No themes or gimmicks this time, just regular old run-of-the-mill normality, which of course, by Drowning in Nineties Anime standards, means a baffling and unrelated array of titles that I happened to pick off the shelf. But then, where else can you read about giant lady-bots, terrible fighting game adaptations, fantasy romance, and Japanese literature all together in one place? This time around, it's Ariel, Samurai Shodown, Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play - OVA 2, and Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: The Izu Dancer, The Dancing Girl, A Ghost Story...
There are basically two problems with ARIEL, and I'm not convinced either of them are problems at all. First up, there's the fact that, like many an OVA adapted from other media - in this case, a long-running series of light novels - it's unapologetic about the fact that it's only presenting a chunk of a bigger story. Indeed, it brazenly advertises that detail by opening with a lengthy recap and then calling its first episode number four, which the subtitles amusingly change to a one, presumably hoping to sneak by those who can't read roman numerals. And then problem number two is that the show seems determined to have its cake and eat it, by being a supposedly comedic mecha science-fiction show that frequently ditches the comedy elements altogether, regardless of how much of its premise is so silly that you'd think a straight interpretation would be practically impossible.
Like I say, problems that may or may not be problems depending on your personal mileage. Certainly, contemporary reviewers had little time for ARIEL, so presumably there were plenty of other people it didn't work for. Me, I pretty much adored it, and I'd argue that both those issues could as easily be viewed as virtues. I mean, the middle-of-the-plot thing is so trivial as to be barely noticeable once you get over the panic of thinking you've somehow missed a trio of episodes just by pressing play. The stories presented here, of which there are three, one running across a pair of half-hour episodes and the others getting somewhat longer episodes to themselves, are all comfortably standalone while benefitting from being watched together, and the only actual annoyance is the presence of a character, alien vigilante Saber Starblast, who's so underdeveloped as to end up feeling like a deus ex machina - though since this is clearly meant as a joke, it's not a very annoying annoyance.
As for cake and the eating thereof, I never did get that saying, and ARIEL isn't the first anime to present a premise too ridiculous to take seriously and then do so anyway. That setup sees three teenage sisters piloting the titular robot, mostly unwillingly, at the behest of their mad scientist grandfather Doctor Kishida. In a tortured backronym for the ages, its name stands for All-Round Intercept and Escort Lady, and it's basically your common-or-garden planet-defending giant robot except for how it looks like Kishida's dead love and fights in an enormous leotard. And if you get to wondering how much said leotard must have cost the Japanese taxpayer, then be warned, it's hardly Kishida's most frivolous bit of cash-burning, which makes it all the more amusing that our alien invaders of the day, led by the unfortunate Hauser, are not only subcontractors for the actual antagonists but subcontractors working on a shoestring budget so tight that the ship's accountant is a prominent character.
There's obviously plenty of room for absurdity in all this, but ARIEL, for the most part, isn't about absurdity. Its humour is of the exceedingly dry variety, and I wonder if that, more than anything, is what flummoxed reviewers at the time. At any rate, come to the show on its own terms rather than grumbling about how it's ignoring your preconceptions and there's plenty to love. The animation varies enormously between parts, but it's always solid and often excellent, the more so because the design work is consistent and ARIEL has some splendid designs, to the extent that even a leotard-wearing robot ends up seeming far cooler than it has any right to. The characters are one-note but charming and the focus on their private lives over their roles in a global conflict reaps surprising dividends, most effectively in the third episode, in which the youngest of the three siblings is torn between a blind date and her robot-piloting duties. The bombastic ARIEL theme that pops up for that selfsame episode is an utter joy, as is the way each episode gets its own wildly different theme and credits sequence; in general, there's the sense that the show is constantly reinventing itself across its brief length, and that's most evident with the last episode, a legitimately great bit of sci-fi disaster movie drama that's played mostly straight despite also being where many of its best gags bear fruit. All in all, while I get how this one must have stuck out like a sore thumb upon release, I'd argue that the years have been exceedingly kind to it, making its oddities seem less like flaws and more like charming quirks. It sucks, then, that it's become one of the most hard-to-find titles out there ... some days it's tough being a vintage anime fan!
How little anyone at ADV could have cared less about their release of beat-em-up adaptation Samurai Shodown becomes apparent approximately one second into the film, when a couple of frames of the original Japanese title card are visible before the English language one cuts in. It's a trivial error, for sure, but also a staggeringly amateurish one, and it's symptomatic of a title that was transparently pushed out the door with nary a thought in the hope that enough people would buy it on the strength of the brand that it might make a little easy cash. Similarly, there's the way all the blood has been recoloured silver, presumably to sneak a lower rating, except on the couple of occasions where it hasn't, and the lack of subtitles, and unsurprisingly there's the wretchedness of the dub that is thus foisted upon us, with no-one making a shred of effort to pretend they're not just reading out their lines, with the narrow exceptions of Tiffany Grant's passable French accent as Charlotte and Marcy Rae as the traitorous villain Amakusa, who's as bad as anyone else but at least seems to have been trying.
It's hard to blame the cast for not investing in their barely one-dimensional characters, and it's hard to blame ADV for not mustering more enthusiasm, but it's easy to blame them for releasing this crap in the first place. And again, that crapness is all Samurai Shodown has to offer is evident from its opening seconds, in which our first exposure to the resolutely lousy animation is an earthquake simulated by jolting the images around a bit, and our introduction to the plot is a brief sequence that serves no narrative purpose whatsoever, since its every moment will be recapped later, before the film lurches with a screech and a 'one hundred years later' text card into the actual setting and story. At which point we get our first insight into how downright stupid Samurai Shodown intends to be, when we meet the reincarnations of the cast members who we saw die in the initial scene, and they're wearing exactly the same costumes. I don't claim to be any sort of expert, but surely that isn't how reincarnation works?
Granted, that's a level of dumb that many a fighting game adaptation has aspired to, and nobody comes to these things seeking elaborate, challenging plots or even basic logic and storytelling.* But I'd wager that the one thing everyone does agree a fighting game adaptation should include is some half-decent fighting, and given that Samurai Shodown seems averse to action of any sort, presumably because it costs money to animate, it's hard to imagine the viewer so undiscriminating that they could find any meaningful pleasure here. Imagine, for example, that they'd be satisfied simply with seeing their favourite characters in anime form and they'd still be in for a crushing disappointment, since only two of them get anything meaningful to do, and that's being generous in the case of the aforementioned Charlotte, whose role boils down to "the one who's a woman that actually gets to talk sometimes."
I always strive to come up with a positive or two, and all the more so for releases that I went to far too much trouble in tracking down, but truly, I've got nothing here. Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture (for which, by the way, read "actually a TV special", because of course) is bad at everything. Well, I guess the music's okay, if by okay we mean thoroughly generic, but that's a low bar to trip over. Other than that, nothing comes close: as a fighting game adaptation, this fluffs the basics, and as a work of storytelling in its own right, it manages to be both hackneyed and incoherent, sputtering its way through a plot that's been told a thousand times and still failing to summon the least bit of lucidity or momentum. Then, because merely releasing such hapless garbage wasn't enough, ADV felt the need to rob us of whatever minuscule pleasure there might have been in hearing a tale set in historical Japan told with actual Japanese actors and to strip the bloodshed from a film in which a bit of energetic bloodshed might have been a tiny saving grace, and, judging by the footage in the Japanese closing credits that never shows up in the actual movie, perhaps even to hack out a few scenes, though what possible motivation there could have been to cut down a film that barely makes it past an hour is hard to say - except, perhaps, for a small act of mercy on the unfortunate souls suckered into buying this turd.
That the second Fushigi Yûgi OVA, known as Reflections, is an across-the-board improvement on the first comes as good news but isn't much of an accomplishment, and anyway, the odds were always solid that having twice the episode count would allow it to step away from the muddled, breathless storytelling on offer there. That Reflections succeeds enough to redeem that first entry by making its developments seem like both an exciting leaping off point and a crucial part of the wider Fushigi Yûgi epic is considerably more of an achievement, and not one I saw coming. But what's really surprising is that it can pull that off and still feel like such a tough recommendation to anyone besides those who are already on board with the show.
Or perhaps that shouldn't be surprising, given that this was the final chapter** in a very long-running story, and we should simply be thankful that it's watchable and accessible in all the ways the first OVA refused to be. Three episodes of that and I couldn't have told you the most basic details about more than a couple of the characters; thirty minutes into Reflections' chunky three-hours-and-change running time and I had a fair grasp of everyone's role and personality, I knew what new threat our heroes were facing, I understood the stakes, I'd chuckled at a few well-peppered-in jokes and a silly post-credits gag roll, and I was engaged enough that I hoped everything would work out for the best. And sure, that has the air of damning with faint praise, but it oughtn't to be taken that way: it requires real craft to reintroduce a large cast and set up a new conflict and actually make it all feel consequential in the space of half an hour while at the same time keeping the tone light enough that it never descends into portentousness.
I nearly used the word "economical" there, and it wouldn't have been unfounded, but while it covers many of Reflections finer points, it would also be to ignore its flaws and the main reason the OVA is a tough recommendation to non-fans. It attempts a lot, is the thing, and most of that's good and lots of it is great, and there's a basically splendid story here with a heck of a twist toward the end, one that packs a real wallop and sets us up for a genuinely emotive, heartfelt climax. But Reflections isn't content with that, nor with sequelling Memories, nor with providing what I suspect is a rather better ending to the show's epic drama than the show itself did. No, it also wants to dig deeper into some of the core characters, and so the bulk of the episodes pull double duty, or even triple duty, telling their own discreet tales while the main plot ticks away on the sidelines while also nudging various other threads forward that will pay off in later episodes. And as much as I commend the writing for its boldness and there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this, it's a sad fact that it's hard not to be a touch bored in places without having spent dozens of episodes around this cast.
Here, I suspect, I'm effectively criticising Reflections for doing its job well, if we accept that its main functions were to reward dedicated viewers and as a grand send-off for a long-running TV show. It's unfair to expect it to manage all that and still stay friendly to new viewers, yet it's frustrating how close it comes; I enjoyed my time with it and was wowed by its successes, even as I frequently found my attention wandering. A more just criticism would be to point out that higher production values would have gone a long way toward keeping me engaged, since there's not much in Reflections that's visually exciting or impressive, though the soundtrack is at least reliably strong. But in honesty, any measure of criticism feels harsh in the face of a really impressive piece of work, and I only wish I could say that this exceeds its inherent limitations. Which, clearly it kind of does or I wouldn't be bothered as much as I am! Okay, I guess we've got us a hesitant recommendation, in that if you're down for some romantic fantasy adventure and can't be bothered to wade through the TV series, there's still enough here to warrant your time - and if you have watched the series, needless to say, you'd be mad to pass this by.
This last volume of U.S. Manga Corps' Animated Classics of Japanese Literature series - that is, last from our point of view, I've no clue what order they were released in - breaks from tradition in a couple of crucial ways. First up, it contains three stories, each of twenty-two minutes or so, where the other volumes included one two-parter followed by a standalone tale; and secondly, it's the first set where I didn't once feel like the animation was at least something of a liability.
That's not to say the budget's magically ballooned; no doubt these three stories were put together relatively on the cheap. But all of them pull off extremely well what the series as a whole was reliably good at, which was marrying style to content in a manner that smooths over any budgetary constraints. And often that style was kept purposefully simple, but here, that's only really the case with the first of our three episodes, The Izu Dancer, and the slightly crude character designs there are offset by some beautifully painted backgrounds in a way that ideally suits the material, a gentle travelogue of historic Japan doubling as a romance of sorts. In common with more than one episode of the show that was obliged to get the job done in barely over twenty minutes, it feels rather insubstantial and ends abruptly, and also in common with those other episodes, that apparent insubstantiality and abruptness leaves you pondering what you might have missed. Sure enough, there's more to chew on in retrospect, in this case mostly to do with the differences in what the events we've witnessed meant to the two protagonists and how much that relates to the extreme divide in social class that separates them.
Which is also true of The Dancing Girl, and indeed, as with the other volumes, the pairing seems deliberate. At first glance, it might also seem a bit too obvious, in that on paper the stories are largely identical, following well-off young men in their relationships with impoverished women who both happen to be dancers. However, The Dancing Girl plays out very differently from The Izu Dancer and its Berlin setting only further underlines the changes, as does the shift to a somewhat harder, more contemporary art style. Ultimately, both of them are strong stories with their own distinct - if broadly adjacent - themes, and placing them back to back turns out to be an inspired move.
It's probably for the best, though, that the final episode goes in a wholly dissimilar direction. Last up, we have what the English release calls A Ghost Story, and which is better served by the name given to it by Wikipedia, Hoichi the Earless. At any rate, it's the likeliest to be familiar territory for fans of Japanese film, since the same tale makes up the third segment of the classic anthology art-horror movie Kwaidan. And, though it's hard to quantify a series that I've mostly loved from start to finish, I'm tempted to call this the strongest single entry of the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, if only for one reason: it's the first where the animation is not only not a detriment but an unabashed asset. A Ghost Story is frankly gorgeous, with some truly lovely backgrounds along the way, and moreover the strong visuals play a big part in pushing its superficially predictable tale toward being, if not actually scary, then definitely creepy and unsettling.
Going in, I wondered whether the lack of a two-parter would hurt this volume, and I guess the answer is no, since it may well be my favourite of the four. Then again, I'd hate to be forced to choose between them; that I've always hedged my bets a bit in recommending these Animated Classics of Japanese Literature releases is no representation of my personal feelings. As with the other three, unless you're fairly interested in both vintage animation and Japanese literature, there's not going to be much of interest here, though anyone who's familiar with Kwaidan might be glad of the opportunity to see one of its best parts adapted in a different medium. Still, of everything I've reviewed here that's highly unlikely to see a rerelease and so more or less lost to posterity, this is the one that breaks my heart the most, and if I really could only save the one volume, I reckon this would be it.
-oOo-
