No theme this time around, and indeed no connecting thread whatsoever, except that we happen to have a set that's brimming with hyphenated titles, which would be weird if the world of nineties anime wasn't quite so full of the things. Which, say whatever you like about it, certainly makes for a really long list, in the shape of Martian Successor Nadesico The Movie: The Prince of Darkness, Great Conquest: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Sounds of Waves & Growing Up, and Hyper Doll: Mew and Mica the Easy Fighters...
Martian Successor Nadesico was one of the best anime series to come out of the nineties, and while its accomplishments were many, the element that truly set it apart was the extent to which it managed to be both a great parody and a great example of all the things it was parodying. Despite blatantly pastiching real robot shows, space opera, and various other popular Japanese SF trends, it somehow still managed to provide an excellent and fairly original science-fiction story, one that would have stood alone fine without the humour. But, perhaps most impressively, there never came a point at which Nadesico, like so many series before and after it, decided to jettison the humour to focus on its story-telling: no, Nadesico stayed funny through to its final minutes, invariably finding time to laugh at even the most major plot developments, and yet also never letting its underlying silliness undermine the more serious elements altogether. It was a rare balancing act and one I don't know I've ever seen done quite so well.
Prince of Darkness doesn't pull that off, and this, among other things, seems to have earned it the ire of the majority of the fan community. But I don't think that was ever its goal, and I'd argue that what it's up to is actually even more subversive, poking holes in the very notion that we should be deeply invested in the fates of certain undeniably shallow characters and going one step further in showing up the silliness of certain space opera tropes. It's bad practise to tell anyone how to enjoy their art, but I can't help being surprised by the number of people who apparently missed the fact that Nadesico was a parody - or else got that it was a parody, but expected it not to parody anything they actually cared about - and wanted nothing from a film other than that it be more of the same.
Prince of Darkness has no intention of being more of the same. For a start, it looks a hell of a lot better than the series ever did, and the series was hardly a slouch. But the movie is operating at a whole different level of ambition, and you can almost sense the animators' excitement at the notion of playing around with a theatrical budget; there are all sorts of neat and clever shots along the way that would have been beyond what the series could dream of. Yet equally striking is the extent to which Prince of Darkness is determined to tell its own story, one set three years after the close of the show, and how it unapologetically flings the viewer in at the deep end. The consensus is that this is because that missing chunk of plot was filled by the Sega Saturn game Nadesico: The Blank of Three Years, and no doubt that's true so far as it goes, but it also feels like a conscious choice made by people determined to toy with fan expectations, since toying with expectations was such a core part of the Nadesico experience.
Thus, we have a largely standalone plot that aggressively disrupts much of what many viewers seem to have loved about the TV series - because, again, there really do seem to be people out there who took its obvious send-up of a central romance plot seriously! Rather than pander to that audience, the film opts instead to parody the post-Evangelion trend for making everything terribly dark and depressing, with nominal series hero Akito getting made over as a moody bad-ass who rides around in a mech literally designed to look like the devil. But it has much more time for the formerly under-utilised Ruri, promoting her to protagonist and captain of the Nadesico B, and she's a marvellous fit for those roles, especially in the opening third where Prince of Darkness is largely content to pretend it's a straight-forward SF movie with a plot it intends to take seriously all the way through to the end.
That doesn't happen, of course, and on a first viewing, it very much feels like the film goes off the rails in its closing minutes. There's an element of truth to that; one undeniable flaw is that a running time of seventy-five minutes sans credits is nowhere near enough to cram everything in, leaving an exceedingly visible three act structure that basically amounts to setting up a threat, ignoring that threat to have fun for half an hour, then dealing with the threat in the most perfunctory fashion imaginable. Still, that for me seems in keeping with what Nadesico was all about, exploding the business of anime space opera from within and smirking all the while, and while I'd be awfully glad to see a longer version of Prince of Darkness with a bit of room to breath - and an ending that didn't hint so hard at a sequel that would never materialise! - I'm glad to have the version we got. There's no recommending it to anyone who hasn't seen Nadesico the series, but for those who have and were put off by the bad press, I'd urge you to give it a go and take it on its own merits, because by that measure, it's a worthy spiritual successor to a show that would have been ill-served by a more by-the-numbers sequel.
There are, I'd suggest, two basic ways to go about fictionalising major historical events, and hats off to Great Conquest: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms for managing to fluff them both. Especially since, for its first quarter, it seems entirely wedded to one of those approaches and the other doesn't get any sort of look-in. For that introductory half hour, our focus is solely on Liu Bei and, soon, the two companions he teams up with in the hope of restoring some semblance of peace and justice to the nascent Chinese nation. And none of this works amazingly well, for reasons we'll come to, but at least you know where you stand with a story that views history through the lens of a single important character and makes them the protagonist of events that in reality had an infinitely larger scope.
We could call that the heroic approach - certainly that's what Great Conquest makes of it - but there's always the alternative of trying to capture as much of the rich, intricate tapestry of history as possible by retreating to a more omniscient perspective and treating events in a pseudo-documentary style, hopping from place to place and character to character whenever is necessary to keep track of the flow of monumental goings-on. And though we've had a touch of that, with a stentorian narrator filling in scraps of wider context and cutaways to a not very helpful map, it abruptly becomes a much bigger deal when the narrative ditches Liu Bei and his chums to start focusing on some of the other major players.
Like I said, though, it's not like it gets either approach right. The Liu Bei segment is fine, but I never got a sense of why he was important or even why he was special; his early successes are unearned, his ongoing victories look more like luck than judgement, he does a lot of crappy things that the film is happy to look past, and he's saddled with a romantic subplot that would be hilariously inept if it wasn't so sexist. But his companions are more entertaining, and at least it's easy to follow the flow of events. Then suddenly Liu Bei drops out of the narrative, and we're being embroiled in national dramas that had been gently hinted at prior to that point and introduced to new characters that the film does such an awful job of differentiating that I was muddling up two of them right to the end. A lot of this stretch works on a scene-by-scene basis, but that's really the only way it works, leaving a story that sputters into life for brief spells before switching focus again and losing whatever momentum it's gathered.
That failure to pick an angle and stick to it is one that dogs Great Conquest all the way through. It keeps threatening to do something interesting and appealing with its animation, aping the style of contemporary Chinese paintings, and had it committed to that, I suspect I'd have loved it despite its storytelling flaws. But more often, it opts to look like some sort of cheesy historical afterschool special. Outside of a few striking battle sequences, the character work is almost never that good, but the film is capable of producing some terrific backgrounds, so it's weird that a fair percentage look shoddy and out of keeping with what surely ought to be the reigning aesthetic. And given that the music makes the same blunder - we get some lovely traditional Chinese music, but a load of tacky action themes that could have wandered in from any low-budget anime - you have to wonder if this was somehow a deliberate stylistic choice, or if there were two different creative teams feuding against each other.
Still, I'd be more inclined to give this a tenuous recommendation, if only on the grounds that epic representations of Chinese history aren't exactly ten a penny in the anime world, but for one thing: it doesn't end. I have a suspicion this is because Eastern Star were more interested in resurrecting the dubbed and edited American version that had previously been available on video and so didn't try and license the third episode, which certainly seems to have been made if Wikipedia is to be believed - and if so, shame on them. But if I've got the wrong end of the stick, then shame on them anyway, because this is one of the most frustrating unfinished titles I've yet come across, breaking off as the narrator tells us how things are really about to kick off now, and passing it off as a finished work is especially irritating. I mean, I don't know that an ending would have saved Great Conquest from mediocrity, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt.
Though I gave it a thumbs up, I wonder if I wasn't a bit hard on the first volume of U. S. Manga Corp's release of the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature series that I looked at. In retrospect, I suspect I went in with certain preconceptions based on how a release like this would function in the West that weren't altogether warranted. The biggest of those was that these adaptations were aimed at children, which both the stories here quickly dispel: the teenage romance of The Sound of Waves involves some nudity and an intimate scene that's surprising in its frankness, and Growing Up makes few bones about the fact that its own youthful protagonist is on the cusp of a job that's tantamount to prostitution. I wouldn't say children couldn't watch these, and I definitely wouldn't say they shouldn't, but it feels like a stretch to suggest they were the intended market.
Likewise, I argued that the animation, though charming, tended to be on the subpar side of things, and ... well, that's not untrue, I certainly think that even by 1986 TV standards, the budget wasn't quite there to do the creators' vision justice. There's plenty of stuff that's a little off; The Sound of Waves struggles with perspective and both titles feature some of the most incredibly simple character designs you're likely to come across, though it's worth pointing out that they're no less effective for their simplicity. Regardless, there's some serious craft here, and not only in the frequently gorgeous backgrounds either. The Sound of Waves features plenty of legitimately impressive animation, both titles are full of subtle, detailed character work, and Growing Up, which has by far the more distinctive aesthetic, looks genuinely lovely, not by being lavish but by finding a style that's the perfect fit for its tale of the harsh transition from childhood to adulthood.
All of which is dancing around the fact that I loved the hell out of what was on offer here, and perhaps also dancing around the fact that it's very clearly not for everyone. But as someone's who's generally interested in Japanese culture and also a colossal animation nerd, this was a delight from start to finish. Of the two works adapted, The Sound of Waves fares better, by virtue of getting two episodes and forty or so minutes to present its story. That still means having a narrator to fill some gaps, but the narration is so tonally suited that it's hardly a problem, and the tale of young love in a remote island community generally goes by at precisely the right pace, excepting perhaps an ending where everything slots into place a fraction too neatly. Nevertheless, it's fine work, and that Growing Up isn't quite on a level is scarcely a criticism, especially when it's such a striking piece of animation. Still, this time the story could use a dash more breathing room, and the ending was so abrupt that I had to rewatch a few scenes to be sure I hadn't missed anything - until I realised abruptness was precisely the way to go.
There's no getting around it, animated adaptations of classic Japanese literature subtitled into English are only ever going to appeal to an incredibly niche audience, and I'm conscious that I'm slap bang in the middle of that audience, whereas anyone reading this may well not be. Add in how difficult it is to track these titles down - that would be very difficult - and it seems mildly crazy to be suggesting anyone should go to that sort of effort. But hey! Who cares. This is a wonderful release, I've a world of admiration for U. S. Manga Corp for releasing something so delightful and so guaranteed not to sell, and it breaks my heart slightly that they didn't manage to get the entire series out.
For something that, on the face of it, looks an awful lot like no end of other titles, Hyper Doll actually has quite a neat angle. Sure, Mew and Mica are two indestructible space girls defending the Earth from all manner of threats while posing as normal high-schoolers, and sure we've seen that concept often enough in anime that you'd probably have to invent a new numbering system to keep up with it, but here's the twist: Mew and Mica really don't care. That is, they care about the posing as high-schoolers bit, in so much as it means they get to goof around and enjoy Earth food and what-have-you, but all that saving the world stuff? Nope, not for them. And indeed, they clearly couldn't care much about human beings full stop, since one of the first things we learn about them is that they nearly murdered their classmate Hideo for discovering their secret, meaning that Hideo is stuck in the awkward position of having to act as though nothing's going on while keeping their identities hidden - something Mew and Mica also don't much seem to give a damn about - and trying not to annoy them enough that they decide to twist his head off.
If that sounds rather like "What if Superman was evil, and also there were two of him, and also both of them were sexy high-school girls" then yup, that gets us most of the way there, and it's a setup Hyper Doll mines for some satisfyingly dark humour, while also not letting it remotely get in the way of being a wacky show about superheroes punching out stupid-looking monsters. The hyper dolls apparently have no foes that aren't stupid, and that "easy fighters" bit in the title that reads so like a mistranslation presumably refers to the fact that all their battles are completely trivial, since they have effectively unlimited power, a detail we discover through a great running gag in episode two. Thus, the only real dramatic tension stems from whether the pair will bother to turn up and whether they'll keep themselves in check enough that there's anything left by the time they're done throwing around energy balls.
This is all quite a lot of fun, but it's fun that Hyper Doll needs an episode to get properly set up, and that's a problem when your OVA consists of only two episodes. I'd bet you actual money there were meant to be more, but there aren't, and so what we're left with is one entirely satisfactory episode that doesn't have time for much besides getting its ducks in a row and one terrific episode that does great stuff with the premise that part one got slightly too bogged down in setting up. And that's about all there is to be said about Hyper Doll: technically it's thoroughly competent without doing anything actively exciting, except perhaps for some character designs that are marginally rounder and more cartoony than what was typical of the time, and director Moriwaki seems content to keep the show on the road without bringing any real personality to the work. A couple more episodes and I suspect this one would be a firm recommendation, but as it is, I guess it's just another promising show lost to the black abyss of history, albeit one I thoroughly enjoyed and will no doubt return to.
-oOo-
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