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.
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.
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?
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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