Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 122

 Normally, I'd be feeling bad about rambling on about another thoroughly obscure bunch of titles, but a) it's not as if there isn't worse to come if I don't give up on this madness soon and b) this is the rare post that throws up something I'd never heard of and ended up slightly loving and c) the one title here that's remotely well known is a return to a franchise we'd have been better off forgetting all about.  Yes, it's  the end of Urotsukidôji - at least for our purposes - and of a journey that began with Legend of the Overfiend practically at the beginning of this series.  Can the finale redeem everything that's come before it?  Well, let's just say I'm not sure it's the worst of the batch from amongst Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, Magical Twilight, Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road...

Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, 1990, dir: Satoshi Dezaki

I remember musing last time as to why no "proper" distributor* ever picked up the two Riki-Oh OVAs that were released in 1989 and 1990 respectively.  Well, here, no doubt, we have part of our answer: Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction is abysmal.  And normally I hate to pre-empt a conclusion this far into a review, but there's no use dancing around the facts on this occasion, since I'm not going to have anything nice to say.  No, wait, the closing song is OK.  But that really is it.

It shouldn't need pointing out that Riki-Oh 2 is the sequel to Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, yet it's easy to imagine the viewer who could get all the way through the latter without realising it had anything to do with the former.  That sort of thing isn't altogether uncommon in the world of manga adaptations, where it makes sense to focus on discreet arcs that are a fit for your running time whether or not they necessarily link together, yet it feels as though there ought to be some connective tissue - heck, the protagonist being recognisably the same in all but a handful of shots would be a start.  And this is especially weird given that both share director Dezaki, a creator of modest but definite talents who apparently forgot everything he knew in the span of a year.  The Wall of Hell was no masterpiece, but it had style, and that style carried it a long way, injecting energy and tension into some basically schlocky material.

Here he does the opposite, and while I don't think we should be throwing too much shade in Dezaki's direction, it's certainly the case that more could have been done with this setup.  It's overly busy and definitely too reliant on coincidence and storytelling shortcuts, but it's not hard to see from what we get here how the material might have played out better, as it no doubt did in the manga.  Following his escape from the hellish prison of the first OVA (I presume), our hero Riki is intent on tracking down his long-lost brother (I think, maybe) who he abandoned when they were children.  This quest takes him to the southernmost cape of Japan (I'm completely guessing) where, in a distressing bit of fiction foreshadowing reality, a malfunctioning nuclear plant has left a chunk of the country supposedly uninhabitable - though in the world of Riki-Oh, that just means it's been taken over by evil sorts as a base for their vague but no doubt nefarious plans.

Let's cover one example of how spectacularly shabby Child of Destruction's narrative delivery is and move on.  It's self-evident that Riki's abandonment of his brother is the beating heart of this material, yet here's how that vital moment plays out on screen: the two are playing hide and seek and it's Riki's turn to hide; as he's running off, a limousine pulls up and the old man inside says, "Wouldn't you like to come and live with me, though?" which Riki agrees to without a second thought; as the car drives off, he sees his brother sitting waiting in the snow and looks mildly troubled; and that's our lot.  So far as it's possible to judge by what we're shown, Riki left his little brother to die because he kind of forgot about him, and wouldn't it be rude to ask the kindly stranger who's just effectively kidnapped you if there might not be room in his mansion for another random kid?

With no one willing to find space in a 45-minute OVA to explain the lynchpin of the whole plot, this never had much hope of succeeding on a story level.  However, I've had kind words to say about many a narratively disastrous piece of anime before now, and so we return to why I don't know that this shambles was altogether Dezaki's fault, for all that he did nothing to right it: Child of Destruction evidently had no budget, and its animation is horrible, and that horrible animation kills every scene stone dead.  There's stuff that could be fun - the action and gore were clearly intended to be - but apparently there wasn't even cash to splash on what ought to have been highlights, since they're as visually malnourished as the rest, constantly relying on the most obvious shortcuts.  And that pushes Child of Destruction down from being merely bad to the realms of face-slappingly bad, because what sort of early nineties OVA can't find a few yen to make its outrageous gore and over-the-top fights look cool?  Fail that and you've failed everything, which, as I've hopefully established, is precisely what Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction does.

Magical Twilight, 1994, dir: Yoshiaki Kobayashi

In spite of appearances, the reason I swore blind I wouldn't review hentai here and then went on to review quite a lot of hentai is not, in fact, that I secretly just wanted to watch a load of hentai and talk about it in public.  No, it's more that, compared with most of what we might categorise as pornography, the boundary between hentai and regular anime is an awfully vague and blurry one, and there's sometimes no sure way to separate one from the other.  But on this occasion I'm pushing that argument about as far as it will go, because, yes, Magical Twilight is most definitely hentai, and yes, I knew that going in, and the only real excuse I have is that numerous reviews suggested it was good enough that, if you squinted a bit, you could watch it as plain old anime.

That's sort of true but mostly not: there's a ton of explicit sex in Magical Twilight and, compared with some of the titles we've covered here, it's hard to imagine how you could snip it out and cobble anything remotely coherent from the remainder.  Though for the first episode, anyway, this seems like it might not altogether be the case: the basic setup, with white witch Chippie and her promiscuous frenemy Irene sent down to the human world to accomplish the practical part of their witching exams by ingratiating themselves with a randomly chosen human, could easily be the setup for your standard comic nineties OVA were events played out a little differently.  This is less true of the two-part follow up, which relies heavily on Chippie's now-love-interest Tsukasa getting jiggy with every remotely appropriate female he lays eyes on, yet its heart remains in the world of romantic comedy and so does the bulk of the material.

Marking on the exceedingly slidey scale of vintage hentai, the sexy stuff is relatively innocuous, which means there's a bad witch who gets sexually assaulted into giving up on her quest to kill Tsukasa and a teenaged girl who wants to sleep with him because she watched her mum sleeping with him and got awfully horny as a result, and actually, now that I think about it, probably more of the sex is non-consensual than not, though that generally means Irene using her magic to have her way with Tsukasa, and there's no indication that he's particularly traumatised by the experience.  Again judging entirely by the standards of nineties hentai, I guess that leaves us somewhere around "only a bit gross"?  At any rate, the animation is respectable enough that these look like real people conducting recognisable acts that horny naked people might get up to, which is by no means a given, so I'm willing to suppose that as hentai it's fairly successful, if perhaps a bit on the unimaginative side.

Which leaves us with everything else, and as often seems to be the case, the everything else fares a good deal better.  Magical Twilight is fairly half-hearted as pornography, whereas as a comedic fantasy it's entirely solid and occasionally much better than that.  The animation is respectable, the character designs are appealing, and there are a handful of properly good gags, most memorably a magically assisted game of ping-pong that gets wildly out of hand.  Sad to say, though, it's still too committed to being hentai to make the most of its fun setup and characters and as hentai it devotes a lot of time to scenes that are staged largely identically, and so, at the end of ninety minutes, it finds itself sat uncomfortably between two rather nondescript stools.  If a fantasy comedy with lots of generic but competently handled sex scenes is the one thing in the world you're craving, it's hard to see how this would majorly disappoint, but for the rest of us, there isn't enough here that's at all special.

Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, 1999, dir: Shin'ichi Watanabe

One of the nice things about this whole reviewing-abolutely-all-of-the-'90s-anime deal is that I've been obliged to give attention to a lot of titles that, for one reason or another, I'd otherwise have skipped.  And OK, that hasn't always been a positive since some of that stuff was eminently skippable, but it's nice to sometimes have your preconceptions proved wrong and be entertained by something you wouldn't normally have given the time of day.  Such is the case with Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and a cover that does practically nothing to sell what lies within to the viewer seeking anything besides romance between a couple of unusually pretty (well, unusually by non-anime standards) guys.

Now, it's not that Lyrics of Love - a subtitle nearly as off-putting as the cover art! - doesn't offer that.  Our hero Shuichi Shindo, lead singer of the band Bad Luck, is certainly head over heels for author Yuki, and though it's not altogether evident for much of the running time, there are clues enough that Yuki feels the same way, albeit in a more stand-offish and cynical fashion.  For Shuichi's love is very much of the puppyish, unfiltered kind, and so it is that, as we join the story, a period of coolness on Yuki's part has sent him into such a spiral of misery that he's incapable of writing lyrics for the band's upcoming new album.  While that mightn't normally be an issue, since everyone else would be happy to bring in a songwriter from outside, Shuichi is just as outspoken when it comes to his musical career, and he's already bragged to the media that nobody but him can do Bad Luck's music justice.

So we have hot guys being in love, not to mention a fair bit of lust - which is quite refreshing given how much anime of the period tends to veer towards prudishness when it's not being out-and-out hentai - and we have music as a central story element, and all of that you could certainly work out from the DVD art and accompanying blurb.  But that Lyrics of Love happens to also, maybe even primarily, be a comedy?  That you'd never guess, which sucks when what we have here is among the funnier comedies to come out of anime in the nineties.  Indeed, it's all the funnier for being ostensibly not much of a comedy at all, since much of the best humour rises out of situations that aren't, on the face of it, especially humorous.  The benefit is that it gets to be wildly goofy at points without ever just being goofy; somehow, the push and pull of extreme silliness and high emotions works in harmony rather than opposition.  Were this not a comedy, Shuichi would be a bit obnoxious and Yuki even more so, but seeing a lighter side to them actually makes their tumultuous romance more engaging and sympathetic, such that when, towards the end of the second of its two episodes, Lyrics of Love is obliged to take its plot seriously enough to bring things to a conclusion, it's drummed up ample good will for a theoretically contrived conclusion to be warm and satisfying.

Had this arrived a few years earlier, then, we might be looking at something of a minor classic - but as I'll never tire of pointing out, 1999 was a bad year indeed for anime as an art form and long after the point when OVA meant the sort of budget that got you near the realms of feature-film animation.  Frankly, Lyrics of Love barely holds up compared with the TV of the time, and that's quite the damning criticism.  I get that not all anime fans are obsessed with the niceties of animation, I do, but there's no avoiding how it hurts the material here, with the musical numbers suffering the most: judging by what we see, there are Punch and Judy shows with more stage presence than Bad Luck.  Thankfully, their songs hold up better, enough to be toe-tapping even if not quite enough to convince you they'd be much of a big deal in real life.  Still, that leaves us with a musical romantic comedy where all three core elements are good to great and only one significant weakness, which is mostly more of an annoyance, so I think we can comfortably call this a recommendation.

Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road, 1993 - 1995, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Shigenori Kageyama

I've frequently been disgusted by the Urotsukidôji franchise, and sometimes angered by it, and often bored, and just occasionally amused, but until now, I can't say I ever felt sorry for it.  Yet that was my main reaction to Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road (or Inferno Road, as it appears to be known to everyone but UK distributor Kiseki.)  I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I dislike this series, and yet I don't know that even I would have wished upon it such a paltry nothing of a finale.  For all that this has been mostly nasty, silly, juvenile stuff, in its best moments, as far as the first two entries go at any rate, there was a certain apocalyptic grandeur to be found, not to mention some really determined cynicism and wallowing in the deepest depths of human ugliness and suffering, and the one thing you'd have a right to hope for from a franchise that sets itself those sorts of goals and intermittently hits them is that it go out with a bang and not the most strangled of whimpers.

But that's not what fans were given in the mid-nineties, and it's certainly not what eventually arrived on the shores of the UK, since the first two episodes of the three-episode OVA were banned outright and appeared merely as scripts on Kiseki's otherwise bafflingly thorough DVD edition.**  That leaves us with some 40 minutes or so of actual footage including credits, presumably cut down from the more standard 45-minute run time: a whopping 40 minutes to send off multiple hours of narrative spread over three not-entirely-reconcilable timelines, and boy is Infernal Road not remotely up to that task.  Nor is the problem the missing episodes, which appear to have been a self-contained tale that didn't move the main story forward one iota, which is in itself a weird move and probably a clear pointer to what went wrong here: everything was in such a mess by this point that it's almost impossible to imagine what a satisfying conclusion would look like, all the more so since we've already had a couple of conclusions that were about as satisfying as it was reasonable to hope for from a property where apocalypses are practically an everyday occurrence.

I admit that I couldn't remember much of the events of previous entry The Return of the Overfiend, since it was bad and I haven't wasted any thought on it since I watched it, so I guess it's my fault that I couldn't recall who most of the characters were that we meet racing in a tank through the ruined remnants of Japan on a mission to defeat the probably-bad messiah the Chōjin with the aid of the possibly-good messiah the Kyō-Ō.  Nevertheless, Infernal Road couldn't possibly do less to reintroduce them or to re-establish their goals or to ease us back into the wider context or to explain who their antagonists are or what their beef is.  Indeed, Infernal Road has no time at all for the viewer who isn't 100% steeped in Urotsukidôji lore, which is ironic given that they, presumably, would be the selfsame viewer who'd be most frustrated by its manifest failings both as a final send-off and a story in its own right.  For that mission to get the Kyō-Ō to the Chōjin and the various attempts to impede it is really all there is here, meaning a fair amount of violent action and the odd dash of demon rape - but much less of both that in any previous entry, even accounting for the reduction in length - and then an ending that I won't spoil except by saying that I couldn't even if I tried.

Nothing could have saved this material, and given the track record it had to work with and the fact that even the best Urotsukidôji entries were deeply flawed, and taking into account that the taste for this sort of stuff was already dwindling fast by 1993, saving was likely never on the cards; but the one thing that frequently pushed past instalments up to the level of intermittently entertaining is the odd bit of quality animation, so it's a further blow to Infernal Road that it contains no quality animation whatsoever and not much that would pass as basically competent.  It's ugly, small scale, and achingly cheap, with a palpable sense of creators who just wanted to get something out the door so they could move onto doing anything else with their lives.  So I suppose the only real plus is that, even for the most devoted fan, there's no reason to track this down: on its own merits it's effectively worthless, and as a conclusion to Urotsukidôji's grand, gross, baffling saga, it's truly bad enough that anything you care to make up will likely be better.  No, seriously, try it: in my version, the Kyō-Ō and Chōjin hugged it out and ended up living together in post-apocalyptic Tennessee raising demon llamas, and that's still an improvement.

-oOo-

So probably not a great post for anyone else, but a definite win for me in that Gravitation: Lyrics of Love was a nice and out-of-the-blue surprise and I'm at last completely done with Urotsukidôji, although knowing me I'll probably feel the need to pick it up on Blu-ray at some point in the future to make absolutely sure it's as unpleasant and basically shabby as I remember it being, the way I did with Violence Jack (which was and wasn't but mostly was.)

Next up: probably the Gundam special in which I bend the definition of nineties anime far past its breaking point...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* Both were put out by a company that I think is called AVP, unless that's just a random bit of text on the box.  They did a relatively acceptable job with Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, for all that nothing about it looked what you'd call professional.  Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, however, which needed all the help it could get, is lumbered with some of the most incoherent subtitling you're ever likely to see.

** Seriously, if you want a great summary of Urotsukidôji's by this point exceedingly dense and tangled mythology and enormous cast, this is the place to find it.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 121

To be clear, I'm definitely not going to start reviewing different releases of the same titles because that would be nuts and there would be no end.  And I feel like I'm opening a dangerous door just by setting the precedent, but there's no getting around the fact that there's a meaningful difference between reviewing all of the first run of Project A-Ko sequels together - as they were compiled on DVD under the banner of Project A-ko 2: Love and Robots - and reviewing them separately as they're now being put out on Blu-ray by our good friends at Discotek.

Or to put it another way, I justified double-dipping on the Project A-ko 2 Blu-ray by convincing myself it was okay because I'd cover it here, and don't think that means I'm necessarily going to pick up the other two when they arrive, Discotek!  Frankly, compiling the three together was by far the more reasonable way to go, and who am I kidding, my money is basically yours at this point.  Hold on, I'm pretty sure I still have a kidney left that I can hock.  While I search, why don't we take a look at Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, Super-Deformed Double Feature, You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, and Riki Oh: The Wall of Death?

Project A-Ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, 1987, dir: Yûji Moriyama

It's hard to say what the perfect sequel to Project A-ko would have looked like.  But my instinct is that, at the very least, it would have needed to be ambitious in the ways the original was.  And that immediately rules out all the usual avenues because if there's one thing that made Project A-ko stand out, it's the extent to which it did the unexpected.  In a sense, that's all it does: what narrative there is ricochets from idea to idea based on little more than what will be funny or interesting in the moment, and its most arresting aspects, like that gloriously singular soundtrack, feel like conscious attempts to stand out from anything that was happening at the time.  What sets A-ko apart is an impish inclination to rush off down any rabbit hole that takes its creators' fancy while giggling at the conventionality of its peers.

Ironically, the final A-ko entry, released under a dizzying number of titles but reviewed here as Project A-ko: Uncivil Wars, took a decent swing at doing the same by chucking out almost everything except the title and the barest bones of the characters, and I remember it as being pretty sucky and probably the worst of the bunch, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Or maybe you can only pull off that sort of trick the once, the more so since Project A-ko's moment was a brief one indeed: barely any time had passed before the market was heaving with anime that parodied other anime, many of them recycling exactly the same jokes in a fashion that must have rapidly made A-ko look a mite dated if you didn't know how many of them it had got to first.

Let's commend Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group for one thing, then: it sure did come out quickly, in less than a year in fact, and that was probably a wise move.  Given that turnaround time, it's safe to say ambition was firmly off the table, and so all hope of a sequel that would push the envelope in the ways Project A-ko did, and with that being the case, what we got was hardly the worst-case scenario.  A-ko 2 goes down a pointless route, but it's an earnest and faintly ingenious attempt to continue a narrative that had no need of being continued.  Picking up a matter of days after A-ko's events, it finds that show's alien invaders now stuck in an immobilised spaceship and trying to make the best of a bad situation by selling themselves as the city's new hot tourist spot.  Or is it all a cunning plan to kidnap the chirpily obnoxious C-ko, who they regard as their lost alien princess for reasons I can't remotely remember?  Probably, but that's not enough to prevent our hero A-ko from agreeing to try and fix their ship in exchange for a free meal.  And in the meantime, wealthy genius B-ko's latest scheming gets waylaid by her father's even schemier scheming, as he pilfers her latest design and convinces the authorities to let him use it in an attempt to loot the crashed ship for its neat alien technologies.

Writing it all down like that, A-ko 2 sounds both busy and nonsensical, much as the original A-ko was, and you'd think that might be a good thing.  It does have a degree of the same energy, which is probably its biggest asset: there's not a lot that unquestionably, consistently works, but nothing doesn't work for long enough to become a drag.  With the same production values as its predecessor, I think I'd go further: the big action climax is well-conceived enough that it might have been something quite special.  But even with barely more than half the running time to be filled, A-ko 2 is a tremendous step down, and while that mostly just leaves it looking a bit cheap, there are moments when it looks really, really cheap*, with designs going wildly off-model and, for some reason, the absolutely worst lip-synching I can recall ever seeing in anime.  Can we blame that on a diminished budget?  How exactly did they get lip-synching so wrong that it's noticeable in scene after scene?  Was it a joke?

Hey, at least the soundtrack's pretty good, which makes it another step down if you're as in love with what Zito and Carbone conjured up for the original A-ko as I am, but on its own merits it stands up well against anything else that was happening at the time.  Can we say the same for Project A-ko 2, I wonder?  Not when it comes to the animation, no, it really is objectionably sloppy at points, but for the rest... Sure, why not?  Project A-ko 2 is a fun little time-waster that likely as not will leave you in a better mood than it found you, and that's fine and dandy, while also making for a crushing disappointment on just about every level.

Super-Deformed Double Feature, 1988 / 1992, dir's: Katsuhito Akiyama, Tatsuya Masaki

I've never pretended to be writing these reviews for much besides my own amusement, but occasionally we come to a title where it really does feel like I'm talking to an audience of one.  For a start, the compilation known to Western audiences as Super-Deformed Double Feature was only ever released on VHS, so far as I know, and while you can find its crucial portions on YouTube, that's not quite the same experience, for reasons we'll return to.  At any rate, the difficulty of laying hands on a video tape from thirty years ago is barely half the battle.  Of the two short animated features included, the first, Ten Little Gall Force, requires that you be a substantial fan of the first Gall Force series, while for the second, Scramble Wars, you'll also need a fair knowledge of the second wave of Gall Force entries plus Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth of all things. I know there are plenty of Bubblegum Crisis fans still around, and Gall Force has its following, but Gaiarth? I'd be surprised if anyone who isn't me has watched that one in the past five years.  All of which is a massive shame because, if you fall into the miniscule demographic that ticks all those boxes, Super-Deformed Double Feature is a blast.

Ten Little Gall Force is a comedic making-of of the first two Gall Force features, except that, outside of the recycled footage, all the cast and crew are represented by cutesy chibi versions of themselves, leaving the bizarre implication that what we call anime is actually the outpowering of some parallel cartoon universe striving for what we'd consider realism.  At no point do the chibi actors comment on how bizarre their in-film counterparts look to them, but that's about the only comedic stone left unturned across a frantic 16-minute run time.  There are clever gags, there are dumb gags, there are sight gags, there are surreal gags, and there are even quite a few rude gags, which begs the question of whether we truly needed to see the Gall Force gang both chibified and naked.  And obviously we didn't, but it does feel in keeping with the Gall Force ethos of matching the most high-concept sci-fi with the most low-brow exploitation; I'd forgotten quite how seedy Eternal Story got amid its heady pacifist space opera musings, but Ten Little Gall Force wasted no time in reminding me!  Then again, I ought to have expected fan service from something that couldn't possibly have been made more for a specific fanbase: this was unmistakeably made by people who loved Gall Force for people who loved Gall Force, with the caveat that if you truly love a property, it's OK to make fun of it in some fairly mean ways.

The same goes for Scramble Wars, if not more so, which is only appropriate for something that pits the casts of Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, and other properties from studio Artmic against each other in a Wacky Races-style contest with an outrageously huge cash prize at the end of it.  Scramble Wars takes up the lion's share of the tape and so gets to develop a bit more, which means it's that bit better for being able to set up jokes rather than rattling about like a pingpong ball in a spin dryer as Ten Little Gall Force did.  Though requiring a wider breadth of knowledge in theory, it's also less reliant on in-jokes, though there's a truly joyous one for the Gall Force fans; but front and centre it's a Wacky Races rip-off, and I'm happy to call it the best of that plentiful subgenre.  It's also probably technically superior, though a startling aspect of both is how well made they are, even if each cheats in its own ways, Ten Little Gall Force by pilfering footage from the Gall Force movies and Scramble Wars by setting the action on Gaiarth and so getting its background art for free.

Admittedly, I was always likely to say nice things about this one, since I love Gall Force and Bubblegum Crisis and and even have a soft spot for Genesis Survivor Gaiarth - which is why I'd argue that watching Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars back to back won't quite substitute the true Super-Deformed Double Feature experience.  The reason being that AnimEigo saw fit to include a couple of short documentaries, and while the animations are the obvious stars, the live action stuff is charming in its own right.  The first focuses on Kenichi Sonoda and is worth watching for his one-man anime movie alone, while the second follows the Gall Force cast as they record one of the songs for the soundtrack and is nearly as fun if you're the kind of person who'd consider watching that sort of thing.  But put all four segments together and what you have is seventy minutes of vintage anime nerd nirvana.

I have an abiding hope that one day we'll get a Gall Force blu-ray set - it's crazy how ignored the franchise has been given some of the rubbish that's been rescued over the years - and if and when that magical day should come, it only makes sense that Super-Deformed Double Feature will make its welcome return as a bonus feature, that being more or less what it always was, albeit in an age when bonus features were another thing you were expected to splash out for.  Should that not happen, I guess you can always go ahead and watch Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars on YouTube; just remember to feel slightly sad that you're not getting the whole of one of vintage anime's most charming, if phenomenally niche, experiences.

You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, 1997, dir: Junji Nishimura

Here's how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: this was one of the very first DVDs I bought to review here, many a year ago, and I got most of the way through it before giving up in despair, since when it's been gathering dust on my shelf, taunting me with its grimy presence.  This is also how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: amid a collection of twenty stories of seven or so minutes, three of them pit our heroic traffic cop pair Natsumi and Miyuki up against panty thieves, and those three episodes occur one after the other.  I can imagine the writer so devoid of imagination that they'd fall to so miserable a cliché of bad anime, and if I really stretch, I can imagine the writer who'd go back to that well not once but twice more, but to then tell those stories back to back?  No, that beggars belief.  And it's hardly the only idea that gets reused here, either, though I suppose "idea" is too strong a word for most of what's on offer.

By the law of averages, not all of those twenty mini-episodes are terrible, though the failure rate is impressively high.  Nevertheless, they're practically all bad in a few basic ways: almost all the humour (and humour is definitely the goal here, for all that it's one more occasionally brushed against than hit) is broadly sex-based, in that the antagonists are creepy guys of one sort or another that Natsumi and Miyuki have to put in their places, generally through violence.  But the whole thing is so leering that it feels far more on the side of the men than our heroes, who are generally treated with no real respect whatsoever; if I told you they spend ten minutes out of the two and a half hours of material here doing anything that resembles actual police work, I suspect I'd be exaggerating.  There are also some strikingly nasty gags at the expense of trans character Aoi Futaba, who I'm fairly sure was treated with a heck of a lot more respect in both the OVAs and the film, and in general, none of the cast feel like they have much to do with their earlier incarnations: they're stock types plugged in to stock narratives, many of which could have wandered in from any show.

The better sections, then, tend to the be the ones that remember what You're Under Arrest is about and that the concept was never, "Oh my god!  Women cops, whatever next?"  Whenever Natsumi and Miyuki are behind the wheel of a car, proceedings pick up considerably, but that amounts to a minute of two, presumably because animating cars costs money and nobody wanted to spend more than the bare minimum on this: it's distressingly cheap-looking from start to finish and if there was ever a point where director Nishimura brought any flair to the proceedings, I must have blinked and missed it.  Heck, even the music is actively dull, and I struggle to think of any anime from the period that couldn't muster at least one decent tune.  Really, the whole business has the feeling of something made as an obligation by people with no affection for the source material and no sense of what to do with it; not that it was ever a good fit for these bite-sized episodes, but the eagerness to veer as far as possible from what the show was traditionally good at in favour of the most generic plotlines imaginable is truly baffling.

I'll say this much: by the end of what amounted to a second watch, the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials had worn my down from active dislike to surly indifference, and there were points, albeit brief ones, when I got caught up in a couple of the better stories.  Aside from the nastiness toward Aoi, there's nothing here that's worthy of real anger or contempt, though that only makes it more frustrating from a reviewing perspective, since I'd always rather have a terrible title that I can merrily tear into over one I'm bored just thinking about.  And it's conceivable that were this mess not dressed up in the ill-fitting clothes of one of my favourite anime franchises, I'd be a little more kindly disposed to it.  But it is, and I'm not, and it's thoroughly depressing that this tacky, lifeless nonsense will be our last brush with You're Under Arrest after the highs of the OVA and movie.

Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death, 1989, Satoshi Dezaki

As a prime example of the mission creep that's overtaken this review series, I offer the fact that once, very long ago, the plan was to cover only films and OVAs from the nineties that had been released in the UK and were readily available, and now here we are with something from the eighties that has seemingly never once had what you might call a "proper" release anywhere outside of Japan.  The only physical copy of Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death you're likely to come across was, so far as I can tell from the shonkily produced inlay, distributed by a company called AVP, on whom the internet yields precisely no information.  It looks awfully like a knock-off, yet you do occasionally see a new, sealed copy floating about, so maybe it's legitimate in some loose sense of that word?

Whatever the case, it's probably not the sort of thing we ought to be concerning ourselves with, any more that it would make sense to be reviewing, say, fansubs of shows videotaped off Japanese TV.  Except for two things: one is that, against all the odds, this 45-minute OVA has managed to retain something of a reputation for itself, as perhaps the least known but still occasionally talked about member of the fraternity of video-nasty-style titles that were so many people's introduction to anime back in the day; and secondly because the wider world of Riki-Oh has left its own legacy, in the shape of the live-action film Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a film prestigious enough to recently get the deluxe Blu-ray treatment - a fact that makes it all the weirder that no one in the West has seen fit to pick up this OVA and its sequel.  (Media Blasters apparently did, but lost the rights before they could do anything with them.)

The Story of Ricky is a gleeful dive into violent excess on a par with any splatter movie you can name, at least as far as delivering maximal quantities of latex and stage blood to provide some ingeniously horrible gore effects goes.  Whether it's a "good" film is perhaps besides the point, though it's certainly put together with a degree of craft that you mightn't expect from something that's aiming, above all, to be shocking and gross.  Personally, I was exhausted well before its end, so the notion of the precise same story told in half the time had a definite appeal, the more so since that story is better fitted to 45 minutes than 90: our hero, Riki-Oh / Ricky, has been condemned to a privatised prison run by a hierarchy of increasingly monstrous tyrants, from gang leaders up to the warden and beyond, and while they're initially willing to leave him be due to his nigh-inhuman martial arts abilities and seeming obliviousness to pain, that status quo barely outlasts the first proper scene.  With the prison's fragile totalitarianism at risk, the only way to go from there is a series of ever more over the top efforts to put our hero in his place, especially as it becomes evident that he didn't end up in this particular prison by accident and won't be done before he's settled some business of his own.

Both live action film and OVA tell a largely identical tale in superficially identical fashions, in that both are primarily vehicles for lots and lots of bloody violence.  So nothing could have surprised me more than how The Wall of Death approaches that violence.  It's certainly there, and it's certainly graphic, but what it isn't is fun in the manner that the movie's take on identical scenes tends to be.  And here, of course, I'm referring to a very specific sort of fun, but there's an undeniable gleefulness to the movie's take on this material that's largely absent from The Wall of Death.  The gore is off-putting and very much seems as though it was meant to be, even in its more absurd moments, of which there are considerably less this time around.

Is this a bad thing?  Is it a good thing?  Truly, I'm not sure.  I can't say I enjoyed The Wall of Death less, but that's arguably just because it didn't outstay its welcome, and while I'd give both interpretations a similar score, here it would be averaging out a much narrower range of highs and lows.  It's relatively well-made, though rarely strikingly so; the animation is resolutely fine and all that visually sets the title apart is some unusually nifty editing, which adds a punchy, unnerving rhythm that's a definite boon.  And while would be easy to condemn the focus on plot over spectacle when surely no one would come to any version of Riki-Oh for the plot, it's hard to see how the narrative could have been trimmed back more without straying into incoherency.  Still, the fact remains that the only reason anyone's likely to seek out The Wall of Death is for its place in the video nasty pantheon, and while it warrants inclusion, I suspect the measure of seriousness it applies to material that's arguably better suited to The Story of Ricky's gleeful excess will make it slightly unsatisfying for most.

-oOo-

My goodness, this is really getting to be an exercise in futility!  Two recommendations for things that are nigh-impossible to watch (I mean, I guess I recommend Riki-Oh) and two titles that I hadn't much time for but that are easy to find - or, wait, no, a quick check suggests that the You're Under Arrest Mini-Specials are even getting a bit rare, and goodness knows that's not likely to ever get a rerelease because, as I think I may have mentioned in my review, it sucks goat nostrils.



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* And for all the deservedly nice things I've said about Discotek, their Blu-ray print needed a fair bit more work or perhaps was from a source that was beyond entirely salvaging.  At any rate, it's nowhere near on a par with what they delivered for the first A-ko.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 120

So much for posting more regularly!  Ah well, I've a few of these on the go and my day job situation is hopefully settling down a bit, so there's hope yet, though I dimly remember saying much the same not so long ago.  As for a common thread, the closest we have is "titles that are really hard to find these days," which is likely to be an extremely prominent theme for the foreseeable future.  All of which is to say that I have nothing to say and we might as well just get on with looking at Dragoon, Megaman: Upon a Star, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and Iron Virgin Jun...

Dragoon, 1997, dir: Kenichi Maejima

If there's one thing you need to know about Dragoon, it's that it has nary an original idea anywhere in its head, except perhaps for the incorporation of science-fictional elements like giant airships into an otherwise fantasy-style narrative - only, by 1997 that had in itself become a cliché in the wake of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and thinking about it, if there's one thing you really need to know about Dragoon, it's that it wants very much to be mentioned in the same breath as those two classics.  Though the conversation would need to be along the lines of "Laputa sure is a great movie, but have you ever considered how much better it would be with lots of bare breasts?"

And having summed up Dragoon as Laputa with a fraction of the budget and endless shots of boobs, I could certainly call this review done, with the only caveat being that, depending on your preferences, I've either made it sound awful or awesome and it isn't either.  The word I'd opt for, rather, would be "pleasant", in the way that only something wholly predictable and unchallenging can be.  While its obsession with lingering over its female characters' exposed upper halves, regardless even of whether they're adults or not, is certainly sleazy, that aside it's all quite sweet and good-natured and relatively bloodless.  If you like straightforward fantasy tales, and if you especially like straightforward fantasy tales that toy at incorporating the odd sci-fi element, it's safe to say you'll get on fine with Dragoon.

None of this would be half as true, mind you, were it not for some surprisingly and consistently decent animation, which makes an out-sized difference in pushing Dragoon up from the realms of not-badness.  Were there more to visually differentiate it, was the world-building more imaginative, say, I'd go further, but as it is, only some reasonably nice character designs do much to make the show stand out.  Still, anime that's made with a measure of talent and care is generally better than anime that isn't, and Dragoon's tendency to punch above its budgetary weight is a definite boon.

All of which would add up to a modest recommendation were it not for one last problem, the only one I'd consider a reason to definitely avoid Dragoon if you should find yourself craving some hackneyed nineties fantasy anime: as rote as its storytelling is, the characters are sympathetic enough that I wanted to see how things played out for them, so that the three episodes here end without so much as a cliff-hanger, having resolved nothing, is quite frustrating - and more so for how the opening sequence is a flash-forward to major events we'll never see play out.  It's not ruinous, simply because what's come before isn't good enough and the tale it's been telling isn't unpredictable enough that never finding out where it's heading is especially painful.  The best of endings wouldn't have nudged Dragoon into the realms of greatness, but the lack of even a half-decent one definitely does it no favours.

Mega Man: Upon a Star, dir's: Katsumi Minoguchi, Naoyoshi Kusaka, Itsurô Kawasaki, Minoru Okazaki

Given what an extraordinary amount of anime we've covered here, it's surprising how little we've come across that was expressly and primarily made for kids.  Probably it's my memory being rubbish, but Mega Man: Upon a Star feels like practically a first.  It has no interest in adding one iota of sophistication or nuance to cater to an older viewer and is wedded so hard to the perspective of its child characters that regular logic immediately flies out the window.  On discovering that their reality has been invaded by video game characters, for example, the first concern of our young protagonist Yuuta's parents isn't to wonder at how the heck such an obvious transgression of the basic laws of reality might occur or what dangers having a mad scientist of apparently unlimited power and ingenuity running around their nation might pose but to question how their son is meant to fit all this commotion in around his schooling.

Honestly, that's kind of refreshing.  Mega Man: Upon a Star is dumb as bricks, but it's the right sort of dumb, the sort that gets that we - and by "we", I definitely mean the under-ten viewer - want to be amused and entertained, and maybe if we get enough amusement and entertainment we must possibly tolerate a dash of education entering the mix.  It strikes me only now that one aspect that sets this apart from most of what's aimed at children is that it's not very interested in humour.  Its stakes are ridiculous, but Mega Man: Upon a Star takes them as seriously as can be.  It actually plays quite fairly toward its young audience, and while it's absurd, it isn't pandering.  Even that educational aspect I touched on comes from a charming, albeit baffling, place: since Mega Man the character is apparently American, the show is determined to have him learn a bit about Japanese culture, geography, and identity, for all that there's nothing here you wouldn't expect the average Japanese schoolchild to already know.

This makes no sense, but it makes no sense in harmless, appealing ways, which is Mega Man: Upon a Star all over.  Its three stories are energetic and fast-paced enough that the silliness never becomes obnoxious.  In the first, Mega Man escapes because Yuuta falls asleep at the controls of Mega Man 5 - which raises so many questions the show hasn't the tiniest interest in exploring! - and is rapidly followed by the nefarious Dr. Wily, who immediately builds an army of robots and takes over an amusement park so that they can enjoy themselves, a plan that's actually not very nefarious at all, come to think of it, though once foiled, he does try and harness the tectonic forces of Mount Fuji to annihilate Japan.  Maybe you should have just let him entertain his robots for a few hours, huh, Mega Man?  Then in the second episode, Dr. Wily steals a time machine and uses it to travel back to kill Mega Man in the womb.  Ha!  No, he uses it to visit various of Japan's annual festivals and at one point steal some sweets, and also to gather a bunch of meteorites to drop on the nation, something it's fair to assume he could have done just as easily without a time machine.  Though his half-hearted attempts to muck with the fabric of time still make more sense than what Mega Man gets up to in part three: suspecting that Dr. Wily is again up to no good, he starts roving forward into the future in search of a point when something outright bad enough is happening that it's definitely the work of an evil genius.

It's a lazy approach to hero-ing that has no right to succeed as well as it does, and by that point I have to admit I was firmly on the side of Dr. Wily, who's a good bit more proactive and benefits from Kenichi Ogata's delightful performance, which brings him to life as both gleefully wicked and ever-so-slightly senile.  By comparison, Mega Man himself is rather dull, as are Yuuta and his sister, though it's fair to suppose that everyone involved is aware of this failing given that we're never apart from Wily for long.  Still, all the voice acting is pretty good, and mostly so is the music, so long as it's adhering to what I take to be revamps of the game's themes and not hurling terrible rock ballads at us over the closing credits.  But what surprised me was the animation, which is never what you might call impressive, exactly, yet always stays on the right side of decent to a degree it's fair to say would be wasted on its target audience.  (Granted, the designs are a bit ghastly, but I guess we have to blame the game at least partly for that.)  And so, as seems to be routinely the case these days, we're left with a title that I'm happy to recommend on its own merits - assuming you have a handy child you want to keep amused for an hour and a half while gently teaching them a bit about Japanese culture - and which is almost totally impossible to find.  Hey, at least the crummy dub is on YouTube...

Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, 1996, dir: Masami Ôbari

Of all the directors active throughout the nineties with a distinctly recognisable style, I'd argue that Masami Ôbari was unique in that he never once made anything you could hands-down describe as good. Oh, I know the Fatal Fury movie has its defenders, and sure it could be worse, but who else was there who combined such a unique MO with such a thudding lack of genuinely stand-out work? Once you know what you're looking for, you can't miss an Ôbari character design, and there are other elements that carry over from project to project as well; the only one I have any wholly positive feelings for is his sure grasp of how bodies look in motion, which, when your CV contains a disproportionate number of fighting game adaptations, is certainly a virtue to cultivate.  But then at the other end of the spectrum, he had a marked tendency towards levels of misogyny that stands out even in a decade when female characters being treated as victims, window dressing, or both was more or less the standard in anime: his women are invariably vixens or airheads and, whichever category they fall into, it's a safe bet their breasts will be bigger than their heads.

Now, this isn't a review of Masami Ôbari.  I mean, obviously it has been for the whole of a paragraph, but it's not meant to be.  Still, it seems to me a fair way into talking about Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer because Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is about as Ôbari-ish as it's possible to be.  It has all of his flaws on unmistakeable display, and, to be fair, all of his virtues as well.  And, like Fatal Fury before it and Battle Arena Toshinden, released the same year, it's based on a video game beat-em-up, in this case one Ôbari also provided the character designs for.  It's definitely possible to imagine this material in the hands of another director, but the result would have been a very different beast: better, perhaps, and surely more coherent, but perhaps a bit less interesting.

On paper, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer has no right to be any level of interesting.  The plot is boilerplate and stupid, unnecessarily overwrought boilerplate at that.  It dances around the crucial elements enough that everything seems vastly more complicated than it really is, and that's primarily the fault of Kengo Asai's script, which dresses up the stuff of fighting game plotting as though it were Greek tragedy, but Ôbari makes no moves to check that tendency.  Barring an eleventh-hour twist that's only a twist if you've never played a video game, this could barely be more of a straightforward tale of disparate heroes banding together against an evil villain, yet it somehow drags that threadbare material out for a hundred minutes, for a good proportion of which the central conflict barely rears its head.

There was probably never going to be a good version of Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and it's even harder to imagine such a version flowering out of Asai's florid prose - though I guess he had to pad the material somehow, and why shouldn't that be by having the cast spout nonsense philosophy at every opportunity?  At any rate, I don't know that it's reasonable to criticise Ôbari for not transforming this into a classic for the ages.  He does his own share of harm, though, and that's even supposing you aren't as horrified by his character designs as I am; but if you are, their flaws are harder to miss when he's this determined to show off their tackiest aspects.  Even by nineties anime standards, the number of times a dialogue scene is shot from crotch or bum height is astounding, and there's so much unmotivated jiggling of boobs that at one point I burst out laughing because it kind of looked as though two characters' breasts were having their own private conversation.

Actually, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is generally quite obsessed with sex, and the bouncing bosoms and endless shots of barely concealed crotches and bottoms become somewhat less noticeable when they're up against, say, an antagonist who's a monstrous hermaphroditic hybrid formed by an incestuous brother and sister.  Yet, in common with all of Ôbari's work, it's also resolutely unsexy, in part because it's so hard to reconcile these designs with actual human beings.  So the sexiness becomes yet another way for Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer to be strange and unexpected, and that's what really saves it, in so much as anything does.  Well, that and some frequently terrific animation, along with a few moments of visual genius: the "secret" final antagonist, in particular, is such a superb bit of design work that you can't but wonder how Ôbari managed to screw up so many of the others.  Which is why, I suppose, I've spent so much of this review discussing him rather than the title in question: here as elsewhere, I find myself just impressed enough - by a terrific bit of action there, a perfectly composed image there, or just by the distinctiveness the man brought to such generic subject matter - to wish Ôbari had managed, just once, to conjure up a masterpiece.

Iron Virgin Jun, 1992, dir: Fumio Maezono

The perfect, they say, is the enemy of the good, and perhaps that explains how Iron Virgin Jun can be both a largely faultless version of what it's trying to be and at the same time slightly hard to recommend.  Then again, maybe that's inevitable when what it's trying to be is a 45-minute OVA adaptation of a short Go Nagai series.  I'm not exactly a fan of Nagai's oeuvre on the whole, and I can't imagine a time when I'll ever be on side with the mean-spirited efforts to be vicious and gross that mark out a title like Violence Jack, yet the list of anime based on his creations that I have a measure of affection for is getting surprisingly long by this point.  But with most of it, I fall into a middle ground of being amused by the absurdity and over-the-top imagination but let down by the lack of much else: there are plenty of solid Nagai adaptations but vanishingly few that push beyond that.

The manga of Iron Virgin Jun sounds startlingly unpleasant: if the Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, its "highlights" include a spot of bestiality and the potential rape of the protagonist as a major plot point, and the anime loses the former and tones down the latter, so it's already ahead of the game for those of us who aren't on Nagai's wavelength.  Still, there's only so much you can do to sanitise a work by someone who's so eager to shock, and, in fairness, only so much you should do without losing the gleeful bad taste that's one of Nagai's hallmarks.  So the threat of rape is still there, it's just introduced late and not taken terribly seriously, which arguably doesn't make it better but at least leaves room for Iron Virgin Jun to put its best foot forward.  Plus, while my heart sank when the Golden Cherry boys were introduced, they being the gang dispatched to rob our hero Jun of her virginity, their character designs perfectly nail the balance of crass and ridiculous that Nagai thrives on: I won't spoil the gag, but I'll admit I laughed.

The Golden Cherry boys, however, are much nearer to the back of Iron Virgin Jun than the front, and what we start out with is the kind of goofy setup that's ideal for one of these shorter OVA films.  Jun's - perhaps literal, to judge by appearances - ogre of a mother wants her to get married.  Jun disagrees, and strongly enough so that she's gone on the run to make her point.  But her family is outrageously wealthy and has no end of colourful henchpeople at their disposal and Jun's mother isn't beyond squandering those resources if it gets her daughter to comply, all the more so since her motives have little to do with wanting to ensure Jun's future wedded bliss.  Fortunately for Jun, and for us since there'd be no plot otherwise, her iron physique and stock of wrestling moves mean she's more than capable of taking care of herself, which doesn't stop the sympathetic and slightly smitten servant Ohnami from tagging along.

There's plenty of material there for comedy, romance, and regular bouts of action, and that would probably suffice for something this short; but having set out its wares, Iron Virgin Jun then delivers enough of a larger plot that it actually manages to have a bit of meat on its bones.  The animation is entirely fine, Maezono's direction is suitably energetic, and so is the unusually present score, which does more than its share of keeping the pace lively.  As far as the source material goes, it's a mostly triumphant attempt at fitting it to the form of a short OVA movie, and thus we return to the opening point: it's possible to get most everything right and still end up with something that's merely okay.  If you were determined to adapt a Go Nagai work that has many of his flaws and not quite enough of his virtues, and you had less than an hour to play with, I can't imagine how things would have turned out an awful lot better, but that's not to say it was ever a brilliant idea to try.

-oOo-

I guess it's always nice to have nothing bad, right?  Then again, it's also nice to have at least one thing that's categorically good, and I want to say that's Mega Man: Upon a Star, but that would be a lie brought on by going in with low expectations and being pleasantly surprised.  Still, if we're looking at four distinctly average titles, at least they're the interesting sort of average: where else but in the world of vintage anime could you apply such a word to titles as merrily bonkers as Iron Virgin Jun and Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer?  So I'm calling this one a win regardless.

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 119

So, we're back in the eighties - but let's not grumble too much about how this nineties anime blog is yet again drifting back into the wrong decade, and this time even brushing the very bottom of said decade. Because if we're getting awfully close to exhausting the best stuff from the nineties, the eighties at least still has the odd gem left to offer, and frankly it's nice to be reviewing some titles that range from decent to excellent for a change, with more towards the top end than the bottom. In fact, we only have one arguably duff title - I say arguably because it's a well-loved classic! - from amongst Be Forever Yamato, Lupin the Third: The Fuma Conspiracy, Tomorrow's Joe The Movie, and Barefoot Gen...

Be Forever Yamato, 1980, dir's: Toshio Masuda, Leiji Matsumoto, Tomoharu Katsumata

While this is the first Space Battleship Yamato movie I've covered here, due to my determination not to be reviewing seventies anime in a blog series that's meant to be about nineties anime and has already strayed too far into eighties anime, I have actually watched the three preceding entries.  So hopefully I have some idea what I'm talking about when I say that the problem with the series is that the first film neither wanted nor needed any sequels.  Granted, the original run of the TV show was so unsuccessful that the episode count was cut by a third, but I've not seen it suggested that the follow-ups were an attempt to restore that lost material.  Rather, it was the belated but monumental success of the film condensation of the series that gave birth to four sequels in a mere six years and which led to them so meticulously following the template it had set.

But Space Battleship Yamato the movie wasn't trying to set a template, it was merely making the best job it could of the nigh-impossible task of cramming twenty-six episodes into a moderately acceptable running time and cobbling together a coherent plot that didn't just feel like a bunch of disconnected things happening for two hours and change.  I doubt anyone involved was thinking, "Hey, this is something that could stand to be replicated three or four times with slavish precision!"  Yet Space Battleship Yamato was a hit, and the sort of ginormous, lightning-in-a-bottle hit that doesn't incline anyone to go all experimental on their audience.

Thus we come to Be Forever Yamato, a film that, while veering slightly further afield than either of the previous two sequels, nevertheless hangs so desperately to Space Battleship Yamato's coattails that it ends up making nary a shred of sense.  That's most obvious in the astonishing two-and-a-half-hour running time, which nothing in the story begins to justify, but really it's everywhere else as well.  With that, said, though, the first third or so does at least give the impression we might be in for something different this time around, and most dramatically so in its opening scenes, in which the oft-embattled Yamato is conspicuous in its absence as an unknown force of alien invaders tear through our solar system, wreaking death and destruction and not stopping until they've enslaved the Earth and ensured there'll be no resistance by erecting a bomb with the potential to erase all life on the planet.

It's at this point that we're finally reunited with the Yamato and its crew - what's left of them, anyway, since Be Forever Yamato isn't above the odd cheap death to give some sense of stakes - and it's also at this point that the plot, such as it's been, starts to unravel hard.  The entire business with the aliens and their weapon of last resort that they seem determined not to use is the major driver for everything that happens and it's brutally dumb if you pause to think about it, as is basically everything to do with them. They're a series of hazards and twists for our heroes to navigate rather than rational characters acting according to their own motivations, and since one of the things the Yamato franchise has been rather good at until now is giving its antagonists a proper measure of autonomy, this is more disappointing than in many another film that only bothered to think through half its conflict.  There are developments in the back third that don't possess a shred of logic; I was reminded at points of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and its hilarious "What does God need with a starship?" shenanigans, and if there's one thing you don't want your epic space drama to remind you of, it's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Still, I'd argue that all this is salvaged by a couple of things.  One is that there's something inherently appealing about the Yamato movies, which are vast and serious and absurd and occasionally thrilling in ways it's hard not to feel a touch nostalgic for if you're an anime fan of a certain age and inclination, and the other is that, while the animation isn't terribly reliable, there's are shots scattered throughout that are absolutely marvellous: put them together with a suitably sweeping score and there's definitely something intermittently special here.  Yes, I would argue that, except that the only available release in the West is a very aged DVD from some outfit called Voyager Entertainment, and it sucks, and sucks that bit harder than their releases of the other films because, around the midway point, Be Forever Yamato decides to shift aspect ratios: you have to assume the idea was that the picture would get bigger in cinemas, but that isn't the route Voyager Entertainment went down, so half the movie ends up double-letterboxed.  Should this ever get a blu-ray release in the West, I'd be a lot more kindly disposed toward it: a great print that showed off the better moments of animation would make its various problems far easier to ignore.  But that's not what we've got right now, and what we've got really is quite a slog.

Lupin the Third: The Fuma Conspiracy, 1987, dir: Masayuki Ôzeki

Given how quickly the series settled into a comfortable groove, it's easy to forget there was a time when nobody quite knew what it meant for something to be a Lupin the Third film.  Oh, the core elements were there, of course, in Monkeypunch's manga and in the TV series, which had clocked up hundreds of episodes across three seasons by 1987; but what works in a comic book or in twenty minute bursts is hardly guaranteed to fill a feature-length running time.  And it's also easy to forget that the three animated films prior to this point hadn't been reliably successful either with audiences or critics; bizarre though it seems in hindsight, Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro was a notorious flop, no doubt in part because of its eagerness to break from the formula of Lupin-ness as it was then.

And so we find ourselves with the fourth animated Lupin feature and the first that wasn't a cinema release but an OVA, which at the time was quite a different beast to a TV special, of which the first of many would soon follow.  No, in 1987, an OVA wasn't much of a step down, and yet it's worth mentioning because The Fuma Conspiracy feels smaller in scope than any of its predecessors.  That's partly due to the running time, which doesn't quite break seventy-five minutes, but as much to do with the story's confinement to a single location, and a single location in the depths of rural Japan, picked apparently because the creators were sick of seeing Lupin in London and Paris but also because researching your own country is a heck of a lot cheaper than researching someone else's.

Another twist: The Fuma Conspiracy opens with a wedding, and not just any wedding but the wedding of regular cast member Goemon - a bum note, frankly, that hangs over the entire movie, since we know Goemon isn't going to get married and the film makes little attempt to convince us otherwise, so that the nuptials, which almost immediately get interrupted and transform into a treasure hunt, seem much like the clotheshorse to hang the plot around that they are.  Nevertheless, for all that it doesn't hold up, it's certainly a novel way into the story, and an early indication of what I was trying to get at in the opening paragraph: The Fuma Conspiracy feels like the work of people who've gone back to square one on how to make a Lupin the Third film and are probing their way forward accordingly.

Which brings me at last to the point, which is that the most striking detail about The Fuma Conspiracy from a modern perspective isn't its quirks, of which it has a few - at the time it was lambasted for not using the regular voice cast in another bid to keep the budget down, and the shift to a more wallet-friendly composer certainly does the movie no favours - but how well it predicted what was to come.  For all that it's definitely its own thing, with a softer, warmer visual style that's closer to Cagliostro than its successors, and the oddness of seeing Lupin running around the Japanese countryside, and the unconvincing hook of Goemon's wedding, the plot soon transforms into something remarkably familiar: Lupin and co square off against a band of colourful enemies in search of a McGuffin treasure, Zenigata and the local cops give lukewarm pursuit, and ultimately everybody comes together in the labyrinthine death-trap that houses said treasure, which you can be confident nobody will get away with.

A strange combination then: had The Fuma Conspiracy occurred a decade later, it would stand out barely at all, and I guess that if you choose to ignore its context, it wouldn't much now, though the setting and the marriage gimmick are striking while you're watching.  But to be clear, the formula that began to take its definite form here is one that works, and, done well, a formulaic Lupin can be a hell of treat.  The Fuma Conspiracy turns out to be a pretty good stab, with few surprises but plenty of polish, and that's most evident in the animation, which is often splendid: the film's centrepiece is a mammoth car chase, and though a car chase might be the least unexpected element of a Lupin the Third movie, this one stands out by its sheer loveliness and ingenuity.  Sad to say, loveliness and ingenuity aren't quite enough to make it genuinely fresh, and the one thing that could have pushed The Fuma Conspiracy into the highest tier of Lupin films is some genuine surprises, so we're left with an above-par entry that's historically interesting more than it's intrinsically interesting and frustratingly difficult to find.  Hopefully that last matter will get sorted eventually; this is a title that would benefit enormously from the uplift to blu-ray.  If and when that happens, it'll be one to jump on, but in the meantime, I guess it's only for completists and those eager to see a Lupin adventure dressed up in more than TV animation.

Tomorrow's Joe The Movie, 1980, dir's: Yōichirō Fukuda, Osamu Dezaki

I feel bad for starting off a review of a beloved classic by focusing on the negatives, but it's better that I get it off my chest right away: The animation in Tomorrow's Joe is precisely as bad as you'd expect of a film cobbled together from a long-running early-seventies TV show and then some.  But it's also worse than that, because the TV show was, one assumes, in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas the film, as presented on blu-ray and presumably as it was shown in cinemas, more or less, comes to us in the widescreen 16:9 ratio, which was almost certainly accomplished by cropping the existing footage.  That, anyway, is how practically every shot across its two-and-a-half-hour running time looks: as though it's been zoomed in on to an uncomfortable degree.  It's hard not to notice and hard not to be distracted by once you've noticed it, especially when the animation is so rudimentary in the first place.

Would you believe me if I said none of that matters?  Would you believe me if I suggested that, just possibly, it works to the benefit of Tomorrow's Joe?  Honestly, I'm not sure I would believe me, because great animation is a big part of what I love about anime and it logically follows that severely not-so-great animation is a major turn-off.  Yet there are benefits, arising not only from the crudeness of the animation but from the crudeness of the designs as well, which are almost elemental in their simplicity.  The most obvious is a sense that the events portrayed belong to the past: what we have here is an eighties movie of a seventies anime of a sixties manga telling a story from earlier in that same decade, and I don't know that slicker animation could get at that accumulated weight of years in the same way the rough-and-ready work here does.  Equally, there's an energy that's perfectly fitted to the material - and I guess, two paragraphs in, it's high time to be mentioning that what we're discussing is a boxing movie, a genre that doesn't really need to look pretty but very much does need to draw you in with its physicality to the point where you practically feel the blows landing.  This Tomorrow's Joe absolutely does, and if it did so any better, I for one would have found it a tough watch, because - even putting aside the boxing scenes themselves - the events it shows are often staggeringly brutal, and I don't know that a more realistic portrayal would have stayed watchable for this sort of duration.

Again, for all that that sounds like criticism, I don't mean it to be.  Tomorrow's Joe is a pummelling movie and ought to be: our protagonist and definitely not hero is Joe Yabuki, who we meet as a cocky street kid picking a fight with a bunch of petty gangsters, ostensibly to help out a little girl but obviously as much or more so because he loves to scrap and has crappy impulse control.  This we'll soon learn for a fact, as Joe's headstrong and self-destructive nature lands him in a juvenile detention centre, and from there in an even worse juvenile detention centre, all despite the efforts of well-meaning drunk Danpei Tange, a former boxer who's determined to harness the young man's potential whether Joe agrees or not.

Eventually, Joe relinquishes, though not for any real reason other than a desire to do better in the fights he's endlessly starting; it's a long way indeed into the film before he shows an interest in boxing as anything other than a medium for doing what he'd be doing anyway.  And in that sense, While Tomorrow's Joe is definitely a boxing movie, it manages to be far more than merely a movie about boxing: there's a tremendous amount of material here, and I wouldn't be surprised if an hour goes by before Joe so much as steps inside a ring.  Then again, the fact of being adapted from a 79-episode TV show gives the film an edge that perhaps no other boxing film has ever had: it gets to be an epic that's established its characters and arcs and themes well before it really commits to its primary genre, and in so doing, plumbs depths that boxing films rarely get close to.  And here I should admit that I don't remotely like boxing, for all that it seems to be an uncommonly good wellspring for cinematic material - yet I can't remember the last time I was as glued to the edge of my seat as I was during the last twenty minutes of Tomorrow's Joe, a single bout shown in what has to be practically real time and played out as something akin to a chess match in an abattoir.

I didn't expect a classic of Tomorrow's Joe, for all its reputation.  There are surely limits to what you can accomplish by hacking together TV show footage, especially when it looks as though nobody thought retouching the roughest patches might be a nice idea before they pointed it toward a cinema.  So maybe the greatest accomplishment here is the editing, or whatever precisely the word is for the job of picking what out of thirty or so hours of footage makes it into a theatrical cut: this material works as a movie to a shocking degree, moving through clear arcs to be sure but always with momentum and an unmistakeable direction.  While there's plenty to admire - I haven't even mentioned the tremendous voice acting or Kunihiko Suzuki's aggressively jazzy, funky score, which proves a far better fit than it has any right to - the greatest triumph is surely the phenomenal job Tomorrow's Joe does of carving out the leanest, most bare-boned version of its vast story and delivering it with propulsive force.

Barefoot Gen, 1983, dir: Mori Masaki

The 1983 film Barefoot Gen is up to at least three significantly different things, and, on the face of it, one of them is practically irreconcilable with the other two.  First and foremost, it's a tale of survival during wartime, initially amid the increasingly intolerable depredations of the last months of WW2, when the writing was clearly on the wall for Japan's defeat, and then in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, one of the most desperately horrible periods of suffering that any population has known.  And lest we fail to note just how horrible it is to be in a city under nuclear attack, Barefoot Gen is also quite explicitly a horror movie: its representation of what the bombing did to human bodies both during and after is unflinching and unsparing in a manner that would be impossible in live action, since no special effects shot could be so excruciatingly effective as the representations of melting flesh Masaki conjures up over and again.

Obviously, those two modes are a perfectly reasonable fit for each other.  But then we get to Barefoot Gen's third thread, the one which sets it apart from almost any similar film and indeed from the obviously comparable masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies: as well as the above, it's also a comedic tale following the adventures of the plucky titular character, something like if The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn happened to be set amid the irradiated ruins of a major city.  And here you'd have every right to expect things to come gravely unstuck, because that's one heck of a fine line to tread, the more so because we're tethered hard to protagonist Gen's perspective and very much expected to laugh at the things he finds funny, for all that six-year-old boys aren't known for their nuanced grasp of humour.  Moreover, every aspect follows that approach, so that Gen and the other characters his own age look as though they've wandered in from a kids' movie, and Kentarō Haneda's score could be transferred over to said kids' movie without the slightest alteration.

A fine line to tread indeed, and yet it's not so much that Barefoot Gen somehow gets away with it but that, in attempting such seemingly incompatible goals and succeeding as well as it does, it manages to be both great and unique.  And maybe the explanation for that lies in how wholeheartedly the film commits to its various strands: with such levels of intensity, any one of them in isolation would be unwatchable for ninety minutes straight.  That absolutely goes for the horror elements, which are wrenching and gutting in a way that goes far beyond what horror generally even considers, be it by throwing the most violently awful images at us and daring us to blink or by going the other way and treating as perfectly normal, say, the facts that radiation burns are going to attract maggots and that a soldier with radiation poisoning might well bleed from his anus.

So we need the comedy, and more so we need Gen's innocence and plucky can-do attitude, in part to soften everything else to the point of watchability but as much so, and more so as the film goes on, to show us that even the innocence and can-do attitude of a good-hearted, brave, and optimistic child has its reasonable limits.  That isn't to suggest the balance is always perfect: Haneda's music, particularly, is wedded far too much to the Gen we meet in the first third, before the bomb has dropped, and feels increasingly inappropriate the nearer we get to the end.  And if we really wanted to nit-pick a film that arguably ought to be kind of critic-proof, I'd have to admit that it didn't tear me up emotionally the way Grave of the Fireflies (or the more recent In This Corner of the World) did.

Then again, I don't know that Masaki - or Keiji Nakazawa, author of the semi-autobiographical manga the film is based upon - were really after our tears, or at any rate whether that was anyone's priority.  Masaki, certainly, seems primarily determined to make us walk in Gen's shoes, or rather, to stumble through the ashes barefoot as his young hero does, deprived of even so basic a protection as footwear.  He's always gunning for the most direct and visceral reactions, be they happy or sad, be they giggling at the dumb antics and absurd arguments of little kids or trying to make sense of the sight of a starving baby suckling futilely at its dead mother's breast.  To create something bearable from such material would be a big ask, so that Barefoot Gen manages to be often entertaining and always engaging even as it grips us by the throat and forces us to stare at images of almost inconceivable suffering is surely enough to warrant calling it a classic.

-oOo-

Can it really be that we have a post with two strong recommendations - indeed, two titles that are pretty much must-sees if you're at all interested in vintage anime?  It certainly would seem so, and I'd even go further and suggest that, whether you care for older anime or not but are in the business of watching good and important films, then Barefoot Gen is one you'll have to get to, the more so because it manages to be good and important without being preachy or suffocating in the manner of so many such movies.

Even more unexpectedly, there's nothing here that I wouldn't recommend to at least someone.  The Fuma Conspiracy is a middling Lupin film with some unusually nice animation, so if and when it gets a re-release, fans of the series should definitely seek it out, and much the same goes for Be Forever Yamato, which I'm confident would go up in my esteem if I could just watch the thing in a good print.

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