Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 92

Personally I'd say this is one of the most interesting selections we've had yet, with the sad finale of my Black Jack OVA marathon, an odd and forgotten title that arguably deserves a little better, and an exciting find born of some seriously nerdy investigation.  But while all of that's interesting to me, it's our fourth title that's fascinated many an anime fan in the years since it's release: Giant Robo has been on my radar for a long, long time, and at last I've got round to it.

So does it live up to its weighty reputation?  Let's take a look at Black Jack: Incubation, Madonna, Mermaid's Scar and Giant Robo...

Black Jack: Incubation, 1995-1996, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Here we are, then, with what for our purposes is the last volume of these Black Jack OVAs that I've managed to review so completely out of order: there's one I haven't covered, but not only is it impossible to find, it came out a year too late for our purposes*.  And honestly, I'm a bit heartbroken to know there won't be any more, since they've been so reliably excellent.  But by the same measure, there were points this time around when I found myself wondering if perhaps it wasn't for the best that the makers restrained themselves to ten episodes that were as strong as these are, rather than pushing on and letting a weak one slip through.

What set me thinking in that direction was the first of the two episodes on this disk, The Owl of San Merida, which is, for my money, the worst of the ten.  It's the one, at any rate, where the various formulae feel too readily apparent and where all the minor flaws stand out most starkly.  Black Jack, our super-surgeon hero, does almost nothing by way of being a protagonist, and is reduced almost entirely to an observer, as we the viewer are, watching a cryptic plot slowly unravelling itself.  And by the time we reach the end, it doesn't altogether feel worth the effort; there's a supernatural twist that's both awfully predictable and not terribly convincing.  On top of that, there's a lack of really striking moments in the animation, which, with Dezaki being Dezaki, is one thing you can generally rely on.  Yet to be clear, The Owl of San Merida is still pretty good.  Certainly its central gimmick, of a man who manifests bullet wounds that heal seconds later, makes for some great body horror, and there's enough intriguing stuff amid the narrative to make it perfectly satisfying.

At any rate, Night Time Tale in the Snow, Lovelorn Princess makes up for its predecessor's relative failings and then some.  This doesn't, it has to be said, immediately look like it's going to be the case, with a baffling jumping-off point that appears to involve Black Jack and his assistant Pinoko being sucked into an historical drama after their car gets snowed under in the middle of nowhere.  Initially, this seems as though its going too far in the other direction, chucking the Black Jack formula and its tenuous adherence to realism out the window, but given that the story is pretty splendid and how entertaining it is watching Black Jack being unfazed by the situation - at no point does he even bother to ask why everyone's dressed like they're in a samurai drama! - it actually works out shockingly well.  And Dezaki is back at his best, conjuring striking scene after striking scene, while keeping his wilder instincts largely in check.  But what really makes Night Time Tale in the Snow, Lovelorn Princess is the lovely coda that comes along after it seems the tale has run its course; the result is a superlative ghost story - of sorts! - and one of the strongest episodes this remarkable series has turned out.

Obviously it would have been nice to have two episodes that were operating at that level, but as with the prior volumes, the very fact of having a pair that are so wholly different does favours to them both.  Plus, if this was your entry point into the series, I doubt the issues with The Owl of San Merida would stand out so harshly; though conversely, maybe the dramatic shift of the Night Time Tale in the Snow, Lovelorn Princess might seem a little too odd.  Whichever way you shake it, I guess this isn't quite in the top tier of these disks, but for such a startlingly consistent show, that's not much of a complaint.

Madonna, 1988, dir: Akinori Nagaoka

The inspirational high school sports subgenre is so damn old that there are probably cave paintings about washed-up former mammoth hunters who've grown too fond of their fermented berry juice taking a bunch of disillusioned young cavemen under their wing and leading them to the top of the mammoth-hunting tables.  And anime certainly hasn't been immune to such tales, so on the face of it, Madonna - which has nothing to do with the pop singer and everything to do with Mako Domon, new teacher at a school decades past its prime, who gets landed with the worst class available and is so disgusted by their antics that she's ready to chuck the towel in until she finds herself mentoring their newly formed rugby club - is about as familiar as you could imagine.

However, in many ways, Madonna bucks the trends for this sort of thing altogether.  Mako is neither a middle-aged man nor an alcoholic, which sets her apart from the vast bulk of her fellow protagonists, and nor does she know a thing about rugby.  The grizzled veteran player will show up eventually, but even he strays from type in a few notable aspects, and the emphasis is always on Mako, who's an appealingly flawed character and nobody's idea of an inspirational teacher; indeed, she really couldn't care less about teaching, a job she ambled into because she'd heard there were long holidays and no overtime, and even once we're past the bumpy stretch in which she's winning the bad kids over and earning their respect, she never changes that much.  Her arc is more one of growing in confidence than of inspiring it in others, and there's a sense that she and the kids she's supposedly introducing to the adult world are actually growing up alongside each other.

But speaking of those tribulations, it's the first half of Madonna that feels least akin to the classic model for these stories, and is perhaps the element that makes it toughest to recommend three decades down the line.  Mako, being an attractive young woman, goes through quite a different set of trials than a male counterpart would, and much of it makes for a tough watch.  Mako gets sexually harassed no end of times, sexually assaulted, and at one point almost raped, and though the show doesn't trivialise any of that, it's still a difficult watch, and there's no question that a modern attempt would have to approach this stuff very differently.  On the other hand, I do think credit's due for keeping us tied so hard to Mako's point of view and resisting any bid to lighten the mood; Madonna is especially good at granting us small moments in which we see how these traumas have got past Mako's armour and made her feel less safe in the world, and for an OVA from the late eighties, that's not nothing.

Indeed, Madonna as a whole does a good job of not playing to the cheap seats.  Many of the teens we're encouraged to believe are capable of redemption start out as thoroughly nasty pieces of work, but we see enough of the environment they're existing in to understand a little of how they've turned out this way.  Here, the animation bears a lot of the weight in selling the rundownedness of everything and how it's seeped into the folks forced to navigate these environments.  The character designs end up somewhere between simple and ugly, but in a way that feels deliberate; Mako, for example, isn't portrayed as some stunning beauty but as a woman just attractive enough to occupy the attention of a bunch of troublesome teens who aren't as worldly-wise as they pretend to be.  The simplicity of the character animation feels less purposeful and more budgetary, but at least the backgrounds are routinely striking, or rather, well-painted representations of mostly grim and rotten urban environments.  It's not the sort of OVA that will wow anyone with its visuals, but they're of a piece with the story it's telling.

Where all that leaves us is harder to pin down.  This was clearly an incredibly minor release at the time - AnimeWorks didn't bother with a dub, or even with that mainstay of DVD "features" the animated menu - and it's easy to see why nobody had an enormous amount of faith in it.  There's no way you could make this material feel wholly fresh, and though the animation is fit for purpose, that's hardly the same as saying it's a joy to look at.  On the other hand, Madonna does do quite a fine job of finding new ways into its hackneyed material, more so than many a better-known counterpart, and at the very least, rugby is an intriguingly weird sport to focus on.  It's definitely not one I personally have the least interest in, so the fact that Madonna manipulated me into caring about the fortunes of a team made up of juvenile delinquents I thoroughly despised not an hour before is surely a testament to something.

Mermaid's Scar, 1993, dir: Morio Asaka

1991's Mermaid Forest was a pretty fine slice of supernatural horror, so it's no small thing that Mermaid's Scar, the follow-up made two years later, betters it in every way.  It helps, mind you, that the former got stuck with all the setup and world-building, and arguably Mermaid's Scar would suffer if you didn't watch them in order.  However, it might equally be that its script just does a much more concise job of laying out its concept - eating the flesh of a mermaid has the potential to make you immortal, but the much greater potential to screw you up in horrible ways - and is thus much quicker to get into the good stuff and stay there.

This time around, our protagonists Yuta and Mana happen to encounter a young boy who's returning to live with his mother for the first time in years, and as they take up temporary jobs nearby, they soon have reason to suspect that he's being ill-treated.  Saying any more than that would spoil things, especially since Mermaid's Scar doesn't do terribly well at hiding its first major twist - and actually, I told a fib at the start, that's probably the one point on which Mermaid Forest does win out.  But then, it doesn't matter a great deal, since I suspect writer Tatsuhiko Urahata (or else original author Rumiko Takahashi) wanted us to get out ahead a little so that what comes after can land that bit harder.  Really, the reveal toward the middle is more significant for how it pushes the narrative onto a new path that only gets darker and nastier the more we learn.

 Director Asaka, surely known mostly for his extensive work on the show Cardcaptor Sakura and its accompanying movies, turns out to have absolutely terrific instincts for horror, always going for the gut rather than cheap shocks or scares, and he also demonstrates a solid grasp of three-dimensional space, resulting in something that feels oddly physical and real and leading to some especially persuasive action sequences.  And while I doubt the budget here was stellar, the animation is thoroughly slick, and more importantly, well attuned to the storytelling, often visually driving home what the sparse script gets to leave largely unsaid.  By way of an example, the way the grislier moments are all the more potent because these characters who've suffered so many injuries over the centuries hardly acknowledge them is great in both giving us an insight into their existence and leaving us thoroughly freaked out.

Plainly, I highly recommend this: there aren't many titles that have done such a splendid job of mining the awful extremes that living forever could so easily lead to if the circumstances or the personalities involved should go wrong enough, and the last ten minutes is one of the finest horror climaxes of any title from this particularly fertile period of anime history.  But as is so often the case - and especially so when it comes to OVAs adapting Rumiko Takahashi stories, it seems - availability is a bit of an issue.  There's a not-so-wonderful print of the Viz dub on Youtube, but weirdly, that dub can also be found on DVD, which is how I watched it: a bit of detective work revealed that the French release actually has it as an option, if you don't mind hard-coded French subtitles.  That release isn't terribly easy to come by either, but it's absolutely worth keeping an eye out for: Mermaid's Scar is in the top tier of nineties horror OVAs and a damn good piece of horror filmmaking by any metric.

Giant Robo the Animation: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1992-1998, dir: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Getting your head around the look of the thing is a great way into understanding what Giant Robo is up to, and also a handy insight into what makes it so special.  The impression is of a 1930s radio drama adapted in the 1960s and then brought to life with the finest animation the 1990s had to offer, and the result is deeply old-fashioned without actually feeling so or coming across as especially nostalgic; it's more like a vision of an alternate-universe future born of an alternate past than an adaptation of dated science fiction.

This is heightened no end by the strange quirk that's perhaps  Giant Robo's most notable feature.  In a stroke of genius born of adversity, an unfortunate rights issue that made a faithful adaptation of Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo manga impossible led to a reimagining that pillaged characters from every corner of the writer's vast output, meaning that suddenly heroes from Chinese legend were rubbing shoulders with robots and mad scientists.  This oughtn't to work, but it does, and wonderfully so, mostly because Giant Robo the OVA commits to it wholeheartedly without ever really acknowledging it: there are a team of superheroes and a team of supervillains, and many of each have an awful lot in common with characters from works like The Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and that's just how things are.  In practise, the mashup is brilliantly odd and exciting, mostly because it lets the creative team go nuts with such an enormous amount of cool stuff: cool magic powers and abilities, cool robot designs, cool evil giant eyeballs, cool character designs, and all of it held together by that aesthetic I touched on at the start, one that's retro in the best possible way, taking elements from the past and making them fresh and new.  Add to that Masamichi Amano's poundingly epic score and animation that gives the impression the budget was basically "What do you need?" and you have a show that's never less than a feast for the senses.

And how I wish all this was attached to slightly more of a story!  For the first two or three episodes, the issue's barely noticeable: the setup, of terrorist organisation Big Fire setting out to shut down the world's energy by sabotaging the nigh-ubiquitous Shizuma Drive that provides universal clean and unlimited power, is enough to get us out the gate, and from there, ample twists and turns make the narrative feel more involved than it really is.  Plus, Giant Robo is exceedingly good at substituting incident for narrative in a fashion that you barely notice while it's happening; every scene has its own rushing momentum that's easy to be caught up by.  However, for me, that all fell apart a little by the end, first because of a penultimate episode that abruptly started flinging in major new characters in a manner that felt slightly desperate and then with a major twist that I'd seen coming since near the beginning and was pretty ruinous in its own right.  I'll say only that Giant Robo has a textbook Idiot Plot, and that if one character had been clearer in their instructions, it would have saved an awful lot of trouble.

This is, I think, enough to rob Giant Robo of the classic status that, in so many other ways, it thoroughly earns.  And that's a crying shame; a bit of tightening, a bit of rewriting, and I'd be more than happy to call this the masterpiece many consider it to be.  On the other hand, even with those niggling issues meaning I didn't quite love it, I was still blown away by it on a regular basis.  So while I'm a little cooler on it than many, I wouldn't question for a second that Giant Robo earns its status as one of those shows you have to see if you're remotely serious about vintage anime.  And for that matter, its unique aesthetic lends it a timelessness not much from the nineties can boast.  Perhaps you need to not think too hard about it, but on the level of sheer experience, Giant Robo is hard to beat.

-oOo-

I'd be lying if I said Giant Robo wasn't a disappointment - and we're talking here about a title that I spent years hunting down on DVD and then upgraded to blu-ray before I'd watched it, so strong was its reputation!  Which I get, I do, but I can't help wondering how so many people looked past what an enormously dumb turn the plot takes.  Then again, I did finally get to Giant Robo during a Christmas break spent in lockdown, so it's fair to say I wasn't in the best state of mind.  There's every chance a rewatch would go some way to changing my opinion, and to be clear, disappointment or no, I still really liked it.

That aside, our standout here has to be Mermaid's Scar.  Given how much time I spent poring over smudgy image captures of the box trying to figure out whether Amazon's claim of an English language option was true - before I eventually stumbled over a grab of the actual DVD menu! - it would have been a shame if it had been rubbish, but I hadn't dared hope it would be quite so good as it was.

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

* By U.S. Manga Corps' release schedule, this was Black Jack: Biohazard, and it's absolutely superb, even in the bafflingly subtitled Malaysian edition that I watched.