So much for posting more regularly! Ah well, I've a few of these on the go and my day job situation is hopefully settling down a bit, so there's hope yet, though I dimly remember saying much the same not so long ago. As for a common thread, the closest we have is "titles that are really hard to find these days," which is likely to be an extremely prominent theme for the foreseeable future. All of which is to say that I have nothing to say and we might as well just get on with looking at Dragoon, Megaman: Upon a Star, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and Iron Virgin Jun...
And having summed up Dragoon as Laputa with a fraction of the budget and endless shots of boobs, I could certainly call this review done, with the only caveat being that, depending on your preferences, I've either made it sound awful or awesome and it isn't either. The word I'd opt for, rather, would be "pleasant", in the way that only something wholly predictable and unchallenging can be. While its obsession with lingering over its female characters' exposed upper halves, regardless even of whether they're adults or not, is certainly sleazy, that aside it's all quite sweet and good-natured and relatively bloodless. If you like straightforward fantasy tales, and if you especially like straightforward fantasy tales that toy at incorporating the odd sci-fi element, it's safe to say you'll get on fine with Dragoon.
None of this would be half as true, mind you, were it not for some surprisingly and consistently decent animation, which makes an out-sized difference in pushing Dragoon up from the realms of not-badness. Were there more to visually differentiate it, was the world-building more imaginative, say, I'd go further, but as it is, only some reasonably nice character designs do much to make the show stand out. Still, anime that's made with a measure of talent and care is generally better than anime that isn't, and Dragoon's tendency to punch above its budgetary weight is a definite boon.
All of which would add up to a modest recommendation were it not for one last problem, the only one I'd consider a reason to definitely avoid Dragoon if you should find yourself craving some hackneyed nineties fantasy anime: as rote as its storytelling is, the characters are sympathetic enough that I wanted to see how things played out for them, so that the three episodes here end without so much as a cliff-hanger, having resolved nothing, is quite frustrating - and more so for how the opening sequence is a flash-forward to major events we'll never see play out. It's not ruinous, simply because what's come before isn't good enough and the tale it's been telling isn't unpredictable enough that never finding out where it's heading is especially painful. The best of endings wouldn't have nudged Dragoon into the realms of greatness, but the lack of even a half-decent one definitely does it no favours.
Given what an extraordinary amount of anime we've covered here, it's surprising how little we've come across that was expressly and primarily made for kids. Probably it's my memory being rubbish, but Mega Man: Upon a Star feels like practically a first. It has no interest in adding one iota of sophistication or nuance to cater to an older viewer and is wedded so hard to the perspective of its child characters that regular logic immediately flies out the window. On discovering that their reality has been invaded by video game characters, for example, the first concern of our young protagonist Yuuta's parents isn't to wonder at how the heck such an obvious transgression of the basic laws of reality might occur or what dangers having a mad scientist of apparently unlimited power and ingenuity running around their nation might pose but to question how their son is meant to fit all this commotion in around his schooling.
Honestly, that's kind of refreshing. Mega Man: Upon a Star is dumb as bricks, but it's the right sort of dumb, the sort that gets that we - and by "we", I definitely mean the under-ten viewer - want to be amused and entertained, and maybe if we get enough amusement and entertainment we must possibly tolerate a dash of education entering the mix. It strikes me only now that one aspect that sets this apart from most of what's aimed at children is that it's not very interested in humour. Its stakes are ridiculous, but Mega Man: Upon a Star takes them as seriously as can be. It actually plays quite fairly toward its young audience, and while it's absurd, it isn't pandering. Even that educational aspect I touched on comes from a charming, albeit baffling, place: since Mega Man the character is apparently American, the show is determined to have him learn a bit about Japanese culture, geography, and identity, for all that there's nothing here you wouldn't expect the average Japanese schoolchild to already know.
This makes no sense, but it makes no sense in harmless, appealing ways, which is Mega Man: Upon a Star all over. Its three stories are energetic and fast-paced enough that the silliness never becomes obnoxious. In the first, Mega Man escapes because Yuuta falls asleep at the controls of Mega Man 5 - which raises so many questions the show hasn't the tiniest interest in exploring! - and is rapidly followed by the nefarious Dr. Wily, who immediately builds an army of robots and takes over an amusement park so that they can enjoy themselves, a plan that's actually not very nefarious at all, come to think of it, though once foiled, he does try and harness the tectonic forces of Mount Fuji to annihilate Japan. Maybe you should have just let him entertain his robots for a few hours, huh, Mega Man? Then in the second episode, Dr. Wily steals a time machine and uses it to travel back to kill Mega Man in the womb. Ha! No, he uses it to visit various of Japan's annual festivals and at one point steal some sweets, and also to gather a bunch of meteorites to drop on the nation, something it's fair to assume he could have done just as easily without a time machine. Though his half-hearted attempts to muck with the fabric of time still make more sense than what Mega Man gets up to in part three: suspecting that Dr. Wily is again up to no good, he starts roving forward into the future in search of a point when something outright bad enough is happening that it's definitely the work of an evil genius.
It's a lazy approach to hero-ing that has no right to succeed as well as it does, and by that point I have to admit I was firmly on the side of Dr. Wily, who's a good bit more proactive and benefits from Kenichi Ogata's delightful performance, which brings him to life as both gleefully wicked and ever-so-slightly senile. By comparison, Mega Man himself is rather dull, as are Yuuta and his sister, though it's fair to suppose that everyone involved is aware of this failing given that we're never apart from Wily for long. Still, all the voice acting is pretty good, and mostly so is the music, so long as it's adhering to what I take to be revamps of the game's themes and not hurling terrible rock ballads at us over the closing credits. But what surprised me was the animation, which is never what you might call impressive, exactly, yet always stays on the right side of decent to a degree it's fair to say would be wasted on its target audience. (Granted, the designs are a bit ghastly, but I guess we have to blame the game at least partly for that.) And so, as seems to be routinely the case these days, we're left with a title that I'm happy to recommend on its own merits - assuming you have a handy child you want to keep amused for an hour and a half while gently teaching them a bit about Japanese culture - and which is almost totally impossible to find. Hey, at least the crummy dub is on YouTube...
Of all the directors active throughout the nineties with a distinctly recognisable style, I'd argue that Masami Ôbari was unique in that he never once made anything you could hands-down describe as good. Oh, I know the Fatal Fury movie has its defenders, and sure it could be worse, but who else was there who combined such a unique MO with such a thudding lack of genuinely stand-out work? Once you know what you're looking for, you can't miss an Ôbari character design, and there are other elements that carry over from project to project as well; the only one I have any wholly positive feelings for is his sure grasp of how bodies look in motion, which, when your CV contains a disproportionate number of fighting game adaptations, is certainly a virtue to cultivate. But then at the other end of the spectrum, he had a marked tendency towards levels of misogyny that stands out even in a decade when female characters being treated as victims, window dressing, or both was more or less the standard in anime: his women are invariably vixens or airheads and, whichever category they fall into, it's a safe bet their breasts will be bigger than their heads.
Now, this isn't a review of Masami Ôbari. I mean, obviously it has been for the whole of a paragraph, but it's not meant to be. Still, it seems to me a fair way into talking about Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer because Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is about as Ôbari-ish as it's possible to be. It has all of his flaws on unmistakeable display, and, to be fair, all of his virtues as well. And, like Fatal Fury before it and Battle Arena Toshinden, released the same year, it's based on a video game beat-em-up, in this case one Ôbari also provided the character designs for. It's definitely possible to imagine this material in the hands of another director, but the result would have been a very different beast: better, perhaps, and surely more coherent, but perhaps a bit less interesting.
On paper, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer has no right to be any level of interesting. The plot is boilerplate and stupid, unnecessarily overwrought boilerplate at that. It dances around the crucial elements enough that everything seems vastly more complicated than it really is, and that's primarily the fault of Kengo Asai's script, which dresses up the stuff of fighting game plotting as though it were Greek tragedy, but Ôbari makes no moves to check that tendency. Barring an eleventh-hour twist that's only a twist if you've never played a video game, this could barely be more of a straightforward tale of disparate heroes banding together against an evil villain, yet it somehow drags that threadbare material out for a hundred minutes, for a good proportion of which the central conflict barely rears its head.
There was probably never going to be a good version of Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and it's even harder to imagine such a version flowering out of Asai's florid prose - though I guess he had to pad the material somehow, and why shouldn't that be by having the cast spout nonsense philosophy at every opportunity? At any rate, I don't know that it's reasonable to criticise Ôbari for not transforming this into a classic for the ages. He does his own share of harm, though, and that's even supposing you aren't as horrified by his character designs as I am; but if you are, their flaws are harder to miss when he's this determined to show off their tackiest aspects. Even by nineties anime standards, the number of times a dialogue scene is shot from crotch or bum height is astounding, and there's so much unmotivated jiggling of boobs that at one point I burst out laughing because it kind of looked as though two characters' breasts were having their own private conversation.
Actually, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is generally quite obsessed with sex, and the bouncing bosoms and endless shots of barely concealed crotches and bottoms become somewhat less noticeable when they're up against, say, an antagonist who's a monstrous hermaphroditic hybrid formed by an incestuous brother and sister. Yet, in common with all of Ôbari's work, it's also resolutely unsexy, in part because it's so hard to reconcile these designs with actual human beings. So the sexiness becomes yet another way for Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer to be strange and unexpected, and that's what really saves it, in so much as anything does. Well, that and some frequently terrific animation, along with a few moments of visual genius: the "secret" final antagonist, in particular, is such a superb bit of design work that you can't but wonder how Ôbari managed to screw up so many of the others. Which is why, I suppose, I've spent so much of this review discussing him rather than the title in question: here as elsewhere, I find myself just impressed enough - by a terrific bit of action there, a perfectly composed image there, or just by the distinctiveness the man brought to such generic subject matter - to wish Ôbari had managed, just once, to conjure up a masterpiece.
The manga of Iron Virgin Jun sounds startlingly unpleasant: if the Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, its "highlights" include a spot of bestiality and the potential rape of the protagonist as a major plot point, and the anime loses the former and tones down the latter, so it's already ahead of the game for those of us who aren't on Nagai's wavelength. Still, there's only so much you can do to sanitise a work by someone who's so eager to shock, and, in fairness, only so much you should do without losing the gleeful bad taste that's one of Nagai's hallmarks. So the threat of rape is still there, it's just introduced late and not taken terribly seriously, which arguably doesn't make it better but at least leaves room for Iron Virgin Jun to put its best foot forward. Plus, while my heart sank when the Golden Cherry boys were introduced, they being the gang dispatched to rob our hero Jun of her virginity, their character designs perfectly nail the balance of crass and ridiculous that Nagai thrives on: I won't spoil the gag, but I'll admit I laughed.
The Golden Cherry boys, however, are much nearer to the back of Iron Virgin Jun than the front, and what we start out with is the kind of goofy setup that's ideal for one of these shorter OVA films. Jun's - perhaps literal, to judge by appearances - ogre of a mother wants her to get married. Jun disagrees, and strongly enough so that she's gone on the run to make her point. But her family is outrageously wealthy and has no end of colourful henchpeople at their disposal and Jun's mother isn't beyond squandering those resources if it gets her daughter to comply, all the more so since her motives have little to do with wanting to ensure Jun's future wedded bliss. Fortunately for Jun, and for us since there'd be no plot otherwise, her iron physique and stock of wrestling moves mean she's more than capable of taking care of herself, which doesn't stop the sympathetic and slightly smitten servant Ohnami from tagging along.
There's plenty of material there for comedy, romance, and regular bouts of action, and that would probably suffice for something this short; but having set out its wares, Iron Virgin Jun then delivers enough of a larger plot that it actually manages to have a bit of meat on its bones. The animation is entirely fine, Maezono's direction is suitably energetic, and so is the unusually present score, which does more than its share of keeping the pace lively. As far as the source material goes, it's a mostly triumphant attempt at fitting it to the form of a short OVA movie, and thus we return to the opening point: it's possible to get most everything right and still end up with something that's merely okay. If you were determined to adapt a Go Nagai work that has many of his flaws and not quite enough of his virtues, and you had less than an hour to play with, I can't imagine how things would have turned out an awful lot better, but that's not to say it was ever a brilliant idea to try.
-oOo-
I guess it's always nice to have nothing bad, right? Then again, it's also nice to have at least one thing that's categorically good, and I want to say that's Mega Man: Upon a Star, but that would be a lie brought on by going in with low expectations and being pleasantly surprised. Still, if we're looking at four distinctly average titles, at least they're the interesting sort of average: where else but in the world of vintage anime could you apply such a word to titles as merrily bonkers as Iron Virgin Jun and Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer? So I'm calling this one a win regardless.
