Here's a worry: we're not terribly far off the point where I run out of DVD-released titles to review, and since I'm still unhealthily addicted to vintage anime after all these many years, that's inevitably led me to seek out more and more stuff that never made it as far as DVD. But while I've never pretended these posts served much of a purpose, filling up entire entries with titles that never even made it onto a remotely modern format seems a bit pointless even by Drowning in Nineties Anime standards.
Thankfully, we're not quite there yet, or even all the way through the relatively well-known stuff; heck, this time around we have a franchise that was revamped not so long ago and two that are still going strong. But yes, we also have something that never made it past a VHS release, and for better or worse, that's likely to be a feature of most posts going forward. Put it all together and you get Ushio & Tora, Case Closed: The Last Wizard of the Century, Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team: Miller's Report, and Compiler...
Is it too much to ask of a comedy action horror show that it be uncommonly great at delivering comedy, action, and horror? A not entirely serious question, I admit, because obviously it's a big ask that anything be uncommonly great on even a single front, but still, we could all point to any number of anime, or to any amount of genre fare in general, and pick endless examples where more subgenres were crammed in than the creators rightly knew what to do with or where one or more elements felt as though they'd been included more from a sense of duty than any creative passion.
What's most striking about Ushio and Tora, then, is not so much its uniqueness - of which there's not really that much to speak of, though the core concept is a brilliant take on tried-and-tested ideas - but the extent to which it does everything it tries its hand at to such a remarkably high standard and with such obvious enthusiasm. The action is thrilling. The horror is ingenious and freaky and really quite shocking in places. The comedy is actually funny and a welcome relief rather than an annoying distraction. And even when Ushio and Tora steps outside of those comfortable boxes and dabbles in, say, a spot of light-hearted romance, it still manages not to embarrass itself.
Really, though, it's bromance that's the order of the day, as that title suggests, or as it does if you know that Ushio is a kid who happens to stumble upon the monster his ancient ancestor once supposedly defeated sealed up down in the cellar with a magic spear stuck in him, which Ushio is fool enough to pull out, and that he decides on a whim to name said monster Tora, because he looks as much like a tiger as he does anything else. From there, you can sort of see how things will go, with Ushio and Tora butting heads and battling other supernatural threats as a grudging team, and Ushio getting into trouble over the presence of a giant carnivorous demon that only he can see, but what sets Ushio and Tora apart is how wholeheartedly it commits to every element of that concept. To focus on a single example, it's striking how Tora never becomes a safe presence, in spite of the frequent jokes at his expense: even in the latest episodes, where he's notionally on side with Ushio, he's a fearsome, unsettling presence, and that has much to do with Chikao Ôtsuka's outstanding performance in the role, veering between snarling menace and self-satisfied amusement and generally finding the perfect meeting point of the two to conjure up a hundreds-of-years-old hellbeast that we both fear and want to spend time around.
Which isn't to suggest that the rest of the cast and crew aren't doing nearly as good work; bar some opening and closing themes that I never warmed up to, there's no trace of bad craft here. The writing is thoroughly ingenious, finding a constant stream of fresh takes on familiar ideas and dredging up foes from the darkest corners of Japanese folklore that I, as someone who's seen far too many similar titles, had never encountered. And the animation and direction are equal to the writing: it helps that the show has such a distinctive look, one of almost unpleasantly rich oranges and blues and character designs that are always a little too dirty and jagged, but that's not to dismiss what a terrific job Yuyama does. Managing such a range of tones and nailing them all without letting the seams show is nobody's idea of easy, but Yuyama - and Ushio and Tora in general - sure does make it look that way.
The Last Wizard of the Century is, I would say, the first legitimately good film in the Case Closed franchise. Oh, the first two had their virtues, and certainly both made for an enjoyable watch, but with this third movie, the franchise finally manages to deliver an entry where the virtues are significant and the flaws are trivial enough not to be much of a problem. It is, mind you, definitely no more than good, and at this point I wonder if Case Closed has any real seeds of greatness in it. I suspect that you could bend this formula far enough that it would produce a work of genuine excellence - if only because, here in the third film, there are elements moving visibly in the right direction - but we're a fair way from that point yet.
But I came to praise The Last Wizard of the Century, not to bury it, so let's begin by noting that it omits the cardinal sin of the first two entries, that of making its central mystery very obvious indeed. Granted, the villain of the piece is nearly as immediately guessable as on the last two occasions, but their identity is far less significant this time around, and I think that's the crucial difference: in place of a murder mystery, what we have instead is a Da Vinci Code-esque historical thriller, and there are enough different moving parts that the pleasure is less in getting ahead of its conundrums than in keeping on top of them enough to cling on for the ride. In this, I'd argue that The Last Wizard of the Century still manages to cheat a bit, in that the crucial details are reliably obvious but thrown at you, sometimes, so rapidly that it's tough to keep track; but then, this being Case Closed, anything at all important gets laboriously repeated once its significance is revealed, so it's barely an issue.
Arguably this is still rather dubious behaviour for what's meant to be a mystery, but as I noted the last time we looked at Case Closed, that evidently isn't high on the franchise's priority list and its probably pointless to grumble too much about its failures to do something that was never on the cards. Plus, the plot is legitimately fun, even when it's milking some fairly over-explored historical ground: we have the murdered Romanov family, we have Rasputin, we have a previously undiscovered Fabergé egg or two, and chuck in a genius sneak-thief foil for Conan and an assassin with a penchant for shooting people in the eye and there are more than enough spinning wheels to produce something satisfyingly convoluted. There's an awful lot of narrative to get through, enough to comfortably warrant the film's hundred minute running time, and that has the added virtue of making it feel more like a proper movie and less like a TV special, as per the previous two.
Not that the technical values exactly scream cinema release. In fairness, the animation is more than respectable, but it's easy to miss how impressive it frequently is when the direction is so leaden. For this entry, the helmer of the first two and the next few to come, Kenji Kodama, is joined by the man who'd be his successor toward the middle of the 2000s, Yasuichirô Yamamoto, and perhaps the results are a little stronger, but there's still a desperate lack of character and imagination: rare indeed is the shot where it feels like a choice was made that wasn't "let's make sure everyone's in shot." Fortunately, Kodama is at least good at keeping things moving at a fair lick, and that's enough to keep his limitations from harming the material. Plus, the rare occasions the film does decide to show off usually come just when they're needed: the climax, especially, manages to use the medium to make what on paper ought to be dull and talky legitimately exciting. All told, it's a marked shift in the right direction, and if the movies stuck to this upward curve, then I'm a little sad to be saying my goodbyes.
Compilation movies are a tricky business, or they are if they blatantly don't have the running time to boil a given series down to even its barest essentials. Miller's Report runs to about fifty-five minutes including credits; Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team's twelve episodes contained at least five times that much footage. So there was never any possibility of condensing the show in its entirety, and where did that leave its creators? Should they whip through hours of material at lightning speed? Should they focus on an isolated incident or two, or at any rate a single plot strand? Should they try and carve out their own story, even if that meant producing new footage?
Miller's Report answers those questions with a resounding, "Yes, yes, yes, and yes." It recaps discreet chunks of narrative, almost all from The 08th MS Team's first half, while adding what can't be more than a few minutes of new animation to smooth out some rough patches and generally give things a bit of meaningful shape. Some of the added scenes would have been ill-fitted to the show, but others feel a lot like outtakes, even though outtakes aren't really a thing in animation unless someone's done their job spectacularly badly. Still, we might cynically suggest that bits of this footage were held back purposefully, or at least were consciously sidelined at the scripting stage, because their insertion would definitely have made certain sequences flow together more smoothly. Mostly, though, what we get is recapping, with two events covered in considerable depth and a scattering of others whooshed past to give us enough information to follow along.
It doesn't altogether work, as you might expect, and for a viewer unfamiliar with the series, I wonder how some elements would work at all: major characters pop up incessantly without introduction, even well into the final third, their relationships to the rest of the cast never to be explained, and it would be generous to describe the results as a coherent plot. What we get, rather, is a series of happenings strung together loosely by theme and more so by a focus on protagonist Shiro Amada, his relationship with enemy pilot Aina Sahalin, and the resulting conflicts both moral and marshal. But it's here that Miller's Report plays its trump card, in the shape of its titular character, a mysterious government spook who when we first meet her is interrogating Shiro on the eve of his court martial for possibly collaborating with the enemy. This works on the simple level of offering a mechanism by which Amada can tell us his story, but to their credit, the film's creators dig deeper than that. Miller crops up again and again, and each time we learn a little more about her, though never so much that we have a clear angle on the character, until a final confrontation that does a fine job of offering a meaningful conclusion even though there's still a third and change of the show left to go.
Miller is an excellent addition, arguably enough so to single-handedly make the film that bears her name worthwhile. Her existence genuinely improves The 08th MS Team, challenging Shiro's values and judgements in ways that they conspicuously weren't challenged in the show, which always seemed to be largely on his side. Since we're talking about one of the finest Gundam series ever, though, it's not as though everything going on around her isn't great: it's hard to judge whether the animation's been polished up, because the show was so routinely superb on that front, but it's certainly terrific, and needless to say, the writing and direction are top-tier. The only real question, then, is who the heck would want to watch the thing when it has the potential to alienate both existing fans by offering them little they haven't already seen and new viewers by leaping over many a crucial detail. For the former, who'll likely own a copy anyway since it comes with the blu-ray edition, I'd suggest doing what I did and waiting just long enough that your memories have begun to fade, so that the movie becomes a pleasant reminder of how splendid The 08th MS Team was. And for the latter, though it might be puzzling in places, I can definitely see this working as a bite-sized introduction to Gundam for those wondering what the mega-franchise has to offer, even if there are undoubtedly better places to begin.
Imagine, if you will, a take on the Oh! My Goddess formula, whereby one of more supernaturally powered females force themselves into the life of a single, socially awkward male, but one commissioned about a week before it had to be out and created by people who'd never in fact seen Oh! My Goddess or one of its countless imitators and indeed had only ever had the concept described to them at two in the morning after a heavy night of drinking. So instead of a household of goddesses we have three invaders from what's described as a 2D world but must surely be intended to be some sort of cyber-realm within the Earth's computers, given that their names are Compiler, Assembler, and Interpreter. And having rapidly lost interest in that invading business, as we meet them Compiler and Assembler are shacked up not with one lone nerdy guy but with a nerd and his hard-drinking, lecherous brother, in between fending off occasional attacks from their former masters, though that's a matter no one appears to be taking remotely seriously.
If I'm being vague, it's because ninety percent of what I've described arrives in a brief introductory villain monologue: by the time we join the show, Interpreter has largely vanished from the picture and Compiler and Assembler have settled into a comfortable groove of hanging out with their kind-of boyfriends. Now obviously, taking a hackneyed concept, making it much dumber, and then largely forgetting about in favour of some random slice-of-life shenanigans is hardly the obvious route to great entertainment. And I'd be lying if I said Compiler wasn't a little terrible; but its unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to stick to a genre template that couldn't have been much easier to follow by this point definitely gives it a certain weird energy. This is truer of the first episode, which is positively demented and seems mostly to have been an excuse to make lots of jokes at the expense of Osaka and Osakans - here, by the way, the unexpectedly decent ADV dub surprised me by leaning hard into the culturally specific humour rather than, like, pretending this was all happening in Pittsburgh or something. I'd say a good sixty percent of the gags rely on knowledge of Japanese culture that the vast majority of Westerners won't have - the climatic one needs half a dozen screens of helpfully provided text to remotely comprehend - and yet somehow the sheer wackiness and enthusiasm is compulsive in and of itself. None of which is true of the second episode, which decides to take a deep dive into Compiler's relationship problems, while ditching the humour and the whole cyber-assassins-from-the-digital-world angle in favour of slightly gloomy melodrama. But while this is obviously much less fun than part one, if only because at no point does it feature a battle between giant animated corporate mascots, it again gains points for the what-the-hellness that's Compiler's main redeeming feature.
Unsurprisingly, neither episode dazzles with its technical accomplishments, though in fairness neither is ever obnoxiously bad. Its apparent that a lot of the animators' attention was going into getting the bare breasts more or less right, because there are a ton of those on display - sentient computer programs, you see, do not understand this human concept we call "nudity" - but they also wake themselves up for the action sequences, which are commendably solid. And the music is perfectly fine, with a catchy enough opening track; plus, for the abovementioned mascot battle we get a riff on the Godzilla theme that's just different enough to avoid a lawsuit, and I'll never turn my nose up at a good Akira Ifukube pastiche.
If you've never heard of Compiler - aside from the many reasons I've covered above! - it's because ADV chose not to bring it out on DVD, though based on their advertising, it seems to have come awfully close. And while they'd release plenty worse titles on the format, I can't altogether criticise their decision: Compiler is a long way from indispensable. Still, if you're the sort of person who's inclined to dredge through the obscurest corners of vintage anime in search of titles that at least stand out as entertainingly strange, then it's very much worth a look; at any rate, the first episode is, and if that's enough to draw you into Compiler's bewildering world then why not keep going? Though whether I'll feel the same having watched volume 2 - because, yes, there's more to come! - is anyone's guess...
So our first step in a while back to VHS-land wasn't a total washout, which is good news because, like I said at the top, those truly long-lost titles are going to be more than ever a feature going forward. As for the rest, the only absolute standout is Ushio and Tora, which I'm amazed doesn't have more of a reputation, but thinking about it, this was one of those rare entries with no real low points. Okay, except Compiler, probably, but let's not be mean about Compiler, it needs all the breaks it can get. I mean, you try holding your head high around all the young and up-and-coming animes when you didn't even get as far as a DVD and even your own creators have probably forgotten you exist by now!
