How on earth did these eighties posts become a regular feature of a blog that has its chronological parameters baked right into the title? Obviously it has a lot to do with me being awful at following the rules I set myself to keep this whole exercise within a remotely manageable scope; but equally as often, it's just that I pick stuff up because it looks interesting or I've heard good things about it and only realise once I get round to writing my review that it came out in the wrong decade. That was the case with a couple of the titles here, and inevitably I then end up reviewing some other stuff that I might have settled for just watching for my own amusement so as not to be left with half a post - which is how I'm talking about a kid's movie that's a whole nine years too early for our purposes!
And why I'm bothering to explain any of this is beyond me! After all, we've got some terrific anime this time around, in the shape of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, Twilight of the Cockroaches, Outlanders, and Macross: Do You Remember Love?
You have to respect the willingness - nay, the eagerness! - of eighties Japanese children's films to go to thoroughly dark places. The Fantastic Adventures of Unico doesn't so much toy with questions of mortality, grief, isolation, and the depredations of age as it does fling itself at them headfirst. What we have here is a cutesy kids adventure that opens with its protagonist being sentenced to death by the gods for the crime of bringing too much unearned happiness to humanity, and though that sentence is quickly commuted to banishment to the ends of creation, it's a fair taste of what's to come. In short order, the chosen agent of the gods, the West Wind, takes pity on our magical infant unicorn hero and drops him off, instead, at the most isolated spot she can find, reasoning that if there's no-one around for him to bring joy to, he can't very well incur the wrath of his creators any more than he already has. But it's not long before the briefly traumatised but ever-optimistic Unico is trying to befriend a demon, a project that goes about as well as you'd expect, in that - spoiler alert, I suppose - he winds up dead within minutes. It doesn't stick, of course, or we wouldn't have much of a film, but you sure feel like it might when you're watching an adorable, pink-haired unicorn child drowning in a seething ocean.
I can't overstress how weird this is; bar a brief interlude in which we're introduced to one of the most delightful cats in all of animation history, there's nary a scene of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico's ninety minute run time in which something emotionally challenging isn't happening. But I also can't overstress how charming and engaging the film is and how much that grows out of its aggressively bleak themes rather than acting as a counterpoint to them. Unico is a kindly innocent in a world where even the gods are seriously screwed up, and though he has magical powers that basically let him do whatever the plot requires, they only work when he loves and is loved in return. Unico's is a world in which even small cruelties can be debilitating, and that lends the moments of kindness and decency that crop up vastly more weight than they have in the average kiddie flick, where the stakes are nonexistent and the forces of evil are more obstacles to be overcome than genuine threats.
It helps, mind you, that the film is lovely to look at, with gorgeously detailed backdrops and simple characters animated with an emphasis on nuance and personality, all gathered together in an aesthetic that somehow squares the circle between its seventies Osamu Tezuka source material and its eighties movie present: the lush colour scheme favours supersaturated shades and burning neon far more than you'd think could possibly work, but somehow it does. Fortunately, perhaps, the soundtrack doesn't try the same trick, and the many songs, mostly delivered by singer / songwriter Iruka, are gentle, folksy things that are so legitimately sweet and sad that they stay on the right side of kitsch.
Which, I think, sums up The Fantastic Adventures of Unico in its entirety. It ought to be unbearable to adult eyes, but, like its hero, it's so genuine and good-hearted, and so willing to confront and try and overcome the darkness of its world, that it somehow turns a tale of a magical unicorn into something complex and powerful, without forgetting that it also needs to be cute and lively and full of colour. I can't begin to imagine how actual children would respond to this, and though I didn't sample the English dub, it's all but impossible to imagine how that wouldn't push the thing off the tenuous tightrope it's walking; it would take almost nothing to make this too cutesy, and less to make it so existentially terrifying that the average child would need therapy on the back of the experience. At the same time, I suspect that emotionally sturdy kids are exactly the right audience, and if I had any to hand, I'd be eager to sit them down and let them experience the bittersweet joys of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico.
It's curious, really, that there isn't more anime that combines animation with live-action footage. Oh, I can think of a few titles that feature both in the same place - Otaku No Video springs to mind as an obvious example - but ones that combine the two, in the manner of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Off hand, I'm not certain I've encountered a single one beside Twilight of the Cockroaches.
Granted, the technique would hardly be an ideal fit for every project, and it's definitely hard to conceive of a more perfect usage than what it's put to here. Twilight of the Cockroaches tells the tale of a tribe of 'roaches who've been living for long enough in a state of nonconfrontational equilibrium with the human whose apartment they occupy that they've come to regard that as just how things are - and the film's central gimmick is to render the bugs in hand-drawn animation while using live-action footage for everything else. (There are two exceptions: a talking dog turd done up in some rather splendid stop-motion animation and one tiny spot of cheating that bothered me more than it probably should have, especially since it's in service of an especially fine bit of visual storytelling.) Anyway, clearly things can't go on as they are, and cracks start to show when our 'roaches encounter a refugee from another tribe that live across the field behind their building; a victim of cockroach / human warfare, he's held up as an example of how great their ceasefire is, but it's obvious to us, if not them, that war is bound to reach their shores before too long. Because it so happens that the woman who lives in the apartment across the field has caught the eye of the sad-sack layabout who's our protagonists' inadvertent landlord, and suddenly he has every reason to clean his act up.
All told, it's rather a strange narrative, one that very much has the feel of an allegory but at the same time is so specific that it's hard to see how it would map onto anything in our reality. Apparently director Yoshida maintained that the cockroaches represented Japan, with the humans as the rest of the world, which does neither side any favours but also does the movie itself a disservice: it does such a good a job of giving its pest stars their own inner life, anthropomorphizing them but never to the extent that we can forget they're insects of a sort that tend to inspire revulsion more than affection. In fact, the register Twilight of the Cockroaches often drifts into is a sort of cosmic horror, since we have a far greater understanding of what's going on and what it means than they do, leaving us full of dread on their behalf as they blithely blunder closer to oblivion.
Nevertheless, plot-wise, I don't know that Twilight of the Cockroaches is wholly a success, and at an hour and forty-five minutes, probably some of its odder digressions could have stood a dash of trimming. But what absolutely does work is the look of the thing: even in the dire print Eastern Star put out, presumably because it's all that survives, the film is a delight to experience. The animation isn't technically outstanding and the designs are relatively simple, albeit brimming with charm, but the integration with the live-action footage is outstanding, ingenious and adventurous in a way I've rarely encountered prior to this. Once you get used to it, which takes all of a couple of minutes, it works and works beautifully, adding a special magic to the storytelling that makes even its odd flat moment feel special. Frankly, if this is what Japan could pull off by mixing live action and animation, it's a hell of a shame the experiment didn't inspire more imitators, but I'm glad we at least got something so deeply weird and individual as Twilight of the Cockroaches.
You can tell a lot about Outlanders from its opening couple of minutes and the way it handles its meet-cute between alien princess Kahm and bumbling human Tetsuya. We're introduced to Kahm as she's single-handedly assaulting the Earth, and, having seen off the air force with her gigantic spaceship, she gets down to slaughtering a bunch of soldiers with her sword in rather bloody fashion. One of their decapitated heads happens to land in the hole where poor Tetsuya is hiding, which is enough to scare him into the open, but not enough to convince him that standing gawping at Kahm - not to mention trying to take her photo! - is a seriously bad idea. Still, his camera somehow deflects her sword, the two end up wrestling, and Tetsuya can't help noticing that Kahm isn't wearing much of anything, by which point Kahm's also finding the whole business a bit of a turn-on, and wouldn't you know it but five minutes later she's decided that it's high time the two of them were wed - and the sooner the wedding night arrives, the better.
Aside from being a bonkers way to get your central couple together, that opening teaches us quite a bit about where Outlanders' priorities lie. Despite the relatively brief fifty minute running time, we'll have a couple more sword fights and the odd space battle, but far more than either, we'll have Kahm and Tetsuya really wanting to jump each other's bones at every available opportunity. Outlanders is delightfully frank about sex in a way most popular culture and definitely most vintage anime almost never is: we're not really expected to believe this is some grand love story, just that these two kids are insanely hot for each other, sufficiently that Kahm's willing to defy her tyrannical father and let Earth off from its destruction and Tetsuya's willing to almost get himself killed and generally to put up with all manner of space weirdness. But they're not the only couple here, we also have Kahm's best friend Battia and rebellious ship's captain Geobaldi, and their relationship is even more openly sexual, to a quite startling degree - not to say that we see a lot, though Outlanders does get surprisingly explicit at points, but in the way the film doesn't remotely dance around the fact that they're two adults who really, really enjoy getting it on with each other.*
I suppose that all this doesn't necessarily make Outlanders good, but since the topic of sex is generally treated with such immaturity, it does make for an awfully refreshing and distinctive watch. Mind you, strip out the hanky-panky and you'd still have a decidedly odd title, one that very much feels as though there's a great deal of plot happening beyond the edges of the frame but still manages to barrel through a satisfying chunk of story in less than an hour. In this, the wonderful design work is a major help, not so much for filling in the missing details but more for selling us on an entire galactic civilisation just by how visually thought through every aspect is. The animation is nothing to write home about, though it's perfectly good and laced with nice character work, but the designs are enough to make for something that's always a pleasure to watch.
However, even putting aside the fact that a space opera rom-com that's obsessed with sex isn't everyone's cup of tea, Outlanders is less than it could be. Perhaps it has something to do with being all the way from back in 1986 - a fact I admittedly wouldn't have guessed from the visuals - but Yamada's direction has a certain stiltedness, a certain uncertainty of tone, and it's not helped by Kei Wakakusa's score, which plays as though this were straight sci-fi and thus does more to undermine the tone than back it up. Neither of those problems are calamitous, but they're enough to leave me imaging a version of Outlanders that works just slightly better than this. Still, I'm plenty happy with what we got; anything this committed to its own weirdness is almost bound to find itself on my good side.
Macross: Do You Remember Love? is a compilation movie retelling the first three quarters or so of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series that wrapped in the previous year, and based on experience, you'd think there's a definite cap to how good a compilation movie can be, for at least a couple of reasons. For a start, that generally means recycled TV footage, which obviously is unlikely to look too hot on a cinema screen, and then there's how basically flawed the whole principle is: a story that's suited to multiple television episodes isn't generally one that can be crammed into a couple of hours without losing any of its depth or nuance.
Having not seen the TV series, I can't comment on that second point, except to say that Macross: Do You Remember Love? certainly doesn't feel like a work that's been stripped of anything at all, or indeed one that's been squashed into a shape that isn't the perfect fit for its material. There is, in retrospect, a certain lumpiness to its story that you could see as representing chunks of multiple episodes, but there was never a second where that bothered me, and indeed there are frequent structural triumphs, such as the way crucial elements mirror each other, that make it hard to imagine how this could have functioned as twenty-some episodes. Its story is a fine bit of space opera, one that pulls off the oft-attempted and even more oft screwed-up trick of marrying personal conflicts to grand cosmic drama, in this case a love triangle between pop idol Lynn Minmay, pilot Hikaru Ichijyo, and his commanding officer Misa Hayase and the tale of how the titular space fortress finds itself entangled in a war between alien species whose history is deeply connected with the Earth's. Honestly, outside of Star Wars at its best, I don't know that I've ever seen a better pairing of small-scale human drama with galaxy-shaking mythologising: there are charming personal moments and there are moments of epic scale, and not only do the two never pull focus from each other, some of the best scenes web them inextricably. It helps that the pace, while not slow, is willing to linger on the character stuff, so that, for example, when Hikaru and Lynn are trapped in a damaged portion of the Macross during a battle, we spend enough time with them that their relationship gains some proper weight. As the title suggests, Do You Remember Love? is very much a love story front and centre, but somehow it manages to make that the core around which a great deal of other stuff spins.
Oh, and that other persistent flaw with compilation movies, the reuse of TV footage? Well, there's none of that here. The movie was reanimated in its entirety, and I suppose that really means we have to view it as something different, more a reimaging, but at any rate it looks astoundingly good, not just in the sense of being exceptionally well animated but for the sheer imagination and ingenuity that co-directors Noboru Ishiguro and Shôji Kawamori bring to their material. There are no end of show-stopping scenes, with perhaps the most memorable being the one that literally stops the show: without going into spoilery details, there's a fairly astounding sequence near the end of a space battle with one character foregrounded that makes the film's marrying of the personal and the epic satisfyingly blatant. But then, I could spend this whole review picking favourite scenes and shots from Do You Remember Love? and while you're watching, the breadth of its ideas and attention to detail seems practically endless.
Granted, there are odd points I could quibble on if I really wanted to; for a film that's so much about music and that features a pop idol as one of its central characters, the music is often disappointingly on the bland side, and I suppose that if you weren't willing to meet it halfway, the plot is much too ludicrous to be taken half as seriously as it is; view it with a cynical eye and there's plenty that would make for easy laughs. But Do You Remember Love?, with its marrying of enormous, bombastic sci-fi thrills and genuinely engaging character drama, is the sort of film that sweeps you up and carries you along, and it would take a hard heart indeed not to surrender to its wiles. It's no wonder this was an enormous hit at the time, and nearly four decades on, it's lost none of its charm.
-oOo-
* Of course, one of them is an anthropomorphised dog. Hey, this is still anime!
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