Not so long ago, I was surprised at how I was still able to fill a post with entries from major franchises, even with over four hundred reviews behind us, and that's truer than ever here, with the added caveat that, for these particular major franchises, it's definitely not going to happen again. Here we say our final farewell to some of the giants of vintage anime, with the last entries that fall within my strict-except-when-I-break-it no TV shows rule for four of anime's leviathans. We've got the last of the many Lupin the Third films from the nineties, the second and last OVA spin-off from Tenchi Muyo!, and the last of Patlabor, along with, at time of writing, the last of the available City Hunter specials. Granted, there's a chance the one movie to never receive an English-language release, The Death of Vicious Criminal Saeba Ryo, will yet see the light of day, since Discotek claimed the rights to all things City Hunter a couple of years back - but hey, that's the future!
So as of right now, let's say our goodbyes courtesy of City Hunter: Million Dollar Conspiracy, Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, Patlabor OVA Series 2: The New Files, and Lupin the Third: Farewell to Nostradamus...
City Hunter: Million Dollar Conspiracy is, I would say, the best-animated slice of City Hunter I've come across, including the OVA released in the US as The Motion Picture and the TV show itself, which was surprisingly lavish and easily beats out some of the lesser offshoots. From what I've seen of the most recent (and actually cinema-ready) movie, that probably tops it, but let's not get into comparing anime from two decades into the twenty-first century with anime from a decade before the end of the twentieth, eh? Though even if we did, Million Dollar Conspiracy would still look pretty fine, so it's not as though the comparison's a wholly unfavourable one. And since I'm a sucker for great animation, the odds were always high that I'd be on side with it.
On the other hand, I've been known to severely dislike City Hunter on occasions, and though I'm coming to wonder if I might have been a touch harsh in the past, nevertheless, there's no denying that I'm not entirely on its wavelength. So it gladdens me to say that Million Dollar Conspiracy does nothing to squander the goodwill it gains from looking really damn good. The story is fairly boilerplate stuff - Ryô is hired by a beautiful woman for the princely sum of a million dollars to protect her from the mob, but he's much more interested in getting into her pants, and it's transparently obvious that there's more going on than she's admitting - but it's boilerplate done well, or at least as well as a somewhat restrictive formula allows. Ryô's lechery stays on the right side of funny rather than tipping over into "but seriously, this guy needs to be in prison" territory as the series is wont to at its worst, the plot's just twisty enough to keep the pace up for forty-five minutes, and perhaps most to the point, there's lots of strong action, buoyed by the high production values and culminating in a climax that gets good mileage out of a fun gimmick for its main antagonist.
None of this, needless to say, reinvents any wheels, and if Million Dollar Conspiracy is a great City Hunter film, that arguably only makes it a good film overall. That would be more of a problem had ADV not seen fit to pair it with the similarly short and equally good Bay City Wars, which we covered back in post number hundred and six. Add to that the bonus of an excellent episode from the show and this was, at the time, a rather terrific release. Now that it's harder to get hold of, obviously that's not quite as true, but if you're into City Hunter, this is certainly a must-have, and if you're looking to give the franchise a try, I reckon it's an even more sensible place to start that City Hunter: The Motion Picture, for all that that's a touch better than either of the two films taken separately.
First of all, let us note that this isn't the same Magical Girl Pretty Sammy who appeared in the Tenchi Muyo! Mihoshi Special and nor, as far as I could tell, the one who'd go on to appear in the TV show Sasami: Magical Girls Club, though the other TV show in which she appeared, Magical Project S, does seem to be a sequel, despite mostly running consecutively with this OVA. Man, vintage anime franchises could be alarmingly complicated! After all, this is already an alternate universe reimagining of a character first encountered in a comedy spin-off of the original Tenchi Muyo! OVA series, though according to Wikipedia, the whole notion was born in yet another side story outside of the world of animation, in one of those voice dramas that were such a big part of the culture at the time in Japan and barely made the slightest dent upon the Western anime scene.
In a sense, none of this baggage matters in terms of whether you're likely to enjoy Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, and in a sense it may well matter a great deal. Which is to say, the show doesn't really have much to do with Tenchi Muyo!, despite dragging all of its core cast over and repurposing them around a tale that now centres on the ten-year-old Sasami and her adventures as a pawn in a high-stakes game of magical kingdom sibling rivalry. For the entirety of the first episode, this struck me as a substantial missed opportunity, in that a magical girl story happening off in the fringes of the Tenchi-verse is on the face of it a more appealing proposition than one that just has characters broadly similar to those characters who have to be laboriously set up over the course of forty minutes. Frankly, that first episode, which feels as though it ought to be hitting the ground running and instead wades laboriously through a sea of less-than-thrilling setup, isn't a strong start.
Inevitably, the show picks up once that's out the way, with a pair of episodes that are free to do their own thing. And while the things they opt to do with that freedom aren't mind-blowing, they're enough to provide a measure of fun. This is truest by some way of episode two, by far the silliest of the three and the one that most feels as though it's having a laugh with the whole magical girl concept instead of parodying it by more or less just being it. Pretty Sammy squares off against a villain who's essentially Bill Gates, the main MacGuffin is a karaoke CD, and for the most part, we get the sort of random silliness you'd expect of something where the concept involved taking a minor character from a well-known franchise and making them a magical girl for the hell of it. Whereas the third episode, while still entertaining, starts to take this whole business too seriously and generally assumes we're invested in these characters simply because we've been hanging around them for an hour and a half, which seems a lot to ask when most of them are just the cast of Tenchi Muyo! stripped to their core traits.
So it's not great, that much is probably obvious. The animation is below the standards set by basically everything in the Tenchi-verse up to this point, with a frequent habit of looking cheap and slightly slapdash, the music is amusing but nowhere near enough so to be a selling point, and what occurs to me now as it didn't when I was watching, this more than anything feels like a pilot for Magical Project S, for all that Magical Project S came out at the same time as two of these episodes. Since I haven't seen Magical Project S, I've no idea if that potentially makes it a worthwhile time investment, but coming at it solely from the direction of someone who's fond of Tenchi Muyo!, I can't say this particularly obscure offshoot - now the least available of all the Western releases - is worth the effort of hunting down. It's a pleasant and very gentle pastiche of magical girl shows that frequently forgets the pastiche part, and there are more than a few of those out there that aren't so astoundingly hard to find.
Given that Patlabor would be high on my top-ten list of favourite anime franchises, it's taken me a bewilderingly long time to get to this second OVA series, for reasons that probably boil down to worrying that it couldn't possibly be as good as the first OVA series or the movies, so why not quit while I was ahead? Well, the joke's on me, or past me anyway; The New Files is most definitely up to the standard of The Early Days, and if it doesn't quite reach the unassailable bar that is the movies, that's only because it's attempting such radically different things that the comparison is meaningless.
Mind you, none of this is apparent from the first four episodes, which are a direct continuation of an arc from the TV series and the closest I've ever seen Patlabor come to the sort of genre fare it superficially resembles and so determinedly tends to avoid being. Heck, there are actual giant robot fights, ones that go on for more than a minute or two, and what's most bizarre to the viewer who's used to Patlabor stories that merrily sideline action for just about anything else they can lay their hands on, they're fairly involved, exciting giant robot fights. So while those opening episodes aren't what any self-respecting fan would come to the show for, it's not like they're bad or anything; in fact, they're a perfectly solid take on some thoroughly generic material, as an evil arms manufacturing company of the sort you could barely step outdoors without running into back in the days of nineties anime demonstrates their latest weapon of war by setting it against the forces of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Special Vehicle Section and their "patrol labour" mobile suits.
An uninspired start, then, but hardly a ruinous one. Heck, it's even a nice palette cleanser to be reminded of what Patlabor generally isn't before you get into some of the very best of what Patlabor is. But then, what truly sets the franchise apart from pretty much all its contemporaries and just about anything similar is its versatility, and I don't know that that's ever had a better workout than here. While it's fair to say the bulk of the episodes fall somewhere amid the loose category of slice-of-life drama and most contain at least some measure of comedy, beyond that it's anyone's guess what you'll get once the opening credits have rolled. It might be an Ultraman spoof or a Dungeons and Dragons pastiche. It might be melancholy, romantic, or surreal, it might be serious or hilarious, and in the case of a couple of the finest episodes, it might superficially not contain much of anything. Patlabor can mine depths of empathy over the mild misery of a tooth ache, can turn a petty dispute among the Special Vehicle Section's support staff into an hilarious all-out war, and perhaps most to the point, is as capable of generating fine human drama from its wonderful, always surprisingly layered cast as any anime show you might care to name.
If there are grounds for complaint, barring that not-so-wonderful opening quartet, they're all quite tiny, and none relate to the production values, which are top notch and comfortably ahead of most of what was happening back in the early nineties: not up to the films, for sure, but better than the already respectable first OVA series. I do have a niggling sense that the balance leans slightly too far toward humour and that it would have been nice to have something similar to and on a par with the superlative two-part "The SV2's Longest Day" from The Early Days. But that feels petty to say, because the humour is largely terrific and it's reasonable to suppose that the TV series these episodes were spinning off from did its share of those sorts of serious tales, whereas the delightful randomness here could only really be fitted into OVAs. Maybe a broader range of stories would have pushed The New Files that bit closer to perfection, and maybe they'd have upset its delicate balance, but whatever the case, this is tremendous stuff. Granted, it's probably not the place to start with Patlabor, relying as it does on a degree of familiarity, but once you've got your foot in the door, it's absolutely not to be missed.
If you were to claim Farewell to Nostradamus was the best Lupin the Third film, I wouldn't agree with you - given that Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro exists, that debate is essentially null and void - but nor would I argue terribly hard. It gets an awful lot right and nothing conspicuously wrong, but more than that, there's just so much of it. And with Lupin being one of those rare franchises where busyness is generally a virtue, Farewell to Nostradamus's extremely busy plot does it plenty of favours. It's a cavalcade of stuff flung at you for the better part of a hundred minutes, and since most of the stuff is at least good and much of it is great, it's hard not to be entertained and downright impossible to be bored. For sure, there are a handful of Lupin entries that aspire to be more than mere entertainment, but for the most part, that's what the franchise aims for and frequently does so well, and perhaps nowhere else does it succeed quite so reliably as here.
However, what keeps it away from the top spot for me is how all that being always good and often great comes at the expense of doing anything truly radical. The plot is the biggest victim: in being a superb mechanism for the delivery of delightful action moments and zippy comedy, it fails to produce much in the way of interesting ideas or to capitalise on the ones it has. One of its more promising elements is the McGuffin of the week, a previously-thought-missing book of Nostradamus's prophecies which billionaire presidential wannabe Douglas has, sect leader Rhisley claims to have, and Fujiko Mine is chasing, meaning that soon Lupin and his other allies are after it too. A book of prophecies is a novel prize for Lupin to be seeking, so it's disappointing that the film barely cares about its contents, except to make some easy jabs at those who beguile others with made-up secrets and the suckers who fall for their schtick. Better deployed is the ludicrous city-sized skyscraper Douglas operates out of, containing the real book of prophecies in its impregnable-but-obviously-not-really vault on the top floor: it's a prime location for some crazy Lupin goodness, and thankfully the movie doesn't squander that one.
Amid the basic treasure-hunt setup, there are no end of familiar elements: a kidnapping subplot, an island prison escape, a cult with ulterior motives, numerous helicopter chases, an entire second McGuffin, and even a jot of amnesia for Fujiko. To be fair, they pass by at such a rate that there's never a point where the film feels especially familiar, but there's also not a point where any of this feels fresh, though some of the finer bursts of action inside Douglas's preposterous skyscraper come the closest, including a particularly awesome climax. With that in mind, and given that this is one of the rare handful of actual cinematic releases rather than one of the myriad TV movies, it should come as no surprise that the animation is reliably impressive. But Farewell to Nostradamus is also kind of clumsy in odd moments, with some overly evident labour-saving, and the designs for the core cast are as archetypal as can be: pleasingly so, it has to be said, with a slight ramping up of their cartoonishness that fits nicely with the light-hearted tone, and yet they do nothing to stick in the memory.
This is all nit-picking, true, and its the sort of nit-picking that only a film of so high a calibre could leave itself open to, but still, there's something ever-so-slightly frustrating about a Lupin the Third film which flirts so hard with greatness. I'm not the first to note that what makes Castle of Cagliostro a flawed Lupin movie is what pushes it toward true masterpiece status: it bends the formula and its characters far enough that they come close to breaking and in so doing gets to go places the franchise generally can't. Farewell to Nostradamus is absolutely not that, and indeed it couldn't push the envelope much less than it does, but damn does it make marvellous use of that envelope. So if it's not the best of the series, it's probably the one I'd point a potential convert to, in the confidence that they'd be guaranteed a ton of fun and come away with a deep love of all things Lupin the Third.
-oOo-
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