics without a backward glance, and when characters change name or status, and when other characters die and return from the dead or transform from babies to children over the space of months. I watched The Hakkenden across a period of weeks, and that was obviously a mistake; burn through it in a weekend and I suspect everything would be clearer. But however you go about it, this is definitely one to go out of your way for, a tale that manages to be grand and quiet, thrilling and melancholy, action-packed and philosophical, and does all of it accompanied by some sterling animation used in a decidedly radical fashion. Anime may be overflowing with semi-historical, horror-tinged martial arts fantasies, but I'd struggle to point to a single one better than this, and its best episodes are practically without equal.
-oOo-
I do believe, bar that one post where I only reviewed stuff I already knew and loved, that this is the most consistently excellent selection we've had, and it's hard to imagine it being beaten any time soon. Personally, my main takeaway is that somebody needs to slap The Hakkenden on a blu-ray or three right this damn minute, but that's probably only because I watched it most recently - though it's only grown on me in the time since. Still, everything here is brilliant to a greater or lesser degree. And thinking about it, the other three titles all have received modern releases and are fairly easy to lay hands on, so I guess there's hope yet.
Next time: back to randomness, and a major classic I've somehow taken all these years to get to...
* Strictly speaking, one's actually a movie that subsequently got lumped in with the OVAs in Western releases, but since it walks like an OVA and quacks like an OVA and happens to be half an hour long, that was surely the sensible call.
** Which is actually two OVA series, but they've never been released in the West as such and you really can't tell from watching.
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