One trend I haven't mentioned, but that's been a feature of the last few posts, is that I've been working through some stray ADV titles that for whatever reason I've missed along the way, and this concludes here with a look at a couple of their less well-known entries. I have a weird relationship with ADV, in that they probably put out more of my favourite stuff than anyone, and yet, of all the big distributors, I tend to feel most resentful about their crappier releases, some of which were extremely crappy indeed - I'm looking at you, Samurai Shodown, and I wish I didn't have to! I think it's partly the sense that, out of everyone, they really ought to have known better, and partly that, as much as an outfit like U.S. Manga Corps were responsible for their share of garbage, they did have some standards: they never, to my knowledge, released a dub-only DVD or recoloured blood green to try and evade the censors.
And all of this I mention because this time around we have both extremes, with an ADV title that I liked a great deal and one that offended me down to the very marrow of my bones. Add in the continuation of our Case Closed mini-marathon and something I'm trying hard to pretend isn't what it says on the tin and that gives us Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, Once Upon a Time, Case Closed: The Fourteenth Target, and If I see You in My Dreams: The TV Series...
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, 1995 - 1997, dir's: Yorifusa Yamaguchi and Akiyuki Shinbo
If your main criticisms of Project A-Ko were that it took itself a bit too seriously and didn't contain about seven hundred major characters then, reader, I may have just the show for you! And if you further felt that the problem with A-Ko's sequels was that they didn't ditch the goofy humour for soul-crushing bleakness, then I'm pleased to say the news is very good indeed. Not that I want to set out by implying that Galaxy Fraulein Yuna isn't its own thing, but neither would I feel I'd done anyone a disservice if they came away with that conclusion, because for the most part it's more about rearranging old ideas into vaguely novel configurations than it is coming up with anything you mightn't expect or have seen elsewhere.
It does, however, have one neat twist on the magical girl formula to which it generally hews quite closely - and wait, are science magical girls a thing? Okay, so maybe that's two twists, in that Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is clumping together some fairly traditional magical girl notions with a healthy dose of sci-fi action, but that's not so unexpected as its central big idea, for all that it's going to sound deeply hackneyed on the face of things. Our heroine Yuna, you see, though she has a science-magical costume change and a sword that appears out of nowhere and sometimes battles inside of a mech that otherwise follows her around as a cutesy chibi version of itself, isn't really much for fighting: she'd much rather solve a crisis using the power of friendship. And while, sure, that's a notion that's given lip service all over the place, here it really is at the core of everything to a surprising degree.
No doubt this is due in large part to how the two OVAs presented in ADV's collected edition of their former VHS releases are spinning off from a long-running video game series, where it's easy to imagine how the notion of turning enemies into allies might function as a gameplay mechanic. But translate that into anime and what you get is an unusually good-hearted show about an unusually nice and caring character who genuinely isn't at all inclined to solve her problems with violence. Which isn't to suggest there isn't a whole lot of violence in Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, because there certainly is, and especially in the second, somewhat longer OVA, the one that drifts so hard away from the goofy comedy that until that point seemed to be very much what the franchise was about. However, even there, the emphasis is completely different, and it's startling just how much having a protagonist who truly wants to be everyone's friend regardless of how hard they may have been trying to kill her just a scene ago alters the usual dynamic of this sort of show. If only because it's the main reason the cast is so outrageously stuffed: when you turn all your enemies into allies, you end up with a heck of a lot of allies, and even though these two OVAs are set more toward the front than the back of the Yuna franchise, she's still accumulated more than her share of colourful former foes turned friends.
It's a nice hook, and the enormous cast is both a minor problem and the source of the odd good gag at the expense of those who end up getting sidelined. By the same measure, Galaxy Fraulein Yuna navigates the transition from comedy to tragedy unusually well, so it's not half the problem it might be. The two OVAs, for all that they came out fairly close together, are very much their own things, but that ends up as more a virtue than a flaw, especially since three more episodes of the extreme wackiness that characterised the original OVA might have grown wearying. And it helps that our director for part two is the mighty Akiyuki Shinbo, who I've often praised around these parts: he's not doing anything spectacular here, but he's a marked leap up from Yorifusa Yamaguchi, whose main virtues are not getting in the way of his material and marshalling his resources well enough for the odd standout sequence. Really, though, they're both quite capable of doing right by a title that, for all its similarities to lots of other stuff, stands out by getting plenty right and nothing conspicuously wrong and being awfully nice and good-hearted even in those moments when it's also being gruellingly grim and dark.
The Fourteenth Target is an even worse murder mystery than the first Case Closed movie, The Time Bombed Skyscraper, and that's quite the accomplishment. For the second time running, I guessed who the killer was in the scene they were introduced, and if I didn't also immediately predict their motive this time around, it's only because said motive would be quite impossible to predict without a slew of information that's revealed only when it absolutely has to be. And while the The Time Bombed Skyscraper managed to fold in some fun little mini-mysteries for the audience to exercise their detecting abilities on, The Fourteenth Target can't even rise to that: aside from the odd sequence where we're expected to try and figure out what clue our hero sleuth Conan has noted but refuses to let us in on, there's only a brief logic puzzle that's shamelessly plagiarised from the first movie.
But then, I'm not convinced The Fourteenth Target cares about being a persuasive mystery; given how preposterous the central conceit is, it's hard to suppose that was anyone's goal. The plot this time around is convoluted enough to make Agatha Christie blush: a killer is targeting the acquaintances of hapless detective Kogoro Mori, working through them based on the numeric order of elements of their names that match up to the numbers of a suit of cards, counting down from thirteen to zero, because who doesn't have fourteen acquaintances with numbers in their names? And I guess I ought to have tagged that with a spoiler warning, maybe, but unless you can read kanji and can read character names that have been clumsily subtitled over AND can translate romaji into kanji at the speed of lightning, there's no possibility of you working any of this out in advance. See what I mean about how this functions as a murder mystery? Or rather, doesn't function at all?
The trick, then, is to not take any of what happens seriously, and fortunately, The Fourteenth Target is busy enough and fun enough on a moment by moment basis that refraining from doing so isn't much of a chore. It works much better as spectacle than The Time Bombed Skyscraper ever tried to, buoyed by some improved animation that rises to the level of intermittently impressive, and for all the plot's failings as regards the genre it's superficially meant to belong to, it does a respectable job of churning out a string of absorbing incidents that are whizzed through with enough pace and vigour that armchair detectiving takes a backseat to simply keeping up with each new development.
What we have, then, is a good franchise movie, irrespective of the franchise the film actually belongs to: a hundred minutes flies by in a blur of comedy and action and suspense and the occasional dash of romance, and if none of it's especially memorable, nor is it ever dull. And as an entry in this particular franchise, The Fourteenth Target makes good use of the characters and digs into them in ways that actually feel quite meaningful, presumably because this early on it was still possible to chuck out major-feeling character revelations. It's a solidly good film in a way The Time Bombed Skyscraper wasn't quite - but I'm increasingly wondering what a truly great Case Closed movie might look like and whether such a thing can even exist. It doesn't help that I still find the core concept deeply unconvincing, and I doubt "teenage detective trapped in a child's body solving crimes by routinely knocking out an adult detective and faking his voice" is going to get less implausible as the series goes along. But mostly I'm dubious that the creators are capable of crafting an actual mystery, one with - dare I say it? - multiple suspects with plausible motives. We have one more entry before Case Closed catapults itself into the new millennium, and it's a well-regarded one, so I guess there's still hope!
Any attempt to grapple with the film known as Once Upon a Time has to begin with the production company Harmony Gold and writer / director Carl Macek, and their presence is so prevalent that I do wonder if there's really any point in reviewing what they concocted as an anime movie at all. For reasons probably long lost to history, Harmony Gold took one look at the Japanese anti-war parable Windaria and thought, "Ah, here's something that would be a great fit for American audiences, if we can only retrofit it for kids, because obviously adults wouldn't ever watch an animated film." And this was the job they handed to Macek, who had already satisfactorily butchered together their most famous Frankensteinian hybrid, Robotech. What they didn't give Macek, however, if the man was to be believed, is a translated script or much of an idea of what the property they'd purchased was about, meaning that, even if anyone involved had been interested in respecting the source material in any way whatsoever, the odds of them pulling it off were vanishingly slender.
I think, though, that we can safely assume respect was on no one's list of priorities, because you don't create something as top-to-bottom ghastly as Once Upon a Time if you're approaching your job with anything like cultural sensitivity or a basic appreciation of the artform you're about to take a hammer to. It's hard to conceive of how this was ever meant to work - Windaria, even in the form Harmony Gold mangled it into, is startlingly violent and bloody for a kids' film, not to mention depressing as all get out - but it's still remarkable how wrong Once Upon a Time goes in so many different ways. Most of these stem from the voice cast, only one of whom could be fairly described as half decent, that being Russell Johnson of Gilligan's Island fame, who provides a measure of class and gravity and so succeeds in presumably the one thing anyone required of him. The script undercuts him horribly, since we're led to believe that Johnson's narrator, meant to represent an older version of protagonist Alan, has learned lessons and gone through moral crises that the material as presented doesn't support in the slightest; still, his presence, and the whole notion of adding a narrator to try and tie this mess together, is probably the closest Macek came to a sound decision.
Everyone else, though, is horrible, and horrible in ways that simply break the film wide open. In particular, there are a couple of vital relationships where it's crucial we believe characters are deeply in love, and the vocal performances lean more toward indifference or active dislike when they're not sliding into the muddled boredom that's the cast's baseline. I'll never cease to be in awe of how bad American dubs from this period could get, since surely the most impoverished amateur dramatics society could have pulled off a better job than this, but Once Upon a Time is striking for how little anybody seems remotely interested in salvaging the film. Johnson is fine, but he's clearly delivering precisely what he was brought in for and no more, and Kerrigan Mahan as young-Alan manages not to seriously fluff maybe half of his readings, but that's as good as it gets, and the bad is so very bad indeed.
And yes, I realise all I've done is talk about the adaptation and that I've said almost nothing about the film, but that's the problem right there: try as you might, it's agonisingly difficult to see the virtues of Windaria through the horrors of Once Upon a Time. As presented here, the plot just doesn't work: it takes more to deliver a powerful anti-war message than spending half your film presenting two sides gearing up for a conflict and the remainder showing that conflict in fairly unglamorous terms, and if Windaria had a message beyond "war is bad but people insist on doing it anyway, the fools!" then Macek managed to exorcise every last glimpse of it. And while there are moments of exciting animation and direction, there's a fair bit of cheapness and a general choppiness too; likewise, the score veers between effective and obnoxious, and since some new music was added, that may be on Harmony Gold as well, but still, there's little that truly stands out. The only aspects I'd say are unreservedly successful are the world-building and mechanical designs, both of which are sometimes good enough to salvage individual scenes from Macek's meddling, and the action sequences, which are genuinely exciting regardless of what nonsense is coming out of the characters' mouths.
Once Upon a Time, then, is a maddening object: the good stuff is just about good enough that it's easy to imagine a much better version, and to suppose Windaria was that version and all the problems are down to Macek and his risible cast; then again, the story as presented is so barely functional that it's equally possible Windaria was broken in the first place, all the more so because it very much seems to be transparently ripping off Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in ways both big and small while not remotely having the budget to do that ripping off justice. Fortunately, we'll get to take a look at Windaria one of these days, since it's easy enough to find in fan-sub form, and hopefully we need give no more thought to Once Upon a Time, except to note that it's a frustrating, mildly intriguing time capsule from a period when anime movies were frequently bigger on ideas and ambition than execution and Western producers were quite capable of retroactively making a hash of all three.
I could mention here how my self-imposed rules prohibit reviewing TV shows and I keep doing so anyway, but the fact is that it actually makes more sense to pretend that the supposedly TV version of If I see You in My Dreams is something other than that, because by television standards it's befuddling. Its running time comes in at just over two hours, and it consists of sixteen episodes, each with an end credits sequence, meaning - what? - maybe ninety minutes or so of actual show, not to mention how each episode scrapes in at not much over five minutes. How this aired in Japan I've no idea, but clumping it together and calling it a TV series leaves a very unwieldly and puzzling product indeed, one that for once might have actual benefitted from a spot of distributor interference: chop this up into regular twenty-two minute segments and you'd immediately have something a good deal more watchable.
Though the weird format is definitely a problem, other anime have shown that it's possible to make these bite-sized chunks of narrative work just fine, and in fairness, If I see You in My Dreams more or less pulls it off on an episode by episode basis ... but hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself. For what we have here is an alternate telling of a tale we've already covered, and which I had warm feelings toward, while admitting that it probably wasn't terribly special in the grander scheme and that quite a bit of it didn't land. In If I see You in My Dreams: The OVA, the most prominent of those flaws was the comedy, whereas here, it's the romance half of the romcom equation that gets short shrift. Meaning that theoretically there's an above-par example of the form to be had somewhere between the two, but let's come back to that, shall we?
Because, yes, If I see You in My Dreams: TV is a disaster of a romance, and would be even more so if you hadn't seen the OVA. Our young lovers are the shy and virginal Misou and the equally virginal and prone to unreasoning anger Nagisa, and there's just no damn reason the pair should be together or that their relationship, such as it is, should endure beyond the first episode. This time around, we don't get to see their initial meet-cute, so Misou is introduced stalking Nagisa at the pre-school where she works and Nagisa is introduced being mean to him, and so things go for quite a proportion of that two-hour running time. Nagisa allegedly does like Misou, for reasons we're never really made privy to - while he develops over the course of the show, he has precious little going for him at the start - but spends most of her time in a jealous rage over one unfortunately misinterpreted situation or another. And given that she has every reason to suppose Misou is at best an unrepentantly two-timing pathological liar, it beggars belief that she'd keep giving him chances, while Misou's habit of banging his head against the brick wall of her apparent indifference is more disturbing than charming.
Nor are those the only issues. If I see You in My Dreams: TV lacks the major saving grace the OVAs had of some nice animation, and though the designs remain appealing, what's done with them often isn't. It also treats Nagisa atrociously: we never get enough of her perspective to make her behaviour justifiable and the amount of time we see her showering or bathing becomes absurd well before the halfway mark. That this is a worse version of something that was only moderately strong in the first place is, I think, undeniable - yet it's not altogether a write-off. As noted above, the funny bits are often quite funny; there's only one real joke, which involves Misou reacting to a setback by cartoonishly turning to stone or floating away or somesuch, and it's so overused that the show even calls itself out on the fact, yet it's reliably amusing. What genuinely hits the mark, though, is what also worked for the OVAs: If I see You in My Dreams is so extremely specific. No grand and universal love story this, but a tale of normal, even nondescript people, mostly salarymen and women, and of a romantic pairing that truly could go either way and quite possibly oughtn't to succeed. That seems like an odd thing to praise, I realise, but there's something to be said for seeing the stuff of anime romcom play out with a cast and setting of a sort we don't often encounter. All the same, I suspect what relative appeal this does manage to scrape together would be lost on someone who wasn't already positively disposed courtesy of the OVA and curious for a different take on the material, so unless that's you, it's probably best to stay clear.
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna was a bit of a treasure and feels like the first unequivocal recommendation I've made in a while; okay, maybe not unequivocal, since it's obviously not going to appeal to everyone, but if it sounds at all like your thing, it's worth seeking out. And while I can't say the same about If I see You in My Dreams, I'd argue that the somewhat hard-to-find release with both the OVA and TV series is a nice little curio that works better than watching either of them in isolation. As for The Fourteen Target, if and when Discotek get round to reissuing these earliest titles, I guess it's not one to skip, though that's hardly much of a compliment, is it? And the very best that can be said about Once Upon a Time is that it's going to be interesting how Windaria fares by comparison!
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