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.