Once again I seem to have lucked my way into a theme of sorts, though it's not one I'd have deliberately opted for. Skimming over them, I can't help noticing that all four titles here are very much about guys doing manly guy stuff, and not one of them has much time for their female characters, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to argue that all four have at least the odd moment where those female characters are basically there so they can be victims for the hero(es) to save.
So that sucks! But hopefully there'll be a few virtues to balance it out somewhere among Fatal Fury 2: The New Battle, Shuten Doji, Lupin the Third: Napoleon's Dictionary, and Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers: Message...
Fatal Fury 2: The New Battle, 1993, dir: Kazuhiro Furuhashi
Had you told me a week ago that the Fatal Fury franchise was capable of turning out a truly good movie then ... well, I like to think I'd have had better manners than to laugh in your face, but there's certainly a chance I'd have scoffed a little. The first OVA was fairly dire, rising to functional in its better moments, and the feature film, which would arrive a year after this second OVA, was decent enough if you could get around character designs that looked as though they'd been concocted by aliens with nothing but the Pioneer plaque to work off. And both shared the problem that there's nothing whatsoever interesting about the Fatal Fury franchise, which I dare say is remembered mostly these days because main character Terry Bogard wears a really stupid-looking cap.
Yet, despite its uninspired title, The New Battle is a genuinely good film. It even profits somewhat from the inherent shortcomings of these things, by framing its plot around fighting to a puritanical degree: in so much as there's a story, it follows Terry suffering a nasty beatdown at the hands of new villain Krauser and then sliding into depression and alcoholism - because, if he can't be the best fighter in the world, what can he be? - until his brother Andy and their friend Joe Higashi learn what's been going on and take it upon themselves to intervene. Granted, there's a bit more going on than that, including Terry getting saddled with an hilariously wardrobed teen protégé who should be more annoying than he is, and the introduction of Mai Shiranui, whose main and perhaps only purpose here is to have extremely large breasts.
Because, yes, The New Battle absolutely isn't perfect, and it's still a Fatal Fury movie, so you do have to be sensible with your expectations. Nevertheless, writer Takashi Yamada and particularly director Kazuhiro Furuhashi manage to turn almost all its potential failings into at least vaguely positive features. Take Mai as an example: enormously sexist as just about everything to do with the character is, here as she very much wasn't in The Motion Picture she's a positive presence, largely by way of being the only person who cares about anything besides fighting. I don't know that I'd accuse The New Battle of having anything as grandiose as themes, but it does nod toward acknowledging that there's something problematic about devoting your life to violence and that possibly it's not for everyone.
Mostly, though, this works because The New Battle understands what it needs to do to and follows through rigorously. It helps that the animation is frequently very good, and helps more that Furuhashi - by far the best director to make anything Fatal Fury-related - conjures up some great atmosphere and routinely captivating imagery. Mostly, though, the film gets that there's one element it can't afford to screw up, as Legend of the Hungry Wolf screwed up so badly, and that means exciting, well-conceived fight scenes, of which there are an enormous number - though somehow the makers just about manage to do the whole "this is a fighting game adaptation so everyone has to fight in every possible combination" thing in a way that feels organic and satisfying. No matter who's scrapping at any given moment, every confrontation points toward Krauser and Terry's final reckoning, and that's just enough direction to keep the show on the road, especially given that Krauser is a thoroughly satisfying bad guy, a self-satisfied Teutonic sociopath with an almighty daddy complex, a weird sense of humour, and, er, a love for playing his gigantic organ.
There are, I guess, limits to the heights to which a fighting game adaptation can climb, assuming that adaptation isn't the fantastic Darkstalkers and doesn't cheat by running off and having an actual narrative and proper world-building. But within the generally accepted limits, I'm happy to place The New Battle in the top tier of what this routinely shonky subgenre has to offer. It may not be terribly sophisticated, but as seventy-five minutes of story about people punching each other goes, it does what it does in a shockingly engaging and well-crafted fashion.
The difficulty in reviewing the early nineties OVA miniseries Shuten Doji is that it does one thing that's quite interesting and relatively original and many things that aren't very interesting or original at all. Moreover, that one thing, though it ticks away in the background right from the beginning - a bizarre opening in which two demonic oni battle through space and time - really only becomes a central feature in the last of the four forty-five minute episodes, leaving more than two hours in which the show isn't up to much that's the least bit exciting.
This is most the case in the first couple of parts, and it doesn't help going in with the knowledge that this is a Go Nagai adaptation, because the basic setup is so similar to Devilman, by far the best Nagai work I've come across, and Shuten Doji never operates on remotely the same sort of level. Then again, even were Nagai's name not on the box, it wouldn't take much guessing that he was behind this, given the emphasis on gross-out bloodshed and particularly given the awe-inspiring levels of misogyny and sexualised violence. That's most prevalent, and most obnoxious, in the first part, in which our teenaged hero Jiro wakes up to his magical powers, while Miyuki, the girl who has a crush on him, mainly spends her time being kidnapped, stripped, and nearly raped, before being licked all over by a demon, setting a pattern for her character that Shuten Doji will have scant interest in shaking off.
Mind you, while I claimed Shuten Doji only has one legitimately interesting feature, it's mildly intriguing how much each of the parts feels distinct from the others: I'd struggle to class this as entirely a virtue, but it's certainly something. The jump between one and two is most dramatic, in that, though it's possible to follow the logical course of events, it seems strange to suddenly find that Jiro's gathered a group of protectors, especially since he could have done with their help throughout the first part. And though the leap in part three, whereby we're suddenly watching a sci-fi movie with spaceships and a killer android, ought to be more jarring, it isn't, perhaps because the similar hop in the opening sequence suggested those spaceships had to pop up somewhere. And then there's the fourth part, which I really don't want to spoil, so let's just say that again it's joltingly different from what's gone before.
I liked that ending on the whole, and while its ambitions aren't altogether new and possibly didn't add up to anything that made an enormous amount of sense, they're enough to set the show apart from the mass of its contemporaries. Which is nice, but maybe not the biggest help when the previous three episodes have failed so thoroughly to distinguish themselves, with the possible exception of a score that borrows heavily and obviously from all sorts of places but does an excellent job in the process. The animation, though, is nothing special, the writing definitely isn't, and while it's sort of gratifying that each episode is doing its own self-contained thing, those are all things we've seen frequently elsewhere.
Then again, hugely unpleasant attitude toward its female characters not withstanding, there was nothing in Shuten Doji that I found actively off-putting, either. I'd even go so far as to place it in the upper tier of Go Nagai adaptations I've seen - though that's barely a compliment! - and I've watched many a worse slice of fantasy-horror with a supernaturally powered teenage protagonist, too. It's definitely not great in any way whatsoever, but by merit of being slightly above average until an ingenious, bonkers, and memorable ending, I'm slightly surprised that Shuten Doji isn't better remembered or regarded.
Lupin the 3rd: Napoleon's Dictionary is what happens when undeniably talented people make something without any visible enthusiasm or inspiration. The team of screenwriter Hiroshi Kashiwabara and director Osamu Dezaki was capable of excellent work together on the Lupin franchise, so much so that it's hard to imagine they could have collaborated on a film with no merit whatsoever. Yet, for whatever reason, both of them seem to have been mostly checked out while they were making this one.
Kashiwabara gets most actively wrong, as a brief summary of the plot neatly illustrates: in this episode, master thief Lupin steals a vintage car so that he can participate in a vintage car rally so that he can win the titular dictionary so that he can find a clue to the actual treasure. Moreover, two of those steps are utterly unnecessary, as the film itself inadvertently admits: Lupin swears that he can't simply steal the dictionary from its current owner, then ultimately does so with zero apparent effort. And speaking of zero effort, that's effectively what Dezaki is providing at the helm ... bar one brief flashback scene, there are none of his signature stylistic flourishes here, which isn't necessarily a bad thing given how annoying they can be, but the trouble is that there's not much of anything else either. His direction is bland and functional and could be the work of most any mid-tier director working in anime at the beginning of the nineties, to the point where I almost wonder whether he farmed this one off onto the office junior while he concentrated his efforts elsewhere. Given that he was extremely busy at the time and also banging out some of the worst work of his career, it's easy to believe.
However, let's assume for the moment that Napoleon's Dictionary was indeed another Kashiwabara / Dezaki joint, if only for the reason that, on a scene-by-scene basis, it's just charming enough to feel like it is. Kashiwabara's script may be all over the place and shockingly devoid of momentum, but he's more than capable of flinging out a few great lines and solid scenes; Dezaki may have been mostly asleep at the wheel, but on the occasions when he wakes up, it's a reminder that few people have ever got Lupin the way he did. The best material here is built around the Lupin / Zenigata relationship, and I think this may be the first film to point out the extent to which the characters are sides of the same coin, so that's nice to see. Though Fujiko is barely present, Jigen's literally along for the ride, and Goemon's mostly occupied with imagining himself as the hero of a Yakuza flick, so it's fair to say that Kashiwabara still managed to drop the ball hard with every other character. Oh, and the animation is pretty rough, so it's not as though that's much of a distraction - though here as he failed to do in From Siberia with Love, Dezaki marshals his resources sufficiently that there are moments of relative quality. Which sort of sums up Napoleon's Dictionary: there's just enough flair and imagination and classic Lupin goodness to not make for a total washout, but nowhere near enough to add up to a legitimately good film.
You don't have to look far to see what Samurai Troopers: Message could have been, because it's right there on the screen. The new footage here is nice indeed and the story it tells, a deep dive into series lore via a character seeking revenge for a tragic incident in the distant past, is a perfectly serviceable one with plenty of potential. But notice what I said there, "new footage"? Well, there's the problem, or at any rate the one absolutely inexcusable problem. Of the five episodes, amounting to just short of two and a half hours, I'd be surprised if more than thirty minutes wasn't cobbled together either from the TV series that this is supposedly a grand finale to or from the preceding OVA, Legend of the Inferno Armor.
Obviously that's an enormous shortcoming, there's no two ways about it. Yet it's still just about possible to see how something worthwhile could have been constructed from the available resources. Samurai Troopers the series was, after all, hardly cheap or ugly, the previous OVA looked rather splendid on occasions, and so it's not like that footage is bad as such. Granted, for any viewer who'd watched both, there'd be a measure of frustration in paying afresh to watch something they'd already seen, sliced up and taken out of context, but if the goal was both a nostalgic look back at and a challenging re-examination of the series up until this point, you can conceive of this working well enough to distract from the absurdly obvious cost-cutting.
And again I know that to be the case, because Samurai Troopers: Message gets things right just enough that its better self is right there to see. Indeed, for the first couple of episodes, I was cautiously hopeful. Since I haven't seen the series, most of what was on offer was new to me, but more than that, there was something legitimately weird and exciting about the format, the bulk of which involves one character narrating over a montage of clips. Whatever the motivation, that's a little radical as far as mainstream animation goes, the more so because Masashi Ikeda's awesomely self-indulgent script leans heavily on poetic introspection, to the extent that it's easy to forget this isn't some European art movie done up in the guise of a show about teens fighting bad guys using magical suits of armour.
All of that remains true to the end, more or less, but it's not a sustainable formula. By the third episode, my patience was waning, as it became apparent that this wasn't an introduction to get us to the point where the plot kicked in and the new footage overrode the old, this was it: the makers really did only have the budget for a single episode and enough story for maybe two or three and yet decided, for whatever reason, to drag that out to two and a half excruciating hours. And yes, once it becomes clear that there's no reward coming, this does get pretty excruciating. The nadir is a sequence in which one character sits listening to their voicemail messages, and I swear, the only actual animation is the blinking light on the answerphone. This goes on for so long that, though I only watched it last night, I'm struggling to believe I didn't hallucinate it in some mad Samurai Troopers-fuelled delirium, because who has the nerve to do that? Who wouldn't throw in the odd close-up or cutaway to distract us from how we're literally watching two frames of animation looping over and over for five whole minutes?
It's rare that we get a title I can't recommend to anyone for any reason, and it's rarer still when said title isn't even that bad. I mean, I've been positive about things that, taken as the sum of their parts, were probably much worse. Samurai Troopers: Message has some intermittently fine animation and a strong concept that it occasionally carries off, not to mention a terrific score - though for all I know, much of that was also pillaged from the series. At any rate, it undoubtedly has virtues, and as a sort of bizarre anime tone poem deconstructing shounen anime and super sentai shows, there are moments when it exerts a hypnotic fascination. But if you're new to Samurai Troopers, that's hardly going to keep you amused through such an unearned running time, and if you're a fan looking for the thrill of a true and satisfying climax, I can only imagine what a kick in the teeth this would be.
-oOo-
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