Following on from last entry's worry that I'm getting awfully short of DVD releases to cover, another concern is that, with so few remotely well-known titles left to review, these posts will hit a point where we're wading through the dregs; since one of my goals has been to highlight the fact that, however tacky, derivative, and wantonly commercial it sometimes got, nineties anime was on the whole pretty good, I'd sooner not end up by putting out post after post of irredeemable crud! Yet, somehow, that point keeps on not coming, in part because the baseline really was pretty decent and even many of the least known titles had something to offer, but also in part because there truly is some brilliant stuff out there that we haven't touched on, whether famous or not. And so it is that, with well over four hundred reviews behind us, we still have a couple of titles here that I'm tempted to describe as classics.
Though granted we also have a couple of titles that I'd never in a million years consider calling classics! So what's what from amid Getter Robo Armageddon, Compiler 2, Sprite: Between Two Worlds, and Neo Tokyo?
Were all of Getter Robo Armageddon operating at the level of its first three episodes, I'm comfortable in saying we'd be looking at a masterpiece ... maybe a major masterpiece, maybe a minor one, but definitely a masterpiece of sorts, because those introductory episodes are as strong as just about anything that came out of anime in the nineties. What we have here is one of those gritty reimaginings of a classic property that were so extremely the rage at the time, and which could so easily descend into grimness for its own sake - an accusation you might be inclined to throw at Getter Robo Armageddon if you were going solely off a synopsis. Because it certainly feels as though its main purpose is to take everything that was sweet and good and innocent about classic giant robot properties and twist it in horrible directions. The genius scientist is a monster warped by the death of his daughter in a truly ghastly robot-combining accident, and is also back from the dead after apparently being murdered by the guy who surely ought to be our heroic protagonist, and who has to be sprung from prison so he can get right the murder he failed at / was actually innocent of the first time around. The kid sidekick is practically mute from trauma; the adult sidekicks are angry and bitter; the war against alien invaders that was supposedly won has in fact accomplished not a damn thing.
As I say, all the ingredients for something self-consciously grim and mock-subversive. But Getter Robo Armageddon gets it right: those opening episodes are like a scream from the subgenre's deepest psyche, plunging its gee-whiz decency into a hell it's wholly unprepared for. And I feel sure this can't be the first time somebody thought to mix horror with giant robots - that's kind of precisely what Neon Genesis Evangelion did, albeit in decidedly different ways - but I definitely don't recall seeing anything that goes down that road so hard and so effectively as Getter Robo Armageddon. The enemies feel like they've wandered in from one of Lovecraft's less pleasant nightmares, all claws and eyeballs and an alarming refusal to keep to one shape for more than a couple of seconds, but what's worse is that their presence has infected so much of the rest of the show, both figuratively and literally. To say more would edge into spoiler territory; suffice to note that there's a real sense of danger and of a world in which goodness is corrupted and transitory. Heck, even the giant robots are sinister, and all the more so because the average anime fan's brain is trained to see them as kind of quaint and goofy. It's all just wrong, in ways big and small, and there's something awfully exciting about that, the more so because the animation is good enough to make the material land with sledgehammer force.
I won't suggest things fall apart with episode four, because they absolutely don't. Getter Robo Armageddon is never less than good. But after that initial salvo, "never less than good" will still, at points, feel like awfully weak sauce. What happened, you see, is that original director and project head Yasuhiro Imagawa - he of Giant Robo fame - walked off, or else was kicked off, the project and seemingly left with all the information about where the already convoluted plot was heading locked in his brain. Thus, the show is forced to reboot itself with that fourth episode, which is fine in that Imagawa had already backed it into a corner where that was happening whatever, but not fine in that Getter Robo Armageddon will only ever feel like the same show Imagawa was making in brief spurts from then onwards. Let me stress: it could have been much worse. Kawagoe, his replacement, is no slouch, and while the animation budget dips noticeably at times, along with the near-hallucinatory levels of imagination, there isn't an episode that doesn't manage a few great moments on both counts.
Yet it would be hard indeed not to get to the end of Getter Robo Armageddon - which, let me stress, is certainly a brilliant ending in its own right - and not wonder what might have been. Shinzo Fujita and Yoshifumi Fukushima, picking up writing duties from Imagawa, make solid efforts to be faithful to the beginning he set out, but how do you be faithful to such a demented fever dream? There's no hiding the seams, and I suspect even a viewer with no knowledge of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans would notice something amiss. Of course, it's perfectly likely Imagawa would have messed this up in entirely different ways; I'm not a big enough fan of Giant Robo to believe he was capable of landing such an astonishing opening play. And maybe that means this was the best Getter Robo Armageddon we were ever going to get, one where reliable craftsmen took over from a visionary better at raising interesting questions than providing satisfying answers - sure, maybe. Whatever the case, we should be glad for what we got, imperfect but often brilliant as it is. But damn would it be a thrill to look into the parallel universe where Imagawa's version made it through to the end...
It's impossible to imagine a take on Compiler that wasn't at least a bit strange, but it's easy to imagine one that was much less strange than what was produced, across the course of three OVAs made by three different directors, at the back end of the nineties. And there already we've touched on part of the explanation for why, in that there's no sense that anyone here was remotely working from the same notes. Heck, it's hard to believe at points that they were adapting the same manga - said manga, by the way, being the creation of Kia Asamiya, who was also responsible for Silent Möbius and Martian Successor Nadesico, among other well-known works, and so presumably knew how to tell a story much more coherently than you'd ever imagine from watching the anime adaptation of Compiler.
The last time we encountered the series, not so long ago, we got two short episodes, one an uproarious comedy where the main joke was essentially "Ha! Osakans, am I right?" and the other a gloomy romance between a sentient computer program given flesh and a womanising drunkard. And I suppose we ought to be thankful that Compiler 2 picks up some threads from what's come before, given how little it seems bothered about making concessions to the returning viewer or indeed the viewer who hasn't already read a good chunk of the manga: at any rate, we're still following the adventures of Compiler and Assembler, refugees from the digital world who've decided they'd much rather hang out in ours with their sort-of-boyfriends than bother to try and conquer it and are happy to scrap with their former masters if that's what it takes to maintain their otherwise carefree lifestyle. And both the comedy and romance elements are still on the table, this time mixed together rather than held at arm's length, though the focus is equally as much on action and - shockingly for a show as laid back and ramshackle as this one - on the conveying of an actual plot.
This is, in itself, no bad thing, though it's not really playing to Compiler's strengths. Or rather, strength singular, since the only thing that truly sets it apart is that giddy sense of anything-goes weirdness, and trying to tell a somewhat reasonable story with a beginning, middle, and end doesn't gel with that so well. Though, to be fair, while the story itself is fairly coherent, the telling is still quite bonkers, if only because nothing about the premise makes a lick of sense, and the more so here in the twenty-first century where the mere matter of flinging around computing terms no longer makes things sound cool and science-fictional. In this second OVA, we never once see the digital world whose overseers have offered Compiler and Assembler a somewhat contrived choice between returning home in the knowledge that all memory of them will be erased from our reality or staying on the understanding that, if they do, the world will be destroyed; but it's impossible to piece together how the place is meant to function based on the scraps of information we get thrown.
Thinking about it, the biggest failing here is probably the amount of time that goes into making that extremely ginned-up conflict and the world-building in general makes any measure of sense. If you need to have your characters actively discussing how the evil scheme they're caught up in is kind of nonsense, something's certainly gone wrong somewhere. It all feels very much like an attempt to wrap things up in a manner that the first OVA couldn't possibly have been less interested in, and mostly for that reason, at no point is Compiler 2 ever quite so much fun as the first episode of Compiler. But it's a good deal more so than the second episode, and judged by the general standards of anime rather than the highly specific standards of this one series, it's arguably better across the board than either: if nothing else, the animation is rather nice, especially by 1999's low bar, and the balance of comedy, romance, action, and general oddness is just about right. At any rate, it left me with a definite soft spot for the franchise, bewildering and routinely dysfunctional as it is, and if you enjoyed the original Compiler, I can't think of a good reason why you wouldn't also enjoy Compiler 2.
Of all the strange and dubious decisions made by distributor U. S. Manga Corps, their attempts to bring over a number of milder hentai releases while going out of their way to hide the fact that they were hentai is surely the hardest to wrap your head around. And of all the strange and dubious titles that were licensed under that strange and dubious decision, Sprite stands out especially in that it's impossible to imagine how this was meant to work.* It's so clearly pornography that you wonder how anyone supposed they could pass it off as anything else; I mean, Fencer of Minerva was kinky as heck but you could sort of squint and pretend you were watching a regular fantasy anime for much of its running time, and there's no amount of squinting that will get you past the turns that Sprite takes in the second half of its eighty minutes. Yet take that away and there's not a lot left. The blurb has to be one of the briefest U. S. Manga Corps ever came up with, and the cover art is noncommittal enough that you have to flip over to the slightly less deliberately misleading back of the box to have any hope of guessing what you're in for.
Then again, perhaps that's not terribly surprising when what you're in for is a soft-porn tale about a teenage girl with severe mental health issues.
Let's be fair, there are absolutely ways you can come at the topic of multiple personality disorder that don't automatically make your story totally traumatic. It's a concept that's been abused enough that the average viewer's reaction is more likely to be to take it with a pinch of salt than to feel sorry for the poor, benighted soul who has all this going on inside their cranium. It's entirely easy to envisage a version of Sprite that doesn't have us thinking about this stuff too seriously, one where a female lead who flips to an alternate personality who's bolder, sexier, and more prone to violence is played for laughs - and who knows, maybe that's even what the makers thought they were up to? I mean, if they did, they were enormously bad at their jobs, but it's conceivable.
Sounds unfair? Then I guess it's time for a plot summary! Our protagonist is Tohru Takamura, who we meet as he's about to start living with relatives while his mother's in hospital. Barely has Tohru set foot on the property before he's inadvertently sprayed water over his cousin Manami and spent what feels like somewhere in the region of seven minutes ogling her sodden breasts, an event we'll later get to see him celebrating in classic teenage boy style with the aid of a box of tissues. Manami is a shy, retiring sort, the more so since she's recently drawn the ire of a gang of bullies at her school; but when Tohru tries and fails to come to her rescue, Manami responds in totally un-Manami like fashion by beating the crap out of them and generally behaving like an altogether different person. That person turns out to be Nami, her alternate personality, who's everything she isn't and happy to do all the things she won't, such as getting sexy with Tohru despite his manifest failings as a human being. The only problem, assuming you don't consider bullying and debilitating mental health issues problems - and there's no real indication the makers of Sprite did! - is that both personalities are convinced they'll disappear if they ever become too subordinate. Tohru wants to help, or at any rate wants to sleep with both Manami and Nami, but what's a boy to do when the girl he's living with turns out to have a promiscuous alternate personality who's totally up for up it? If your first guess was not "urgently seek the advice of a qualified psychiatric professional," there's a fair chance you've successfully pre-empted the plot of Sprite.
There's nothing here that truly works: the animation is just about as good as it needs to be and never remotely more and the soundtrack stands out solely for including a tune that brazenly rips off the theme from Top Gun in a way anyone who's ever seen Top Gun couldn't possibly miss. But that doesn't mean Sprite can't be kind of hypnotic. Like a lot of bad anime, its refusal to go down the easiest route - indeed, its determination to pursue any number of totally incompatible routes all at once - takes it to places that are more interesting than you might expect from the setup. And also, in fairness, much more creepy and disturbing. As with most of the titles U. S. Manga Corps brought over in their bid, presumably, to trick Western audiences into watching hentai without their noticing, it makes for a fascinating time capsule, but unlike most of them, it isn't much actual fun to sit through.
Outside of Studio Ghibli, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to suggest that there were no three more important directors working in anime at the back end of the eighties than Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and Katsuhiro Ōtomo. In the same year that Neo Tokyo was released, Kawajiri put out Wicked City, the first of a string of seminal works that did as much as anything to set the template of what a certain breed of anime would look and act like throughout the coming decade; Ōtomo, meanwhile, was a year away from Akira, and along with Neo Tokyo would be involved in 1987 with another anthology movie that feels very much like its spiritual twin, the superb Robot Carnival. And if Rintaro was arguably past the most significant and influential portion of his career, he still had one of his finest works, Doomed Megalopolis, waiting in his near future, a title that's every bit as genre-defining as Kawajiri's efforts.
So how the hell has Neo Tokyo vanished from the face of the Earth and the memories of all but the most hardened of vintage anime fans? For what reason is its DVD release one of the rarest and most hard to find? If, as seems likely, ADV just didn't produce anywhere near enough copies, perhaps in the assumption that they could only hope for the niche-ist of niche audiences, even having made up a new title to cash in on Akira's enormous fame and the Ōtomo connection**, why has no one sought out the license since? Why don't we have a blu-ray of this thing? Could it be that three of the if not necessarily most talented but definitely most interesting and significant creators of pre-twentieth century anime just somehow managed to produce a sucky movie between them?
Reader, they did not. But they definitely did produce a very weird one, and now seems as good a time as any to wade into the specifics of each segment. Rintaro gets to go first, and if his section gives a taste of what's to come, it's only by being random enough that the astute viewer will realise they're better off chucking their preconceptions out the window. The marvellously titled Labyrinth Labyrinthos follows a young girl and her cat as a game of hide and seek takes them into a fantastical and sinister other world, and - no, wait, that's pretty much the entire story. But since storytelling was invariably Rintaro's weakest point, the opportunity to go all in on imagery and ideas does him no end of good, especially since (and this is true of all of Neo Tokyo, incidentally) the animation is routinely astounding. At any rate, other than to slap us around with some delirious weirdness, Labyrinth Labyrinthos mostly serves as a way into the film proper and to Kawajiri's entry, Running Man, which - uh, still doesn't have all that much of a story. Indeed, until I read the Wikipedia entry, I couldn't have told you what it was about at all, except that there's a racing driver and a private detective who does nothing besides offer up a spot of narration and maybe the racing driver has psychic powers or something? It's almost as much of a mood piece as Labyrinth Labyrinthos, but with a very different mood, and since Kawajiri was nearly as great a visual stylist as Rintaro, that turns out to be perfectly okay, though it remains probably the weakest segment.
Which brings us to Ōtomo's Construction Cancellation Order, and while I'm sure there's an argument to be made that it's not the strongest part, I can't imagine what that argument might involve. At last we get an actual, proper plot, though Ōtomo's tale of a beleaguered salaryman trying to convince the robot foreman of an entirely robot-run construction project buried deep in the depths of a South American jungle that the project's been cancelled is still more about mood that anything else. And here's what, for me, pushed Neo Tokyo past the point of being a good but haphazard compilation of stunning yet faintly unsatisfying short films into the realm of definite greatness: somehow, against all the odds, it feels like a single movie with overarching themes and attitudes, though I'm not convinced even its three creators could have articulated what those themes and attitudes are. Unlike, for instance, Memories - and say what you like about Ōtomo, the man's certainly had his hand in more than his fair share of excellent anime anthology projects! - it somehow pulls off the trick of feeling like a unified entity and so of being better than the sum of its already strong parts. Which makes the only real dissatisfaction that, at fifty minutes, it leaves you wanting more than it has to provide; one more piece, from a director on a par with Rintaro, Kawajiri, and Ōtomo, and we'd be looking at an undeniable classic, rather than what for all the world feels like (and couldn't possibly have been!) a trial run for the masterful Robot Carnival. Still, put the pair of them together and you'd have one of the greatest anime double bills imaginable, so that's really the tiniest of criticisms.
-oOo-
Anything else I might have to say here is overshadowed by the fact that I finally got to watch the somewhat legendary Neo Tokyo and that it didn't disappoint. It's a fine little film on its own, but more than that, it's such a nexus of everything important that was going in anime in 1987 that it's always felt like a gaping hole in my knowledge. Taken purely on merit, though, Getter Robo Armageddon was nearly on a par, and while Compiler 2 very definitely wasn't, it was at least a fun diversion. Would that the same could be said for Sprite, which I'd got my hopes up for on the back of how cheerfully demented some of U. S. Manga Corp's other attempts to bring hentai titles over without anybody noticing were! Nevertheless, three of out four is still pretty good going this late in the game...
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