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)...
Or Genesis Surviver Gaiarth, as the AnimeEigo edition insists on misspelling it, and perhaps it's 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 that 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.
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.
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.
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.
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