125 posts! That's totally something to celebrate, or possibly to commiserate if you consider reviewing extravagant amounts of mostly impossible-to-find media from decades ago a life-wasting exercise in futility. But surely nobody anywhere would think that, so let's go with the celebrating! And what better way to mark a major Drowning in Nineties Anime landmark than with some eighties anime? OK, I know, but this way we get to cover some pretty good titles, including a couple that you can even buy on those shiny, new-fangled Blu-ray thingamajigs the kids won't shut up about, and I don't have to ramble on about VHS titles that probably about three people on the planet would be interested in watching. So here for the big 125 - and review number 500! - are Tomorrow's Joe 2, Fair Then Partly Piggy, Prefectural Earth Defense Force, and Final Yamato...
On the one hand, to expect the second Tomorrow's Joe movie to go as miraculously right as the first did feels optimistic. After all, the original seemed as though it could easily have been not half so good as it was, and only by some fluke of editing genius was a coherent two-and-a-half hour-long movie dragged together from the dozens of hours of footage that comprised the original TV series. Yet if you were the optimistic sort, you might equally ask, why shouldn't it happen again? After all, the elements and process were essentially identical, and Tomorrow's Joe 2 has a few obvious advantages: a mere 47 episodes to compile rather than the 79 of the first series and so a less intimidating run time of under two hours, some noticeably more polished animation, and perhaps most importantly, all the groundwork already in place, so we don't need half a movie just to get us into the boxing stuff.
Maybe, then, it's my personal preferences that made Tomorrow's Joe 2 a relative disappointment. I wouldn't choose to sit down and watch a boxing movie, but the original Tomorrow's Joe largely tricked me into it, in that by the time its protagonist Joe Yabuki finally stepped inside a ring, I was already totally absorbed by the character drama. More than that, though, I'd argue Tomorrow's Joe had one virtue Tomorrow's Joe 2 couldn't hope to replicate, and that was belonging to the perfect genre for something so vast and shaggy. Because far more than it was about boxing, it was a coming-of-age story, and who expects those to be structurally neat and tidy? The only necessities for such a narrative to work are that it leaves its protagonist somewhere close to being an adult and that it gives a sense of that progress in an interesting, arresting fashion, and this Tomorrow's Joe pulled off as well as any example I can name.
Tomorrow's Joe 2 actually has more of a definite shape to it, but it's one that's barely apparent through an episodic first half that has to reset itself a couple of times and only really becomes absolutely clear in the last minutes. To go into details would be spoiler-y, and while I didn't wholly get on with the film, I certainly wouldn't want to do that: it's absolutely up to some intriguing things, and though I'm comfortable calling it a boxing movie, that's not to suggest its ambitions and themes are limited to the action within the ring. Far more so than the first feature, it's interested in what it means to be a career fighter, what it says of a society that it would allow such a profession, and where, for a man like Joe Yabuki who knows nothing else and perhaps is good for nothing else, that all leads.
I respect that, but respect isn't the same as enjoyment, and Tomorrow's Joe 2 is tough to enjoy. Partly that's because its answers are grim and fatalistic, with not a lot of light amid the darkness, and partly it's because, while the animation is better, it's still not so good that it's actively pleasurable to look at - though Discotek's inclusion of an option to watch in what I take to be the correct aspect ratio this time around is a huge boon. Perhaps hypocritically, having grumbled that the film is too much about boxing for my tastes, one of the more frustrating issues is that the fight scenes aren't especially good; even the lengthy climatic bout doesn't get near to the heights of the first film's yet lengthier climatic bout. But for all that, I don't regret my time with Tomorrow's Joe 2. I have a feeling, too, that it's one that will stick with me, since the parts that work best get to some undeniably powerful places. I'd only say that if you enjoyed Tomorrow's Joe, this is a very different experience: a tougher, harsher, more frustrating, and somewhat lesser one that nevertheless flirts with greatness on a reasonably regular basis.
Fair, Then Partly Piggy is an adaptation of the first two volumes of a series of beloved children's books written and illustrated by author Shiro Yadama*, and I think it's fair to say that everything about it that works and everything that doesn't revolves around these facts. For, judging by the limited available evidence, which is to say a brief extract from the book provided on Discotek's otherwise spartan Blu-ray release, Toshio Hirata's directorial take is less an interpretation and more a slavish recreation. And while the word "slavish" doesn't exactly have the best connotations, it's not as though it's automatically the wrong route by which to transfer a book into a movie, especially when said book is so abundantly, obviously charming as this one.
The story, as I'm sure I'm not the first to observe, is Death Note for preadolescents. Young Noriyasu happens upon his mother reading the journal he's been keeping religiously ever since he began it for a class project and, in a bid to mess with her head, decides to write the next day's events in advance and to make them as absurd as his eight year old's imagination will allow, which extends as far as a snake appearing in the family's bathroom. When, the next day, there actually is a snake in the bathroom, he assumes it's just his parents pranking him in return, and even a further experiment that could easily have proved fatal for all involved doesn't convince him otherwise, leading inevitably to ever-more-absurd abuses of his reality-bending powers - though, this being a Japanese children's movie and not an American one, not much in the way of lesson-learning or character development. Then, having run out of book at around the midway mark, Fair, Then Partly Piggy reboots itself as a tale of journalistic integrity, or the lack thereof, and finds a whole new bunch of weird places to go to.
There's problem number one: this is two films jammed together without any effort to hide the seams, which shows most noticeably in the fact that you'd kind of expect Noriyasu to be quicker on the uptake when his fake newspaper articles start coming true after the exact same thing just happened with a demonically possessed journal, or whatever was going on. Indeed, generally, Fair, Then Partly Piggy relies heavily on Noriyasu being dumb as bricks even by the standards of his age demographic, which, combined with a grating laugh that gets trotted out awfully often, makes him a touch difficult to stay on side with. (That he never tries to use his unearned deific powers for anything besides wacky, slightly cruel mischief and has no real personality beyond "rubbish at sports" doesn't help either.)
Problem number two is probably more personal and maybe - no, definitely - not a problem in a fair number of ways. Hirata makes the choice to stay faithful to the books' illustrations, which are typically picture-bookish at the level of Noriyasu's reality and reduced to childish doodles for things like when Noriyasu's own illustrations come to life. The reason I don't want to criticise too hard is that it's wonderful to see a kids' movie that does something, anything, interesting with its animation, and there's no question that it gives the film a unique flavour, with the closest comparison I can come up with being Takahata's My Neighbours the Yamadas. Only, what's interesting for a few minutes is less so for an hour and a quarter, and it's a one-note approach for a film that would have benefited enormously from having more thought put into why we should be watching instead of reading. It flattens the mundane and the bizarre to a single uniform level and so doesn't leave anywhere to go in terms of visuals: no matter how crazy things get, they're always presented in basically the same fashion.
If that sounds like nit-picking, particularly when aimed at something with no pretensions beyond being a wacky little movie for younger children that their parents can also find moderately amusing, then, yes, it absolutely is, and Fair, Then Partly Piggy nails the modest goals it sets itself with aplomb. On a scene-by-scene basis, it's often pretty wonderful, and much of the humour is surprisingly surreal and deadpan rather than being loud and silly as you might expect; more than once I found myself thinking that if David Lynch had ever tried his hand at making an animated feature for the young'uns, it might have turned out rather like this. The problem is merely that it's good enough that I wished it were better: a dash more imagination, more advantage taken of the change in mediums, and the slightest effort made in figuring out how to combine multiple books, and this could have been awfully special.
Prefectural Earth Defense Force came out in the same year as the hugely influential Project A-ko and is up to some remarkably similar things, while being, for my money, better in nearly every way. And I realise I'm almost certainly alone in thinking this, though I'd argue part of the reason for that is that nobody's seen Prefectural Earth Defense Force, and part of the reason for that is surely that, not for the first nor the last time, ADV did a bewilderingly bad job of selling it. I mean, what's with those slogans on the cover? I think the goal is to make it look like a Star Wars pastiche, but I couldn't guess why, and in the meantime we're left with not one but two pieces of text that have no relation to the title on offer or anything else. And the back is worse, with some aggressively dreadful design choices, too-small text, and the only marginally less strange claim that "Before there was Excel Saga... There was Prefectural Earth Defense Force!"
I mean, chronologically that would be hard to argue, but presumably the implication is that Prefectural Earth Defense Force was in some way influential on or meaningfully similar to Excel Saga, and barring a few essentials - they're both science-fictional comedies that feature one or more female characters working in service of a male character bent on world domination - they're not much alike at all. And okay, writing it out like that, I do see where they were going, but Prefectural Earth Defense Force offers a very different experience, and it was definitely A-ko I found myself thinking of frequently and Excel Saga not at all. It's the difference, I think, between fond satire in the former case and satire that's a little vicious about and derisive of its targets in the latter: Prefectural Earth Defense Force, like A-ko, finds the clichés of eighties Japanese genre fiction hilariously silly, but it wants to revel in that silliness and ramp it up to the nth degree, not critique it in any meaningful fashion.
The central concept is more a jumping-off point, but since it's pretty neat, it's worth getting out there. Somewhere in the boondocks of Japan, the nefarious Telephone Pole Group have set their sights on world domination in an unusually pragmatic fashion: accepting that conquering Tokyo would probably go as badly for them as it has for all the other potential world dominators, they've settled on taking over one prefecture instead and working out from there. This of course means there are no proper heroes around to stop them, so the job falls to three random teenagers with no powers or qualifications, which would be more of a big deal if - and here you'll see why a full plot synopsis would be a waste of everyone's time! - it weren't for the fact that Santin, a tourist from India, has recently been transformed into a missile-spewing cyborg and is hellbent on revenging himself upon those responsible, which he believes to be the villains of the Telephone Pole Group.
All of this, anyway, is mostly just a centre around which Prefectural Earth Defense Force, over the course of three episodes and some fifty minutes, rushes off down whatever screwy comic rabbit holes take its fancy. And if I had to point to a reason this received a cool reception in the US and couldn't fall back on "ADV sucked at marketing comedy OVAs," I'd have to confess that much of the humour, from the central gag on upwards, requires a degree of knowledge of Japanese culture and so doesn't have the universality of something like Project A-ko. On the other hand, that humour is also much more dense, meaning that if you're on its wavelength, the laughs are crammed in awfully tight. Plus, while there's never a moment where it could be accused of taking itself seriously, there's just enough of a grounding in reality that the characters register as characters rather than comic props, and - something I didn't remotely expect by the midway point - it even wraps up in kind of a proper conclusion.
Ultimately, I think what reminded me most of A-ko, though, was that elusive labour-of-love quality that comes along so rarely, and here's the point where, for me, Prefectural Earth Defense Force nudges into the lead. You likely haven't heard of Studio Gallop, and I certainly hadn't, but in 1986 they had effectively no work to their names, and by heck does this feel like the product of fresh young animators desperate to show off what they can do. Because those fifty minutes consist of almost nothing but showing off, starting with an eye-popping and wholly unnecessary red herring of an opening and carrying on from there. It's marvellous stuff, but more than that, it's infectiously fun: you can almost feel the creative team encouraging each other to greater and greater excesses, and the visual over-the-topness is almost always in the service of pushing jokes to ever more ridiculous heights. Prefectural Earth Defense Force is funny enough that it's hard to imagine a bad version of the material, but what Gallop delivered all those many years ago was closer to the best possible take, and it's a crying shame the results should have been so forgotten to anime history.
Final Yamato is a masterpiece of animation, and it's a good thing too, because it's profoundly useless when it comes to practically everything else. Narrative had never been a strong point of the film series - initially because it was obliged to compile an enormous amount of TV into something that could pass as a feature film and then later because that TV series hadn't really left anywhere to go besides "more of the same but bigger" - and yet Final Yamato manages, somehow, to have at once the least story and the longest running time. Upon release, indeed, it was the longest animated film ever, and it still more or less is, depending on how much you're willing to count director's cuts and additional footage, since Final Yamato originally aired with a post-credits epilogue that added another ten minutes to its already far from breezy two and a half hours. Yet if I were to tell you that the plot amounts to "The Yamato and its crew try to stop evil aliens from drowning the Earth using a passing water planet" I'd be exaggerating only slightly, and then by purposefully leaving out some of the dumber details.
Final Yamato has lots of dumb details, and some of them are pretty fundamental, such as bringing back a long-dead character with some absurdly hand-wavy logic in a scene that manages to strike the perfect worst balance between briskly jumping the shark and piling on enough of an explanation to actually make some sense, or telling us another character who hasn't appeared in the film at any point is dead only to have them pop up a couple of hours later to save the day. And I could go on and on, and probably fill the rest of the review without much trouble, because there's practically nothing in the screenplay - muddled together by too many writers to list - that could definitely be said to work. Even the character drama, which ought to be easy enough this many films in, is fluffed at every turn, despite setting itself such low goals as "character who messes up in the first act slowly regains his confidence" and "couple who we know will end up together do in fact end up together." And given that the characters are dull and one-note at their best, this doesn't leave the cast much to work with, so it's hardly surprising that nobody makes much of an impression.
This, then, leaves a staggering amount of heavy lifting to be done by the animation, and to a somewhat lesser degree the designs, and to a slightly lesser degree still Hiroshi Miyagawa and Kentarō Haneda's score, and it's saying an awful lot that everything's up to the task. As I said at the start, that's truest of the animation, which is routinely so wildly impressive that it almost doesn't matter what nonsense it's portraying, the more so since the one thing the script does manage not to fluff is chucking out plenty of action that's bound to look cool when presented in the best manner money could buy and skilled craftsmen could draw in the year 1983. I wasn't exactly keeping count, but it's likely that more than half of Final Yamato consists of spectacle, and all of that spectacle is terrific, enough that, if you're willing, it's not terribly hard to ignore the whys and wherefores.
In all of this, I suspect Final Yamato is precisely what its makers intended and probably in large part what its rabid contemporary fanbase wanted, and as with many an enormous blockbuster, it's arguably better to view the result less as a film and more as some cultural artefact that defies the usual rules of criticism. Final Yamato had to be epic and huge and crazily expensive, and it didn't really have to tell a good story or even to tell a bad story well, and while it would obviously be nice if it had done those things, there's perhaps no point in worrying too much over what might have been when the result is as thrillingly lavish and outrageously over-the-top as this.
-oOo-
So admittedly not the finest selection we've had, but it's always nice when everything's pretty good, and Prefectural Earth Defense Force is a modest treasure. But let's move on from all that so that I can make some vague predictions about the future of this series! I mean, very vague, but here goes: I almost certainly won't be going past post number 150, if only because it's deeply unlikely there'll be anything left to cover, and by the opposite measure, I would quite like to reach that next big landmark. I suspect the wells will run dry long before that point - we'd be talking another hundred reviews, and I'm deeply unconvinced there are that many titles left that come anywhere near fitting the rules of what I cover - but what's life without stupid, meaningless targets that you'll almost certainly miss? Bring it on, world! Magic number 150 here we come!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* I think. Getting accurate information out of Google on a series of Japanese picture books turns out to be surprisingly difficult!
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