Monday 8 February 2021

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 94

I've been feeling the lack of themes in recent posts, and while it may not be much of one, especially given just how much of what I've reviewed here falls into the category, franchise spin-offs are better than nothing.  Even then, I'm maybe pushing it with the last entry, since I've never got the impression that the TV incarnation is considered the "main" version of Lupin the Third.  And thinking about it, is the Kimagure Orange Road movie a spin-off when it effectively wraps up the entire story?  But hey, I only follow the stupid rules!  And, er, make them.

Oh, also, as per my promise from last time, everything here is pretty much readily available, most of it thanks to the ever-marvellous Discotek.  If you're in the UK, all their DVD releases are multi-region, though they state otherwise, and personally I've taken to importing them via the excellent Otaku: if you don't mind a slightly longer wait, they're the most reliable and reasonably priced option I've found.

And with the free promotion section of the post out of the way, let's turn our attention to Fatal Fury: Legend of the Hungry Wolf, Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers: Gaiden, Kimagure Orange Road The Movie: I Want to Return to That Day, and Lupin the Third: From Siberia With Love...

Fatal Fury: Legend of the Hungry Wolf, 1992, dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi

I never feel I've done a good job with these reviews unless I've found something positive to say, so here goes: Fatal Fury: Legend of the Hungry Wolf is perfectly functional, and indeed, for the entire length of its first couple of scenes, altogether okay.  It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that follow on relatively logically from each other, and the animation and designs are efficient enough that you can always more or less tell who's who and what's going on.  Oh, also the music's pretty tolerable in places.

And with that out of the way, let's move swiftly on to the negatives, which is everything else.  The thing is, I know it's possible to tell an effective, vaguely novel story based on a fighting video game in the space of forty-five minutes, because director Fukutomi would pull it off the very next year with his Art of Fighting adaptation, which betters this in every way.  So even though fighting games have rarely proved fertile soil for impressive anime movies, there's no excuse for how by-the-numbers this is.  With barely an idea in its head, all Legend of the Hungry Wolf can think to do is barrel through some backstory for the game, and it even manages to screw that up by falling back on the laziest possible angle for these things and chucking in a tournament sequence that requires placing what scant plot there is on hold for a futile five minutes.

Still, if Legend of the Hungry Wolf had aspired to nothing besides that, it could still have been fine.  Some decent action choreography would have helped, of course, and direction that was up to anything interesting whatsoever, and backgrounds that weren't drab paintings of mostly boring locations … just something somewhere to give it a spark of life.  All the same, it's the particular shape Takashi Yamada's narrative takes that pushes this from mediocre to outright bad, and I can't really cover that without spoilers, so be warned!  This is the kind of story where the only female character dies midway through so that the hero has that bit more motivation to defeat the villain, and indeed in which she manages to deliver her final, inspiring monologue after being shot, falling half a dozen storeys, and landing on her head.  It's the kind of story that revolves around a special martial arts move, hilariously left off the otherwise complete summary of techniques that the villain's lackeys steal in the opening scene, and wouldn't you know but that happens to be the one move that can get through his defences in the climatic battle when all else has failed?  Oh, and don't expect our hero to check whether his arch-nemesis is dead after he's punched him into a pond, because that wouldn't leave much space for a sequel, now, would it?

Basically, the plot is lazy crap of the laziest, crappiest sort, and even if the rest of Legend of the Hungry Wolf was firing on all cylinders, it would be quite a weight for the film to drag around.  But since there isn't a single element that's doing more than getting the job done, the fact that it's in service of such a crummy, obvious, predictable, and yet barely rational story is deadly.  In a subgenre that's produced a disproportionate share of rubbish, Fatal Fury: Legend of the Hungry Wolf stands as an exemplar of how to get a fighting game adaptation wrong in just about every way possible.*

Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers: Gaiden, 1989, dir's: Kazuki Akane, Mamoru Hamatsu

Given that I know effectively nothing about the TV show Samurai Troopers - AKA Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers, AKA Ronin Warriors, and given that this first OVA is a direct sequel to its 39 episodes, it's fair to say I'm not close to being the intended audience.  And fair's fair, I tried to modify my expectations accordingly.  But you know what?  I really didn't need to.  Not only is it pretty good, it stands on its own in an entirely satisfying fashion, as you might hope given that, to my understanding, the title Gaiden translates roughly as "side story".

Anyway, I can't altogether tell you what Samurai Troopers as a whole is about, because this two-part OVA wisely decides to discard any setup or character introductions and let us catch up on the fly with anything we really need to know and might have forgotten in the nearly two months since the TV show ended.  Given that our five heroes are all much of a much and that the concept seems to be, "it's a Super Sentai show, only with magical samurai armours instead of science-y futuristic armours", any degree of explanation would have wasted some of its precious forty-five minutes - and yes, I'm conscious that all of this hesitant praise sounds a lot like criticism, but hey, not everything has to be Shakespeare, and I genuinely did admire how Samurai Troopers: Gaiden came along and told its little tale and dashed off with the minimum of fuss and clutter, so there.

This particular side story sees four of the gang going off to track down the fifth, whose armour has shown up in America of all places, and appears to be responsible for some decidedly unheroic deeds.  It soon turns out that their missing friend has been lured into a trap by a brand-new, OVA-suitable foe with nice, straightforwardly evil motives and not much in the way of history, but a terrific enough design and a weird enough vibe and modus operandi that they're just fine for these specific purposes.  There are some effectively creepy moments, some neat fights, and it's all about what you'd hope for from something like this, without ever particularly excelling or breaking out of its constraints.

Funnily enough, it also ends up providing the sort of introduction that it conspicuously isn't trying to offer, which is neat from the point of view of anyone who, like me, decided to skip fifteen hours of TV and go straight to the sequels.  Given that the remaining two OVAs are considerably longer, I'll be approaching them with correspondingly higher expectations, and if they're as throwaway as this is, it will be quite the disappointment.  But as what it was clearly meant to be, a fun diversion to keep the property in audience's minds, Samurai Troopers: Gaiden does exactly what was needed and does it all quite well.

Kimagure Orange Road The Movie: I Want to Return to That Day, 1988, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki

I kind of feel like the first Kimagure Orange Road feature film, I Want to Return to That Day, saw me coming.  Just a few weeks ago, I was grumbling over the second volume of the OVA series, complaining that protagonist Kasuga Kyosuke's supernatural powers felt like a clumsily used plot device and lamenting the central love triangle that drove the show, whereby Kyosuke is dating the much younger Hikaru but quite evidently sees her more as a friend and wants badly to be with the third member of their group, Madoka.  Why did Kyosuke let this absurd situation continue for month after month, I asked?  Why didn't he just tell both girls how he felt?

And along comes I Want to Return to That Day, responding to those questions with a bluntness and power I hadn't remotely prepared for.  Gone is any mention of Kyosuke's supernatural abilities, and as for the rest, the answers are both obvious and simple: Kyosuke doesn't break up with Hikaru because breaking up with people that you care about, even when you don't love them or want to be in a relationship with them, is horrible and devastating and generally one of the worst experiences it's possible to go through, let alone to put someone else through - and the more so when that person isn't the sort to quietly accept it.  And attempting to start a relationship with someone you do have strong feelings for is far from straightforward, especially when the price of doing so is their closest friendship.  Sure, Kyosuke has been screwing up all this while, inadvertently abusing Hikaru's feelings and lacking the courage to pursue a more adult relationship with Madoka, but who hasn't made the same sort of dumb mistake at some point?  Indeed, it's practically a guaranteed part of being a teenager, when the lines between love and friendship are at their most smudgy and you're yet to fully learn how much doing the easy thing can often be doing the wrong thing.

This is really all the plot I Want to Return to That Day has to fill its scant seventy minutes: Hikaru and Kyosuke share their first kiss, Madoka is surprised by how jealous she feels and lashes out at Kyosuke, Kyosuke finally realises what's at stake and does what he's been putting off all these months, and much pain and sadness follows.  AnimEigo's blurb describes the film as bittersweet, but there's generally more bitterness than sweetness, and I mean this not at all as a criticism: the emotional honesty on display here is quite something, and though the results are pummelling, that only makes the glimpses of hope we see toward the end that bit more poignant.   The closest parallel I can think of is the much-overlooked Ghibli movie Ocean Waves - also directed by Mochizuki, I realise only now! - though I'd argue that I Want to Return to That Day is that bit stronger, if only because it gets to cheat a little by having shunted so much of its character building onto the series and OVAs.  Though with that said, I don't see any reason the film wouldn't stand on its own, since the central setup is so easily grasped.

Admittedly, I don't know that I Want to Return to That Day quite manages to look like a cinema-worthy feature, though it's definitely an improvement on the OVAs, which I assume were already a marked step up from the TV series.  To some extent, though, it's hard to see how a higher animation budget would have brought much to the table, and what we have is ample to capture the subtle nuances of expression necessary for all of this to work.  And Mochizuki, one of my favourite decidedly unfamous directors, is on truly wonderful form here, ably abetted by his trio of editors; between them, they conjure up some bravura sequences, wringing every drop of emotion out of Kenji Terada's script and sometimes getting to the same place with merely the right cut away in the right place or a perfectly chosen camera angle.  Altogether, this is one of the boldest and most unapologetically heart-breaking films I've seen about the step into adulthood and all the complications that brings, and as much as I didn't have much time for Kimagure Orange Road up until now, that the OVAs were often kind of a slog was a small price to pay for so splendid an ending.

Lupin the Third: From Siberia With Love, 1992, dir: Osamu Dezaki

From Siberia With Love might almost be my favourite of the many Lupin TV specials if it wasn't so damn cheap and ugly.  In the past, I've praised these specials for their visual consistency and even on occasions for being worthy of a cinema release, but there's absolutely none of that here.  This looks like a TV movie, and it looks like a TV movie where the money ran out somewhere in the early planning stages, and it looks like a TV movie with a director who makes lots of very bad calls in his attempts to mask the inadequacy of his budget.  And like I say, all of that's a heck of a shame, because everything else about From Siberia With Love is great.

We'll come back to that, but lets dwell a little longer on the problems, and in particular on Osamu Dezaki's hand in them.  Anyone who's read a few of these reviews will know that he's a director I once hated and have come to grudgingly admire; he has a terrific sense of style, but one that, when applied lazily, tends to overwhelm his material and needlessly distract from the narrative.  There are nearly as many cases where Dezaki gets it somewhat wrong as when he pulls it off, but I'm pushed to think of another example that goes quite as thoroughly wrong as this.  For a start, because the money's not there, Dezaki's left to rely on an exceedingly small repertoire of tricks: his trademark dissolve to a painted image shows up plenty, but what's unmissable is the habit of repeating a snippet of footage two or three times to accentuate the action.  This happens so often that I'd lost track within the first ten minutes, and I don't know that there's a single moment when it succeeds, in large part because, despite what I just said, it's not accentuating the action, it's invariably replacing it.  Because, you know, good action animation is costly, and reusing footage is much less so.

Other than being overly noticeable and tacky, this also means that From Siberia With Love is that rare Lupin film without a single decent action sequence.  Oh, there are ones that work marvellously on paper, but none that survive the budgetary restrictions with all their dignity intact.  The first is probably the worst, being positively agonising, and there are brief bursts that are somewhat better, suggesting at the very least that Dezaki was trying to marshal his slender resources to where they might have the most impact, but still, an action comedy with no actively enjoyable action sequences is a hell of a thing.

That really ought to be ruinous, and as sad as it makes me to badmouth Dezaki after becoming a convert, he's doing little to right the ship here.  Fortunate, then, that veteran Lupin scribe Hiroshi Kashiwabara was there to provide one of the very best plots, and the better scripts, that have graced these movies.  Kashiwabara had a hand in quite a few of my favourites, but this might be his best effort, taking a fun central idea that spins out from an historical event - in this case, the deaths of Russia's imperial Romanov family - and drags it into the present, then hurls in a sizable cast, all with their own agendas, and watches them play off each other in enormously enjoyable fashion.  Star of the show is undoubtedly the villainous Rasputon, who's hilarious and off-puttingly weird and convincingly conniving all at once, but everyone's worthy of inclusion, and the way the script rattles between them and steadily doles out key information is top-tier stuff.  With a story this good, all Dezaki really needed to do was keep out of the way, and while he doesn't quite manage even that much, the result is still an enjoyable romp, albeit one that could - and should - have been stellar.

-oOo-

There were some real highs and lows there, but let's end on a positive note and mention once more how unexpectedly marvellous I Want to Return to That Day was.  It would be dumb to claim there's any single reason I love anime, a field so broad as to almost defy classification, but certainly one reason is the willingness to take established properties in directions you'd never expect.  Kimagure Orange Road gets a film that's up there with Tenchi Muyo!'s Tenchi Forever! and Urusei Yatsura's Beautiful Dreamer for using its source material as a springboard to go somewhere bold and unpredictable.  I don't know who thought that taking a supernatural romantic comedy and stripping out the supernatural bits and the comedy and making the romance painfully realistic was a good idea, but my hat's definitely off to them.

Next up: well, a bit of a break probably, since I'm about caught up with these again, and then possibly another trip back to the eighties, depending on which work-in-progress post gets wrapped up first.  And of course I really need to be thinking about how we're going to mark the big one hundred, since that's getting awfully near...



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* And I say this as someone who quite enjoyed Battle Arena Toshinden!

Tuesday 2 February 2021

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 93

As seems to be happening a lot lately, this is another enormously random post, with a couple of the most profoundly weird entries we've yet had (and given the frequent weirdness of vintage anime, that's saying something!)  We're also heading to some particularly obscure places, in part due to my recent habit of grabbing the odd title that never made it past a VHS release ... though, come to think of it, this is nothing compared with what's left sitting on the newly installed VHS to-watch shelf!

But does weird and obscure equate to good?  Well, not necessarily, when it comes to Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, Tales of Seduction, Miyuki Chan in Wonderland, and the Kimagure Orange Road OVA (Disk 2)...

Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, 1992 - 1993, dir's: Shinji Aramaki, Masayuki Ozeki, Hideaki Ôba

Or Genesis Surviver Gaiarth, as the AnimeEigo edition insists on misspelling it, and perhaps its unfair to pick on a release for misspelling its own title, but this one kind of has it coming.  At least, the particular version I watched certainly does; I can imagine scenes that collapsed badly in the dub playing better in the original Japanese, and it's possible the collective result would be a release that didn't end up so wearying and cliched as this did.  Genesis Survivor Gaiarth does, after all, have a bit of a novel hook to it, or anyway a hook that's been done elsewhere but not quite done to death: the futuristic world of Gaiarth, you see, exists in the wake of a war that's largely busted humans back to the level of pre-industrial civilisation, except for the fact that most of the tech is still around and the problem is more than nobody understands how to properly use it.

There's a persistent sense that the show would like to take this further than it does.  By the time a robot described as an elf shows up and joins our band of heroes, it's apparent that the big idea here is "classic-style fantasy, only with all the fantasy replaced by sci-fi stuff."  But the plot quickly undermines itself by requiring various characters to have a working knowledge of robotics, which seems out of place in a world where people routinely call robots "beasts".  Nevertheless, there's the seed of a neat idea there, and moments when Genesis Survivor Gaiarth manages to do something with it, my favourite being the "spells" characters cast that are cobbled together from technical gobbledygook they clearly don't comprehend themselves.  Admittedly, even that's not the newest of concepts, but it's the one time the English translation wakes up and has a bit of fun with language instead of leaning on whatever banality is ready to hand.

Probably, though, the script would be functional enough if it weren't for the English voice cast's determination to drag it down to the lowest possible depths.  Out of all of them, only Rick Forrester as Zaxon manages not to humiliate himself, and that's in a part I suspect even I could have not made a hash of; "noble robot" is never going to be the biggest dramatic stretch.  Ralph Brownewell is miserably awful in the lead, confusing being loud and dumb with appealing innocence, while Belinda Keller is only marginally better as main female protagonist Sahari, relying on a single note for her character and making that note really damn shrill.  It's the sort of dub that makes you wonder what the hell was going on with the American voice acting community in those days, because no-one gives the impression of making a shred of effort or of granting the material even the minor levels of seriousness it warrants.

That dub is pretty fatal, but it feels like quibbling to suggest that Genesis Survivor Gaiarth would be significantly better without it.  Aside from the central "it's fantasy but not" gimmick, the one thing that really stuck with me here was how badly its three directors' styles mesh.  Of the three, only Shinji Aramaki - who also had a major hand in the writing and planning and generally appears to have been functioning as project lead - would go on to much of a career, and only then once he became a trendsetter of CG filmmaking.  Here his work is largely functional, which is more than can be claimed of Ozeki, under whose guidance the animation dips into subpar TV territory.  Ôba picks things up with the last and probably most visually consistent episode, but by then the damage has been done.  All told, I suspect that in the original Japanese, Genesis Survivor Gaiarth is a title I'd have found passable but disappointing.  However, saddled with such a god-awful dub, even passable ended up as a stretch.

Tales of Seduction, 1991, dir: Osamu Sekita

What the hell are we supposed to do with Tales of Seduction?  It's something that could perhaps only have come out of the nineties, and three decades after its initial release, is so bewildering that I barely know how to go about summing it up.  But okay, imagine if you will an erotic Tales of the Unexpected, except played mostly for laughs, and where all of the plots revolve around what the title considers seduction but the subtitles doggedly refer to as rape.  And by current definitions, we're definitely talking the latter, in that the women involved are invariably tricked or manipulated, though never, thank goodness, actively forced; at the time, I guess that was sufficiently a grey area to keep this on the right side of screamingly horrifying.  Though you'd think the fact that the closest character we get to a hero in two of the three tales here is - and this is a phrase I could happily have gone my whole life without ever typing - a rapist for hire, would have given someone pause for thought even way back in 1991.

Each of the three tales is roughly fifteen minutes long, which is about all they could possibly stretch to, since they're really more like anecdotes or the setups for jokes - did I mention that Tales of Seduction is dead set on considering itself a comedy?  In the first and sleaziest, a pop song writer divides his time between coercing novice starlets into having sex with him and lusting over the girls at a nearby college, while convincing himself that the one he's most obsessed with is actually just an object of platonic affection who reminds him of his first love.  Tales two and three both involve the aforementioned rapist for hire Toyama no Benbei, who settles various affaires de coeur that have gone off the rails in his own inimitable manner.  All three stories are unremarkable on the technical front, without every slipping into being actively bad, and director Sekita's only real flair is for amping up the comic moments.  Certainly  Tales of Seduction is quite useless as erotica, and also weirdly chaste for such an overtly sordid show.

Anyway, look, I'm going to have to own up sooner or later, so let's get it over with: I didn't hate this, for all that I probably should have done.  Nobody could suggest it handles its themes with tact or grace, but it's never quite as appalling as a synopsis is bound to make it sound.  For a start, there isn't the slightest suggestion that we're meant to be on side with the men, except perhaps for Toyama no Benbei, who's more a weird force of nature than any attempt to represent an actual human being.  All of them are obnoxious, ridiculous, or both, and the show is quick to make sure we're aware that the women who were misled into sex were quite happy with the results and have no ill feelings, which - okay, probably makes it worse, but is enough in context to keep the whole business tolerable.  And then there's the really damnable thing, which is that the twists are actually rather effective and some of the jokes are actually quite funny, to the point where I really did laugh out loud.

And yes, I'm aware this probably makes me an awful person, but it's also a testament to the extent that, while I have grave doubts the world ever needed what Tales of Seduction has to offer, it delivers fairly well.  This is not, I have to stress, a reason to watch it, and I say that even with sexual politics put momentarily to one side; the world is full of better twisty short stories, and better comedies, and better erotica, and bringing all of those together with some mildly decent animation doesn't turn them into anything special.  Really, the only features that stand out about Tales of Seduction all this time later are its profoundly screwed-up premise and the manner in which it manages to dredge something watchable out of such an obvious minefield.  I guess that, under the circumstances, not being a toxic train wreck of epic proportions is quite the win here, but that's still a long way from being actively good.

Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland, 1995, dir's: Seiko Sayama, Mamoru Hamazu

The first thing that hits you with Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland is Toshiyuki Honda's score: it's goofy, energetic, at first glance fairly obnoxious, and once it's inside you're head, you're never likely to get it out, because get past the initial shock and it's pretty damned addictive in a sugar rush-y kind of way.  A good job, too, because that score accompanies every second of the two fifteen minute episodes that compose ADV's release, sometimes receding to a gentle tremor, sometimes shouting its presence, but always providing the spine that keeps Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland on its feet.

You could see that score as something of a metaphor, as well, because Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland as a whole is equally goofy, energetic, and obnoxious, but with a certain charm that sinks in quickly and never outstays its welcome.  Those two episodes are heavily truncated retellings, respectively, of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, except that Alice is replaced with Japanese schoolgirl Miyuki and the entire rest of the cast are replaced by hot women who hit on her at every conceivable opportunity.  So maybe not the most faithful of adaptations then.

If this had been made entirely by men, it might be easier to get a handle on or to dismiss as one more bit of sleazy exploitation from a decade when anime churned out more than its fair share.  But in fact, the original Manga came out of all-female collective Clamp, and whether that makes it less sleazy or exploitative I'm in no position to say, but the knowledge does make you wonder if there isn't more going on than is apparent at first glance.  Certainly, Miyuki-Chan seems to have little interest in being erotic, let alone pornographic; first and foremost, its aim appears to be having fun with its concept and playing it for surreal laughs.  Miyuki is quite the innocent, with no interest in reciprocating the endless advances made toward her, and ultimately what we get is effectively the same situation repeated over and over in various combinations: she meets a character with some resemblance to one of Lewis Carroll's, they crack onto her, she demurs, and some happenstance whisks her off to the next scene.

Absurd and insubstantial though this is, it's also thoroughly entertaining.  Miyuki doesn't get much depth or background, to say the least, but one of the great things about animation is that it can take on a lot of the heavy lifting of characterisation, and in those terms, she's a marvellous protagonist, gangly and perpetually baffled but with just enough of Alice's eager curiosity and willingness to skip blithely onto the next crisis that she never seems victimised by the string of women who are after her innocence.  There's really only the one joke here, and it's a thoroughly odd one, and you can kind of see why no more of the manga's remaining five episodes made the leap to the screen.  But for all that, Miyuki-Chan ends up as something unique and a little special; for those who like to explore anime's stranger corners, this definitely needs to be on the to-see list.

Kimagure Orange Road OVA (Disk 2), 1989-1991, dir's: Takeshi Mori, Shigeru Morikawa, Kôichirô Nakamura, Naoyuki Yoshinaga

I think it's fair to say that I don't get Kimagure Orange Road.  Oh, I understand its significance as a landmark title in anime history, right enough; if I hadn't already, watching an episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya directly afterward certainly did the trick, because you can see the line of descent to that show nearly two decades its senior clear as day.  But what I don't get is ... well, the entire concept, basically.  What was weird for four episodes is plain bizarre with eight under my belt.  Essentially, this is the story of a guy who's in love with one girl but apparently has no problem with dating another for months on end, and has practically limitless magical powers that he refuses to use to help anyone, including himself, lest he might have to, like, move house or something.  It just doesn't work!  Or rather, I suppose I ought to say that it doesn't work for me, since it's obviously worked for plenty of people over the years.  But Kyōsuke Kasuga's behaviour follows no rational pattern, and the love triangle he's caught in and that's so crucial to the show feels far more like a dramatic contrivance than anything actual people might get mixed up in.

Still, with the negatives out of the way - wait, no, actually I have a couple more.  The animation is run-of-the-mill and the direction is generally listless, and given the amount of pop music in this second volume and how routinely wonderful anime music from the period tends to be, the offerings here are fairly lacklustre.  This really does feel more like TV than the level I'd expect of an OVA, and that's reinforced by the lack of any real thread connecting the episodes, barring the fact that the first two on this second disk tell a single story.  But there's scarcely a shot anywhere that suggests the added resources of an OVA budget, which reinforces the impression of a show more interested in being functional than special.

And okay, now that's the negatives out of the way, and I'll concede that I at least got more out of this second volume than I did the first.  The opening two-parter, following the romantic complications that ensue when Kyōsuke inadvertently swaps bodies with a pop idol, is nothing terribly exciting, but it gets better as it goes along and ends on a strong note.  But from there, things improve dramatically, or at any rate get much more interesting.  One of my biggest issues with the first volume was its godawful gay panic episode, and An Unexpected Situation, which brings back Kyōsuke's cousin Akane, almost feels like an attempt to set right the horrors of her first appearance.  But for one scene in which she does something incredibly nasty for not much reason at all, it manages not only to pull off a sympathetic portrait of a gay woman being socially pressured into trying to pass as straight, but to do so without abandoning the breezy light-comedy tone that Kimagure Orange Road is so invested in.  And it's bettered by the last episode, Message in Rouge, which has the decency to wrap things up by treating Madoka as a human being rather than just the centre of Kyōsuke's obsessions, and in the process to tell a story that's a good bit more serious and adult that what's gone before.

But with all of that said, I'd be pushed to regard the two best episodes as more than good, and the first two are merely okay, and those problems that I find so hard to get past are present all the way through: Kyōsuke's possibly-girlfriend Hikaru is a basically dreadful character, their relationship makes Kyōsuke seem like a jerk even when he's not wasting the limitless potential of his supernatural powers, and the male gaze-iness of the whole thing does no favours to Madoka, who seems to be perpetually on the verge of becoming a meaningful character in her own right.  I don't know, maybe there are just some shows that you can't get a handle on through their OVAs, and the series is a stunning masterpiece that juggles all these issues so deftly that they're unnoticeable?  Nevertheless, while this second volume was an okay way to pass some time, history's definitely been unkind to the Kimagure Orange Road OVAs.

-oOo-

That wasn't such a great selection, for all that I always enjoy probing the odder and lesser-known corners of the nineties anime world.  Tales of Seduction is at least intriguing from a sociological point of view, in that it's fascinating to wonder how anyone ever thought it was remotely okay; sometimes the nineties really does seem like another planet!  I guess the only thing I'd actively recommend is Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland, and hey, there are still second hand copies kicking about at not-too-crazy prices, so that's something!

All the same, this is definitely one of the more pointless posts I've come up with.  Perhaps next time I'll try and dig up a few titles that someone somewhere might actually be able to find and want to watch.  But no promises, okay?



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