Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 105

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...

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: The Movie, 1991, dir: Masa Aono

The movie of the long-running and highly popular series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water simply has no reason to be as bad as it is.  Even if we accept that it reached a certain point in its production with irresolvable flaws baked in - an inadequate budget, a replacement director with minimal experience and no discernible talent for imagery or storytelling, and an uninspired plot that couldn't hope to stretch to a feature-length running time - still none of them explains how tossed-off the final product feels, as though it were created out of genuine anger at the fanbase for giving enough of a damn about the property that anyone might think making a film follow-up was a good idea.  Mere indifference or mercenary crassness couldn't hope to produce anything this all-round lousy.

A lot of that undoubtedly does come down to the tortured production that saw original director and series maestro Hideaki Anno being obliged to walk away from the project, along with the at-that-point deeply in debt studio Gainax, leaving the movie to be finished any which way it could be so long as it somehow made it into theatres.  Yet, with all that, there are still some simply terrible decisions made along the way, and they start in one of the opening scenes, in which our hero Nadia, now working as a reporter in London, is provoked by an image of the Eiffel Tower into a series of flashbacks to the show that will go on to fill more than a third of the film's eighty-five minutes.  Which is obviously a heinous and dreadful way to kick off a movie adaptation, but, like, they're not even good flashbacks.  If you're going to chuck in thirty minutes of reused footage, surely you'd go for footage that sets the scene for the story you're about to tell?  Or failing that, for sequences that are reasonably connected?  But no, Nadia the Movie would rather throw fifteen hours of television into a blender and see what pops out.

Cut that intro and you immediately end up with a superior work, firstly because it's embarrassing to show off how much better animation done for TV is than the animation you're expecting people to pay to watch on a cinema screen and secondly because it serves no purpose except to pad the running time and ensure that the viewer is thoroughly checked out by the time the actual movie rolls around.  It's not as though sixty-minute anime films weren't a thing in 1991, and my guess is that the plodding intro is there solely to make the pretence that Anno and Gainax were more involved than they were.

Whatever the case, things pick up once we at last get started, in that sixty minutes of ghastly animation following a so-so plot is better than thirty minutes of randomly flung together scenes.  Though the tale it's out to tell is hokum, and though the telling is largely incompetent, from there onward the whole business generally manages to hover around a level of harmless mediocrity.  The animation is truly dire - that pretty much all the shots that struck me as actively competent appear in ADV's one minute trailer tells you all you need to know on that front - but it's not the sort of direness you can get worked up over; it's more dispiriting than hateful.  As for that plot, it's a slice of nonsense about an evil new baddy trying to kick off a world war for reasons, and it's hampered by how the main new character is called Fuzzy and Fuzzy gets bafflingly transliterated as Fudgy, a name it's tough not to chuckle at, but there are definite flashes of the old-fashioned adventure yarn charm I assume to be the series' main selling point.  So I guess that if you loved the TV show and were filled with a craving for more so powerful that you didn't care in the least how good it was, you could conceivably just fast-forward through the flashback stuff and get yourself a little pleasure out of this.  I mean, you could do that, but you shouldn't.

Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Harp of Burma & Season of the Sun, 1986, dir: Noboru Ishiguro

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.

Strange Love, 1997, dir: Daiji Suzuki

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.

Sukeban Deka, 1991, dir: Takeshi Hirota

Imagine, say, The French Connection, but with Gene Hackman's hardboiled cop replaced with a high-school girl and ... wait, no, that's an insane premise, isn't it?  Nevertheless, that's what Sukeban Deka - literally "Delinquent Girl Detective" - has to offer, and presumably it didn't seem quite so insane to Japanese audiences, given that there's an unholy amount of this stuff out there, including a TV series and multiple feature films.  And of course this anime, though only two episodes totalling some hundred minutes or so were produced.  Which is a shame because, in its best moments, which are most of them, it's pretty damn great.

We are, mind you, talking a very specific kind of greatness that definitely won't be to everyone's tastes.  This is pure pulp of a most exploitational kind, and although director Hirota brings a ton of flair to the proceedings, along with a fine grasp of how to put together exciting action on a budget, it's fair to say that its virtues aren't often technical ones.  But if you're at all down with the concept of a gritty seventies cop drama supplanted into the environs of a modern-day (well, modern-day thirty year ago) Japanese high school, with cliques replacing gangs and the rich, beautiful, popular girls taking on the roles of gang bosses, and of course our yoyo-wielding hero Saki Asamiya in place of Gene Hackman or Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood, then Sukeban Deka dives into that grimy well with ferocious energy and commitment.

Aside from some exceedingly light humour care of a boy named Sanpei who falls puppyishly in love with Saki, it's surprising how seriously Sukeban Deka takes its obviously ridiculous setup, and surprising, too, that taking it seriously actually makes things more fun and not less.  This also means there's a real lack of punch-pulling; the inciting incident for the police deciding that blackmailing a sixteen-year-old girl into becoming an undercover cop is the murder of a school bus full of students, and events don't lighten up much from there.  Again, how much you see that as a virtue is bound to vary, but for me, the treatment of one particular character pushed so deeply into the realms of nastiness that it went from gritty to outright unpleasant.  I'm wary of spoilers, so I'll say only that the fact of having a female protagonist doesn't make misusing another female character in awful, hackneyed ways any more appealing.  It's all the more of a shame because Saki herself is genuinely marvellous, with voice actor Kazue Ikura managing to conjure a convincing arc from rage-filled bad girl to tentative agent of justice and letting a more humane side sneak in bit by bit.  And though, again, the animation isn't especially impressive, Hirota sensibly devotes due resources to making our hero look iconic at every opportunity, enough so that even her weaponised yoyo somehow ends up seeming more cool that silly.

In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed it, it's clear to see how Sukeban Deka might have worked better.  The first half, which focuses more on Saki while letting the plot mount up steadily in the background, is more out-and-out fun than the second half that actually has to do something with all those plot threads, and the big action climax is of a sort that could have wandered in from any number of contemporary anime titles, though it's done better than most.  This is undoubtedly tacky nonsense based on a premise that crumbles into absurdity if you think about it for more than a second, but surely we're better off with tacky nonsense that's made with energy, passion, and commitment, aren't we?  And if that also gives us the sight of a pink-haired, yo-yo wielding delinquent girl beating up on armies of thugs, I don't see that anyone has a right to complain.

-oOo-

While there might not be anything here that deserves to be called buried treasure, Sukeban Deka was kind of a delight, the more so because it came so completely out of leftfield; I'd never even seen a trailer for it until about a month ago, and why ADV would have failed to trumpet one of their better and more interesting releases is beyond me.  By the same measure, that makes it tough to find these days, which is a heck of a shame, especially given that it's not exactly the sort of title that's likely to receive a rescue.  Which is probably true of everything here, come to think of it - I believe the Nadia movie was even left out of the recent-ish DVD reissue - though I continue to hold out misguided hope for a blu-ray box set of the entirety of Animated Classics of Japanese Literature.  Hey, a vintage anime nerd can dream!

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

* Having now seen the first of Ichikawa's adaptations, I feel I owe the anime version, and particularly screenwriter Yoshida, an apology.  While the film is unquestionably superior on the whole, I'd say the anime version actually does a better job of adapting material that arguably isn't terribly well suited to being adapted.