Back we go once more to the eighties, though actually, there was a point when I was hoping to make this some kind of themed special based around insane high school-set anime, having covered a couple of titles that shared some clear common ground; but that didn't work out because it's not like I have much choice in what's left to review these days, so we've just got to work with what we've got. Which for today's purposes means Arion, Battle Royal High School, Ultimate Teacher, and Unico in the Island of Magic...
Here we have a precedent: a title that, though coming out a quarter of a century ago in its native Japan and more recently in both France and Italy, has never seen a release with English subtitles. Or rather, not until now, since, thanks to Discotek, Arion has finally made its English-language debut with a rather lavish blu-ray edition. Which is all well and good, but the fact that Arion has taken twenty-five years to make it into English is insane. I mean, Spectral Force could get a release but not this? Someone somewhere took a look at Psychic Wars and decided it just had to be thrust before the English-speaking public, but not one publisher until now felt that maybe jumping on the rights for the second feature by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, the director behind Crusher Joe: The Movie and Venus Wars (not to mention, more recently, the superlative Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin) might be a wise move?
You know what? I'm halfway to thinking Arion was worth that absurd twenty-five year wait, because it's an excellent film. As for quite how excellent, I'm not sure I'm ready to make definitive statements on that front quite yet, because it's far from faultless, and those faults make an early showing that sucks a little of the wind from its sails. The animation is often splendid, but also a touch clunky and inconsistent at points, and more so outside of the many action sequences than within them. And while it's always nice to have a score by Ghibli favourite Joe Hisaishi, it's fair to say that this finds the man at a point when he was merely a fine composer of anime music and not one of our greatest living musical artists, so there are catchy and inventive pieces but nothing that quite qualifies as ear-searing genius. And then there's the plot, which...
No, actually, the plot definitely warrants a paragraph to itself, because it's where Arion threatens to let itself down and ultimately triumphs most dramatically, though there are bound to be those who are put off by its extreme busyness and habit of jumping gracelessly from point to point. That does make it somewhat hard to love, in truth, but there's a lot of plot to be worked through, even with a two-hour running time, and I don't know that I can see how it could have been handled with much more delicacy. Yet for the first half hour or so, it certainly seems like Yasuhiko and his writing partner, Akiko Tanaka, are taking the path of most resistance through a perfectly straightforward narrative, in which young Arion finds himself conned by his conniving uncle Hades into involving himself in the divine war currently threatening to make a right old mess of the world, with Zeus on the one side and his brother Poseidon, who also happens to be Arion's father, on the other.
Because, yes, we're in the realms of Greek mythology here, a point I probably ought to have mentioned earlier, though this is Greek mythology played so fastly and loosely that at first it seems like not knowing the source material might actually be a bonus. For my money, Arion redeems itself on that score and then some, to a degree I wasn't remotely prepared for, finding its own tale to tell in the stuff of Greek legend and shifting from a feverish mythological greatest hits into something truly powerful and worthwhile. I won't dig into that too deeply, because it bears discovering for yourself, but I will say that if you're a fan of the Dark Souls games, as I am, you'll come away from Arion with a definite sense of familiarity; I've never seen the connection made, but I find it hard to believe this wasn't one of Hidetaka Miyazaki's many sources for his own gloriously elaborate feat of world-building. And even putting that aside, there are a fair number of enjoyable twists and turns along the way, some relatively predictable, some straight out of leftfield, but enough when gathered together that, by the midpoint, the story has become more an asset than a liability. Couple that with the aforementioned mostly fine and often marvellous animation and the aforementioned score by a genius in the making, and add in the sheer pleasurableness of seeing the greatly undervalued Yasuhiko going to town on some of the finest narrative material ever conjured by human minds, and you have a film that, now that it's at last available, ought to be seen by as many people as possible.
I'm not going to try and convince you that Battle Royal High School is the best vintage anime I've seen, but it may well be the most vintage anime I've ever seen. It's astonishing how much it feels like a distillation of almost everything that was happening in the scene toward the end of the eighties, and which would keep on happening for a good few years more. We've got demon invasions, we've got grotesque monsters, we've got plenty of pretty brutal fighting, but we've also got high school drama, a dash of comedy, a love triangle, some thoroughly gratuitous nudity, sci-fi elements in the shape of a character who apparently lives on a satellite and transforms into a robot ... considering that it barely runs for an hour, it's bewildering how much Battle Royal High School tries to cram in, and more so that, despite every part feeling highly familiar, the sum of those parts has a curious freshness to it, more so that many a similar title.
I'll try and sum up the plot, but I don't know how far that will get us, partly because, being a distillation of a much longer and more involved manga, there's an awful lot of plot to wade through, and partly because none of it matters a great deal except to get everyone lined up for - well, a battle royal. In a high school. As for the reason there's a high school involved at all, that would be our main protagonist in a film consisting of almost nothing besides protagonists, Riki Hyoudo, who as we meet him is wrapping up thrashing the last members of his school karate club while wearing what the script claims to be a leopard mask but which looks awfully like the head of an actual leopard - the sort of bizarre and disorientating detail, incidentally, that Battle Royal High School is rather excellent at throwing in to keep you off balance. Soon we learn that part of the reason Riki's such a badass is that he's the Earthly alter-ego of the demon lord Byoudo, who wants to use him as a vessel through which to conquer our world. But one of Byoudo's court, the fairy master Kain (and as much as this feels like a subtitling error, they are the master of a bunch of fairies) has other ideas, and they're not the only one: in the mix are also a demon hunter and the aforementioned satellite-dwelling space cop, neither of whom are very impressed with all this dimension-invading malarkey.
That's a lot of ingredients, and I still haven't listed all the significant characters - let me remind you that this thing doesn't make it all the way to an hour! - and yet none of them are of much consequence, nor is the fact that the plot, if we want to be generous and call it that, is pretty much illegible if you're fool enough to start thinking about it even slightly. Nor is it terribly important that much of the animation is a touch ramshackle or that the character designs feel consistently off in a way that's interesting but maybe not what you could call successful. And who cares that, barring the punky end track "Medusa", the soundtrack is wholly forgettable? Battle Royal High School isn't about any of that; really, the clue's right there in the title. We're here for the action, and the action is great, be it some exceedingly gross body horror or the many, many fights that are crammed into that relatively brief running time. In any other anime, that might be a problem, but given that the ratio of crazy violence to basically anything else is something like 70 / 30, here it's tough to care.
It's not even as though I'm exactly a fan of this stuff, though it certainly helps that all the best animation work has been saved to ensure that the action's as thrilling and freaky and impactful as it can be, and I'm never not going to give bonus points for some really committed animation. Still, on the whole, I've never been as into the branch of vintage anime that's remembered mostly for its shock value as some. Battle Royal High School unquestionably has most of the relevant flaws, from its incomprehensible but derivative plotting to its crappy attitude toward its female characters; but pilfering from nearly every corner of the contemporary anime scene, boiling the results down to their essence, and pouring every last drop into so tight a running time makes for something unexpectedly special and exciting. Battle Royal High School is incredibly rare these days and seems to have been largely forgotten, and I'd argue that that's downright criminal, because almost none of its peers nailed what it's up to half so well.
Of the smattering of releases that never made it past VHS or laserdisc*, there are few that anyone much seems to care about, but Ultimate Teacher is a title that will sometimes crop up when people mention their hard-to-find favourites, and it's not difficult to see why: whatever its relative flaws and merits, there's not much else out there like it. Not much, I say, rather than nothing, because actually I've seen a few things that are fairly similar, and if you're a fan of a certain brand of Japanese humour - one that's probably exemplified, or at least explored in most depth, by the series Excel Saga - then it's a safe bet that Ultimate Teacher won't come as much of a surprise to you.
For anyone else, though, its particular brand of comedy, blending jokes from all across the spectrum from extreme crassness to social satire but generally landing somewhere amid a sort of boisterous, tasteless surreality, might come as quite the shock. Certainly I can imagine that not a lot of Western viewers would have expected a spectacle like Ultimate Teacher all the way back in 1988, when we were all less inured to seeing this sort of raunchy, bloody, profoundly silly weirdness in animated form. To sum up a plot that doesn't need much summing up, the huge and flamboyantly dressed Ganbachi arrives one day at Teioh High School, insisting he be taken on as a teacher and that he'll turn the place around, and the head is only too happy to take him up on the offer despite his obviously strange behaviour, since Teioh needs all the turning around it can get. In short order, we discover that Ganbachi is every bit as strange as he seems and that his eccentricities clearly have something to do with the brief prologue in which someone or something escaped from a mysterious underground laboratory. But Teioh's new teacher is also in for a surprise, when he discovers that the beautiful girl he met on the way there is actually the school's top delinquent Hinanko and is more than capable of standing up to him. Actually, I've somehow made that sound like quite a bit of plot, but on the screen it really isn't, the more so since the above takes up maybe five minutes and the remaining fifty is just Ganbachi and Hinanko working out their differences in various silly and violent ways, which get even sillier and more violent once we discover Ganbachi's bizarre secret and meet the scientist responsible for it.
I suspect greatness was never within Ultimate Teacher's grasp. There isn't enough in the concept for it to be more than sporadically funny, and there definitely wasn't the budget to make it look at all special. But when it comes to the UK release, anyway, what keeps it from being consistently good, a goal otherwise well within in its reach, is Manga's dubbing. In fairness, that's not for a lack of effort and definitely not for a lack of committed vocal performances: unlike so many of their dubs, it's obvious everyone was giving their best efforts, and Marc Smith, in particular, brings no end of gusto to the part of Ganbachi. Yet that turns out to be a lot of the problem, in that it doesn't take much to push this particular brand of humour into being loud and obnoxious. That's a tendency encouraged by the writer responsible for the translation; to pick on one stand-out example, they clearly thought having characters say "pussy panties" over and over is funny, and fair enough, I imagine it will be to some people, but for me it almost immediately got annoying, especially because it sucked the life out of what was evidently a joke with a bit more nuance and cultural specificity. Manga would go much deeper down the rabbit hole of convincing themselves that chucking swear words and sexual references into a script somehow made it automatically comedic and / or edgy, but that's not to say it does Ultimate Teacher any favours.
Nevertheless, there's no denying that it's earned its small niche in history. For all the problems with the script and to some extent with the voice acting, Ultimate Teacher does manage to be pretty funny, and once the full scope of its concept is revealed around the fifteen minute mark, the goings-on reach some admirably bonkers and screwed-up heights. It's not altogether incomprehensible that Manga didn't try and get this one out on DVD, but it's definitely curious, especially given some of the risible nonsense they packed out their Collection range with; in its own right, Ultimate Teacher may not be any sort of classic, but I'd take it over the likes of Vampire Wars** any day of the week.
Yes, it's time for another wacky exploit of Unico the good-hearted magical unicorn, who, if you read my review of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, you may remember was so hated by the gods that they sentenced him to death, a fate he narrowly avoided due to the dubious kindness of the West Wind, who let him off with just a life of perpetual solitude. And so it is with the opening scene of Unico in the Island of Magic, in which the West Wind, having dragged Unico away from the friends he made in the first film, has whisked him to another remote part of the world and wiped his memories, presumably just in case being able to recall that he'd once experienced some emotion other than crushing loneliness might mitigate his suffering ever so slightly.
Fortunately for Unico, that kindly fiend the West Wind has misjudged this time around and plonks the young unicorn down in a place that's absolutely teeming with people, not to mention talking animals and monsters and all sorts of other oddness, and it's not long before he's found himself roped into a fresh adventure - though admittedly it takes him a while to get past the traumas he receives in the opening minutes and start to trust again, because, my lord, has there ever been a grimmer children's entertainment franchise than this one? Anyway, Unico hooks up with a girl named Cherry, who manages to rapidly overcome his PTSD, and just possibly all would be well for our pink-haired chum, except that Cherry's runaway brother is an apprentice wizard in service of the fiendish Kukuruku, and Kukuruku is determined to turn all living things into inanimate dolls, including not only Cherry's parents but all the local townsfolk as well, which means the world is seriously in need of the services of a brave unicorn with baffling, arbitrary magical powers.
That gets us to somewhere near the mid point of a movie that manages to be at once busy and ambling in the way that maybe only kids' fantasy films can be, and it's certainly a plot that improves as it goes along: for the first thirty minutes, it seems as though elements are being thrown in more or less at random, and it's only well past the halfway mark that a definite shape begins to become apparent. It's fair to say that tight, clear storytelling is absolutely not a virtue of Unico in the Island of Magic, and that might be a problem, except that - like so many of its peers from this heyday of Japanese animated children's film-making - the movie looks absolutely ravishing. When barely a minute goes by without something hugely visually exciting to feast your eyes on, it's hard to care about a plot that's pinging about like a pinball or getting bogged down in nothing much for fairly long stretches, because whatever's happening, it's at the very least a joy to look at. The pinnacle of this is the titular island of magic, which is such a feast of mad design and dementedly ambitious animation that, were everything else in the film an utter mess, it would still justify giving up ninety minutes of your time.
Thankfully, that's by no means the case. Unico in the Island of Magic has its flaws to be sure, and the one that bothered me particularly was Unico himself, or rather the annoying conceit of having his memory wiped, which leaves him less a protagonist and more a whiny blank slate for a sizeable percentage of the film. But if we're given bland heroes - Cherry is nondescript enough to make a mind-wiped Unico seem interesting - the return is absolutely terrific villains, both in Cherry's conflicted brother and in his wicked master, whose eventual backstory is both bizarre and hugely satisfying in how it's been set up via lots of neat visual cues. While you're watching it, Unico in the Island of Magic feels like a fever dream brought on by listening to too much prog rock in a particularly weird disco, yet by the end it has a reasonably clear and legible shape and even some rather nice themes that it has the decency to lay out gently rather than hurling at the viewer. So while its strangeness and darkness and messiness all might seem off-putting to anyone not watching primarily for the superlative animation, I'd argue that there's still a splendid kids' film here if you're willing to tune into its wavelength.
-oOo-
* The internet swears blind that a DVD version exists, but I can find no actual trace of it anywhere.
** Funnily enough, I recently reappraised Vampire Wars via the US release that came with the original language version so frustratingly absent from all Manga's Collection releases, and that alone pushes it up into the realms of half decency, so clearly the moral here is that Manga's crappy dubs could ruin most anything.
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