We definitely seem to be settling into a pattern here, with one or two somewhat mainstream titles - inevitably care of the good folks at Discotek - accompanied by whatever long-lost oddities I happen to have stumbled upon lately. But this time around, the thing you might have actually heard of is of a particularly interesting nature, since it's at once from a major franchise and being released for the first time in the US. Many eons ago, I noted wistfully that I'd run out of City Hunter to cover unless the day should come when Discotek released the one OVA that for whatever reason never made it across back in the day, and lo and behold, here we are, with City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba - accompanied by Capricorn, Samurai Gold, and God Mars: The Movie...
It would take a lot for this, the last of the City Hunter movies to be released in the twentieth century, to live up to its marvellous title. And to be clear, it's not the "death" part I'm referring to, which by itself would feel like cheap misdirection given that we know Ryo Saeba is unlikely indeed to be killed off here or anywhere. No, it's "vicious criminal" that makes it sing, since for all his manifest failings as a human being, Ryo isn't that, (though arguably only because the franchise exists in a world where neither sexual harassment nor mass murder are criminal offences,) meaning that right off the bat we have us an enticing mystery hook.
Here's a pleasant surprise, then: for the first half of its running time, Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba does about justify its flamboyant nomenclature, and in so doing gets awfully near to knocking Goodbye My Sweetheart - aka City Hunter: The Movie - from its well-deserved top spot. Indeed, it arguably has something neither Goodbye My Sweetheart nor either of the other meaningful contenders for the position possesses, in the shape of what's, to the best of my knowledge, an original premise, one that's not Speed but on a train or Die Hard but in a hotel. Moreover, it's a strikingly current-feeling setup that finds Ryo on the run with a news anchor (female and attractive, naturally) who's come to him in a bid to get free of the evil media empire she works for. The point where this all gets rather special and modern is in how said media empire have the ability to modify video footage in real time, meaning that setting Ryo up as a kidnapper rather than a rescuer is as easy as slapping a knife in his hand and a mean expression on his face.
A fanciful notion for 1999, and kudos to writers Tsukasa Hôjô and Nobuaki Kishima for coming up with it and then milking it in fun and satisfying ways. Though perhaps I oughtn't to be crediting both of them, for Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba is as much a work of two halves as anything I've come across, and those halves are so unequal that I could readily believe they each writer came up with 45 minutes of script without speaking to each other. Somewhere around the midpoint, there's a major twist, and it's a stupid twist that the film never quite recovers from, though it does regain some ground once it's had time to figure out the new direction. Actually, part two might have been a decent enough movie in its own right, for all that its ideas are much less fresh; what it can't get away with is being crudely grafted onto something that's inherently more interesting.
That's the only really big problem with Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba but not the only problem, and the other one is arguably more annoying, since a City Hunter movie can comfortably stand to have a messy narrative, whereas boring action sequences tend to be more disastrous. They're not here, mainly because the animation is good enough to make even dull action moderately engaging, but it definitely sucks the wind from the film's sails at multiple points when it could dearly do with some excitement to keep us distracted. If only Kazuo Yamazaki had stuck around to provide the odd set-piece on a par with those in Goodbye My Sweetheart: that, I think, would have pushed Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba into the realms of greatness, rather than it being a pretty good City Hunter entry that constantly gets beaten out by its own title.
ADV's box cover proudly declares this to be "Johji Manabe's Capricorn", which, with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, seems rather an odd choice. I don't know about Manabe's popularity within Japan, but in the West his influence was limited indeed: there was this, there was the adaptation of Outlanders, covered here a couple of years back - my conclusion seems to essentially have been, "boy is Outlanders horny" - and his manga Caravan Kidd appears to have made it over to the US in full. In America, at least, Manabe's was hardly a name to conjure with.
I'm not convinced that was altogether his fault though, in the same way that I'm not sure it was his fault he never got a really outstanding anime adaptation that made it as far as the West. Judging solely by Outlanders and Capricorn, Manabe's schtick was pretty neat: fairly straightforward genre tales gussied up with a racy edge, elaborate settings, and, for some reason, lots and lots of animal people. That was definitely a thing in Outlanders, and it's more so here, not to mention how our heroine Mona is a sexy dragon lady, a detail that unfortunately meant I spent most of the running time being reminded of Dragon Half and struggling to take anything remotely seriously.
Mind you, perhaps taking itself less seriously would have done Capricorn some favours, though that's part and parcel of its one big problem, which is that it's determined to barrel through far more plot than it remotely has the space to deal with. That's true of many of these shorter OVA movies, of course, but I can't off the top of my head think of a more egregious example: Capricorn wants to be an epic tale, and epic, by and large, demands more than 45 minutes. It gets there, but the cost is any characterisation whatsoever, and even more damagingly, the worldbuilding that I can imagine being a big part of the manga's appeal, since it very much feels as though there's an interesting world to be seen here if we weren't being flung through it almost too fast for the details to register.
This sparsity of detail is most an issue, though, with our protagonist Taku, who we meet at the exact moment he materialises in the fantastical, delightfully named alternate world of Slaphrase. In short order, Taku will perv on Mona taking a bath - presumably because there was literally no other way to introduce female characters in nineties anime - and then find himself drawn into the resistance against the villainous Zolba, who's plotting to invade the mysterious orb hanging in Slaphrase's sky, which somehow seems to be connected with Taku. Oh, look, it's Earth, all right? It's obvious and even the box blurb gives it away. Anyway, Taku too will turn out to be more than he appears, and that leads us to a plot twist that ought to have at least some impact, but the thing is that we never got to know Taku before he was thrust into this particular story, and he might be the mayor of Denver or a dozen unusually smart ferrets hiding in a cunningly crafted flesh suit for all we know. His character, essentially, is, "guy who's in another world that he can't make much sense of," until the plot calls on him to be something more.
That may be Capricorn's biggest weakness, but it's not actually a disastrous one; nor, surprisingly, is some noticeably cheap animation, which is salvaged largely by the fact that Manabe's designs are so pleasant to be around. Indeed, that goes for all of Capricorn: the source material is just about strong enough that all the adaptation needs to do is not get in its way too much, and Imanishi was absolutely a good enough director to pull that off, even with such obviously limited resources. Those 45 minutes fly by quite satisfyingly, and it's simply a shame that there wasn't the room to let the material breath even slightly: add another quarter of an hour in which to contextualise Taku and in general to give the characters some actual character and so the plot some meaningful stakes, polish up the animation a touch, and you'd have something that would stick in the memory once the credits were done in the way the Capricorn we actually got unfortunately fails to manage.
If you have to set your expectations extra low for anime titles that were never reissued from their VHS releases, that goes doubly for distributor Western Connection, who are known these days, where they're remembered at all, for being especially shonky and lacking in any measure of quality control and killing off more or less every license they touched.
So it comes as all the more surprise that Samurai Gold should turn out to be good. No more than good, mind you: no real flashes of excellence here, and not much in the way of distinctiveness either, though you might expect some on learning that its one-hour story is a take on the life of semi-legendary historical hero Tōyama no Kin-san, immortalised in kabuki theatre and subsequently in no end of films and TV shows, and here thrust into a sci-fi future that at the same time bears a striking resemblance to the Edo period in which he lived. All of which is undoubtedly to Samurai Gold's benefit, except that the science-fiction never gets much past, "But what if Gundam?" and if you new nothing of Tōyama no Kin-san, as I didn't, you could easily make your way through the story without guessing its roots, though some of its later developments would feel that bit stranger.
The conceit of combining Edo architecture and motifs with the stock sci-fi designs of the time, though, does turn up some fairly fresh and appealing imagery - take, for instance, a highway overarched by torii gates - and while I'm far from an expert, I'm pretty sure I detected nods to period art in the character designs as well. Those designs benefit, too, from some above-average animation, even if director Umezawa isn't always the best at hiding his cost-cutting measures, as with shots of immobile crowds that stretch on long enough to be noticeable. For the most part, however, Samurai Gold offers some respectable visuals, and that and the 16:9 aspect ratio almost left me wondering if the thing might have had a cinematic release, for all that most everything else about it screams typical late-eighties OVA.
Not that that would be such a bad thing, either, mind; the late eighties was a fine time for OVAs, after all, a brief window in which they got to be more experimental and risk-taking than would be allowed even a few years later. And so we have a tale that not only gets to reimagine historical events through a futuristic lens but drags in a whole bunch of other genres while it's at it, functioning at any one time as an action comedy, a romance, a political thriller, and a courtroom drama, and most often as some combination of the lot. If this makes Samurai Gold feel rather haphazard, it also makes it impossible to predict or grow too bored with - unless, presumably, you're already familiar with the material from other tellings - and engagingly busy, with a startling amount of twists and turns and even some meaningful character development and high drama all squeezed into an hour.
And here I am feeling like, having insisted that Samurai Gold never pushes past being good, I've made it sound quite great, possibly because it's already beginning to look that way when I think back to it. So let me try and remember that, for all its minor eccentricities, on a scene-by-scene basis it was a lot like a lot of other titles from the late eighties and early nineties, with the overriding instinct being to imitate rather than playing up the uniqueness of the material. Whether or not that's a bad thing is debatable; there's certainly an argument that, with so many balls already in the air and so little time to barrel through so much narrative, more ambition would have been a distraction rather than a plus. Given its inherent limitations, I suspect the Samurai Gold we got might be close to the best possible version, and sometimes consistently good is perfectly fine.
The first time through, I fell asleep watching God Mars: The Movie, and while I'm not about to claim that's the film's fault - I was really tired! - I'm also not, having watched it through again properly, willing to take the whole of the blame, because there were a couple of points where I found my eyes growing heavy on that second go round too.
Granted, I don't quite have the affinity for early eighties anime that I do for nineties anime, and especially not for the seemingly endless string of giant robot shows that seem to have been aimed squarely at older kids and younger teens, with not much thought given to the possibility that an adult viewer might want to get something from them as well. That's firmly where we're at here, and as such, God Mars: The Movie - a retelling of the 64-episode show Six God Combination God Mars - is full of remarkably dumb details and nonsense plotting, all of it more or less precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to run across in a giant robot anime from the front end of the eighties. Humanity has become a space-faring civilisation on the brink of breaking out of our solar system by the far-flung year of 1999; Earth's elite combat squad are all too young to get their driving licenses; and the villainous Emperor Zul, who's decided that the people of Earth have already seen quite enough of the galaxy, is such an idiot that you have to assume everyone else took one glance at the job of Galactic Emperor and decided it looked too much like work. His plans go off the rails almost immediately, when the alien being he planted on Earth - now known as Takeru and the old man of the aforementioned Crusher Squad at the crusty age of 17 - decides he'd rather defend the planet he's lived his entire life on than turn against it because some creepy space guy tells him he should.
Zul was pretty much my favourite part of God Mars: The Movie, partly because his design is rather awesome but mostly because he's such a force of absurdism and chaos, concocting ever-more-nonsensical schemes, contradicting himself constantly, and apparently being evil more for the fun of it than through any hope of gain, given that all the problems he encounters are of his own making and could have been resolved with minimal effort at almost any point in the film's 90-minute running time. And God Mars: The Movie surely needs a good villain, or at any rate a bad but entertaining villain, because its heroes are thoroughly dull, with almost everyone but the achingly tedious Takeru and his brother Marg getting pushed firmly to the sidelines.
Thankfully, and acknowledging that early-eighties giant robot anime is rarely the place to look for intricate characterisation or rich plotting, it's a good job that, as a work of animation, God Mars: The Movie fares better. It's precisely as dated as you'd expect, but it does look somewhat like a cinematic feature, and a lot of that's down to director Imazawa. The animation is reliably fine without doing much to impress, but Imazawa has a definite gift for the sort of epic sci-fi that the film's aiming to deliver - perhaps honed during his time helming the TV show - and his greatest virtue is a sense for how to use scale to really wow. It's not something he calls on much, but there are a handful of shots that are a little breathtaking, in the way a film containing massive spaceships and robots ought to be and so few are.
The odd awesome sequence that makes impressive use of scale and a delightfully daft villain aren't enough to push God Mars: The Movie anywhere near greatness, but they save it from being merely serviceable, and the whole business gets steadily better the more it goes on, meaning that most of its best moments are backloaded. Given those virtues, it's no surprise that the ultimate showdown against Zul is a highpoint, and it occupies an unreasonably large portion of the running time, which goes a long way toward making up for the slightly dull opening and convoluted, momentum-less middle. That obviously still leaves this firmly in the "worth a look if you like this sort of thing" camp, though given my basic lack of enthusiasm, I guess my mild enjoyment is sort of a recommendation in itself.
-oOo-
Since I tend to review individual titles rather than releases, let me take this opportunity to plug Discotek's fantastic City Hunter collection, which includes all six of the vintage OVAs and TV specials. Granted, two of them are fairly dreadful, but that leaves four that are somewhere between good and great, with Goodbye My Sweetheart - aka City Hunter: The Movie - standing out as one of the finest franchise films to come out of the nineties. And since I've grumbled a bit about how overly costly the Project A-ko sequel blu-rays have been, let me say for the sake of balance that Discotek have gone completely the other way here, bundling what easily could have been split into two sets together at a thoroughly reasonable price.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
