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...
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.*
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.
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.
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-
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