It's fitting that, here on the cusp of the big one hundred post, we should go all in on the randomness, and this is definitely among the oddest selections we've had yet, if only for how I've somehow ended up with gross-out body horror placed next to a charming kids' movie about a friendly whale. Aside from our first entry, finishing off the Lupin the Third marathon I've apparently been crawling my way through since way back in post 28 and November of 2017, there's nothing here that could remotely be considered famous or well-regarded. And part of the reason for the obscurity is that, of the four titles here, one of them only ever came out on VHS and another seems to have had about the most limited DVD release imaginable, so you could definitely argue that there's a bit of barrel-scraping going on.
But no, let's try and be optimistic! Surely there's got to be something worth a damn in among Lupin the Third: The Columbus Files, Kama Sutra, Apocalypse Zero, and Fly Peek: Peek the Baby Whale...?
Lupin the Third: The Columbus Files, 1999, dir: Setsuo Takase, Shin'ichi Watanabe
It's a lot of pressure to be the last of your kind of the millennium, so perhaps we shouldn't be unduly harsh toward The Columbus Files for being so mediocre as it is. There's even an argument to be made that by the numbers was the way to go here, capping off a decade of TV specials that often hit considerable heights and sometimes pushed gently at the Lupin envelope but generally were content to turn up and get the job done. And since that's mostly true of The Columbus Files, I'm again left to wonder how much my lack of enthusiasm for it was down to the fact that it was both the last Lupin TV special of the nineties and the last one I'll be covering in these reviews.
The immediate answer to that question is that, sure, there are many ways in which The Columbus Files is fine but not outstanding. The artwork and animation are the one that stands out most: it's pleasing that the film doesn't try to veer too modern, but it just ends up looking very clean and crisp and thus a touch bland in the way anime from 1999 had a tendency to do. There's nothing conspicuously wrong, and that's far from a given with Lupin specials, but two nights on and I struggle to think of a single scene or image that really wowed me. Which is equally true of the narrative, at least in its broadest sense of a series of incidents: The Columbus Files rattles along from set piece to set piece, chucking in the odd comic interlude and pause for exposition, and it's all perfectly entertaining while you're watching, if somewhat overfamiliar if you've seen as many of these as I have.
Stripped down to its nuts and bolts, however, the plot is the one element that goes really, conspicuously wrong, and in rather a frustrating fashion, too. The Columbus Files chooses for its focus Lupin's on-and-off lover and perpetual rival in the art of thievery Fujiko Mine, and specifically concentrates on their relationship and the matter of what actual feelings might or might not lie beneath all of Lupin's clowning and Fujiko's femme fatale games-playing. This is a good angle for a Lupin film to cover, one of my favourite things about the series is that these relationships have plenty of potential depth for the creators willing to dive into them, and there's definitely gold to be mined here. Unfortunately, The Columbus Files chooses to go about its self-imposed task by giving Fujiko amnesia, which is awfully cheesy, but might still get us somewhere interesting, except that Fujiko Mine with amnesia is pretty much not Fujiko Mine at all. The version of the character we get instead is scarcely more than a plot device, a blank slate for Lupin to interact with and a victim to be protected and rescued; put all that against the regular Fujiko, a wily, back-stabbing, outrageously sexy master thief who's always two steps ahead of anyone in the room and ... well, you see the problem.*
The makers address this by introducing a second female protagonist, Rosaria, but that doesn't help because she isn't very interesting either and suffers from being tied into the main story in ways that do her no favours. Come to think of it, The Columbus Files has one of the series' least interesting or thought-through McGuffins and dives so deeply into supervillain-of-the-week territory that it frequently ceases to feel like a Lupin-esque treasure hunt at all. And here we are at the end of the review, and I've almost convinced myself that calling this one mediocre at the start was too kind. But that's not true, I don't think; for the most part, I enjoyed it fine while I was watching, and though I wasn't blind to the narrative problems, the minute-by-minute high jinks were engaging enough to keep me from dwelling too hard. Still, in a world where there are a staggering number of Lupin TV specials to choose from, it's fair to say that this one's more toward the bottom of the pile than the top.
It's almost impressive, really, how bad Kama Sutra manages to be at everything it attempts. And for a forty minute OVA, it attempts quite a bit: at one point or another, it's an historical drama, a goofy comedy, an action movie, and an erotic thriller, at the very least. To do none of those things with more than the barest modicum of competence, well, you don't just luck your way into a film-making mess like that.
Normally at this point I'd take a stab at a bit of a story summary, but among the things Kama Sutra is inordinately lousy at is communicating its plot, so the most I can do is offer up the bare bones. We open in ancient India, and some bad guys are attacking some presumably non-bad guys, and there's a princess whose bodyguard gets killed, and then we cut to the present, at which point archaeologists have found the princess, who's been asleep all this time and has now woken up, which possibly has something to do with a magic sex cup - I definitely remember the magic sex cup being important - and then the main hero has sex with the archaeology professor's assistant, then his girlfriend turns up, then the bad guys arrive again and for some reason the main bad guy isn't dead either, and maybe there was a car chase? I'm pretty sure there was a car chase. And then more stuff happened and, look, I really wasn't concentrating by that point. I mentioned the plot revolves around a magic sex cup, right?
Anyway, none of this is done even the slightest bit well, and also none of it fits together in any practical or productive way. The action is devoid of thrills, the comedy is wacky and wholly lacking in actual jokes, the historical elements and the portrayal of India in general are as crass as you'd expect, and the erotica ... well, I'm torn between thinking that deserves a paragraph all of its own and wanting to skim over it as lightly as possible. Given that the animation is as bad as anything I've ever seen in anime, there was never any hope of it succeeding, but the extent to which Kama Sutra screws up - if you'll pardon the pun - what you'd assume to be it's raison d'être is genuinely special. There's only really one substantial sex scene, and not only does it take place in some bizarre sex pyramid that feels like something out of the movie Cube (and if you're half as prone to claustrophobia as I am is even more terrifying), it's hilariously unadventurous. If most Go Nagai titles feel like the work of an excitable, slightly psychotic twelve-year-old boy who's just discovered his dad's hidden magazine collection, Kama Sutra takes that to a whole new level, and its notions of sex are absolutely those that said twelve-year-old would hold. I mean, this is a supposedly erotic title that considers the woman being on top to be outlandish enough to be worthy of note!
There's a small part of me that wonders if Kama Sutra edges its way into so-bad-it's-good territory; I suspect parts of it will stick in my memory when scenes from merely mediocre anime have long since faded, and there's a fair chance that the nightmare sex pyramid will haunt me until my dying days. But is that a reason to watch it? No, it's most certainly not. However, it is on Youtube, and while normally I'd get a bit sniffy about that socially acceptable piracy site, in this instance, I feel like the only person you'd really be stealing from if you spent ten minutes chuckling over the weirder and more absurd scenes in Kama Sutra is yourself. So if all this talk of sex pyramids and magic sex cups has roused your curiosity, I guess that's an option - but just know that I take no responsibility!
Apocalypse Zero has been sitting on the to-watch shelf for a very long time now, after I bought it out of a vague sense of duty and curiosity - could anything really be as nasty as this famously vile title was rumoured to be? - and then commenced to avoid it at every turn because I'm just not that much of a gore-hound and so much of the anime that's remembered solely for how horrible and boundary-pushing it was has turned out to be a depressing chore. So colour me surprised: I didn't hate Apocalypse Zero. Heck, I even quite enjoyed it. I even got to the end and found myself wishing there was more; the plan was for an entire eight more episodes to finish off the tale begun in the two here, and while I perhaps couldn't have stomached that many, a couple more wouldn't have hurt.
Quite possibly this means I'm not a healthy or well-balanced human being, because there's no getting around it, Apocalypse Zero is phenomenally repellent. Barely five minutes have gone by before we're watching an obese, mostly naked monster-woman sucking the face clean off someone's skull, and there's worse to come from there, all of it running along much the same lines: if you're at all uncomfortable with sexuality played up for maximum grotesqueness or weaponised genitalia or shots of body parts that really ought to be on the inside very much ending up where they shouldn't be, then Apocalypse Zero is going to push your buttons with maniacal determination. And that, I think, is what ultimately made me warm to it; anyone can animate exploding bodies or deformed monstrosities, but to put this much effort and imagination into your unpleasantness? On those terms, Apocalypse Zero is flat-out ingenious, to the point where it not only shocked me but surprised me, jaded film nerd that I am.
Now, I realise I've got this far without making any attempt to explain what the show is actually about, and while I could, I'm not convinced it would do anybody much good. There's nothing original here except the levels of gore and general offensiveness, and on the whole, that's possibly for the best. Because the gore's a lot to process in and of itself, and also clearly where everyone's creative attentions were focused, and likely a searingly original plot would only have got in the way. Apocalypse Zero robs openly from things like Fist of the North Star and Violence Jack with its post-apocalyptic setting and from the likes of The Guyver with its sinister organic super-suits that look nearly as screwed-up and threatening as the villains, and it even dallies with a bit of high-school drama, à la more shows than I could name. But in so much as it cares about any of this, it's on a level somewhere around pastiche, except without any of the overt humour that implies. Apocalypse Zero takes itself entirely seriously, even when things are happening that surely we can't be expected not to find ridiculous, and after a while I came to suspect that was the joke: push the clichés of violent anime far beyond their breaking point, then push a bit further, and dare the audience to either switch off or to laugh.
Like I said, I'm probably a dreadful person, because I did laugh more than once, and frequently it was that gleeful sort of laugh you get from watching creators go to places you never expected them to go to, because there are levels of depravity that most of us - and even the creators of nineties anime video nasties - tend to back away from. Then again, it may simply be that I'm a sucker for well-made animation, no matter what awfulness it's showing, and I'd have given Apocalypse Zero a pass on those grounds alone: compared with many of its peers that went for shocks over content, it's actually rather skilfully and thoughtfully put together. Or just possibly there was a part of me that's been missing the kind of gonzo horror that, for example, a young Peter Jackson used to make in his Bad Taste and Braindead days. Whatever the case, if you like your horror gross and deliriously weird, and you reckon you've seen everything, maybe you could do worse than tracking down Apocalypse Zero and discovering how wrong you can be.
In so much as there are reasons to be talking about Fly Peek: Peek the Baby Whale, they mostly boil down to factors not directly relating to the film itself. Historically its greatest importance is surely that, a couple of years later, Hollywood would - arguably! - file the serial numbers off the story and release it under the title of Free Willy, a film that would go on to be bewilderingly successful and spawn an even more bewildering number of sequels. I mean, I guess there's no proving it, or else we'd surely have heard about the lawsuit, but the two movies are exceedingly similar, down to some very specific details that are hard to rack up to parallel evolution. And then, on a less contentious note, we have the fact that this is the sole feature-length work of director and producer Kôji Morimoto, who's had quite a fascinating career over the years, as both the co-founder of Studio 4°C and the man who's surely contributed to more anthology movies than anyone alive: Robot Carnival, Genius Party, The Animatrix, Short Peace, if you can name an anime anthology, he's probably in there.
None of this should be taken to suggest that Fly Peek - or whatever we choose to call a film that distributor Kiseki would only ever release on VHS and under an unholy splodge of a title - isn't worth discussing in its own right. Actually, it's very much good enough to make Morimoto's lack of a return to directing features quite saddening. If I say that it has the feel of a minor Studio Ghibli work from around the same time, that's also not meant as a criticism. It's very much a kids' movie, though with enough depth and edge to reward any adults who happen to be in the room, and though its character designs are simple and rather old-fashioned for the start of the nineties, the animation is detailed and the backgrounds are lavish, and also actively Ghibli-esque in places: the city that the back half of the film takes place in feels like a semi-remembered fever dream of a European coastal town more than an actual, physical space in ways that work to the considerable benefit of the material.
There are, it has to be said, some narrative problems along the way. The extent to which the film breaks into two clean halves is frustrating, even if it's not particularly damaging when all's told. In the first half, we follow brothers Kai and Moito, who find a way to deal with the grief surrounding their drowned father** by caring for a stranded albino baby whale that they name Peek. This all gets wrapped up when a nasty bit of bullying toward the two brothers leads to the rest of the village learning their secret, which in short order means that Peek becomes the property of a nearby sea circus and its unscrupulous owner, who sees the infant whale as a potential attraction and has no qualms about keeping it imprisoned for the rest of its life. Once Kai learns of the obvious deception he's fallen for, he heads off to set things right, at which point the film basically reboots itself and forgets about Moito, to the extent that he never appears in a scene beyond that point. Along with that, there's a noticeably different tone and the introduction of an all-new major character in the shape of the sea circus owner's daughter Maila, and while both halves are up to good stuff on their own terms, it's by and large very different stuff, especially since the back end is a good deal more action heavy.
We know it's possible to navigate this sort of narrative with more grace and coherency because ... well, I'm only going off the synopsis here, having never seen it, but I get the sense that Free Willy managed to iron out the weirder glitches and streamline those two chunks of plot into one. On the other hand, there's something quite charming about the way Fly Peek is so willing to buck storytelling common sense and just keep the focus where it needs to be, no matter if that means ditching what we'd been led to believe was a crucial character. And even with that odd flaw, and its strange character designs, and a theme that feels somewhat overfamiliar here in 2021, there's a lot else that's charming, enough to make the film's almost total vanishment from the world seem as sad as its director's vanishment from the realm of feature-length movie making. Fortunately, it's made its way onto Youtube in a surprisingly nice (if annoyingly cropped) print, so if you've burned your way through all of Ghibli and fancy a sweet, ever-so-slightly dark, lovingly made anime kids film, this one's definitely worthy of your time.
-oOo-
* In the interests of fairness, I will say that the point at which Fujiko finally gets her memories back is one of the character's most hilariously bad-ass highlights, so that's something.
** A drowned father, incidentally, that the dialogue seems to uncritically suggest was a whaler, making for a film that's apparently much more comfortable with the killing and eating of whales than the idea of keeping them in captivity.
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