So, we're back in the eighties - but let's not grumble too much about how this nineties anime blog is yet again drifting back into the wrong decade, and this time even brushing the very bottom of said decade. Because if we're getting awfully close to exhausting the best stuff from the nineties, the eighties at least still has the odd gem left to offer, and frankly it's nice to be reviewing some titles that range from decent to excellent for a change, with more towards the top end than the bottom. In fact, we only have one arguably duff title - I say arguably because it's a well-loved classic! - from amongst Be Forever Yamato, Lupin the Third: The Fuma Conspiracy, Tomorrow's Joe The Movie, and Barefoot Gen...
While this is the first Space Battleship Yamato movie I've covered here, due to my determination not to be reviewing seventies anime in a blog series that's meant to be about nineties anime and has already strayed too far into eighties anime, I have actually watched the three preceding entries. So hopefully I have some idea what I'm talking about when I say that the problem with the series is that the first film neither wanted nor needed any sequels. Granted, the original run of the TV show was so unsuccessful that the episode count was cut by a third, but I've not seen it suggested that the follow-ups were an attempt to restore that lost material. Rather, it was the belated but monumental success of the film condensation of the series that gave birth to four sequels in a mere six years and which led to them so meticulously following the template it had set.
But Space Battleship Yamato the movie wasn't trying to set a template, it was merely making the best job it could of the nigh-impossible task of cramming twenty-six episodes into a moderately acceptable running time and cobbling together a coherent plot that didn't just feel like a bunch of disconnected things happening for two hours and change. I doubt anyone involved was thinking, "Hey, this is something that could stand to be replicated three or four times with slavish precision!" Yet Space Battleship Yamato was a hit, and the sort of ginormous, lightning-in-a-bottle hit that doesn't incline anyone to go all experimental on their audience.
Thus we come to Be Forever Yamato, a film that, while veering slightly further afield than either of the previous two sequels, nevertheless hangs so desperately to Space Battleship Yamato's coattails that it ends up making nary a shred of sense. That's most obvious in the astonishing two-and-a-half-hour running time, which nothing in the story begins to justify, but really it's everywhere else as well. With that, said, though, the first third or so does at least give the impression we might be in for something different this time around, and most dramatically so in its opening scenes, in which the oft-embattled Yamato is conspicuous in its absence as an unknown force of alien invaders tear through our solar system, wreaking death and destruction and not stopping until they've enslaved the Earth and ensured there'll be no resistance by erecting a bomb with the potential to erase all life on the planet.
It's at this point that we're finally reunited with the Yamato and its crew - what's left of them, anyway, since Be Forever Yamato isn't above the odd cheap death to give some sense of stakes - and it's also at this point that the plot, such as it's been, starts to unravel hard. The entire business with the aliens and their weapon of last resort that they seem determined not to use is the major driver for everything that happens and it's brutally dumb if you pause to think about it, as is basically everything to do with them. They're a series of hazards and twists for our heroes to navigate rather than rational characters acting according to their own motivations, and since one of the things the Yamato franchise has been rather good at until now is giving its antagonists a proper measure of autonomy, this is more disappointing than in many another film that only bothered to think through half its conflict. There are developments in the back third that don't possess a shred of logic; I was reminded at points of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and its hilarious "What does God need with a starship?" shenanigans, and if there's one thing you don't want your epic space drama to remind you of, it's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Still, I'd argue that all this is salvaged by a couple of things. One is that there's something inherently appealing about the Yamato movies, which are vast and serious and absurd and occasionally thrilling in ways it's hard not to feel a touch nostalgic for if you're an anime fan of a certain age and inclination, and the other is that, while the animation isn't terribly reliable, there's are shots scattered throughout that are absolutely marvellous: put them together with a suitably sweeping score and there's definitely something intermittently special here. Yes, I would argue that, except that the only available release in the West is a very aged DVD from some outfit called Voyager Entertainment, and it sucks, and sucks that bit harder than their releases of the other films because, around the midway point, Be Forever Yamato decides to shift aspect ratios: you have to assume the idea was that the picture would get bigger in cinemas, but that isn't the route Voyager Entertainment went down, so half the movie ends up double-letterboxed. Should this ever get a blu-ray release in the West, I'd be a lot more kindly disposed toward it: a great print that showed off the better moments of animation would make its various problems far easier to ignore. But that's not what we've got right now, and what we've got really is quite a slog.
Given how quickly the series settled into a comfortable groove, it's easy to forget there was a time when nobody quite knew what it meant for something to be a Lupin the Third film. Oh, the core elements were there, of course, in Monkeypunch's manga and in the TV series, which had clocked up hundreds of episodes across three seasons by 1987; but what works in a comic book or in twenty minute bursts is hardly guaranteed to fill a feature-length running time. And it's also easy to forget that the three animated films prior to this point hadn't been reliably successful either with audiences or critics; bizarre though it seems in hindsight, Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro was a notorious flop, no doubt in part because of its eagerness to break from the formula of Lupin-ness as it was then.
And so we find ourselves with the fourth animated Lupin feature and the first that wasn't a cinema release but an OVA, which at the time was quite a different beast to a TV special, of which the first of many would soon follow. No, in 1987, an OVA wasn't much of a step down, and yet it's worth mentioning because The Fuma Conspiracy feels smaller in scope than any of its predecessors. That's partly due to the running time, which doesn't quite break seventy-five minutes, but as much to do with the story's confinement to a single location, and a single location in the depths of rural Japan, picked apparently because the creators were sick of seeing Lupin in London and Paris but also because researching your own country is a heck of a lot cheaper than researching someone else's.
Another twist: The Fuma Conspiracy opens with a wedding, and not just any wedding but the wedding of regular cast member Goemon - a bum note, frankly, that hangs over the entire movie, since we know Goemon isn't going to get married and the film makes little attempt to convince us otherwise, so that the nuptials, which almost immediately get interrupted and transform into a treasure hunt, seem much like the clotheshorse to hang the plot around that they are. Nevertheless, for all that it doesn't hold up, it's certainly a novel way into the story, and an early indication of what I was trying to get at in the opening paragraph: The Fuma Conspiracy feels like the work of people who've gone back to square one on how to make a Lupin the Third film and are probing their way forward accordingly.
Which brings me at last to the point, which is that the most striking detail about The Fuma Conspiracy from a modern perspective isn't its quirks, of which it has a few - at the time it was lambasted for not using the regular voice cast in another bid to keep the budget down, and the shift to a more wallet-friendly composer certainly does the movie no favours - but how well it predicted what was to come. For all that it's definitely its own thing, with a softer, warmer visual style that's closer to Cagliostro than its successors, and the oddness of seeing Lupin running around the Japanese countryside, and the unconvincing hook of Goemon's wedding, the plot soon transforms into something remarkably familiar: Lupin and co square off against a band of colourful enemies in search of a McGuffin treasure, Zenigata and the local cops give lukewarm pursuit, and ultimately everybody comes together in the labyrinthine death-trap that houses said treasure, which you can be confident nobody will get away with.
A strange combination then: had The Fuma Conspiracy occurred a decade later, it would stand out barely at all, and I guess that if you choose to ignore its context, it wouldn't much now, though the setting and the marriage gimmick are striking while you're watching. But to be clear, the formula that began to take its definite form here is one that works, and, done well, a formulaic Lupin can be a hell of treat. The Fuma Conspiracy turns out to be a pretty good stab, with few surprises but plenty of polish, and that's most evident in the animation, which is often splendid: the film's centrepiece is a mammoth car chase, and though a car chase might be the least unexpected element of a Lupin the Third movie, this one stands out by its sheer loveliness and ingenuity. Sad to say, loveliness and ingenuity aren't quite enough to make it genuinely fresh, and the one thing that could have pushed The Fuma Conspiracy into the highest tier of Lupin films is some genuine surprises, so we're left with an above-par entry that's historically interesting more than it's intrinsically interesting and frustratingly difficult to find. Hopefully that last matter will get sorted eventually; this is a title that would benefit enormously from the uplift to blu-ray. If and when that happens, it'll be one to jump on, but in the meantime, I guess it's only for completists and those eager to see a Lupin adventure dressed up in more than TV animation.
Would you believe me if I said none of that matters? Would you believe me if I suggested that, just possibly, it works to the benefit of Tomorrow's Joe? Honestly, I'm not sure I would believe me, because great animation is a big part of what I love about anime and it logically follows that severely not-so-great animation is a major turn-off. Yet there are benefits, arising not only from the crudeness of the animation but from the crudeness of the designs as well, which are almost elemental in their simplicity. The most obvious is a sense that the events portrayed belong to the past: what we have here is an eighties movie of a seventies anime of a sixties manga telling a story from earlier in that same decade, and I don't know that slicker animation could get at that accumulated weight of years in the same way the rough-and-ready work here does. Equally, there's an energy that's perfectly fitted to the material - and I guess, two paragraphs in, it's high time to be mentioning that what we're discussing is a boxing movie, a genre that doesn't really need to look pretty but very much does need to draw you in with its physicality to the point where you practically feel the blows landing. This Tomorrow's Joe absolutely does, and if it did so any better, I for one would have found it a tough watch, because - even putting aside the boxing scenes themselves - the events it shows are often staggeringly brutal, and I don't know that a more realistic portrayal would have stayed watchable for this sort of duration.
Again, for all that that sounds like criticism, I don't mean it to be. Tomorrow's Joe is a pummelling movie and ought to be: our protagonist and definitely not hero is Joe Yabuki, who we meet as a cocky street kid picking a fight with a bunch of petty gangsters, ostensibly to help out a little girl but obviously as much or more so because he loves to scrap and has crappy impulse control. This we'll soon learn for a fact, as Joe's headstrong and self-destructive nature lands him in a juvenile detention centre, and from there in an even worse juvenile detention centre, all despite the efforts of well-meaning drunk Danpei Tange, a former boxer who's determined to harness the young man's potential whether Joe agrees or not.
Eventually, Joe relinquishes, though not for any real reason other than a desire to do better in the fights he's endlessly starting; it's a long way indeed into the film before he shows an interest in boxing as anything other than a medium for doing what he'd be doing anyway. And in that sense, While Tomorrow's Joe is definitely a boxing movie, it manages to be far more than merely a movie about boxing: there's a tremendous amount of material here, and I wouldn't be surprised if an hour goes by before Joe so much as steps inside a ring. Then again, the fact of being adapted from a 79-episode TV show gives the film an edge that perhaps no other boxing film has ever had: it gets to be an epic that's established its characters and arcs and themes well before it really commits to its primary genre, and in so doing, plumbs depths that boxing films rarely get close to. And here I should admit that I don't remotely like boxing, for all that it seems to be an uncommonly good wellspring for cinematic material - yet I can't remember the last time I was as glued to the edge of my seat as I was during the last twenty minutes of Tomorrow's Joe, a single bout shown in what has to be practically real time and played out as something akin to a chess match in an abattoir.
I didn't expect a classic of Tomorrow's Joe, for all its reputation. There are surely limits to what you can accomplish by hacking together TV show footage, especially when it looks as though nobody thought retouching the roughest patches might be a nice idea before they pointed it toward a cinema. So maybe the greatest accomplishment here is the editing, or whatever precisely the word is for the job of picking what out of thirty or so hours of footage makes it into a theatrical cut: this material works as a movie to a shocking degree, moving through clear arcs to be sure but always with momentum and an unmistakeable direction. While there's plenty to admire - I haven't even mentioned the tremendous voice acting or Kunihiko Suzuki's aggressively jazzy, funky score, which proves a far better fit than it has any right to - the greatest triumph is surely the phenomenal job Tomorrow's Joe does of carving out the leanest, most bare-boned version of its vast story and delivering it with propulsive force.
The 1983 film Barefoot Gen is up to at least three significantly different things, and, on the face of it, one of them is practically irreconcilable with the other two. First and foremost, it's a tale of survival during wartime, initially amid the increasingly intolerable depredations of the last months of WW2, when the writing was clearly on the wall for Japan's defeat, and then in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, one of the most desperately horrible periods of suffering that any population has known. And lest we fail to note just how horrible it is to be in a city under nuclear attack, Barefoot Gen is also quite explicitly a horror movie: its representation of what the bombing did to human bodies both during and after is unflinching and unsparing in a manner that would be impossible in live action, since no special effects shot could be so excruciatingly effective as the representations of melting flesh Masaki conjures up over and again.
Obviously, those two modes are a perfectly reasonable fit for each other. But then we get to Barefoot Gen's third thread, the one which sets it apart from almost any similar film and indeed from the obviously comparable masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies: as well as the above, it's also a comedic tale following the adventures of the plucky titular character, something like if The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn happened to be set amid the irradiated ruins of a major city. And here you'd have every right to expect things to come gravely unstuck, because that's one heck of a fine line to tread, the more so because we're tethered hard to protagonist Gen's perspective and very much expected to laugh at the things he finds funny, for all that six-year-old boys aren't known for their nuanced grasp of humour. Moreover, every aspect follows that approach, so that Gen and the other characters his own age look as though they've wandered in from a kids' movie, and Kentarō Haneda's score could be transferred over to said kids' movie without the slightest alteration.
A fine line to tread indeed, and yet it's not so much that Barefoot Gen somehow gets away with it but that, in attempting such seemingly incompatible goals and succeeding as well as it does, it manages to be both great and unique. And maybe the explanation for that lies in how wholeheartedly the film commits to its various strands: with such levels of intensity, any one of them in isolation would be unwatchable for ninety minutes straight. That absolutely goes for the horror elements, which are wrenching and gutting in a way that goes far beyond what horror generally even considers, be it by throwing the most violently awful images at us and daring us to blink or by going the other way and treating as perfectly normal, say, the facts that radiation burns are going to attract maggots and that a soldier with radiation poisoning might well bleed from his anus.
So we need the comedy, and more so we need Gen's innocence and plucky can-do attitude, in part to soften everything else to the point of watchability but as much so, and more so as the film goes on, to show us that even the innocence and can-do attitude of a good-hearted, brave, and optimistic child has its reasonable limits. That isn't to suggest the balance is always perfect: Haneda's music, particularly, is wedded far too much to the Gen we meet in the first third, before the bomb has dropped, and feels increasingly inappropriate the nearer we get to the end. And if we really wanted to nit-pick a film that arguably ought to be kind of critic-proof, I'd have to admit that it didn't tear me up emotionally the way Grave of the Fireflies (or the more recent In This Corner of the World) did.
Then again, I don't know that Masaki - or Keiji Nakazawa, author of the semi-autobiographical manga the film is based upon - were really after our tears, or at any rate whether that was anyone's priority. Masaki, certainly, seems primarily determined to make us walk in Gen's shoes, or rather, to stumble through the ashes barefoot as his young hero does, deprived of even so basic a protection as footwear. He's always gunning for the most direct and visceral reactions, be they happy or sad, be they giggling at the dumb antics and absurd arguments of little kids or trying to make sense of the sight of a starving baby suckling futilely at its dead mother's breast. To create something bearable from such material would be a big ask, so that Barefoot Gen manages to be often entertaining and always engaging even as it grips us by the throat and forces us to stare at images of almost inconceivable suffering is surely enough to warrant calling it a classic.
-oOo-
Can it really be that we have a post with two strong recommendations - indeed, two titles that are pretty much must-sees if you're at all interested in vintage anime? It certainly would seem so, and I'd even go further and suggest that, whether you care for older anime or not but are in the business of watching good and important films, then Barefoot Gen is one you'll have to get to, the more so because it manages to be good and important without being preachy or suffocating in the manner of so many such movies.
Even more unexpectedly, there's nothing here that I wouldn't recommend to at least someone. The Fuma Conspiracy is a middling Lupin film with some unusually nice animation, so if and when it gets a re-release, fans of the series should definitely seek it out, and much the same goes for Be Forever Yamato, which I'm confident would go up in my esteem if I could just watch the thing in a good print.
