I know things have been awfully uneventful around these parts lately, and they're likely to stay quiet for a while longer, what with me having a new job and more or less zero free time and all. Nevertheless, I'm not the sort of person who, once they've set themselves the nigh-impossible task of reviewing every bit of anime released in the West in an entire decade, quits with the finish line in sight, and I have one or two posts nearing completion, so hopefully there won't be another gap quite so long as this one.
And more good news! We're back to having at least a couple of titles that you might possibly have heard of, in among Mad Bull 34, Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie, Ninku: The Movie, and Guy: Double Target...
Mad Bull 34, 1990 - 1992, dir: Satoshi Dezaki
That protagonist is John "Sleepy" Estes, AKA Mad Bull, the sort of cop who shoots first and pretty much never asks questions or does anything that resembles what those of us who aren't nineties anime writers might regard as police work. For about three minutes, this looks set to change when he's partnered with the Japanese-American Daizaburo "Eddie" Ban, a straight-laced sort who's disinclined to shoot perps into paste when he could, like, handcuff them or something. But one of the early twists on its formula that Mad Bull 34 surprised me with is that Daizaburo comes round to Sleepy's way of thinking in barely any time, to the point of defending him impassionedly when his unique brand of policing finally gets taken to task at the end of the first episode.
Another unexpected element is how that first episode is more of a compilation, rattling through four or five largely self-contained plotlines, a format that's already out the window by the beginning of episode two. Indeed, Mad Bull 34 is hopeless at deciding quite what it wants to be, even down to the most basic level of how committed it is to the whole exploitation thing. Episode one really goes out of its way to amp up the violence and nudity, and wholly gross as that "Hit and Rape" title is, it's nevertheless pretty appropriate. And the second episode kind of sticks to that but soon decides comic violence is too much like fun, culminating in a section toward the end that veers hard into what we'd now call torture porn, as a female character the creators have actually bothered to develop slightly gets beaten and sexually assaulted and Daizaburo gets battered to a pulp in a sequence that seems to go on forever.
Seriousness, let alone a serious treatment of violence, is the last thing Mad Bull 34 is suited to, so it's a relief when the third episode shifts back toward material that's, if not exactly more light-hearted, then at least delivered with tongue closer to cheek. On paper, it's still grim stuff, as Sleepy and Daizaburo take it upon themselves to protect a female reporter determined to expose a serial rapist who's bought his way out of justice and find themselves targeted in turn by a gang of suicidal Chinese assassins; but it manages just the right measure of daffiness, and the violence of both sorts has been toned down to pretty much normal nineties anime levels, so it feels less as though it's going out of its way to shock. However, Mad Bull 34 being Mad Bull 34, a positive change in direction can't last more than an episode, and so we end on the lowest of notes, with a storyline that's both sillier than anything we've had yet and delivered with vastly more self-seriousness, while also making Sleepy seem like a spectacularly awful human being to a degree that blows right past the high bar the show's already set - the more so because it really seems we're meant to side with him as he sleeps with the deranged, cop-killing daughter of the best friend he got kicked off the force.
It's odd to come across a show that on the one hand seems to have such a clear sense of its own identity and on the other is perpetually losing sight of what it wants to be. Despite how I've probably made it sound, there are moments when Mad Bull 34 comes together: outside of the irredeemable last episode, the action is energetic, and Sleepy and Daizaburo have engaging chemistry, or do in the original Japanese - I forgot to sample Manga's dub, but, judging by track record, its safe to assume it's dumb and awful. The animation rarely gets up to anything impressive and nor does Dezaki's direction, but there are some terrific New York backdrops and Sleepy's design is a source of joy, more akin to what Genndy Tartakovsky would get up to later in the decade than what most of anime was doing at the start of the nineties. As for music, the incidental stuff rarely rises past ignorable, but we do get a James Brown end track for episode one - yet another thing I'd never have predicted! - followed by songs from that master of cheesy nineties pop rock Joey Carbone; if they're not on a par with his Project A-Ko contributions, their presence is still a nice surprise. Which is a welcome development, really, when most of what's surprising about Mad Bull 34 is how it sets itself the seemingly straightforward task of being exploitative trash and manages to get even that wrong more than half the time.
Instead, what we have before us is, I think, a new first for Drowning in Nineties Anime. The franchise spin-off cinematic release that runs to about the length of a regular TV episode seems to be something unique to anime, and not many of them found their way over to the US and UK, since their function was presumably to be offered up in double bills that would compensate for their meagre individual running times. And AnimeWorks deserve a measure of credit, I guess, for attempting to replicate that concept, if only ever the once: Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie came packaged with the equally short Ninku: The Movie, which we'll be getting to in a minute.
Maybe it'll be great, who knows? But it seems to me that there are some fairly large problems inherent in making a standalone franchise movie that runs to less than half an hour. We've seen some pretty good anime titles of that length, and one of my all-time favourite movies that's just outside the purview of this series, Cat Soup, is barely longer. Only, those weren't tied to a wider property, with all the expectations that involves, and it's that aspect which really sinks Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie. It needs to feel bigger than an episode, so rather than tell a fun little self-contained story, it has to aim for world-threatening stakes, except that it has no time to set up those stakes and no way of persuading us that any of its events are likely to have meaningful consequences.
This probably doesn't sound like that big an issue, yet in practice it gets in the way of everything that might otherwise work. There's some solid action along the way, but since Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie only has time for a brief setup, a middle act that feels altogether like padding, and an epic climax that still seems rather knocked-off and trivial, it's mostly empty spectacle. And even putting that aside, the story still doesn't quite function: our heroes are set the task of rescuing someone they don't like and that we're given no reason to like either, and all the end-of-the-world stuff is so woolly that it's impossible to imagine it will come to anything important.
I wish I could be kinder. In theory, there's nothing that wrong with Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie, and technically it's perfectly fine, with a couple of standout sequences evidently there to say, "No, look, you're not just watching a TV episode in a cinema, honest!" But maybe a minute's worth of impressive animation is hardly reason to spend just shy of half an hour watching something so futile and generic. This has almost nothing to offer anyone bar existing fans, telling a tale we've seen variations of a thousand times and telling it badly, and I can't imagine those fans would be too impressed with a title that presumably offers less on the story front than what the TV show delivered on a regular basis.
I don't know what life-altering experience happened to director Noriyuki Abe between the years 1993 and 1995, but where his Yu Yu Hakusho entry does most everything a short franchise movie ought not to do, his Ninku: The Movie works about as well as you could possibly hope such a thing would.
Okay, so I'm not being altogether serious. It's not as though Abe was the problem with Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie, his direction there was perfectly serviceable, and it's not as though his efforts are that much more accomplished this time around, though he certainly does a more than respectable job. No, where Ninku: The Movie succeeds is more to do with setting itself the proper goals. Its story is ideally suited to its barely-more-than-a-TV-episode running time, it's so thoroughly standalone that I was never for a moment lost despite knowing nothing about the property besides what the ultra-brief intro chose to inform me, and yet it has just enough scope and style that you can tell it's not merely an extra episode stuffed into cinemas.
Above all else, though, Ninku the series is simply a better fit for this sort of thing. It's a comedy, which means it doesn't need to have any pretensions of epicness, but it's an action comedy, so it still gets to end on a fight sequence and rustle up the semblance of a three-act structure. To succeed, it merely has to deliver some solid laughs and a good scrap, and it manages both, and if that was all there was to the matter, I'd still be inclined to give it a thumbs up. So that the technical values are on the impressive side feels mostly like a nice bonus. To some extent, I suppose, this comes from a lack of familiarity with the series, which, annoyingly, never found its way to a Western release: that the art style is weird and abrasive and unlike most of what was going on in the mid-90s comes as a novel surprise, as does the extent to which the relatively simple but essentially realistic designs can be distorted in fun, interesting ways, making the brief bursts of action exciting not just on their own terms but as animation as well.
Perhaps, though, nerding out over the animation isn't the best way to go with a show in which, after all, one of the main characters is a penguin. That there's a measure of movie-style quality to be found here is a welcome bonus, to be sure, but Ninku: The Movie could look like garbage and still deliver twenty-some minutes of consistently funny gags. The setup sees our heroes, a bunch of highly skilled and highly dim-witted martial artists known as the Ninku, running into a bunch of Ninku imitators, to whom they soon find themselves employed as servants. To say more would surely spoil things given how little there is to spoil, but suffice to say that the central joke is a good one that makes for an often hilarious middle act, and the film has the sense to ditch it at precisely the point when it might risk getting tired to barrel on into its action climax.
Under normal circumstances, all of the above would still leave us at the point where so many of these reviews wind up, at which I have to concede that, sure, there's enjoyment to be had here, but is it really the sort that warrants hunting for a long out of print and hard-to-find DVD? And okay, yes, that's going to be the case for the vast majority of folks; but if you're the sort who tracks this stuff down, I'd propose that AnimeWorks' two movies-for-the-price-of-one gimmick narrowly edges this one over the line: Ninku: The Movie is a delight and Yu Yu Hakusho: The Movie is worthwhile enough if you view it as a bonus rather than the main attraction.
Moreover, as is often the case - and I swear this isn't just me being prudish! - the result would be an almost inarguable improvement, because Guy: Double Target is very bad indeed at being hentai and only slightly bad, heck even sometimes okay, at everything else it sets out to do. There are two substantial sex scenes in the first episode: the first is only a bit unpleasant in that one of the parties is presumably being coerced, though we're led to believe they're altogether happy with the situation, but it slams the brakes on whatever plot momentum has built up to that point, while the second is very deeply unpleasant to an extent that feels out of keeping with everything around it. As for the second episode, there's one brief, entirely consensual sex scene that's so mild they could have left it in a cut version and still got a pass from the censors. So whatever way you shake it, Guy: Double Target is crappy hentai.
This is good news for Drowning in Nineties Anime purposes, since hentai isn't our bag, and probably good news for Guy: Double Target, since it seems so disinvested in that side of things. The problem is that surrendering any running time at all when you only have seventy minutes in which to tell two entire stories is never going to be the best move, and it's not as though the material is to such a standard that the show can afford any more slipups. It's easy to see what the creators were after: something breezy, sexy, violent but basically fun, a kind of semi-pornographic sci-fi Oceans Eleven sort of deal (or in anime terms, Dirty Pair with half the Pair being, well, a Guy.) And its easy to see because there are moments when it succeeds and you're left wondering how everything else went quite so wrong. The opening scene of the second episode, in particular, finds just the right tone, before immediately dumping it with a resounding splat.
Interestingly, and as evidenced by the widely divergent approach to being - or not really being - hentai, each of the two episodes has largely different faults. Episode one is an exceedingly gory, trashy, rather muddled tale of a tyrannical prison built on a sentient planet that sometimes somehow turns people into monsters, and those two threads only gel when it becomes handy for the A-plot that there be some monsters to fight in the big action climax. Whereas episode two is the much less gory, somewhat less trashy, far too undernourished story of a religious cult with nefarious plans involving galactic domination and a giant golden statue that our hero Guy and his partner Raina reckon on stealing. The common thread between them is a lack of clear exposition and unfathomable character motivations: having watched this once while half asleep and again to make sure my half-asleepness wasn't to blame, I can't tell you what those nefarious plans involved, or how Guy and Raina thought they'd escape with a gigantic statue, or why they felt getting themselves thrown into the evil sci-fi prison in the first episode was a remotely sensible idea. So I'm going to go ahead and put the blame squarely on bad writing.
Generally at this point I'd propose that solid technical values, somewhat appealing character designs, and the odd bit of genuinely imaginative animation go some way to softening the blow; but in truth, none of those help much with nonsensical plotting. Even if they could, and even if there weren't too many moments of cheap shabbiness to counterbalance them, the first episode only really impresses with its icky monster designs and gross-out gore, while the second devotes too much of its creative energies to an action climax with no stakes or drama and not much ingenuity. So while a non-hentai cut of Guy: Double Target would allow its occasionally virtues to shine more than they do, that's not to say it would claw its way up to being worth watching.
-oOo-
If this is one of those posts that makes it look as though the best is far behind us, then don't despair just yet! And by you, I mostly mean me, because there are certainly days when I gaze at the to-watch shelf and think that precise thought - but regardless, it's not altogether true. I'm far enough along with these posts to know that there's the odd gem yet to come, and as for this one, while it's about as small a triumph as you could hope for, Ninku: The Movie made me thoroughly happy for all of half an hour.
