Our Dr. Slump and Arale-chan marathon didn't get off to the best of starts, what with me tacking its beginning onto the end of my Dragon Ball Z round-up out of an obsessive-compulsive need to keep these posts at four reviews a piece. But look, that's all behind us now! And if you want to pop back and read my thoughts on that first film, you can do so here, but if you'd rather not, then I'll save you the trouble and just quote my own conclusion:
"I don't know exactly what I'd make of this if I'd watched it in isolation, but as the first entry in a five film marathon, it's an utter joy, and my only worry going forward is whether such ridiculous daftness can stretch to a longer running time without becoming completely exhausting."
So was that worry justified? I guess we'll find out, as we work our merry way through Dr. Slump and Arale-chan: Hoyoyo! Space Adventure, Dr. Slump and Arale-chan: Hoyoyo! The Great Race Around the World, Dr. Slump and Arale-chan: Hoyoyo! The Secret of Nanaba Castle, and Dr. Slump and Arale-chan: Hoyoyo! The City of Dreams, Mechapolis...
Given my concerns over how something as aggressively wacky as the first Dr. Slump film could possibly translate to a feature-length running time, the immediate good news - which is also ever so slightly the bad news - is that Dr. Slump: Hoyoyo! Space Adventure doesn't try. That's to say, the franchise's first stab at stretching to feature length eases up noticeably on the madcap pace that characterised Hello! Wonder Island and instead is content to behave like a proper movie, with things like a legible story and a coherent three-act structure with a beginning, middle, and end. This is definitely the right choice, because ninety minutes of Hello! Wonder Island would have been absolutely brain-melting, but it does have the unfortunate side effect that Hoyoyo! Space Adventure has to busy itself with things like setting up plot and establishing characters, stuff that simply isn't as much fun as the delirious comic anarchy that's surely the series' standout trait. To put it bluntly, Hoyoyo! Space Adventure is only sporadically funny, and almost never as hilarious as the better moments from Hello! Wonder Island, which I assume to be a fairly good representation of how the TV series operated.
Fortunately, that's largely it for the criticisms, because while Hoyoyo! Space Adventure has the relative disadvantages of stretching a brand of comedy out to ninety minutes that's designed to work in much shorter timeframes, it has the benefit of doing quite a fine job of being a ninety minute comedy-sci fi movie that works in its own right. Not, granted, the sort that modern audiences would expect to see up on a cinema screen; the animation's had a bit of a polish and there are some nice sequences, but we're squarely in the middle of eighties TV animation blown up to movie proportions territory here. Yet, taken as the sum of its parts, it feels like a film in a way Hello! Wonder Island didn't pretend to try at, with big musical numbers and exciting action sequences and running gags and even some vague dabbling at themes, though they don't get much beyond "Being a jerk is bad so don't do it." But that's fine; unlike many a comedy, Hoyoyo! Space Adventure never forgets to be fun, even when it's not being actively funny, and a movie that's fun from start to finish is - well, it's a fun movie is what it is.
Most of the reason Hoyoyo! Space Adventure is lighter on laughs than Hello! Wonder Island is that it's obliged to use the series' stand-out character, dim-witted, indestructible, super-strong robot girl Arale, with more restraint. Indeed, it breaks down fairly neatly into scenes that do something or other to shunt the plot forward and scenes that are just Arale being weird, dim, violent, or all three. While I was watching, this felt like a flaw, in that the Arale scenes are always the highlights, but in retrospect, I reckon the balance is pretty much spot on. The gain is that Hoyoyo! Space Adventure has much more charm, and some mild stakes, and even a degree of genuine warmth, the sort where by the end you feel kind of sad that you're not going to be able to hang out with the characters any longer. It's an extremely watchable concoction that flies by at lightning speed, and even if it relaxes a little on the humour front, it never wastes an iota of energy on being anything besides entertaining.
I don't have it in me to criticise this third Dr Slump movie for ripping off the Wacky Races formula, not when the franchise is such a perfect fit. In fact, it feels so logical as to be almost inevitable; after all, what was Wacky Races but a loose framework upon which to hang a bunch of goofy jokes and scattershot comic scenes? And now that the series has stepped back from regular movie length to regular pre-2000's anime movie length, which is to say somewhere around the fifty minute mark, the idea of a race around the world into which all the regular characters can be flung seems like just about the right amount of narrative for one of these things. So really, my only complaint is that I wish Dr Slump: The Great Race Around the World was better at doing all that than it is.
To be sure, it's not bad. But it's more toward that end of the spectrum than either of its predecessors, and given such a seemingly perfect setup, that feels more annoying than it perhaps ought to. The main problem is that it's not terribly funny, which was fine for "Hoyoyo!" Space Adventure because that had other stuff going on, whereas The Great Race Around the World is doing nothing besides things that should in theory be amusing and it's just that few of the gags are that strong or necessarily recognisable as gags at all. Weirdly, it's Arale, generally the most reliable character, who gets the worst of this, having been reduced largely to an annoying toddler who shouts the same handful of phrases over and over and rarely gets those moments of inspired lunacy that made her such a standout in the first two films. Generally, for most of its running time, this feels as if it's ambling through a series of loosely connected events, which is of course exactly what you'd expect from Dr Slump and so a dumb criticism in and of itself, except that elsewhere the events in question were often funny and here they're only intermittently funny.
Ultimately, being Wacky Races proves not to be the ideal fit that it seems. Only two sets of characters get to have much of a presence: there's Slump and Arale, in their depressed sentient minivan - one of the funnier jokes, by the by - and series regular villain Dr. Mashirito, who bizarrely seems to recognise Arale but not notice that one of his fellow racers is the woman he kidnapped and tried to force to marry him in the last film. Most of the other regular cast members pop up, but the format gives them not a lot to do except be there, and they don't even get distinctive vehicles to drive or anything by way of gimmicks. It doesn't help that the plot ensures that the race boils down to basically three participants and the remainder are clearly just making up the numbers.
I'm making The Great Race Around the World sound hopelessly terrible, where actually, in some limited ways, it's a step forward: Shunsuke Kikuchi's score is a bit more present and striking and, for what feels like the first time, we get glimpses of somewhat movie-appropriate animation, even if the general aesthetic is still that of a somewhat expanded TV budget. Actually, that hits the nail on the head: The Great Race Around the World has the vibe of a TV special more than a cinema release. Where "Hoyoyo!" Space Adventure seemed delighted at the prospect of filling out ninety minutes and stretching the envelope of what Dr Slump could be, The Great Race Around the World has the air of a creative team landing on an idea that will about do to occupy the better part of an hour, because sure, why not? It's all very small and unambitious and a touch under-baked, and though it coasts by on the virtues of an inherently likeable and amusing property, that still makes for a genuine disappointment.
From its opening scene, it's apparent that The Secret of Nanaba Castle is a return to something that feels like a proper movie rather than a TV special, for all that it's yet another step down in length, to a mere forty-eight minutes. This was director Hiroki Shibata's debut, and he'd go on to work almost entirely in kids' television, albeit on such prestigious properties as Sailor Moon and Digimon, but here he shows a natural-seeming knack for punching his material up into a register that feels cinematic in a way even the most obviously cinematic Dr Slump movie so far, Hoyoyo! Space Adventure, never quite managed. And as I say, this is apparent from the beginning, and a pre-credits sequence that feels much like the sort of thing you'd find in an actual movie, delivering a fun, compact, mildly exciting episode in which some mysterious characters discover a mystical jewel in an exceptionally well hidden mountainside cave and pointedly not featuring any of the familiar Dr Slump characters.
It's a fair taste of what's to come: one of the weirdest things about The Secret of Nanaba Castle is how it keeps to the spirit of what a Dr Slump movie involves while discarding so many of the traditional ingredients. So the setting is the nineteen-twenties and the plot is, more than anything, a pastiche of the sort of pulpy adventure serials the US was churning out in those days, the very same material that would be revamped so lovingly by the Indiana Jones franchise - and while it will eventually end up feeling like a quite specific send-up of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a film that bizarrely came out in the same year and so surely wasn't an influence, The Secret of Nanaba Castle spends far more of its time just grabbing from those sorts of stories in a merry, freewheeling fashion.
Again, the extent to which this feels like a Dr Slump movie comes down to whether you think the heart of the franchise lies with the anarchic Arale-Chan and the show's generally wacky tone and ultra-cartoony ethic or whether you think it matters that the core cast and setting are kept front and centre. Unless I was really missing something, the titular Dr. Slump doesn't even appear in this one and Arale has been refigured as a Robin Hood-esque sneak thief: we first meet her pulling off a heist for baked potatoes to feed the denizens of the orphanage where she apparently lives. But change the character details any which way you like, Arale is still Arale, as bonkers and unflappable and wilfully destructive as ever, and she remains the core of what's funny about The Secret of Nanaba Castle. Indeed, humour doesn't really seem to have been anyone's priority, and though there's plenty to chuckle at, there aren't many outright laughs.
Still, this fourth Dr Slump movie remains a thoroughly engaging experience, barrelling from one ridiculous set piece to another and generally allowing just enough sense to creep in to keep the plot moving in a vaguely coherent direction. A purist might grumble that shifting the entire ensemble to a different setting and sidelining half the cast is kind of a cheat, but then Dr Slump would be the strangest possible series to get puritanical about, given how deeply random craziness is baked in to the formula. For me, while I wouldn't have said no to a jot more humour, this entry was both a breath of fresh air and an engaging film in its own right, and thus a definite contender for my favourite entry so far.
It was quite late at night and I had a glass of wine or two in me when I settled down to watch The City of Dreams, Mechapolis, and if you sat me in a court of law and made me swear I was absolutely certain it wasn't all some fever dream brought on by booze and tiredness, I'm not altogether sure I'd be willing to take the chance. This fifth entry is a return to the demented energy and non sequitur-driven plotting of the first film, Hello! Wonder Island, which it resembles in other ways, too, and after three shots at seeing what an actual, functional Dr. Slump movie might look like, it's kind of a joy to find the makers once more throwing up their hands in merry abandonment and admitting this franchise works best when it's just hurling whatever bonkers crap occurs to them in the moment at the screen as hard as they possibly can.
Thus, even the semblance of a plot that we get is fundamentally nuts: Arale and her friends see a trailer for a sort of wandering intergalactic amusement park by the name of Mechapolis - presented by the robot from Metropolis, incidentally, because why not? - and Arale decides she'd very much like to go there, despite the fact that nobody's altogether convinced it exists. But of course it does, and in due course most of the cast have been whisked there in a pastiche of alien abduction films, and as promised they're granted their wishes, however ridiculous, costly, or dangerous, until one character's tyrannical selfishness breaks the exceedingly tenuous logic of a society where everyone and everything is a wish-granting robot, at which point all manner of chaos ensues.
Another way in which The City of Dreams, Mechapolis resembles Hello! Wonder Island is in being so short that we can barely call it a film at all, scraping in at a mere thirty-eight minutes, which is fortunately about right for something that would probably provoke seizures and severe mental scarring if it went on for an awful lot longer. And yet another way is that it has a tendency to look exceedingly cheap, so much so that it feels more like another bit of deliberate silliness than a lack of animation know-how, especially since, once we get into Mechapolis, there are some sequences that are actually fairly flashy and slick. And I'd better point out here that none of these comparisons are meant to be considered negatives, since in many ways Hello! Wonder Island was my favourite slice of Dr. Slump action, being as it was a perfect distillation of a formula that never felt absolutely right when it was expected to carry a proper narrative or stretch to any real length.
As for which is better, or indeed whether The City of Dreams, Mechapolis is preferable to a more coherent, substantial entry like Hoyoyo! Space Adventure, well, I'm not sure those questions get us anywhere useful when the general bar of quality is this high. The City of Dreams, Mechapolis is even more obsessed with cultural references than its predecessors, to the point where Gamera and Dr. Spock are both recurring characters, and in its weirdest moments, it's about as far out as this exceedingly weird franchise has managed to get, and personally I found both of those pluses, though I guess there are those who wouldn't. At any rate, if you'd enjoyed what's come before, I find it hard to imagine you wouldn't get a kick out of this last entry too, and if you felt like starting at the end, well, why not?
-oOo-
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