Despite me claiming not so long ago that all the famous titles of nineties anime were behind us, we've quite the star-studded selection this time around, with a full spread of OVAs and spin-offs from franchises that range from the gigantic - welcome back, Tenchi Muyô! - to the well-respected among fans of older anime, as with Giant Robo. But if there's one lesson we've learned the hard way over the last hundred and some posts, it's that stalwart anime mega-series were quite as capable of producing awful tat as random titles that barely anyone's heard of. So who knows what highs and lows await us with Tenchi Muyô!: Mihoshi Special: Galaxy Police Mihoshi's Space Adventure, City Hunter: Bay City Wars, Fushigi Yûgi: Memories, and the Giant Robo: Ginrei Special...?
I've seen reviewers dismissing the Tenchi Muyô! OVA episode Galaxy Police Mihoshi's Space Adventure as a bit of inconsequential fluff, and to that I can only express bafflement, because to my mind it's high-concept metanarrative chicanery on a par with the likes of Mulholland Drive. Follow along with me here: the half-hour special begins with hapless space cop Mihoshi being called out on what a useless idler she is, only to defend herself with a story of one of her greatest adventures. However, barely has she begun but she's incorporating members of the Tenchi Muyô! gang into her tale, and though she insists she's just using their names for the sake of convenience, that's clearly not the case, since they all basically correspond to their "real-life" counterparts and since this show introduces Sasami's magical girl alter ego Pretty Sammy, who'd go on to have multiple series of her own. So is this really some long-lost event that everyone else has forgotten? Is everything taking place in some dark corner of Mihoshi's fractured psyche? But it gets weirder, because the story we hear Mihoshi telling, which, remember, is supposed to be a demonstration of her great space cop skills, doesn't at all match up with the one we see play out, in which Mihoshi is, if anything, even more bumbling and dim-witted than normally. And then there are a couple of closing twists that muddy the waters even further, including a sequel hook that can't possibly be occurring within Mihoshi's version of events, since it goes against her own understanding of what happened.
Of course, confusing doesn't necessarily equate to good, and there's a sense in which this is a fairly lousy representation of what the Tenchi Muyô! franchise is about, in that all the smart sci-fi stuff I was so impressed by back when I marathoned the OVAs and films is entirely absent. And I suppose this is what people are referring to when they write off Galaxy Police Mihoshi's Space Adventure as trivial, except that there were episodes there that also didn't much bother with that side of things and focused instead on the comedy, and Mihoshi's special is funnier than any of them. The narrative high jinx are the bulk of the joke, along with the uses to which Mihoshi puts the various cast members and, as usual for the character, her enormous idiocy in the face of just about any imaginable scenario, but amid all that there are some tremendous gags, which, when it comes to a comedy spin-off from a long-running show, seems like all you can reasonably ask for.
However, Tenchi Muyô! being Tenchi Muyô!, we also get top-notch production values, comfortably on a par with the main series, and fun tunes for the opening and end credits - the former a montage of Mihoshi bumbling her way through a fairy-tale version of the Tenchi-verse, in yet another bit of story-within-story and the latter effectively a trailer for Magical Girl Pretty Sammy*. Which reminds me! This review is toward the more pointless end of the spectrum since you can't actually buy Galaxy Police Mihoshi's Space Adventure on its own; in the UK it came packaged with the rest of the OVAs and in the US it was released together with Pretty Sammy. That makes whether to buy it an incredibly easy decision if you're in the UK, since it's a nice bonus to an already excellent collection, but I guess for the US it comes down to whether Magical Girl Pretty Sammy is worth hunting out in an exceedingly hard-to-find release. So I'd better get that one reviewed sooner rather than later, huh?
Despite unexpectedly liking the title that was released in the West as City Hunter: The Movie, I've generally been pretty down on the City Hunter franchise, and though I haven't revisited either of the two TV specials I covered in the early days of these reviews, Secret Service and .357 Magnum, I doubt I was unduly harsh on them.** But Bay City Wars has something neither of them had: a running time of just under forty-five minutes. And while conventional wisdom says that half the running time is in no way a merit, here it most definitely helps. Keeping things fast and tight does wonders for the City Hunter formula, which, after all, spent over a hundred TV episodes figuring out how to charge through comedic crime adventures in well under half an hour.
Perhaps ironically, I more than once found myself thinking "Man, I wish they'd used this story for one of those feature-length specials", but I'm fairly sure in retrospect that the increase in length would have undone most of its virtues, because the basic setup is nothing special. It is, in fact, a blatant Die Hard rip-off, down to some fairly minor details, though it also has the good sense not to rip off Die Hard to the extent of keeping its events locked into one location, which means the otherwise fairly generic action gets to benefit from being set in places like a theme park and a car showroom that allow for some visually engaging sequences. Nevertheless, the concept is Die Hard to a tee, with terrorists taking over the newly built Bay City hotel to get at the supercomputer in its basement, while Kaori and Reika are trapped at a party taking place inside and Ryo and Umibōzu are closing in on the building for their own reasons.
Those reasons are pretty damn dumb, it has to be said, and Ryo's motives in particular consist of chasing after food and chasing after a woman in that order, reducing him to even more of a ridiculous cartoon parody of a human being than he is generally. And I mentioned that the entire narrative revolves around a hotel with a supercomputer in its basement, didn't I? One that can interface with every other computer in the world, for reasons that boil down to "so the plot can happen"? Fortunately, the short running time once again does Bay City Wars a world of favours, since it's hard to get hung up on how nothing makes a lick of sense when you're being whisked to the next gag or gunfight without a moment to catch your breath.
Also, and whether or not we can put this down to the shortened running time or not is debatable, but the production values are decidedly impressive, especially compared with the longer specials. The action is genuinely exciting, the explosions are suitably explodey, and even the quieter moments get a boost from how solid the animation is and how engaged director Kodama seems to be with the material this time around. Tatsumi Yano's score is an equal highlight, with a nice main theme that picks up on the fact that the terrorists are South American and runs with it, albeit arguably to completely the wrong part of South America. But no one comes to City Hunter expecting cultural sensitivity, right? And for the viewer who foolishly did, at least Ryo's lechery is less of a plot driver than in other entries. Really, accepting that I'm no great fan of the franchise, this isn't far off being a perfect outing in my book: barring some risible plotting, it never sets a foot far wrong, and there's definitely never a boring moment. Plus, ADV had the decency to package it together with another shorter special, Million Dollar Conspiracy, and assuming that doesn't completely suck - watch this space! - this one seems like a sure-fire win for both existing fans and anyone looking to dip a toe into the murky City Hunter waters.
Of course it's not entirely fair to review the OVA spinoffs of long-running TV shows in isolation, but rarely does it turn out to be much of a problem, since OVAs on the whole tend to be side stories, reboots, and the like. So it's actually quite a shock to come across something like this OVA of the fifty-two episode series Fushigi Yûgi, which cuts the uninitiated viewer no slack whatsoever. Character introductions? Plot recap? Even making clear what's happened since the end of the series? These are not things the first Fushigi Yûgi OVA - which IMDB calls Fushigi Yûgi: Memories, so let's go with that - has any interest in concerning itself with.
Which makes reviewing it a tricky business, since I freely admit I haven't a clue what was going on for most of the running time; even summing up what bits of the narrative I did cobble together would probably be beyond me. And since it's not like I didn't do my due diligence, reading up on the show beforehand, I'm not convinced the fault lies entirely with me and my inability to follow a story. Indeed, I suspect the issue has much to do with the fact that three episodes was entirely the wrong length for the tale being told here, all the more so given that, by the end, the only real purpose it seems to have served is to chuck out the status quo set up by the original ending and lay the groundwork for the twice-as-long second OVA that would soon follow. With the knowledge of hindsight, it seems to me that the same point could have been reached in five minutes of exposition - there are literally only two scenes that contribute directly - or else with an episode more to let the events presented here feel like they matter in their own right.
And here I am, trying hard to avoid getting into the specifics of a plot I'm barely halfway to getting straight in my head, but since I don't want to be down on Fushigi Yûgi: Memories entirely for that reason, I'm going to need to engage with it a little bit. As I understand it, the basic setup for Fushigi Yûgi the series was that friends Miaka and Yui got sucked into a magic book and to the book's version of ancient China, where, among other events, Miaka fell in love with the warrior Tamahome. Knowing that much is sufficient to make rough sense of episode 1, in which Tamahome rather than Miaka gets drawn back into the book and its world, but is no use for episode 2, which focus almost exclusively on the trials awaiting him there. And that's a shame, because of the three, it's this middle episode that gets up to something that's exciting even for the Fushigi Yûgi novice. Basically, Tamahome is told he's not Tamahome at all but his enemy Nakago possessing Tamahome's body - or possibly the other way round - but whatever the fine details, it's enough for some novel conflict, as Tamahome at first dismisses the absurd-seeming possibility and then becomes increasingly doubtful of himself as the evidence accrues.
Sadly, this goes nowhere satisfying, and the third episode is the one that suffers most from the show's undue compression, barrelling through acres of plot and numerous character introductions and reintroductions and the establishing of a major new enemy and all manner of other bits and pieces, only for things to be wrapped up in a manner that feels less like an attempt to tell a new story than to lay the groundwork for one yet to come. Obviously, that might be different for established fans, who'd no doubt get more from some of the revelations and conflicts on offer here; it's certainly not a safe or inconsequential tale, so points for that. Still, those fans aside, there's almost nothing on offer barring a couple of standout pieces of music and the better moments of that middle episode. The animation is resolutely mid-nineties TV fare, the designs are bland, and the story feels at once rushed and overly expository, which is quite the feat. Then again, given the lack of pandering to newcomers, up to and including some comedy shorts at the end of each part that expect you not only to know the entire cast but apparently who their voice actors are too, it's transparently the case that this was made for ardent devotees of the TV show. And though I'd imagine even they would have preferred a less cluttered, jolting story, really, who am I to say?
I've come to view Giant Robo as more of a disappointment than it remotely deserves, purely because it was merely very good and not impossibly excellent as I'd hoped it might be based on its considerable reputation. So well done to the Giant Robo: Ginrei Special for being an actual, unquestionable disappointment in no uncertain terms. I'd imagined, perhaps naively, that by devoting three whole episodes to the OVA's sexy superspy female lead, they might delve a bit deeper into a character left frustratingly underexplored and underutilised in Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still. Rather than, you know, just spending an hour and a quarter leering at her butt.
Okay, I'm being slightly unfair, though you wouldn't guess that from the first episode, which does a great deal of leering indeed. It immediately lost points for starting with one of those introductory shower scenes that nineties anime was so fond of - because how else would you introduce a female character, eh? - and then won a few of them back by cutting to one of the male bad guys being gratuitously naked too, then lost all of that headway and then some with a sliver of a plot that clearly existed just to get Ginrei's clothes off yet again. Which all else aside is plain bad writing; if that's your goal, why not save everyone some trouble and just have twenty minutes of shower scene? Anyway, the first episode is largely terrible, especially given that I haven't even mentioned how much it recycles footage from The Day the Earth Stood Still. It manages to stay watchable by keeping its tongue close to its cheek, but it's far from a promising opening, and its only other virtue is that it's the shortest of the three.
The second is much weirder and still fairly creepy, but at least, in its better moments, is weird and creepy in mildly amusing ways. The story sees young Daisaku, pilot of Giant Robo, defecting to the evil Big Fire, except now their initials stand for Blue Flower, and stealing a backup robot that was modelled on Ginrei as he goes, meaning that - hoo boy! - we can have an upskirt gag with a giant robot. Actually, thinking back, the first half is pretty much full-on dreadful, and things only really pick up in the second half, when Ginrei gets to pilot the Ginrei-bot and we get a bit of moderately well-animated giant robot fighting to brighten the proceedings. (I forgot to mention that the original animation in episode one was conspicuously lousy, probably because I didn't want to talk about episode one more than I had to.) There's also a subplot, if we may stretch that word well beyond its usual limits, in which our heroes and villains get drunk together, and thus allow for some gags, one or two of which get quite near to being funny.
Last up, the third and longest episode takes a stab at providing something akin to what I'd originally hoped for, and if the main conclusion to be drawn is that the reason the production team were so shy of attempting a proper Ginrei tale is that they hadn't a clue how to go about one, still, it makes for a nice break. We only see our titular character naked once in the entire thirty minutes, how's that for progress! But then we have a narrative that practically trips over itself in its efforts not to be about Ginrei or to give her anything meaningful to do, and focuses instead on people and events we've no reason to be invested in, and ... well, the animation's much improved, so there's that. Honestly, though, how can you devote three episodes to a character with such promise and come away with a mess like this? How, even back in 1995, did anyone think the animation equivalent of a pinup calendar was the way to go with this project? (Oh hey, I forgot the DVD extra that more or less is a pinup calendar.) I've seen plenty worse anime, what with two of the episodes being somewhere around decent and the production values being generally okay, but I'd struggle to point to another that threw away so much potential with such wilful determination. So well done for that if nothing else, Giant Robo: Ginrei Special.
-oOo-
** I've actually revisited Secret Service since I wrote this and, nope, I wasn't being harsh at all.
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