This one set out to be a sexy anime special, because, as we've long since established, there's a fair old bit of vintage anime that, while not out-and-out hentai, was still happy to include a splash of gratuitous titillation to spice up the proceedings. But somewhere along the way, the post seems to have morphed into something that's harder to pin down and arguably more interesting: the connecting thread here is that, whether through cuts for the Western market or marketing approaches or choices made by the original creative teams, all four titles here censor or downplay or otherwise get a bit tricksy with their sexual content. But rather than try and explain what I mean by that here, we may as well roll straight into the reviews and take a look at Fencer of Minerva: The Emergence, Variable Geo, Sins of the Sisters, and Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time...
Fencer of Minerva: The Emergence, 1994, dir's: Takahiro Okao, Osamu Sekita
I haven't forgotten how I've said multiple times that I wouldn't start reviewing hentai here, but the problem is, what happens when someone goes out of their way to put out a hentai title in a way that downplays its hentai-ness as much as possible? Not that that's precisely what U.S. Manga Corps did with Fencer of Minerva, the amount of semi-nudity and chains on the cover is definitely a tip-off, but what they did apparently do is trim some of the sexy stuff to secure a lower rating and then describe the result, rather duplicitously, as "action / adventure" rather than, you know, soft porn.
In fairness to them, whichever way you come at this first volume of Fencer of Minerva, it's going to end up feeling like a surprisingly elaborate fantasy adventure that has to keep putting on the brakes every ten minutes for a sex scene, and since the two strands don't always gel, there's sense in marketing it as one or the other rather than trying to express how schizophrenic it actually is. For the first two episodes, anyway, this also has the curious side effect that you can just about watch the show as a decent slice of high fantasy and about tune out the sexy stuff. Not that I've anything against that in theory, but - apparently drawing heavily on a series of books by author John Norman known as the Gorean Saga - Fencer of Minerva is extremely focused on male-dominated bondage and female submission, to the point where those ideas are baked deep into its world-building, with a culture that essentially seems to have replaced marriage with sex slavery in which it's always the women who end up enslaved. Since it's aiming to be more erotic than horrifying, Fencer of Minerva wraps itself in knots dressing most of this up as consensual, and so, for instance, as much as our protagonist Diana might seem unhappy about being whipped, the men doing the whipping are quick to point out that she's actually clearly turned on by it. Which, I don't know, maybe is persuasive if you're determined not to think about it, but given the pains Fencer of Minerva goes to in crafting a world where female subjugation is the norm, it's tough not to reach the conclusion that, for all that Diana routinely ends up consenting after the fact in some form or another, her consent is meaningless in a culture where the roles available to women apparently boil down to princess or sex slave, with the princess jobs particularly hard to come by.
The flipside of this is that, while it makes the hentai aspects off-putting unless you're on their wavelength, it doesn't harm the adventure fantasy side of things all that much. A version of Fencer of Minerva less committed to its core concept would actually be worse, I think; for the first two episodes, the sense is more of having this society plonked in front of us to make of what we will than of being expected to blindly accept it, especially given that said society clearly isn't functioning awfully well: this we learn in the opening scene, when a bloody coup separates our protagonists, Shou the son of the murdered king and Diana the daughter of his usurper. By the time fate chucks them back together years later, the land is on the verge of revolt, and it's that turmoil which drives the action as much as Diana's discovery that just maybe she'd quite like being a slave so long as Shou happens to be her master.
Sadly, the political shenanigans go out the window for the third episode, which dispenses with most everything but the sex and really does seem determined to persuade us that sexual slavery is a great lifestyle choice that any woman would be mad to turn down. And here I ought to mention that Fencer of Minerva isn't in any way well animated or pleasant to the eye, barring the odd nice background, and so even if the soft-porn parts worked on their own merits, they still wouldn't work, so that an episode with nothing else going for it is basically an episode with nothing going for it whatsoever. Oh, except for the music, I guess, that's unexpectedly great, with gorgeous opening and closing themes that appear to have blundered in from some much better anime. Given how that still leaves us with two episodes I found mildly engaging versus one I had no time for, I feel like I'm still just about recommending this if it sounds like it might be your thing, but that last part is definitely a bigger than usual caveat.
, 1996, dir: Tooru Yoshida
As a way of getting us to a point where you might have some sense of what Variable Geo is like, I'm going to have a crack at describing the first five minutes, though I'm not sure I'm up to the task, so bear with me. We open on a young woman we'll later learn to be named Yuka Takeuchi, and as we meet her, Yuka's stressing out because it's raining and she's running late for her waitressing job. However, barely has she arrived and begun to be scolded by her manager but she spies another woman standing in the street who evidently has business with her. That business turns out to be challenging her to a fight, something Yuka seems wholly unsurprised by. Little turnstile posts pop out of the ground and they both insert the special cards they have - this, I stress, is happening in a previously crowded road in the middle of Tokyo! - and, lo and behold, the ground opens and a wrestling ring rushes up from some unfathomable subterranean depth. At which point, every screen in the city cuts to the unfolding match, including that of the mayor, who seems terribly pleased that a Variable Geo bout is about to kick off and terribly unconcerned that it's brought the capital of Japan to a standstill.
Reading over that, what I doubt I've conveyed is how odd and hallucinatory the intro of Variable Geo - and the rest of it too for that matter, but we'll come to that - feels. Variable Geo the anime, you perhaps won't be astonished to hear, is an adaptation of a fighting game, from that period when fighting games were absolutely everywhere and apparently every single one got an anime adaptation. The Variable Geo series' gimmick - because this was also the period when fighting games were having to resort to increasingly showy gimmicks to stand out from the pack - was that all the characters were women, and waitresses, and rather than, like, having their spine torn out or something, the punishment for the losers was that they were stripped naked and / or sexually abused.
While we might dearly wish otherwise, Variable Geo the three episode OVA takes all that and recreates it faithfully. Or ... I dunno, maybe faithfully isn't the word. It's definitely the case that the losers have their clothes torn off, either relatively voluntarily or else by whoever's to hand, and obviously this is gross and exploitative, but what makes it especially weird is that Variable Geo seems to understand and acknowledge that fact, and so we're left with exploitation in which the cast keep calling the show - and by implication, the game - out on its dodgy antics. Oh, there are the occasional characters who are quite down with getting naked, but there are plenty more who let us see how miserable and humiliated they are, injecting a measure of humanity into what, on the page, clearly ought to be tacky smut.
What I'm trying and probably failing to get at here is that Variable Geo is both much better than it ought to be and much, much stranger. It's like a bunch of very smart, capable people sat down and genuinely tried to make a solid anime adaptation of a game that sounds unbelievably unpleasant based on its Wikipedia description without altogether chucking away their integrity or creativity. That means keeping the horribly exploitative aspects but twisting them into something openly uncomfortable, and it means adapting a plot that doesn't make one whit of sense by massaging it down into manageably nonsensical chunks, and it means a quite dizzying lack of internal logic: as far as I could figure out, Variable Geo fights are wrestling matches happening solely between waitresses, except when they involve ninjas or corporate CEOs, and also you can use weapons or magical powers or cybernetic enhancements if you like, and you can have other people fight on your behalf or bring along a gang, and quite why nobody has thought of just nuking their opponent from orbit is anyone's guess.
Perhaps most shockingly, and for a rare change, having a creative team who actively appear to give a damn means a fighting game adaptation that actually has some pretty good fights, which more than anything suggests that director Yoshida hadn't the faintest clue what his job was here. Indeed, the animation as a whole is respectable in a way the source material could never hope to be, to the extent of somehow redeeming some theoretically godawful character designs. And while I hate myself a little for having enjoyed Variable Geo as much as I did, that being a heck of a lot, I also can't but love its creators for taking something that, by any imaginable metric, should have been terrible and arriving at one of the most vibrant, amusing, exciting, and bonkers fighting game adaptations you could hope for.
Sins of the Sisters, 1994, dir: Yorifusa Yamaguchi
As a way into how aggressively baffling Sins of the Sisters is, we might pause to note that what it really ought to be called is St. Michaela Academy II, or maybe St. Michaela School Travels II, or to give it its Japanese title, Sei Michaela Gakuen Hyouryuuki, but what's really important is that it's a sequel to a previous OVA from four years earlier. And sure, passing off sequels as original stories is bound to cause a measure of puzzlement, but the truth is that Sins of the Sisters trips over itself in assuming we haven't seen part one and need all the salient facts repeated, so that's not really the problem here, except in so much as it requires the dumping of quite a lot of exposition to bring us to the point where this particular tale can get rolling.
But nope, for all that that may be part of the issue, it's certainly not the heart of it. Rather, the issue is that the story
Sins of the Sisters sets out to tell is positively demented from top to bottom. I'd try for a summary, but doing it justice would require more words then I'd normally write for an entire one of these posts, and I doubt anyone would be much wiser by the end. But let's see if we can't set out the crucial points: we open on the bitter close of the
Children's Crusade, a real historical event you'd better be at least vaguely familiar with if you're going to be on
Sins of the Sisters' wavelength even slightly, at the point when young Hans, leader of the youthful would-be crusaders, realises that he and his fellows have been betrayed and sold into slavery by the pope. Rather than take this lying down, Hans denounces god, commits suicide, and travels hundreds of years into the future, where he reincarnates as teenaged schoolgirl Aiko and teams up with the other students of St. Michaela Academy to overthrow all the world's religions and governments and usher in a utopic golden age of peace, and ... oh hell, this is already sounding like the ravings of a lunatic and, so far as I could tell, I'm not even up to the stuff that wasn't just a recap!
Suffice to say that this sequel sees the survivors of the first OVA, largely without Aiko / Hans, who's recovering from the injuries they sustained in part one, setting out to avert the historical tragedy that set off this whole mess in the first place, even though doing so would presumably reset everything to the way it was. Anyway, our intrepid band of warrior schoolgirls find themselves accompanied by a woman / ghost / murderous hermaphrodite whose lover died in, I think, the unaltered timeline, and they're trying to ensure that Hans dies just as he historically did, possibly, and argh trying to make sense of any of this is making my brain bleed. Which is hardly surprising given that I spent most of Sins of the Sisters in delirious awe at how badly it was mangling history, logic, and the most basic rules of narrative construction; really, from the opening scene and the first mention of the Children's Crusade, I knew I was in for something truly and awesomely special. But however historically dubious that was, it barely prepared me for the point when the youthful crusaders find themselves reinforced by a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls in modern-day uniforms and barely blink an eyelid, though I'm fairly certain the average French person in the thirteenth century hadn't the faintest clue Japan existed.
But cataloguing every mad moment in Sins of the Sisters is a fool's game when it consists of almost nothing except mad moments. And I haven't even touched on how this demented fantasy time travel historical thriller is also, and maybe even primarily, a work of pornography. Fairly softcore pornography, granted, but given that all the characters are children or teenagers, it's hard to see who U.S. Manga Corps thought they were kidding with their claim that "all characters depicted in sexual conduct or in the nude are aged 19 or over" ... there's a brief but disturbing rape scene that alone gives the lie to that. Yet getting prudish about Sins of the Sisters is equally a fool's game, if only because the person who comes to a simplistically animated fantasy time travel historical thriller in search of erotic thrills deserves our pity more than our censure.
Or am I just making excuses? As is probably clear by now, I adored every mad minute of Sins of the Sisters, and I'd have forgiven it quite a lot simply for how it offered me ninety-some minutes of not knowing what the hell craziness it was going to pull out of its crazy hat next. And speaking of hats, let me take mine off in the direction of director Yorifusa Yamaguchi, who deserves all the praise in the world for meeting some very obvious budgetary restraints by indulging his most outlandish creative instincts, regardless of whether they were necessarily "good" or not. One example should suffice: in that opening scene, as the child crusaders hurl themselves into the ocean, they're represented not as individuals but as identical amorphous humanoid shapes, with Hans the only recognisable human among them: it's so obviously a cost-cutting measure, and it looks sort of rubbish, yet it's also damned effective in a strange and abstract way. Which, for a particular sort of viewer, might well sum up Sins of the Sisters: it's clearly very bad indeed on many, many levels, and at the same time it's so far from anything you're likely to have come across and so stubborn in treating its absurd material with stony-faced seriousness that it's hard not to love it a little simply for going against all the rules of what conventional storytelling is meant to look like.
Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is something of an exception here in that it contains no sexual content whatsoever bar a bit of semi-nudity and some none-too-subtle implication, but I'd argue that it earns its right to be a part of this post, because what ADV presented as a largely sex-free fantasy tale was anything but in its original incarnation. It is, in fact, an adaptation of the hentai RPG video game franchise Dragon Knight, and specifically of Dragon Knight 4, so far as I can tell. But the funny thing is, the cut version of Dragon Knight is so great that it's impossible to imagine how it would be improved by jamming in sex scenes, and having unearthed the removed footage online, I can confirm that it brings bugger all to the table, except in so much as moderately well-animated sex scenes can be enjoyed on their own merits. But given that one of them makes our protagonist a rapist and all of them together make him kind of slutty in ways the plot badly needs him not to be, I'm comfortable in proposing that the ADV version is actually an across-the-board improvement.
That Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is going to be something special becomes apparent in its opening scene, which quickly sets out its irresistibly neat premise. We meet our hero Kakeru in a subterranean cell, where he informs us he's been for a very long time indeed, and what we glimpse of the world above suggests it's gone straight to hell in that time. But Kakeru's freedom is at hand: a guard who enters his cell reveals herself to be the dark-elf Marlene in disguise and she has a means of sending him back through time, in an attempt to set right what went so badly wrong the last time. There's a pretty enormous catch, though: Kakeru will be there in disguise, helping his former self, and if young Kakeru should discover who his mentor is, adult Kakeru will vanish from existence. Moreover, with the long-imprisoned Kakeru's memory on the distinctly flaky side, the most help Marleen can offer him is that he needs to convince her past self of something vital and that, if he should succeed, he'll be able to save his childhood love Natasha, his failure to do so being about the only thing that cuts through his mental fog.
Those first five minutes are near to flawless, using the sort of stylised mood that only animation can generate and a pair of strong performances to hook us into the world, and though there'll be dips along the way - especially where that animation is concerned, care of some exceedingly evident budgetary constraints - there's never a moment with Kakeru and Marlene on screen together that isn't hypnotic. Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is arguably quite bad at a lot of things, such as keeping track of a large cast of minor characters who presumably mattered more in the game and making any sense whatsoever of its wider conflict, which until the last episode is engaged with hardly at all, but the developing central relationship and that marvellous premise are a charge of narrative energy that's never absent for very long. I suppose that "go back in time to save your past self" isn't the most original idea ever, but "go back in time to save your past self when you can't remember what went wrong the first time and are also rapidly coming to suspect that you may have been stuck in this loop basically forever" is a heck of a lot more so. And arguably it makes those storytelling flaws far less relevant: future-Kakeru is barely engaged with most of his companions because by this point they're mere doomed pawns in a conflict that's been played out far too many times, and even that conflict isn't as important as the tiny opportunities along the way to nudge events onto a new and potentially better path.
I'm nervous of overselling Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time, because there absolutely are problems. As I said, the budget just isn't there for something this ambitious, and though director Matano and his team do a sterling job of getting every last yen onto the screen and thus making the stuff that matters sing, that still leaves an awful lot of obvious corner-cutting, not to mention some deeply uninspired character work; to pick on the most egregious example, I couldn't decide whether I found it more galling or charming that Marleen is to all intents and purposes a copy and paste of Pirotess from Record of Lodoss War. And yet the central setup is so, so good, and it's apparent that Matano knew that and flung everything at making what needed to work work, and for me it absolutely did, more so than I could have imagined had you pitched me a four episode OVA adaptation of a hentai RPG video game. Ultimately, its failings are easy to turn a blind eye to, whereas if, like me, you're theoretically a fan of fantasy but deeply tired of seeing the same clichés endlessly trotted out, its uncommon virtues make for a real treasure that's among very best titles of its type.
-oOo-
Obviously something's gone terribly wrong here, because the last time I did one of the these sexy anime posts, I'm pretty certain the conclusion wasn't "most of this stuff is great and you should absolutely keep an eye out for it." The clear exception, of course, is Fencer of Minerva, and even that managed to be pretty solid for a couple of episodes care of a few novel ideas. As for the rest, though? Well, Sins of the Sisters is probably terrible - no, it's definitely terrible - but nothing would betray the spirit of Drowning in Nineties Anime more than failing to recommend something that delightfully insane, and Variable Geo somehow manages against all the odds to be legitimately good, and Dragon Knight: Wheel of Time is a new favourite. Go figure!
Sins of the Sisters, 1994, dir: Yorifusa Yamaguchi
