While I still sometimes surprise myself by coming across a major release I've somehow failed to review here, it's safe to say that in general we're drifting into more and more obscure waters, with the vast majority of the well-known titles that came out of the decade far behind us. This time around, though, we have a name I reckon most anime fans will at least be aware of: even if it's somewhat overshadowed by the fact that creators Hideaki Anno and studio Gainax would go on to make arguably the most famous nineties anime show of all, the seminal Neon Genesis Evangelion, there's a lot of love out there for their first run at the world of TV, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. So what could possibly go wrong with a movie spin-off, eh?
Quite a lot, as it turns out! Brace yourself, reader, for a look at Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: The Movie, along with Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Harp of Burma & Season of the Sun, Strange Love, and Sukeban Deka...
I've looked at two of these Animated Classics of Japanese Literature releases so far, and in both cases got hung up on the somewhat subpar quality of the animation, then had to row back when I realised it wasn't half so much of a problem as it might initially appear to be; so forgive me if this time around I get caught up on precisely that same detail. The thing is, The Harp of Burma, which occupies two of the three episodes on offer here, is the first Animated Classic that is inarguably hampered by bad animation, to the point where it's impossible to ignore. It's the singing that breaks it, singing being something that is never going to look remotely right if you can't sort out your lip synching, and since there's a heck of a lot of singing in The Harp of Burma - what with music being one of its central themes and all - that's definitely an issue. Add in parrots drawn by people who presumably had only had parrots, or indeed birds in general, described to them at third hand, and which are also major plot points, and a monkey that doesn't serve much narrative function but looks inordinately awful, and you end up with a title where the roughness of the visuals is actively getting in the way of its storytelling.
Was this a conscious choice? I've noticed with previous entries that books written for or about children seem to have been stuck with a markedly simpler style, with mixed results. The Harp of Burma is apparently a kids' book, though given the extent to which Japan's military defeat in the Second World War, prison camps, and the decay of human bodies are all crucial to the tale it tells, I'm inclined to think it's more of a kids' book in the Japanese sense than in the Western sense; it's hard to see this ever ending up as a Disney movie, put it that way. Anyway, if that look was a choice, it was one taken too far into the realms of active shoddiness, and it's not the only questionable decision, either. Screenwriter Kenji Yoshida opts to present the plot, which concerns the fate of one Private Mizushima, who gets separated from his unit in the days following Japan's surrender, in somewhat the fashion of a mystery, with the bulk of the narrative devoted to watching his fellow soldiers wonder what the hell happened to him, until the truth is revealed in the closing minutes. As I understand it, this isn't how the book functions, and while I get why Yoshida went down that route, faced with the difficulties of cramming a novel into under fifty minutes, it does lead to a saggy middle act, with all the best material heavily backloaded.
Still, The Harp of Burma has its compensations, and the foremost of those is its musical score, which, in keeping with the material, is fairly spectacular: there's a scene, in particular, that would die on its arse if the music wasn't up to the task and relies on performances in three different languages and two distinct dialects of English, something anime has a grand tradition of getting catastrophically wrong, yet here is presented flawlessly. And it's not as though dodgy design work and stiff animation and slightly questionable storytelling choices have it in them to sabotage a literary classic: it's easy to imagine a better adaptation, especially given that the great Kon Ichikawa filmed the book not once but twice*, but that doesn't rob the material of its impact, it merely sucks some of the air from out of it.
Regardless, Season of the Sun, though confined to the one episode, is better on just about every level, and this despite sharing the same director, a surprise given how improved the animation is this time around. It's by no means a fun watch, and based on how one-sidedly its tale of sex, obsession, and possibly of love in post-war Japan is presented, you could reasonably accuse it of some pretty deep-seated misogyny. On the other hand, you could equally argue that we never get much sense of what's going on inside the male protagonist's head either, especially when he seems largely oblivious to whatever's motivating his frequently cruel actions. Anyway, while tough to experience, the material packs quite the punch, and even better, is an excellent fit to accompany The Harp of Burma, albeit a rather depressing one, as we see what would become of the relative optimism and readiness to explore new possibilities for Japan expressed there. That combination strengthens both parts, and while this was arguably the weakest entry of the series I've looked at so far, it still merits a watch if you're among the presumably tiny number of people who'd find something like this interesting.
I can think of no way to describe the two-episode OVA Strange Love that doesn't make it sound absolutely terrible. And perhaps I shouldn't be trying, since a brief glance at some reviews confirms that there are lots of people who think it's exactly that, and also because, as with a lot of nineties anime that tried to wring laughs out of the borderline pornographic, it's a hell of a thing to wrap your head around from a Western perspective a couple of decades into the twenty-first century. But in brief: the first of two episodes follows young college professor Sushiaki, who falls head over heels in lust with the - here I quote U.S. Manga Corp's box description! - "busty and beautiful coed" Yoshida, only to discover that she eats guys like him for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as she invites herself over to his apartment only to play mercilessly on his desire to sleep with her. And once that's all worked itself out, we have episode two, where we find ourselves abruptly shunted over to Yoshida's perspective, as she in turn falls for a newly arrived female student, much to the chagrin of her obnoxious rock star boyfriend, who decides to punish her by seducing the innocent she has her eye on.
Like many an anime sex comedy, this doesn't really function as pornography, since the sex isn't sexy and the very nature of the plot pushes it more toward being awkward and uncomfortable, but mainly because the art style is such that anything that might be at all arousing becomes mildly disturbing instead. Yoshida looks like an exceedingly top-heavy alien, the menfolk are worse, and for some reason everyone has bewilderingly ugly-looking ears. So the question becomes whether it's strong enough as a comedy to balance that out, and the answer is ... well, no, not really, but more so than you might expect, and perhaps a bit more than that if you don't mind laughing at scenes that are often excruciating.
Now, maybe I've just set my bar so low for this sort of thing that almost anything could hop over, but for me, Strange Love was both funnier than I'd have imagined from the first few minutes and - the much bigger surprise - a good deal more effective as a drama and character study. I wonder, even, whether it benefits from the shift in standards that makes something like this so dubious to a modern sensibility; it would be mad to accuse it of feminism, since it couldn't be operating much more from a position of male gaze if it tried, yet the narrative fights that every step of the way. There's something genuinely fascinating about how we meet Yoshida through the eyes of a man who can't see beyond her body and is so blind to her personality that he spends most of his time conjuring up absurd fantasies of how he'd like their relationship to be, only to flip to her own perspective and see what Sushiaki saw - essentially, that she's all too happy to manipulate men for her own ends - through an altogether different lens. Yoshida's an enormously long way from what we here in 2021 mean when we use the phrase "strong woman", yet she's definitely strong, more so than a creep like Sushiaki can begin to grasp. That comes into sharp focus when Sushiaki, having been extensively teased and mocked, suggests he could just take what he wants by force, only to have Yoshida point out to him that she's a black belt in karate and he's welcome to try. I can't speak for the filmmakers' intentions, but there as elsewhere, I got the impression that they were basically on Yoshida's side and wanted the viewer to be too, for all that it would be easy to present her as some kind of hideous nightmare ripped from the male id.
There are other virtues as well, and a lot of them cluster in the second episode, and the rather sweet fashion in which Yoshida comes to terms with the fact that she's just maybe extremely attracted to another woman and then in how she tries to tentatively communicate that while also pretending that no obviously she's not cracking onto her newfound friend and actually everyone in Tokyo holds hands don't you know? And here toward the bottom of the review, I find myself wondering if I'm just giving Strange Love credit for threatening to be something deeply unpleasant and then rowing back, and probably there's an element of that; the setup for both episodes is so potentially creepy that any deviation from that worst-case scenario is bound to be a nice surprise. Nevertheless, I do think there's a little more to it than that, and that Strange Love deserves a dash of credit for finding some genuine humanity and a sizeable dollop of humour in a setup that seems like it has scant room for either.
-oOo-
