Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 98

We're in the ballpark of having a proper unifying theme for our four entries this time around, which is always a surprise.  Granted, its a theme that covers quite a bit of anime from the time, but all of these titles were attempts to pick up a beloved franchise years or even decades after its heyday and to take it in a bold new direction.  This is something anime can be unusually good at, and for me that has a lot to do with a willingness to go against the apparent grain of what made a property popular or successful and try to find an excitingly different angle, meaning that, while the results aren't necessarily always great, they at least tend to interesting.

Do these four manage to pull that off, though, or do they just end up as crass imitations?  Let's dig into Gatchaman, New Hurricane Polymar, Tekkaman Blade II, and New Kimagure Orange Road: Summer's Beginning...

Gatchaman, 1994, dir: Akihiko Nishiyama

Resurrecting a classic property years later is a tightrope walk.  Alter too much and you risk losing the original appeal; alter too little and you've made a rehash rather than a reboot.  Go too dark, go too funny, go too campy, change the characters, don't change the characters ... there are no end of ways to get it wrong, and because you're dealing with something that was once - and you're presumably hoping, still is - much-loved, the ire you'll receive when you screw up, or even just go a little bit awry, is liable to be far harsher than if you'd messed up on a fresh idea.

Gatchaman - that is, the 1994 reimagining of the seventies TV series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, which reached the West in mangled form under the title Battle of the Planets - absolutely nails it.  And though the reasons it does so are many and varied, I'd argue that the primary source of its success is an absolute, unshakeable conviction that Gatchaman, and more specifically the superhero team that goes by that name, is the coolest thing ever.  Practically from its opening moments, Gatchaman grabs you by the throat and screams, "Look at them!  They're science ninjas, damn it!  Ninjas!  With science stuff!  And they're dressed like birds!  How cool is that?!"  Which, if you'd asked me two days ago, I'd have replied, "I guess maybe mildly cool?" but now that I've seen the Gatchaman OVA would have to admit is so cool that everything else henceforward is going to seem just a bit less cool for the fact that this exists.

Because, in director Nishiyama's hands, these kids really are awesome.  One of the major changes, perhaps inevitably, is an upping of the violence levels, and while that's generally an obvious and tacky route to take a reboot down, here it means that the Gatchaman team get to really ninja it up, taking out endless goons in ludicrously slick fashion.  Plus, though there's no actual sex and nary a sniff of romance, the sex appeal has been dialled up to eleven: unsurprisingly, that means token girl member Jun looking hot and getting stuck with a flash of nudity, but actually it's team leader Ken who gets sexualised the most.  (Indeed, Jun is treated with more dignity than this type of show normally allows, being both a genuinely useful team member and as deft at kicking ass as anyone.)  More generally, though, the attention to detail in ensuring that everything relating to the team - every pose, every gesture, every neat vehicle transformation and dramatic cape flap - is as hypnotically stylish as can be suggests a passion for this material that went far beyond the usual cash-grubbing.

The same is true for the animation, which, taking into account the fact that this is an OVA of two and a bit hours, is awfully close to "no expenses spared" territory.  Obviously, some expenses were spared, and that even includes a spot of reused animation, but since that consists of the sort of sequences you'd expect to be reused - the one I first spotted was Joe's plane docking with the team's supersonic jet God Phoenix - it's almost more a virtue than a flaw.  The same goes for the score, which is often very cheesy indeed, down to an absurd hair-rock anthem for the closing credits, and yet feels like a perfect fit for a title that manages to have its cake and eat it by simultaneously going down the seemingly incompatible superhero routes of dark brooding and gleeful retro camp and somehow landing them both.

Arguably, the only point where that categorically doesn't work is the plot, or at any rate the parts of the plot that relate to its villain's motives, which are the most incompressible, self-contradictory nonsense you could hope for.  Yet even there, it's hard to grumble; probably that (and other issues, for that matter) would stand out more to someone who'd never encountered Gatchaman before in either its Japanese or US iterations, but with the TV-footage-recycling movie and dim childhood memories of the show behind me, nonsensical villain motives felt very much par for the course.  I suppose in a sense that's giving Gatchaman bonus points for being Gatchaman, but so be it: if there's one lesson I've learned lately, it's that Gatchaman is the coolest thing imaginable and deserves all the bonus points it can get.*

New Hurricane Polymar, 1996, dir: Akiyuki Shinbo

On the face of it, New Hurricane Polymar is something we've seen plenty of around these parts, and indeed something we were looking at just a paragraph ago, a gritty reboot of a much older series that attempts to drag its source material into the present without losing too much of what was appealing in the first place.  Though within anime and Japanese culture in general, we could go further than that, since shows about youthful heroes battling crime with the aid of super-suits of one sort or another are part of the bread and butter of the nation's media.  And - again, on the face of it - there really isn't a lot to differentiate New Hurricane Polymar.  Teenager Takeshi Yoroi finds himself the recipient of a curious red helmet in the mail, sent by a schoolfriend he hasn't seen in ages, a genius scientist who we already know and he quickly discovers has been murdered by a vicious terrorist organisation hellbent on hastening the human race's extinction from climate disaster.  Fortunately, or maybe not so fortunately, Takeshi is the sole employee of hapless detective Joe Kuruma, who's just competent enough to track the terrorists but not at all competent enough to do anything about their shenanigans, at least not without the aid of a besuited hero by the name of Hurricane Polymar.

One obvious element that sets this apart from similar titles is the talent at the helm.  Here we have another work from someone we've seen a lot of in these reviews, director Akiyuki Shinbo, who'd only really come to widespread fame on the back of the superb Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but who'd been quietly banging out work that ranged from respectable to great for nearly two decades by that point.  Back in 1996, Shinbo was the better kind of hack, in that I don't imagine this was a passion project and there's not a great deal of directorial presence, but at the same time, everything is delivered with an unobtrusive sense of style that suggests a creator with talent and ideas to spare.  However, if you're up on your anime, it's not Shinbo who leaves the most noticeable mark but character designer Yasuomi Umetsu, who a couple of years on from this would make his own directorial feature debut with the notorious Kite, where he'd blatantly rip off one of his own designs to such an extent that it's really damn noticeable.  I mean, I had to keep doing double takes to be sure that Takeshi and Joe's landlady wasn't actually teen assassin Sawa and about to kill everyone in the room.**  Honestly, it's a little distracting, but hey, at least we get some unusually imaginative character designs, so there's that.

Neither Shinbo nor Umetsu's presence, however, is what ultimately makes New Hurricane Polymar feel different from its many counterparts.  What does the trick is more a matter of tone, and how the show opts to push hard into being about comedy as much as it's about action.  And even that isn't really it, since anime is frequently willing to throw daft comedy antics into something that, judging by the bloody violence and gratuitous nudity, might not be the most obvious fit.  But New Hurricane Polymar takes that to a whole 'nother level in a way I can't say I've seen before: it feels, essentially, like two different shows smushed together.  The action stuff is very much what you'd expect of the genre and is taken completely seriously; I'd go so far as to say that there isn't a hint of humour at any point when Takeshi's suited up.  Whereas outside of those scenes, the comedy balance is way higher than you'd expect, to the extent that we get regular insights from Joe Kuruma's dog and there's a running joke about how his office is dangerously uninhabitable that runs so hard that it starts to overtake the A plot.

It's all very weird, and while it's maddening that only two half-hour episodes of New Hurricane Polymar were ever made, I can kind of see why this might not have found its market.  Were the action scenes not so deadly serious, and indeed so well done, I'd be inclined to suggest that it feels like the work of people who simply didn't want to make the product they'd been handed and decided to sabotage it from within.  But that's not at all the vibe: the stuff with Hurricane Polymar is plenty good in its own right, it just keeps on taking a back seat to the comic side of things, which has the benefit of feeling that bit fresher.  Slam them together and you definitely have an odd mix that never quite gels, but at the same time one that's surprising and entertaining in a way a synopsis would barely hint at.  If New Hurricane Polymar had been finished - and hey, it's only missing one episode! - I'd be pushing it enthusiastically, but even at only an hour, it's still a bit special.

Tekkaman Blade II, 1994, dir: Hideki Tonokatsu

Just what is it you come to a sci-fi show about people in cool suits fighting aliens for?  Is it the people in cool suits fighting aliens?  Or is it more the rambling character drama?  Do you really like to watch your heroes bickering about nothing much?  And then making up?  And then bickering some more?  Do you want them to obsess incessantly over who has a crush on who, and would absolutely everyone have a crush on somebody else - somebody who's guaranteed not to like them in return - as though they're really in high school and not defending the Earth from imminent annihilation?  Well, if all of that's the case, then boy are you going to love Tekkaman Blade II.

An OVA follow-up to a lengthy series that sounds as though it didn't need much following up, Tekkaman Blade II is effectively Tekkaman The Next Generation, which would be a reasonable enough approach to take if it weren't for the fact that the new character it fixes its attentions on is Yumi Francois, a young mechanic who's recruited to the team for absolutely no imaginable reason.  Granted, the "apparently incompetent new recruit turns out to be the one team member who can save the world" trope is about as old as sci-fi anime itself, but it pretty much has to go one of two ways: either they have some hitherto-unknown power that makes them especially capable or they're so uniquely personable that they become the heart and soul that nobody realised the team was missing.  So that Yumi Francois starts out as an annoying cretin and ends up as an annoying cretin and only accomplishes anything whatsoever because she's inadvertently given access to a devastating superweapon that she just barely figures out how to control is ... well, it's a fresh take, I'll give Tekkaman Blade II that much.

Fortunate for those fans of teenaged soap opera, then, that the show is much more interested in Yumi's love life - though even there, it's even more interested in showing her and any other female characters naked at every opportunity.  And somewhere amid the lingering shots of bare breasts and bums and the endless scenes of Yumi pining over the hilariously nicknamed D-Boy, there's that aforementioned sci-fi show about people in cool suits fighting aliens, which for the first three episodes feels so pushed into the background that you wonder why they bothered.  When an actual plot of sorts starts up after the midway point, it's quite the shock, but an improvement nonetheless, since those back three episodes contain the seeds of an interesting story.  Unfortunately, it's one that relies heavily on knowledge of the original series that the OVA has shown zero interest in sharing, and even at its best, the delivery's decidedly clunky.  Most noticeably, it seems the writers heard about foreshadowing once but didn't get how it was supposed to work; a crucial character relationship is dropped in three episodes before it will matter by having one of the female pilots take a phone call from her father - while topless, of course! - and another pilot's tragic backstory is hinted at by having him randomly quoting the bible, again a good hour before the reasons why will become apparent.  It's so clumsy that it's kind of endearing.

The only element of Tekkaman Blade II that's unequivocally a success is the animation, which is thoroughly decent all the way through, if never eye-popping.  And the bulk of the design work is relatively appealing, too, though when things go wrong they go really wrong.  In particular, I struggle to think of an instance where that hideous trope of making the female characters' suits look super-girly so we don't for an instant forget they're girls has felt more stupid and inappropriate; Yumi's suit looks as though someone had a last-minute panic and decided to stick giant cherry blossom petals all over it.  Like Yumi herself, it's a bizarre attempt to bring something kitschy and cutesy to a show that otherwise seems determined to be quite grim and serious, and as with most everything about Tekkaman Blade II, it leaves you with the distinct sense that the creators had no idea what they were trying to accomplish.

New Kimagure Orange Road: Summer's Beginning, 1996, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

It's hard to know just what we're meant to make of Summer's Beginning.  It came relatively close on the heels of the Kimagure Orange Road TV series and the prior film that brought it to an ostensible close, with a gap of a mere eight years, and certainly positions itself more as a continuation than any sort of spin-off or reboot.  And yet it does insist on calling itself New Kimagure Orange Road and in general on having the feel of a revamp even when it picks up so directly from I Want to Return to That Day that it repeats a handful of crucial scenes by way of a recap.

Then again, you can see the makers might have felt that a bit of ambiguity was in their favour.  Continuing a plot that was functionally complete while also insisting on taking things in a new direction has the unfortunate effect of making Summer's Beginning feel distinctly like fan fiction, and it has to jump through quite a string of hoops even to get itself started.  This second movie picks up three years after the first left off - with Kyosuke and Madoka finally a couple and Hikaru heartbroken but already bouncing back via a burgeoning career as a dancer in musicals - and thus far, their lives have continued to follow roughly the same tangents.  Kyosuke and Madoka are still together, though his job as a photojournalist has kept them separate for a while, and Hikaru has been Stateside with her work.  However, that all gets shaken up when the present-day Kyosuke and the Kyosuke of three years earlier both have near-fatal accidents, leaving younger Kyosuke in the body of his older self and older Kyosuke stuck in some sort of limbo.

This is a breathtakingly contrived way of getting Summer's Beginning to the point it apparently needs to be at, which is to tempt Kyosuke with the what-might-have-been of seeing a more grown-up Hikaru, one who's come out the other side of the pain of their breakup as a stronger, tougher, more likeable person, but also isn't so past it that she doesn't have a yearning for the guy who dumped her all those years ago.  And as riddled with problems as that setup is, it's not devoid of appeal.  Like I said, this has the feel of something fans eager for more might cook up, yet it also seems like the work of people who genuinely cared about these characters and knew their history and hidden depths and wanted to do them justice.  On that level, it's often a success: as much as I loved I Want to Return to That Day, I wouldn't class myself as a Kimagure Orange Road devotee, yet there was many a moment that I got a kick out of.  The best of those, for me, revolved around Madoka and Hikaru, and if there was a loose thread left hanging, it was that their friendship seemed irreparably broken, so I appreciated the less cavalier approach Summer's Beginning took to the matter of their relationship.

Not everything succeeds so well.  My biggest bugbear was how obsessed Summer's Beginning was with the prospect of Kyosuke and Madoka first sleeping together, to the extent that it becomes a crucial ongoing plot point; it's handled tolerably enough, in fairness, but it definitely undermines the maturity shown elsewhere and veers terribly close to being the wrong sort of fan service.  And there are some technical issues along the way, too, in the shape of a slight but noticeable lack of polish in places where the film would greatly have benefited from it.  For example, a crucial scene in which Hikaru gets to show off her dancing falls flat because, if the animation is to be believed, she isn't really all that good.  On the other hand, the film does an excellent job of updating the classic character designs and of using its visuals to convey the crucial shift into adulthood that's so essential to its themes.

There isn't really a good reason for New Kimagure Orange Road: Summer's Beginning to exist, following on as it does from an ending that was to all intents perfect and setting itself the task of answering questions that didn't need asking.  However, perhaps as much through luck as judgement, it hits on some genuinely emotive topics - the idea that this version of Hikaru that Kyosuke is so enticed by only exists because their breakup forced her to grow up and find her inner strength is quite fascinating - and there are plenty of individual scenes that land with real force.  The problem is that Summer's Beginning has to wrap itself in such knots to get to that material, and all the body-swapping and time-jumping stuff is much less interesting than the simple character beats that, after all, are what Kimagure Orange Road was fundamentally about.  Still, there's pleasure to be had here, even if its not consistent, making for an addition to the franchise that just about earns its seat at the table.

-oOo-

Despite what I said in the introduction, there's only one real triumph here, though what a triumph it is!  The Gatchaman OVA is a masterclass in how to get a revamp right, so much so that it's hardly fair to weigh anything else against it.  On the other hand, Tekkaman Blade II is the only major failure, and I don't know whether that has much to do with it being a reboot, though it would surely have been better if it had settled on either telling its own story or developing what had come before rather than uneasily shuttling between the two.  As for the rest, New Hurricane Polymar is perhaps the most interesting title in terms of how it goes about reimaging its source material, whereas New Kimagure Orange Road is the most strange and baffling, and probably deserves credit for being as good as it is when it's so inherent misconceived.

And with that, we're exceedingly close to the big one hundred post, which I'm mostly through writing ... I'd have got there a lot quicker if I didn't keep getting dizzy from all the excitement!  In the meantime, however, we've one more batch of random nonsense to look forward to, so expect that in the not-too-distant future...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* If there were two, the other one would be that when I grow up I want to be a science ninja.

** Though what I was really reminded of, and what New Hurricane Polymar is reminiscent of in quite a number of ways, is Umetsu's much-underrated 2004 TV series Mezzo DSA.