One great thing about this blog having a readership of basically nobody is that if you are reading it, and there's something you'd like me to cover, and I can get my hands on it, the odds are it will end up here sooner or later - and so it is with Wild 7, another one of those titles that never made it beyond VHS and which was suggested in the comments a few months back. Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have a classic of sorts (or maybe half a classic?) that got put off until I could rewatch it on Blu-ray, along with a couple of the usual random finds, which leaves us with Wild 7, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², K. O. Beast, and Catnapped...
The best summary I can come up with for Wild 7 is "Dirty Harry remade as a Saturday morning cartoon," which won't be much use to anyone who doesn't remember either Dirty Harry or Saturday morning cartoons, but it's hardly my fault I was born in a different century. From the former we have the whole "when the criminals are so despicable and everything's awful and corrupt and beyond saving, wouldn't it be better if the cops just shot all the bad guys on sight" right-wing fantasy that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever but admittedly makes for cool action scenes. And from the latter we have an air of extreme goofiness that manifests most obviously in how our protagonists - they're a bunch of former crooks handed police badges and turned into effectively a law-enforcement biker gang - have motorcycles that can fly and fire missiles and generally look as if they've wandered in from M.A.S.K or the sillier episodes of G.I. Joe.
This is, of course, a stupid combination that has no right to work. And by any reasonable rules of storytelling, Wild 7 is a fiery train wreck, unable to settle on a tone for more than two adjacent scenes and constantly undermining its feeble attempts to be political or satirical or whatever the heck it imagines it's up to. This is most evident in the third-act climax, when the bulk of the team - who've been largely sidelined until now in favour of a focus on a single character, making even the title somewhat absurd - have to choose between rescuing one of their own and carrying out their assigned mission. So far, so hackneyed, except we've been led to believe that the whole justification for this nonsense is that the Wild 7 can protect innocents where the regular, non-murdering police can't, and said mission is all about stopping a bunch of innocents being slaughtered, whereas it's been established that no one else is in harm's way in the other scenario. Guess which they go with? And if we were to take Wild 7 seriously, this would all be quite shocking and unpleasant and whatnot - but if we were to take Wild 7 seriously, we'd also have to turn a blind eye to flying motorbikes.
Technically the OVA has the feel of work by talented but inexperienced animators who are regularly running into their own limitations. I have no idea whether that was the case or not - the inexperienced bit, I mean - but the ambition is unmistakeable: Wild 7 is constantly throwing up daring, elaborate shots without any sign of a guiding ethos beyond, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" And often it is cool, if you're down with the whole air of hyperviolent silliness, but sometimes it's quite shonky, and that manifests most with the character work, which is so all over the place that I'd have struggled to describe most of the cast right after the closing credits. Still, I'd always rather have ambitious animation that routinely gets a bit screwy than bland animation that's reliably OK, and at least Kazushi Umezo's high-energy score is there to level out the uneven tone and remind us that all Wild 7 really wants is for us to have dumb fun.
Now, where most things that claim to offer dumb fun fall down is in failing to deliver the second part, something Wild 7 is careful not to do, with its puppyish determination to ensure boredom never sets in for the barest fraction of a second. Thankfully, this also makes it easier to not take the violence and general nastiness seriously, compared with something as grimy as, say, Angel Cop, and also to feel OK about not taking it seriously, since Wild 7 is quite capable of undermining its own ridiculous central thesis: give the police heavy weapons, it merrily informs us, and they'd likely cause utter havoc while failing to protect much of anything or anyone. As such, I have no qualms about recommending it and being faintly annoyed about its failure to ever get a DVD release: this very much feels like the sort of thing that ought to have more of a cult following.
I can claim no lack of bias when it comes to Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show I'd count among the seminal works of the twentieth century and consider to be essentially perfect. Even knowing its reputation, it hit me like a juggernaut and dug deep into my head in a way that may not have been altogether pleasant at the time but certainly stayed with me. Is it actually perfect? Heck no! But as with all great art, its imperfections are so inextricably a part of what makes it work that fixing them would jeopardise everything else.
That brings us to our actual topic, which isn't exactly Neon Genesis Evangelion the series and was the beginning of an attempt to grapple with the most troublesome aspect of the show, to whit the fact that most viewers had been left with barely a clue as to what had gone on and a significant percentage were deeply, even angrily frustrated by its ending. For that was the point - if received wisdom is to be believed - at which the budget issues that had been a growing concern throughout the production became so unignorable that director Hideaki Anno's ambitious plans had to be scaled back and replaced with... Well, look, I personally like that ending plenty, but it absolutely isn't what anyone would have expected from the culmination of what they'd been naively imagining was essentially a giant robot show, that's for sure.
How much of what did and didn't go into the final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion was down to budgetary constraints is apparently up for debate, and we can say the same for what happened the following year: was Anno really trying to set things right with the fans or just grateful for the opportunity to return to a property he'd poured his heart and soul into, but with a guaranteed audience and some serious cash at his disposal? Whatever the precise reasons, a new feature film was conceived to replace the original ending, and by way of reminding everyone why they'd loved Evangelion (or most of it, anyway) as much as they had, it was ushered into cinemas with a retelling of the first 24 episodes, the chunk that remained canon, followed by the first half hour of the new ending, all under the title Death and Rebirth. That version, however, would be superseded not once but twice, as Anno continued to tinker and as the notion of previewing a film that was separately available started to look increasingly silly, and thus, finally, we arrive at Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², that being the current widely available incarnation.
If that's a lot of setting up, it's because it's both difficult and pointless to talk about Death (True)² without that context. It was, after all, created for a singular purpose, more so than even the usual compilation movie: it seems extremely unlikely that anyone intended it to supplant the series, and the aim was rather for a refresher with just enough new footage and extra information that hardcore fans would feel rewarded for laying down their yen. Granted, that new footage is nice, as is the structuring device that's used to provide some sort of shape to a film edited by what feels more like dream logic than cause and effect, whereby we see core cast members gathering one by one to perform the classical piece that plays over the closing credits, Johann Pachelbel's exceedingly lovely Canon in D. But even with all that, what's the most you can hope for from a seventy minute retelling of 24 episodes of TV?
The thing of it is, though, for all its supposedly modest ambitions, Death (True)² works. It comes damnedly close to pulling off something it has no right to even be attempting, namely functioning as a self-contained movie, and all that really stymies that is how the ending was destined to take place, four months later, in an actual movie. It even mostly looks the part, with obvious care taken to make sure the animation was polished enough to be acceptable on a big screen, and it has a head start given that Evangelion was nearly always a gorgeous, stunningly designed show, budgetary issues be damned. It may be a mere retelling, but it's a fine retelling of one of the seminal stories of recent decades, using its nonlinearity and some exceedingly sharp editing to clarify relationships and plot points and treating the impossibility of cramming in everything as an opportunity rather than a constraint. It's a sturdy enough recap that watching it together with The End of Evangelion would be a worthwhile experience even for someone unfamiliar with the series - particularly if they had the new Rebuild of Evangelion films under their belt - and for existing fans, it's a satisfying reminder of what makes Evangelion so profoundly wonderful that oughtn't to be skipped just because they've been there before.
But what pushes K. O. Beast up to the level of at least comfortably good is that it was clearly made with a ton of enthusiasm. In ways big and small, it feels cared about, and if that can't quite edge it past those intrinsic flaws, it certainly makes the virtues a lot more noticeable. That's truest of the animation and design work: the former shows its budget but constantly pushes against it, especially when it comes to delivering action scenes that go well past what was strictly necessary for so light-hearted a title, while the latter provides a depth of setting and intricacy of world-building that isn't remotely there in the script. The mecha designs and locations are particularly special, even if that still doesn't add up to much originality - though only now do I realise that the title it most reminded me of, Magic Knight Rayearth, came out a couple of years afterwards, so perhaps I'm not being altogether fair. At any rate, it's not the bad kind of familiarity, more the "this cool design looks a bit like that cool design" sort that's practically a bonus when it comes to anime.
None of this extends to the characters, who really are types more than individuals and fairly one-note types at that: I genuinely couldn't tell you what bird person Bud's personality is beyond "American, likes girls," and the American part makes no sense at all, while another of the core cast members, Tuttle, gets so little definition that I kept forgetting he was there. Still, once again, appealing designs and obvious enthusiasm make a difference, and I was surprised when I returned to the second half of the story - this was actually two OVAs, one of three episodes and another of four - that I was glad to be reunited with the gang. Actually, the back end is better in every way, using its extra breathing space to let the comedy play more and bleed into the action and sci-fi elements, so that the show largely stops feeling as though it's jolting awkwardly from one to another. And if the plot never fully gets around to being innovative, it does play out satisfyingly, so that everything ends on a positive note.
And I appreciate that "better than the sum of its parts" isn't the most glowing praise, but here it does mean quite a bit, the more so when none of those parts are bad unless some mild derivativeness makes you especially angry. Really, the only thing that actively counts against K. O. Beast for the person who quite likes the sound of a goofy sci-fi show with unexpectedly good production values and not quite enough to distinguish it is The Right Stuf International's mercenary decision to spread it across three DVDs, making it that bit harder and more expensive to track down than it ought to be. The good news is that you can still find copies kicking about: I got the lot new from Robert's Anime Corner, who I'm happy to use this opportunity to plug, since finding pristine copies of a long-out-of-print title and getting them delivered just in time for my birthday was one of the year's nicer surprises.
I'd never suggest that Studio Ghibli's outsized influence on the medium of Japanese animated family films is a bad thing, but I do strongly suspect it's the case that it's led to the favouring of certain types of stories and subgenres over others. And one such casualty has been - well, I don't even quite know how to define it, really, but it seems to me that there's a proud history in Japan of animated kids' movies that are first and foremost about chucking as much barely connected stuff at the screen as they possibly can, with preferably those wild flights of fancy extending to the level of the animation itself, so that worries like realism and consistency are infinitely less important than doing neat stuff that simply wouldn't be possible in live action.
I could offer up specific examples, but I think that anyone who's seen more than a couple of children's anime films from prior to the nineties will have an idea of what I'm on about; indeed, go back far enough and it was probably more the rule than the exception. But even by 1995, they were a dying breed, and I've struggled to think of any examples at all beyond that year: ironically, the only one I can come up with is Ghibli's own delightful and underrated The Cat Returns from 2002, which might almost be seen as a homage to our present subject and even shares the precise same running time of 75 minutes.
That's an important detail when it comes to Catnapped! - yes, we got there eventually! - because any more of what it has to offer would run the risk of leaving the average viewer with their brains dribbling out of their ears. The Cat Returns is random and frenetic, and so are classic works in this same mode such as Animal Treasure Island, but they have nothing whatsoever on Catnapped!, which spends all of about five minutes pretending to be relatively normal before it leaps onto the highest diving board and hurls itself into a deep, deep swimming pool full of crazy.
As such, any attempt to sum up the plot beyond "two kids get whisked into a world of humanoid cats" would start to sound like nonsense. Catnapped! actually has a bunch of plot - really, quite a staggering amount for that slim running time, including at least a couple of lengthy flashbacks to fill us in on major details and to flesh out important characters - but it's never really about that plot, which is perhaps why it defies summary so thoroughly. The story is mostly just a medium for whatever ideas and imagery the filmmakers felt the need to throw in at any given moment, and most of it seems to have been geared toward the end goal of delivering the most delirious climax they could concoct. And if you're at all like me, this is kind of a lot at first, and even slightly off-putting, until the moment a few minutes in when you realise you really are best off just enjoying the ride.
What's perhaps strangest about a film in which more or less everything is strange is that, somehow, it does carve out for itself quite a satisfying narrative, or at least an emotional core and enough character development that it's not just a nonstop stream of outlandish imagery. Still, there's rarely an instance when that's not what Catnapped! is primarily up to, and how much you'll get on with it definitely depends on how appealing that sounds. This is all the truer because the character designs seem to be purposefully skewed toward the odd and faintly discomforting, and the animation, while consistently good, is rarely quite up to the level of what it's striving to convey, so that the joy comes more from what's being shown than how. Catnapped! is absolutely the sort of film you have to meet halfway and on its own terms, even the sort that feels like its creators didn't care all that much whether everyone liked it so long as a handful of people were on its peculiar wavelength, but for that select audience, it's sure to be quite the delight.
-oOo-
It's a big ask this late in the game that everything I cover in a post should turn out to be any good, so I for one am cherishing this batch and four titles I genuinely enjoyed, with both Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)² and Catnapped brushing up against greatness and Wild 7 and K. O. Beast both being enjoyable in spite of some hard-to-miss flaws. And only now does it occur to me that I should have saved this one for next time, what with post number 125 being something of an anniversary and all. Oh well! I'm sure I'll come up with something...
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
