2021: I Tried to Get Out and They Held the Door

It's not as though, when I admitted around this time last year that I had no choice left except to give up on my lifelong dream of being a professional writer, I expected anyone to step in and magically fix things.  Still, there's not being disappointed and there's being fine with a situation, and I can't say I'm altogether fine with the fact that a handful of people who might, with negligible cost to themselves, have made an enormous difference, chose instead to let a year go by without lifting a finger.  The most obvious of those, of course, being my former publisher, whose inaction and disinterest have kept the fully completed fourth Black River Chronicles novel from getting out into the world, not to mention burying my also-ready-to-be-published novella Graveyard of Titans and leaving my Tales of Damasco trilogy in limbo.  Which is to say that, yes, The Black River Chronicles: Graduate or Die is no closer to ever seeing the light of day.  Not that I've altogether given up, but - especially given that my request for support from the SFWA went ignored for over ten months, and yes, I'm including them in the abovementioned 'small handful' - it's hard to see any reason to be hopeful.

Mind you, there's an argument that my biggest enemy on the writing front in 2021 was myself, since I was the one who thought it was a good idea to try and finish the book I'd begun, The Beasts of Siege City, though the project had already become an act of masochism and clearly wasn't going to get any easier.  Somehow I did indeed make it to the end, and insanely, what I was left with was some 350'000 words of novel, which is, I think, more than all three Tales of Damasco books together.  That one is even less likely to be read by anyone, since it's broken as hell, to the point where I don't know how I'd even begin to go about editing it into shape.  And if I was still writing, I think I'd be quite frustrated by that, since I know there's good stuff in there and that it might have been really good stuff if I'd come at the material when I was in a better state.

Then there's the really weird thing, which is that, for all that it was most definitely the death knell of my decade-long career as a novelist, 2021 somehow turned out to be a bloody good year for short fiction sales - arguably the best I've ever had, depending on how you juggle the numbers.  Is there some moral here?  I'd like to think it's that the short fiction side of things might be worth persevering with, except that short fiction is a bitterly awful way to make money and the prospect of going back to writing as effectively a second job isn't something I can contemplate right at the minute.  (Not that I exactly have a first job right at the minute; boy was 2021 awful in just about every conceivable way!)  Still, if all that can be said is that this short spurt of sales was a last huzzah then, whatever, I'll take that, especially since it meant getting to return to some of my favourite markets and to work once more with some of my favourite editors.

Even nicer, two of those stories would probably have been sunk if they hadn't made it into the venues I'd effectively written them for.  Where else but Mysterion would have considered the lengthy magic-realist meditation on religion and isolation that was An Exchange of Values Conducted in Good Faith?  Where else would my experimental fantasy action story Fall to Rise have fit but in Beneath Ceaseless Skies?  And while it's possible to imagine the strange little horror fable A Cold Yesterday in Late July elsewhere, there was no more perfect home for it than The Dark.  Add getting a story I'd come to suspect was unsaleable, my warped spy pastiche M.A.T.E.R Knows Best, into Distant Shore Publishing and a late-in-the-day acceptance from On Spec for my Compassion Fatigue - a personal-favourite piece that I spent years trying to shift finding a place in a 'zine I've been trying to break into for roughly as long - and then top it all off with a couple of anthology reprints and, on that single narrow front, 2021 was a total win.

And of course there's one other bit of good news, in that my delayed Rebellion novella The Outfit is out at the beginning of March, which I realise only now is all of about a month away.  So that's exciting, and something I imagine I'll be talking about quite a bit in the coming weeks, so I won't say much here besides - Joseph Stalin!  Pulling one of the biggest bank robberies in history!  To fund the Russian Revolution!  And it all really actually happened!!! 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 113

I'm always happiest with these posts when they're a weird hodgepodge, so here's a one that makes me very happy indeed: where else but in vintage anime reviews would you find magical girls rubbing shoulders with child detectives and S&M-loving princesses in the company of monster hunters?  Though now that I think about it, I feel like there's probably a single anime show out there somewhere that includes all of the above!  Heck, with a little tweaking, I've just described Claymore.

So to be clear, none of what I'm reviewing here is Claymore, which is a great show that you should definitely watch but came out a full eight years too late for our purposes.  No, what we have this time is Wedding Peach DX, Case Closed: The Time Bombed Skyscraper, Fencer of Minerva: The Tempest, and Blue Seed: Beyond...

Wedding Peach DX, 1996 - 1997, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

I'm tempted to propose that, if you like magical girl shows, and if you like magical girl shows that make no pretence whatsoever of doing anything besides following the conventions of magical girl shows to the letter, then you'll almost certainly like Wedding Peach DX (for which, read "deluxe") and quite probably the 51 episode series to which this four-episode OVA was a sequel, too.  And I think that's pretty fair, because Wedding Peach DX absolutely follows all the conventions, which, when it comes to this particular genre, are very conventional indeed: the group of neatly colour-coded female friends, the canned transformation sequences, the cartoonish creature sidekick, and the particular blend of light action, goofy comedy, romance, and kitsch, it's all here and all done more or less as it would be done in, to take the obvious example, Sailor Moon.

As someone who's only slightly embarrassed to admit that they do like magical girl shows, in spite of and perhaps a little bit because of their extreme formulaicness, I did indeed enjoy Wedding Peach DX, but I'd also suggest that it isn't quite such a cut-and-paste job as I may have begun to make it sound.  Don't get me wrong, if you've seen any Sailor Moon or anything at all similar to Sailor Moon, this will hold not one single surprise for you.  But what makes it fun, aside from the fact that obviously this stuff is innately fun when it's done well or else the entire genre would never have become so enormous and enduring, is that Wedding Peach DX knows precisely what it is and knows that we know and is quite ready to use that shared knowledge to push what's already fairly silly into the realms of being really, really silly.

This doesn't happen all the time, and it's not really a thing at all for the first and weakest episode, which mostly concerns itself with undoing the ending of the TV series to the point where we can have us a magical girl show at all.  Though even then, there's enough of a weird edge that Wedding Peach DX is recognisably its own entity: there's its transformation sequences for one thing, which sees each of the girls fitted out in a wedding dress that burns away to leave their actual outfit, or how head love angel - oh, I ought to have mentioned, they're love angels and not magical girls at all! - Momoko's ultimate attack involves firing off a grenade launcher, albeit one with a heart-shaped sight.  So sure, it's already somewhat strange, but for all of episode one and the bulk of episode two, it's strange within clear parameters that feel more as though it's nudging at the conventions than actively messing with them.  However, by episode three, there's an undeniable knowing wink to the proceedings, and by the last episode, in which our heroes get turned into cats and replaced by feline doppelgangers of themselves, there's more knowing winking going on than there is anything close to conventional storytelling.  The most obvious example, and perhaps my favourite moment across the entire nearly two-hour running time, is when Momoko looses her patience against a particularly annoying villain and yells "High-speed transformation of rage!" - at which point we're treated to precisely that.

So all things considered, Wedding Peach DX does a good job of being just what you'd expect it to be while adding enough of a twist that it has a measure of character; it's easy to see why the show ran for so long despite being so superficially unoriginal.  With that said, that it takes a couple of episodes for the proceedings to get going isn't great when a couple of episodes is half your show.  There's never a moment when it's less than watchable - the animation is hovering around TV territory, but not obnoxiously so, and the music, of which there's a lot, is just the sort of joyously cheesy J-pop you'd hope for - but there's also only really an episode and a half where it's up to something remotely special.  A pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours, then, but Wedding Peach DX is a far cry from being indispensable, though at the least you could do worse than tracking down the final episode on Youtube. 

Case Closed: The Time Bombed Skyscraper, 1997, dir: Kenji Kodama

While we've touched on most of anime's megafranchises here, there's one that's eluded us so far and that's eluded me as a viewer entirely: until now, I hadn't seen so much as a scene of Case Closed - or Detective Conan, to give it its Japanese title - for all that there's a quite bewildering amount of it out there, be that the more than a thousand episodes of the TV show or one of the movies that have been coming out on a pretty much yearly basis since this first entry aired back in 1997.  Mostly that avoidance was a matter of accessibility: of the three films released during the nineties, not one is readily available, with the original Funimation disks both long out of print and surprisingly hard to find, though Discotek have been doing a steady job of bringing out the newer entries and presumably plan to work their way back to the start sooner or later.

Still, if I sat about waiting for reissues, we'd never get anywhere, and so at last I've had my first taste of one of the most popular series in anime history.  And lo and behold, it was ... er, fine, for the most part.  But before we get into why I can't be more effusive in my praise, a quick intro to the concept, since I personally went in with a bunch of wrong assumptions, the most prominent of which being that our protagonist, Conan Edogawa, was a little kid who solved crimes.  Which, okay, isn't a hundred percent wrong, or even slightly wrong, but the wrinkles are more than usually important: Conan, you see, is actually a teenaged detective trapped in the body of a child, for reasons this first film takes some pains to lay out, and is necessarily keeping this truth hidden from the world and most of those closest to him, including his friend Ran, whose roof he's now living under.  Due to those circumstances, Conan is obliged both to give most of the credit to Rachel's dad Kogoro, also a detective but a thoroughly useless one when left to his own devices, and to rely on the gadgetry of his sole confidante, Dr. Agasa, to mask his involvement.

This is all much weirder than what I expected going in, and it takes a bit of getting used to, if only because it seems like an inordinate amount of busywork to get us to the point where we can watch a child detective solving crimes, which you'd assume would be the draw.  I guess I'd better not generalise too hard on the back of ninety minutes of watching, but the impression I got is that Case Closed, like many a giant anime franchise, isn't desperately interested in the genre it sets itself up as: that's more a starting point to wrap a comedic action adventure around.  At any rate, that's certainly the case in this entry, given that The Time Bombed Skyscraper offers up a mystery so obvious that it's impossible to imagine the viewer who couldn't get far, far ahead of it: I'd figured out the identity of the antagonist before it was revealed there was an antagonist, and I don't claim to be particularly clever in doing so.

You'd think this would be a problem, and for me it definitely was, in that I like a good mystery and that makes it tough to enjoy a stupefyingly obvious one.  But if we accept that Detective Conan, at least in this first instalment, was more looking for a frame on which to hang its action and comedy, then what we get just about does the business, with a couple of moderately thrilling set pieces and lots of mildly amusing shenanigans to fill the running time.  Plus, it's not as though there's no cleverness to be found: the opening scene is a nice little murder mystery in itself, and there are other moments along the way where it's clear that writer Kazunari Kouchi could be getting a lot cleverer if the material allowed.  Nevertheless, it would be absurd to claim that having an incredibly predictable mystery at its heart does the material any favours, if only because, if The Time Bombed Skyscraper was to coast by as an action comedy, it would need to be a damn sight better at both action and comedy, and really just better generally.  Director Kodama, who'd be the custodian of these films through to the early two thousands, brings nothing to the table besides an ability to keep the plot moving in a sprightly fashion: at no point is there an interesting creative choice made and never does he attempt anything that would elevate the proceedings beyond the level of well-made TV.  Based on this and his efforts on the City Hunter films, I've no qualms about calling Kodama a hack, but he was definitely capable of better hackwork.

What saves the The Time Bombed Skyscraper, then, in so much as anything does, is the mechanical efficiency of a well-worn franchise that's made of many solid moving parts, even if none of them are getting a very spectacular showing here.  The basic concept is good fun and, for all that Kouchi's script treats the audience like morons, there's something quite neat and engaging in the way it nests lots of mini-mysteries into the proceedings, not all of which are so achingly obvious as the overarching plot.  So a perfectly adequate starting point, I guess, one more likely to please the existing viewer than the neophyte for sure but unlikely to actively put anyone off.  All the same, I hope there's better to come, because right at this minute I'm struggling to see what here warranted a thousand episodes and the better part of twenty-five sequels!

Fencer of Minerva: The Tempest, 1994, dir: Takahiro Okao

First up, if you haven't seen the first volume of Fencer of Minerva, which U.S. Manga Corps dubbed The Emergence, there's no reason you'd want to bother yourself with this closing pair of episodes - unless, I suppose, you had an overwhelming desire to watch a simply animated sex scene or two and every other suitable title had vanished from creation.  But let us assume that, unlikely though it is, you've watched the first volume and were so enamoured by its soft-porn paean to the joys of female sex slavery, mixed with some fairly involved political shenanigans and world-building and presented via some largely subpar animation, that you're itching to discover whether part two could possibly be as good.  Should you, dear imaginary reader who almost certainly doesn't exist, take the dive?

Yes, you should, and having established that we have on our hands a title with no appeal to the vast majority of viewers and guaranteed appeal for an infinitesimally small minority, I guess I could wrap this up right here.  But where's the fun in that, eh?  And it would be bad form not to at least try and sum up why this second volume is a success by the dubious standards Fencer of Minerva has set itself.  Though even that's a pretty easy one to answer: basically, it remembers the politicking and interesting world construction that the third episode briefly ditched and gets back to what made the first couple so mildly entertaining.  Moreover, part two sidelines what were for me the least salutary aspects: it's with great relief that I get to report that at no point does anyone get whipped and then have it explained to them how much they enjoyed the experience, and if you can somehow ignore basically all the subject matter, the only really flat-out misogynistic detail is a bizarre moment in which our heroine Diana gets slapped for having the temerity to mouth off about chess.

In all seriousness, The Tempest is a fair bit less obnoxious in its attitudes toward women, which, while being an incredibly long way from saying it isn't obnoxious at all, nevertheless slightly surprised me.  You'd assume this was geared toward a very specific market, so the fact that these last two episodes contain nothing that would be likely to cater to that market is probably a bit weird.  There isn't even really that much sexual content this time around, and Diana - while still absolutely convinced that the best possible thing for herself and for women in general is enslaving themselves to a man - has developed considerably from the story's beginnings.  She's vastly more in control of events, with her supposed master Sho largely wrapped around her little finger and doing nothing by way of protagonist duties, and the events of the seemingly-pointless-at-the-time episode three have left her both actively bisexual and eager to experiment, and now that I think about it, I'm not certain that anyone gets seduced anywhere in these two episodes except by her or by one of the women she in turn has decided to train up in the art of sex slavery and ... were they aiming for some kind of bafflingly wrong-headed feminist message here?  Is such a thing possible?

I truly don't know, but Fencer of Minerva is definitely up to something, and that, along with its repeated attempts to tell a proper fantasy story set in a proper fantasy world, are enough for me to find it mildly intriguing and intermittently entertaining even when there's no denying that it does neither of those things well and has nothing - bar some inappropriately haunting music - to redeem it.  I'm glad I saw it, and I'm glad U.S. Manga Corps were around to pick up a title that no one else would have touched with a ten-foot pole, and I kind of admire the makers of Fencer of Minerva for somehow carving a coherent five-part tale out of this material: I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone thought that making a fantasy adventure about how one woman brought about significant socio-political change through a kink for sexual subjugation was a good or rational idea, but given that they did, I guess we ought to be pleased that they stuck the landing.

Blue Seed: Beyond, 1996 - 1998, dir: Jun Kamiya, Kiyoshi Murayama

What ADV released as Blue Seed: Beyond was in fact two separate OVAs by two different directors and indeed two different studios, separated by the matter of a couple of years, and given that they're also up to completely different things, it seems unreasonable to try and review them as single entity.  So let's not do that.

Firstly, then, we have the opening two-parter, which is more or less what you'd expect of a two-episode follow up to a long-running series, in that it serves as a sort of mini sequel that whisks us through a brand new conflict while letting us hang around with the familiar characters a little longer and see where they ended up in the time since the show ended.  To some extent, this was wasted on me, as someone coming to Blue Seed afresh, but it was easy enough to gather the general concept and who everyone was.  Though with that said, the Wikipedia entry makes the TV series sound quite complex and involved and not at all like the monster-of-the-week fare on offer here.  Still, it's a perfectly diverting bit of B-movie fluff, and all the more so in the second episode, when our heroes head over to San Francisco to show the Americans how the experts go about fighting monsters - which is made especially hilarious because there's lots of talk about keeping the situation under wraps, and then they come up with a plan that could probably be photographed from space.  It's very much that sort of anime, and there's nothing remotely special going on here, but there's nothing really wrong, either.  And with the mighty Production I.G on animation duties, it never looks less than good, though by their unusually high standards, this feels a little phoned in, and it would certainly help if all the character and creature designs didn't seem like they'd wandered in from different shows.

Then the third episode is Speed in a hot spring resort, and is precisely as awesome as that sounds, assuming that your response to the pitch of "Speed in a hot spring resort" was "That sounds extremely awesome" and not "Uh, what now?"  This immediately makes it the best Speed pastiche ever - yes, even better than the Father Ted one - and, well, one of the top five hot springs resort episodes in anime at any rate, because while I generally hate them, they do throw up the odd gem when they manage not to be just an excuse to get the female cast in their birthday suits.*  And look, Blue Seed: Beyond absolutely does do that, don't get me wrong, but then it reveals that there's a bomb in the hot spring that will go off if the water level changes even slightly, and then it throws in monkeys, and honestly, nothing I tell you is going to do justice to one of the most wildly amusing half hours of anime I've experienced.  It even manages to look terrific, and I have next to no experience with studio Xebec, but that they shared an OVA with Production I.G and managed to come out effortlessly on top makes theirs a name I'll be keeping an eye out for in future.

Based on its first two episodes, Blue Seed: Beyond would be a tough recommendation to anyone who hadn't watched the series; it's fine and all, in an uninspired and pleasingly goofy way, but it's hard to imagine the viewer so starved of anime about pretty people fighting monsters that they'd want to seek it out.  Then the third episode is unabashedly brilliant, though I'd imagine it's a fairly rubbish episode of Blue Seed, given that there aren't any monsters and you could easily switch out the cast with any random bunch of beautiful women (and one hot guy) and achieve largely the same results.  Frankly, I don't know where any of this leaves us, but I had a good time with Blue Seed: Beyond - which is to say, an okay time and then a great time, averaged out - so I suppose I can't not give it a thumbs up.

-oOo-

It's weird to look back at this one and realise there's not a single standout, when there also isn't anything that I didn't enjoy.  If there's any unifying factor, I suppose it's inconsistency: if all four of the titles here were as good as their best parts, they would be easy to recommend.  For Wedding Peach DX and Blue Seed: Beyond, that means a mix of splendid and not-so-hot episodes, and for The Time Bombed Skyscraper it's a formula that harms as much as it helps, and for the second Fencer of Minerva volume it's ... okay, no, nothing in Fencer of Minerva really works and I'm largely giving it credit for not being as awful as it might have been, but hey, I sort of had fun with it!

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

* The Ranma 1/2 OVAs and the second Patlabor OVA both spring to mind - er, excuse the inadvertent crap pun - as shows that managed to do great things with the formula.

Film Ramble: Top 10 Fantasy and Science Fiction Films of 2021

 I skipped my genre-film best of last year for fairly obvious reasons, and I would have skipped this year, too, for the less obvious reason that, having mostly quit writing, I'm free to just fill up this blog with vintage anime reviews if I so choose.  But a friend asked if I'd be doing one, and I've just about seen enough good movies to fill out of a top ten, and I've not much better to do, so why not?

First up, then, I'll concede that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings possibly ought to be on here somewhere, but I just hate its last act so goddamn much - it's the most aggravating example yet of the trend whereby Marvel only have one idea for how to handle a big action climax - and I'm also more annoyed that I probably ought to be that they've taken a street-level martial arts hero and turned him into yet another clone of Iron Man.  Lupin III: The First was a close call and Venom: Let There Be Carnage could also easily have taken the bottom spot, which is more than could be said of The Matrix Resurrected: while I have a measure of respect for Lana Wachowski for making a feature-length essay on how badly she didn't want to make another Matrix movie, and there was a marvellous little Reeves / Moss romcom tucked away amid its bloated running time, would a single half-decent action sequence have been too much to ask?  Ghostbusters: Afterlife I ignored because it looked terrible and I refuse to get nostalgic over something I was never obsessed with even as a kid.  And was there a Pixar movie this year?  If there was, it must have looked so boring that I immediately forgot its existence.

I ought to note, too, that everything bar the last three entries is ordered according to little more than the whims of a moment, since quality-wise the films are all good but not great in a largely indistinguishable fashion.  So if you want to get annoyed that I rated, say, Eternals over Encanto, then obviously feel free to do so, but perhaps don't tell me, since I'll probably have changed my mind anyway.  Let's go!

10) Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night

I've always quite liked Sword Art Online without exactly knowing why or feeling especially good about devoting my time to it, but if there's been one glaring problem right from the off that the show's seemed incapable of or unwilling to fix, it was the way it treated its female characters in general and female lead Asuna in particular.  And it's desperately embarrassing that it took them this long to set that right in any meaningful way, but hey, here we are, and the result is some of the best work the highly inconsistent franchise has managed to produce.  A retelling of the first series from Asuna's perspective, it benefits greatly from the fact that she's not immediately a badass the way the series' male protagonist Kirito was, and indeed not even a gamer - a detail that makes the desperately played-out isekai genre feel a little fresher - and gains, too, from an emphasis on friendship and its pitfalls that makes for a rewarding first half.  Once Kirito shows up and the film's events veer closer to those of the show, the film loses steam somewhat, but still, for anyone curious as to why Sword Art Online is so huge and eager to experiences its virtues with less of the nagging flaws, Aria of a Starless Night is the new best starting point.

9) Monster Hunter

Bless Paul W. S. Anderson, the man's a national treasure who'll never get a fraction of the credit he deserves.  For over two and a half decades now he's been churning out B-movies, and some of them are marvellous and some of them are mildly terrible, but they're all kind of joyous in their own ways and there's not a one that feels as if it was made with less than total commitment.  Plus most of them star Milla Jovovich, and anyone who manages both to wed Milla Jovovich and find a place for her in damn near every project they go near warrants an extra measure of credit - bringing us neatly to Monster Hunter, which quality-wise is definitely nearer to the top than the bottom of Anderson's CV and indeed has a good solid stretch toward its middle that may be the best filmmaking he's produced since way back in Event Horizon.  That Monster Hunter tails off a bit in its back third is definitely a shame, but it's never less than thoroughly entertaining.  In a better world, this is the sort of of disposable-but-well-crafted fluff that would come out every month, but our world sucks and Hollywood has long since lost the art of making consistently good B-movies, so we should be extra glad of them on the rare occasions they do appear.

8) Earwig and the Witch

Is Gorō Miyazaki the equal of his father Hayao Miyazaki, our greatest living animation director by a country mile?  No, he isn't, and the answer's right there in the question.  Was a movie made for TV ever going to be the equal of cinematic masterpieces like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro?  Clearly not, in the same way that no one holds Ghibli's other made-for-TV project, Ocean Waves, to that standard.  Will CG ever truly capture the handmade loveliness of top-tier hand-drawn animation?  Actually, that one I'm increasingly on the fence about, and while Earwig and the Witch doesn't get us there, it's a better stab at recreating Ghibli's distinctive aesthetic while at the same time edging it toward new places than most reviewers gave credit for.  At any rate, while an undeniably lowkey effort coming from the greatest animation studio to ever exist, Earwig and the Witch is a delight watched purely as itself, with its thoroughly prickly protagonist and a plot - in which, as many a bitter critic pointed out, nothing much happens - that plays out more like a procedural than the twee fantasy fare it clearly doesn't intend to be.  It's also very, very English, in ways that it's frankly astonishing anyone who hadn't grown up in the country could pick up on: note, for example, how many pubs the tiny village setting has!  And while Englishness is hardly a virtue in and of itself, it's indicative, I think, of how much love and care Gorō put into this, his third directorial effort.

7) Encanto

This would be awfully near the top of the list if the last five minutes weren't such a monumental act of creative cowardice and generally pissing the entire message of the movie up the wall just because Disney can't possibly leave something without the possibility of sequels and spinoffs: it's that rare ending so misconceived that it manages not only to suck in its own right but to hurt everything that was great before it.  So that's a shame and all, but if you stopped watching at just the right time, you'd be left with one of Disney's strongest efforts in a good few years, and perhaps their most radical attempt at shaking up their formula by looting from cultural sources outside of the European folktale - in this case meaning a bafflingly earnest effort to transform the raw stuff of the Latin American magic-realist tradition into a funny kiddy musical.  Its also their most explicit shot yet at aping Studio Ghibli's emphasis on essentially villain-less narratives in which what propels the story is more a working out of internal conflicts than a response to external aggressions.  And that it lands on both those counts while also being a pretty good traditional Disney movie is honestly kind of a wonder - which is why it's so maddening when the post-climax comes along and nukes all the film's good intentions from orbit.

6) Eternals

After the manipulative poverty tourism of Nomadland and the hopelessly lacklustre trailers, and given the very likely probability that nobody anywhere cares one iota about these characters, my hopes for Eternals weren't what you might call high.  And sure enough, it proved to be something of a trainwreck.  But it was an interesting trainwreck, and I was very ready for an interesting Marvel movie by that point.  And if many of the ways in which it's interesting aren't good and some of them are quite actively bad - The leaden anti-humour!  The constant self-congratulation at being slightly less awful at representation than most big budget movies! - a few are actually kind of exciting.  Really, I'd have forgiven it a lot for its earnest attempt to have actual, meaningful themes and to grapple with big ideas and to try not to be too pat in its answers.  This is exemplified by a climax that does practically none of what we expect from the climax of a Marvel movie, or any sort of big-budget movie, and instead expects us to watch our "heroes" fight each other over what amounts to differing interpretations of their faith.  And look, I'm not saying Marvel ought to be replacing their done-to-death "fight on the ground / in the air / in the sky" third acts with religious wars every time, but as a one-off?  It's certainly different.  I couldn't swear that being different is equal to being good - I couldn't swear that anything in all of this works! - but better a brave failure than a safe success.

5) Raya and the Last Dragon

I'd argue that the good stuff in Encanto is better than the good stuff in Raya and the Last Dragon, but at no point does Raya and the Last Dragon defecate all over its bed and then fling the filthy sheets in your face, so it gets to be a little higher up the list.  On the other hand, Raya and the Last Dragon does have a couple of great virtues of its own, one being that it's absolutely bonkers - somewhere along the line, somebody thought that remaking Mad Max, but with a teenage girl riding a giant pill bug, was a good idea, and that someone was actually listened to instead of being quietly ushered in the direction of the nearest sanatorium! - and the other being that, more so than any other film since Disney burned the last tattered shreds of its soul and abandoned traditional animation, it looks staggeringly lovely.  Get past the unapologetic mangling of various Southeast Asian cultures into one misshapen whole, which is possibly more offensive than the way Encanto does the same with Latin America but yields far more entertaining world-building results, and there's a pleasurable, if distinctly rote, fantasy coming-of-age tale here that's well toward the upper end of the middling ground that both Disney and Disney-Pixar seems convinced is what doing their jobs means these days.

4) Spider-Man: No Way Home

Right from the off, for anyone who's lost patience with the Marvel juggernaut and is sick to the back teeth of this current suffocating wave of nostalgia in lieu of entertainment, No Way Home sounded like the worst damn thing.  Even if we ignore the fact that you really ought to be able to walk into a cinema and watch a movie without having seen seven other movies put out by two different companies over a two decade period, who could think that doing the precise same thing as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse only inevitably worse while also reminding people of those Sam Raimi Spider-man movies, two thirds of which were better than anything in your own series, was a bright idea?  And so, with all that, it's possible I'm giving Spider-Man: No Way Home credit for not being a ghastly wreck.  But I hope not.  It finds journeyman director Jon Watts getting up to considerably more interesting stuff than in his previous efforts (bar that one terrific sequence from Far From Home) and features some of the best effects work the MCU has yet to produce (if we ignore The Lizard, anyway; whatever Watts paid his eight-year-old nephew to fling that crap together in an afternoon when he realised they'd somehow missed out an entire character, it was too much.)  Yet, if I'm being honest, what really worked for me was the nostalgia, in part because I actually liked most of the preceding Spider-man movies but also because, shockingly, it opted to be so sad.  Seeing Tobey Maguire, whose career's been in the toilet for years, back in the spider-suit was sad; likewise Andrew Garfield, whose films may not have been the best but who did good work in the role.  Among the things I found weirdly moving, the amount of closure it delivered for those long-lost incarnations of the character was the most startling; but really, for all its quipiness, No Way Home was a strikingly melancholy and earnest movie, one that truly seemed set on doing right by its title character.

3) Dune

I actually have a bunch of problems with Villeneuve's take on Dune, and two of them are far from trivial.  It's absolutely half of a movie, and as the running time dragged on, I found that harder and harder to ignore, because there's just no arc here: it's a story that runs and runs and runs and stops, and that stopping point could easily have been anywhere in the last third without leaving the result any more or less shapeless.  And while there was a lot in the design work that I found thrilling, it bugged me deeply that, having found an aesthetic he liked the look of, Villeneuve seemed determined to plaster it over everything.  Say what you like about the Lynch version (or don't, since I like it and you probably don't) but it did a hell of a job of creating a universe that felt full of wildly different and competing cultures and ideologies, whereas Villeneuve's Dune does a hell of a job of creating a universe where everything's drab and brutalist.  Neither of those are small issues, so that the film gets this high on the list is a testament to how good every other element is, and more than anything to how it does the one thing genre fiction needs to do and rarely nails, which is to transport us somewhere totally other and make it feel real and true.  I didn't always love Dune, but I believed it, and arguably that's nearly as valuable.

2) The Suicide Squad

I don't much like James Gunn as a writer and I'm lukewarm to him as a director; there's nothing on his CV prior to The Suicide Squad that I'd rate as highly as other people generally do, not even the first Guardians of the Galaxy.  But with the astonishingly free rein DC appear to have given him, Gunn got to lean hard into the black humour and wanton sadism that were an uncomfortable fit for his PG13 projects, and with Margot Robbie now the undeniable MVP of the DC comics universe and Daniela Melchior stealing the film from under almost everyone else, he finally managed to make a film that does right by its female characters, and with a project that plays to his strengths and irons out his weaknesses, the results are a thing of wonder.  Incredibly dark and mean-spirited wonder, to be sure, but then, that's a big part of the fun and also wholly appropriate: The Suicide Squad ponder the notion of a US supervillain strike team mucking about in world affairs for all of about three seconds, recognises it for the grotesquery it is, and proceeds accordingly, crafting a delirious two hours of entertainment that skewers its concept with fanatical dedication.  Though written like that, it sounds like a grind, and thanks to a splendid cast doing splendid work and some truly excellent gags and just the right amount of decency and kindness at the centre of its shrivelled tumour of a heart, it somehow never is.

1) Zack Snyder's Justice League

I can't possibly justify this decision, except by saying that the existence of Zack Snyder's Justice League feels to me like a miracle and, let's face it, we don't see a lot of those these days.  And yes, I get that you might choose instead to view it as a win for the tenacity of toxic fandoms, but consider the alternative: that Snyder, an inconsistent craftsman who nevertheless clearly believes deeply and wholeheartedly in what he's up to, set out to create something of epic grandeur as one part of something even more preposterously epically grand, and a bunch of studio execs who'd lost faith in his vision because it wasn't as shiny and quippy as what those other studio execs were doing used a horrifying family tragedy as the leverage to push him off the project so that he could be replaced by a philandering, abusive hack who everyone pretty much knew by that point ought not to be working in an industry where he might get any chance to abuse his power - and then, somehow, years later, the stars aligned in such a way that Snyder got not only to fix his film but to then break it in a whole bunch of other ways that are giddily fascinating if you're a certain kind of film nerd.  A more than four hour running time!  A 4:3 aspect ratio!  A goddamn black and white version!  Clearly this sort of auterishness is madness and not a remotely sustainable model for making films, but just once in a blue moon, to experience something so vast and singular and magnificently demented - well, it was a rare treat, and for me, one of 2021's much-needed highlights.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 112

It's been ages since I've managed to get a post up here!  What can I say?  Sometimes you have to focus on getting the bills paid.  And perhaps since I've been unusually busy, that also means I'm concentrating on titles of under an hour in length - with an extra-short introduction to match!  Time's a-wasting, so let's get on and take a look at Princess Minerva, Tattoon Master, The Samurai, and Power DoLLS...

Princess Minerva, 1995, dir: Mihiro Yamaguchi

I don't want to suggest that Princess Minerva is overambitious, because in most ways it's anything but, and yet its greatest failing is definitely one of trying to cram too much into a forty-minutes-plus-credits running time.  Or rather, it thinks it can get away with using an awful lot of that time for setup, ending on a note that couldn't scream "now all that's out of the way, we can get into our real story!" much harder if it tried; indeed, one of the last lines of dialogue is effectively that.

The plot, such as it is, sees the boisterous, headstrong Minerva, princess of the land of Wisler, determined to recruit herself a squad of bodyguards via the medium of a fighting tournament that she herself will take part in.  And this already doesn't make a ton of sense, since feeling you need to be surrounded at all times by bodyguards doesn't exactly equate with being boisterous or headstrong, but let us generously argue on Princess Minerva's behalf that this is more an excuse to get into a scrap under her masked alter-ego of Cutey Kamen and also perhaps because she's secretly a bit lonely, having apparently no one to keep her company except her constant chaperone Blue Morris, whose job (which, of course, she's spectacularly bad at) is to keep the princess out of trouble.

This means we need enough characters for a decent-sized fight tournament and gang of bodyguards / friend surrogates, plus a decent introduction to Minerva herself and the show's secret superstar Blue Morris, plus Minerva's dad, plus the inevitable villain to be faced off against in the climax and the villain's even more villainous mentor and boy is that a ton of stuff to be crushing into this sort of running time.  Which even then might not necessarily be a problem, except that Princess Minerva far too often forgets that it needs to get all of that done and be routinely funny.  Sporadically funny?  That it manages.  And many of the characters, based on what little we learn of them, are perfectly fine and pleasant to be around, though Minerva herself never gets far beyond that anachronistic Cutey Kamen gag, which the makers seem to consider vastly more amusing than it could ever hope to be.

What mostly stands out then, in a show that seems to be nodding vigorously in the direction of female empowerment, is how revealing and uncomfortable-around-the-groinal-area-looking most of the costumes are, when the characters aren't just flat-out naked for no very obvious reason, which if nothing else suggests that nobody had altogether thought through what they were trying to accomplish here: even in vintage anime, it's hard to think of many titles that go this far down the rabbit hole of aiming a tale at teenage girls while also making sure at every opportunity that teenage boys get something to ogle.  But if ogling was the true goal, some better animation would have been nice, and some more imaginative designs, and even then, there are plenty of similar titles from the time that square the circle of having positively portrayed female characters but with a moderate amount of fan service and actually remember to chuck in more than a handful of good gags.  In fact, I don't generally do this, but you know what?  If you want a fun fantasy comedy about misbehaving female teenage royalty, Detatoko Princess does everything Princess Minerva tries and gets it right, and is twice as long to boot.

Tattoon Master, 1996, dir: Shûichi Hirokawa

One of the many nice things about distributor Media Blasters being back in active business and energetically reissuing large swathes of their catalogue is that reviewing their long-since-vanished titles feels that bit less redundant than it used to.  Not that Tattoon Master is among those they've rescued from the grave, but who knows, they might, and that's more than can be said of a lot of what I cover here.  Whether they actually ought to, though ... well, I guess that's what I'm meant to be covering, isn't it?

So excuse me if my answer is a resounding, "Um, maybe?"  But perhaps a plot summary will give you an idea of why it's tough to work up strong feelings either way, especially if you bear in mind that Tattoon Master was one of those obviously unfinished titles that the distributor was so fond of, consisting of two half hour episodes that wrap up nothing whatsoever.  Anyway, that plot: we first meet out teenaged protagonist Hibio when he's dressing down a pair of his friends for harassing a girl, only for him to then tell her off in turn for wearing a skirt and so attracting their unwanted attention.  And this teaches us most of what we need to know about Hibio, who has, it's implied, gone severely off the rails since the assumed death of his anthropologist mother two years earlier, enough so that he seems to have developed a mild hatred of all things female but not quite enough that his innate sense of justice doesn't shine through occasionally.  But, shock!  Hibio's mum isn't dead at all, she's off in some unspecified middle of nowhere with the Tattoon tribe, who gain magical powers by tattooing their bodies or somesuch nonsense, and not only that but she's promised that her son will marry their princess, Nima, who took such a liking to him based on a glimpse of a photo that she decided to abandon her royal duties and chase after him.  But bigger shock!  The misogynistic Hibio doesn't want to get married, and also there's a schoolfriend with a crush to be competed with, and also also Nima's being hunted by some guy who believes her tribe is responsible for his brother's death, and that's all the alsos we get because, lest we forget, the thing's only an hour long.

There's nothing actively bad in there; or rather, there's quite a lot that could easily have been very bad indeed, from the basic premise upward, but Tattoon Master does a deft job of ducking the worst of it by, firstly, making clear that Hibio is a jerk and that we're not expected to sympathise with his jerky attitudes, and secondly by giving us enough glimpses into his bitter sense of abandonment and his supressed better self that we're confident Nima isn't wholly barking up the wrong tree, and lastly by making Nima herself a bit more complex than the semi-naked airhead we're initially introduced to.  On the whole, if Tattoon Master has an angle that separates it from the many contemporary titles it's blatantly similar to, that's it: the show has a sliver more seriousness and a dash more maturity than you might expect, in a way that extends to designs that lean more toward realism than cartoonishness and some generally respectable animation that grounds even the wackier moments with a certain physicality.

Does that make it better or worse?  Does it make any difference at all?  Honestly, I'm not sure, and maybe that's the heart of why I'm feeling more ambivalent about Tattoon Master than I'd like to.  Or put it this way: it's great to have a distinctive approach, but when you only have two episodes to play with, making your approach "every comedy fantasy anime you've seen but with a fraction more realism and psychological depth" is arguably less valuable than just cramming in a ton of great jokes and getting out of Dodge.  Which, to bring us back to the opening, makes for a title that would certainly be worth considering if it should one day resurface at a sensible budget price but is just as certainly not worth the effort of hunting for in its current, hard-to-find form.

The Samurai, 1987, dir: Kazuo Yamazaki

I hadn't so much as heard of The Samurai until about a month ago, and I'll wager you haven't either, and there are plenty of reasons that might be the case, the most obvious being that there have been many, many short comedy OVAs released over the three-and-a-half decades since this one came out and obviously not all of them are going to be remembered.  But if I may, I'm going to suggest another explanation, which is that ADV's presentation of the title absolutely sucked, and what kind of chance did it ever have with a cover like that?  Would you have even guessed this was meant to be a comedy?  Would you have come to any sort of conclusion whatsoever or just taken a single glance and instantly forgotten the entire business?  That's one exceedingly lazy bit of design right there, and the back isn't an awful lot better, though it does at least have the decency to clue the potential buyer into what they might be in for.

The point of this lengthy diversion being, The Samurai is actually pretty good, and maybe even very good, and it's a shame that it hasn't managed to hang onto some sliver of a reputation, the more so given that it's that rare vintage title that can still be picked up at sensible prices.  Though all of this comes with the caveat that it may well not be your thing: this is one of those raunchy anime comedies that were so the rage back then, which means lots of (mostly female) nudity and lots of gags where said nudity is more or less the punchline, and that's obviously not everyone's cup of tea.  Nor is it mine, mostly, but The Samurai has the decency to get to its smutty jokes honestly and to play them with great energy and glee, and that makes it easy to be on side with.

Takeshi Chimatsuri is a teenager who, for reasons the plot never discloses but kind of nods toward in a surprisingly satisfying fashion, lives his life entirely in the mode of an historical samurai, down to carrying a sword to school - something that comes in handy in the opening scene, in which terrorists have taken over his class, an incident that gets resolved in seconds and is never referred back to, which should give you an idea of how rabidly the show tears through ideas without worrying over how they'll fit together.  Other than his eccentric lifestyle choices, Takeshi has one great weakness, and that's women: even a glimpse of unveiled female flesh is enough to send blood geysering from his nostrils in the fashion of countless horny anime teenagers.  While this clearly hasn't been doing him any favours, it's about to become a major issue indeed, as the two new female students entering his class turn out to be a pair of ninjas in search of the short sword that Takeshi's father once won from their dad.  Moreover, they're willing to do whatever it takes, and as you've probably guessed by now, that includes taking some or all of their clothes off in roughly every other scene.

Okay, maybe suggesting that The Samurai gets to its nudity honestly was a stretch in retrospect, but still, it's about as integral to the plot as you could hope.  It's a fine line that's being tread, to be sure, and the show is definitely more sex-obsessed than most, but it also never forgets that the goal, first and foremost, is to be funny, or at any rate fun, and it manages that effectively non-stop for the whole of its running time.  That racing through of plot points I mentioned is a virtue in that respect, and the result plays much like a sketch show, or perhaps more accurately a greatest hits: my guess is that there was a longer manga and the creators decided to barrel through the material as best they could in the time they had.  Which is a good approach for this sort of thing, especially so when you have some uncommonly decent animation at your disposal, of a sort that would have been barely imaginable for this kind of material even a half decade later.  The Samurai looks pretty flashy for what it is, certainly about a thousand times better than that crummy cover would suggest, and if my theory's right, it's a heck of a shame some lazy distributor decisions kept such a delightful little title away from the audience it deserved.  There's not much to be done about that now, but maybe keep an eye out for it, eh?

Power Dolls, 1996 - 1998, dir's: Hiroyuki Kitakubo and Masayuki Hidaka

Mostly watching and reviewing vintage anime is fun, pretty much regardless of whether said anime is any good or not, hence why I keep on doing it with such obsessive persistence.  But just occasionally you come across a title that's very frustrating indeed, and it's such a one we have here.  Power Dolls - or rather, Power DoLLS, since, as you can see from the cover if you squint, there's an especially tortured acronym to be accounted for - isn't very good, but it isn't good in ways that aren't terribly interesting to talk about and make me annoyed not at the creators, who genuinely appear to have done their best to make the most of an intrinsically unrewarding brief, but with ADV, who released a duff DVD in the sure knowledge that it couldn't possibly reach the one audience that might get something out of it.

That's to say, if you were to actively enjoy Power DoLLS, I'm confident it would be because you were a fan of the turn-based strategy video game series that it was made as an accompaniment to.  Not, let's be clear, an adaptation, something that might have potential to reach beyond those who were familiar with the source material: no, for all that Power DoLLS deigns to key us in with the bare basics of its setting, nevertheless the two stories presented here are almost wholly driven by an assumption that you're already acquainted with the characters and central conflict, because good luck trying to get more than the shallowest grasp of them based on what's provided, let alone to find any emotional resonance in the events portrayed.  And here's why that's especially annoying: not one of those games was released outside of Japan.

So nuts to ADV for putting out something that simply had no right to be dropped into Western markets, presumably in the hope that girls plus giant robots was such an inherently winning formula that it couldn't fail to rake in a little cash.  But equally frustrating is that Power DoLLS is nearly good enough to stand on its own merits rather than as a mere accompaniment to a games series that sounds as though it was considerably better than this might lead you to expect.  Don't get me wrong, there isn't the barest shred of originality here, but the future war that the OVA presents is treated with an appropriate measure of grimness and both the tales on offer do a decent job of undercutting their gung-ho nature with an awareness that war actually kind of sucks, and even in the space of less than an hour we get to see refugee crises and civilian causalities and moral greyness and in general the kind of stuff that gets stripped away from war when it's being used for the purposes of entertainment.  And sure, that may only be giving credit for having taken notes from Gundam - Power DoLLS has basically no notes that it hasn't taken from Gundam - but better to borrow from a franchise that treats these topics well.

Actually, if all we had to deal with was a short Gundam knock-off that had delivered the vast bulk of its story in an entirely different medium, I might still be more kindly disposed to Power DoLLS.  But what really makes the experience galling is that what we actually get is not a two-part OVA but two wholly separate OVAs, or possibly an OVA and a pilot for a series that never came to fruition, which is very much what the second one appears to be.  And part one is barely functional on an animation level, while part two looks pretty nice if you can get past some decidedly strange character designs, and there's a four year in-universe gap between the two that places them in entirely different conflicts, presumably because they were made on the back of entirely different games, and the whole experience of watching them and trying to focus on their relative merits while ignoring their obvious but different flaws is damn dispiriting.  Power Dolls isn't awful, it's simply a functional attempt at providing a specific product for a specific audience, and that makes it tough to hate on but considerably tougher to say anything nice about when you're not in and couldn't possibly be in that demographic.

-oOo-

That was a bit of a washout, and a particularly disappointing washout, too.  I had unreasonably high hopes for Princess Minerva, based on nothing besides the knowledge that nineties anime was more than capable of producing good comic fantasy with less than an hour to play with, and I suppose I had even less reason to be optimistic for Power DoLLS - it is, after all called Power DoLLS! - but the cover made it look sort of neat, and I'm absolutely foolish enough to fall into ADV's carefully laid "look, girls and giant robots!" trap.  As for Tattoon Master, I'd seen some fairly positive reviews, and they weren't wrong, exactly, but there's a difference between promising and successful, and it's a title that definitely needed a couple more episodes to prove itself the latter.  And so we're left with The Samurai, which I had no expectations of at all and which proved to be a total joy.  So I guess the moral is, expect everything to suck and maybe sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised.  Wait, no, that's an awful moral!

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