Unlikely as it seems, we have another post of stuff that's readily available - nay, readily available on blu-ray, no less! - and I'll be amazed if that ever happens again, but for now, let's wallow in the joyous fact that lots of great (and, OK, some not so great) anime is still being put out on shiny disks and take a look at Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Afterglow of Zeon, Project A-Ko 4: Final, NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX, and All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH!...
I'm not convinced there was ever a possibility of cutting a two hour movie from the thirteen episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory that was remotely as successful as that seminal OVA series. Stardust Memory wasn't always the paciest or the most concise show, but then, that willingness to slow down and build its world and characters, or just pause for a stunner of an action sequence, was the source of many of its virtues, and I've never been a fan of the breakneck storytelling that characterises much of the Gundam franchise, especially when it comes to these compilation films. However, there are definitely ways in that could have worked, and it's evident that the creators of The Afterglow of Zeon put some thought into the question rather than simply stripping out everything remotely unessential and lashing whatever was left together as best they could.
I mean, that is a thing they did, it's just not the only thing. And therein lies the problem: any one approach might have succeeded, but The Afterglow of Zeon tries its hand at three that I counted, if we include the aforementioned path of least resistance. Which, actually, isn't quite what's happening anyway, given that the film does do away with quite a bit that was, if not crucial to the plot, then at least pretty useful in regards to making it followable: it's fair to say that Imanishi's take heavily favours the material he himself directed, which means an emphasis on the second (and, for me, the slightly weaker) half and an opening that hits the ground running way too hard.
So that's one angle. But initially it looks as though Afterglow of Zeon might be up to something considerably more interesting, as we're greeted with narration from Nina Purpleton and by far the clearest explanation of the one-year war and the Gundam-verse I've encountered. And that got my hopes up for a version of Gundam 0083 told through Nina's eyes, since the ill-use of her character was perhaps my biggest bugbear with the OVA's telling. Saddled with the thankless dual role of love interest and exposition-deliver, Nina was probably doomed from the off, but the directions she's taken in the last few episodes are frustratingly nonsensical and ripe for a revision that clues us in to what the heck she was thinking beyond Stardust Memory's "Boy, women sure are emotional to the point of being downright crazy, huh?" Which makes it all the more annoying that Nina's narration ends up as nothing more than a lazy way to plaster over some of the wider story gaps, leaving the sense that she was picked more because everyone agreed that Rei Sakuma had a nice voice.
That leaves us with one last approach, and perhaps the most potentially exciting, and this one Afterglow of Zeon does follow through on somewhat, though I came to suspect that again it was more from necessity than creative choice. A take from the antagonists' perspective is sitting right there, and it's not as though Gundam hasn't dabbled plenty in that sort of thing, but here it could really have paid dividends since they do have some legitimately good points: given that the tale begins with the revelation that the Federation have been developing atomic superweapons in secret, their moral high ground is severely lacking. But though Afterglow of Zeon feels more balanced than Stardust Memory did, that never particularly leads anywhere, presumably because to really delve into the motivations and morality of the Delaz Fleet would have required the production of new footage.
Which, in a review that so far has been a bit unduly harsh, leaves us with the one thing Afterglow of Zeon couldn't hope to screw up even slightly. It may not be the best possible two-hour version of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, but it's still Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, and that's some pretty great bones to have. The animation hasn't got any less glorious, the character and mecha designs remain some of my favourites anywhere in Gundam, and in general the visuals outshine almost everything else from the time, looking remarkably fresh and current even some three decades later. The same goes for Mitsuo Hagita's thrilling score, the strong cast, and the largely excellent work of both directors: this could only ever have gone so far wrong, and while it takes a fairly good stab at times, that leaves a somewhat mangled, not always easily followed version of two hours of fundamentally excellent Gundam.
I can't be sure whether these Project A-Ko sequels have improved with each entry or whether they've just worn me down, but Project A-Ko 4 was comfortably the one I enjoyed the most. And again, I don't know if that's the same as being the best; Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group had an infinitely clearer story and Cinderella Rhapsody played around much harder with what it meant to be a follow-up to the original A-Ko. Indeed, narratively Final is quite the mess, and it's difficult to judge how much of that is a deliberate harnessing of the first entry's chaotic energy and how much is simply that nobody was quite sure what story they were telling or how to keep it in line with the demands of wrapping up threads from the preceding two. Which is something Final concerns itself with more than I'd have expected, meaning that borderline-mute love interest Kei is back from Cinderella Rhapsody and this time romancing A-Ko and B-Ko's teacher Miss Ayumi, much to their mutual chagrin, which in turn is enough to wind up the eternally annoying C-Ko, who had good reason to suppose she was back to being the centre of everyone's attentions.
Oh, and also there's a massive alien fleet approaching Earth for reasons unknown, though they'd be more obvious were it not for the various red herrings that writer Tomoko Kawasaki throws in to obfuscate things. Really, the plot is far from a strength in and of itself, but since it's merely a vessel for delivering gags and amusing nods to other media, more so even than Project A-Ko's was, it proves to be just what's needed. Really, it's that return to being anarchic for its own sake that makes this such a joy, and the sense of fun that was never 100% there in the last two is back in full force. This feels like the work of people who at once have huge affection for the property they've created and no qualms whatsoever about blowing it all to pieces if the result is the tiniest bit funnier. So we get perhaps the most random smorgasbord of references yet, from an hilarious mockery of Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day to classics of Japanese cinema to The Graduate, and on and on, with no end of cameos to be spotted if you're quick enough with the pause button.
Arguably, none of that makes Final a necessary watch, and for all the efforts to provide a true and definite conclusion, this takes us nowhere Project A-Ko hadn't already and indeed doesn't really do much to slam the door on further sequels. If there's any real finality here besides the title, it's in the pervasive sense that the creative team knew they'd drained all the mileage from the franchise they could and were ready to bring the roof crashing down, which is admittedly just the right sort of note for the series to go out on. That faint air of wheel-spinning is enough to make it that bit less satisfying than the original was, as is the inconsistent animation, and yet I struggle to imagine the viewer who enjoyed Project A-Ko and didn't also get a kick from this - which is weird given that, way back in March 2017, I was that selfsame viewer. But here in 2023, and even with the somewhat weak start of Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, I definitely can't stand by my earlier dismissal of these sequels, the more so given how loving and lavish Discotek's Blu-ray releases have been, so I guess that leaves us with an across-the-board thumbs up for all things A-Ko-related.
NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX is at least better than NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX. It has more of a story than "new villain appears, heroes defeat new villain", and thus rises above the laziest possible level of plotting. It also has the decency to ignore basically everything that happened in the previous OVA, which has the advantage that the romantic developments between our protagonist Lamune and Princess Milk have been forgotten and we don't have to endure another ninety minutes of them angry-flirting with each other. Not that the alternative, whereby Lamune and his pun-loving pal Da Cider's sole motivation is to cheat on their respective girlfriends with a pair of random women, is better in any meaningful sense, but it does have the advantage that this time everyone's bickering for a vaguely sensible reason.
Oh, but we're already deep into the realms of faint praise! Well, faint praise is all that NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX is going to earn itself, I'm afraid, but I was genuinely glad that the plot was up to something, even when that something didn't work in much of a meaningful fashion. The alluring ladies that Lamune and Da Cider have their sights set on are named Gold Mountain and Silver Mountain, because why wouldn't they be, and they're obviously up to no good, though not so obviously that the show doesn't hang onto that revelation as a half-hearted third act twist. And because that setup wouldn't fill a single episode, let alone three, we also get some business involving a Wacky Races-off with some other prospective suitors, Milk and her sisters chasing their deceitful beaus disguised as Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts - well, Sacred Scouts if you believe the lawyer-proofed subtitles - and a bit of time jumping through past episodes that would probably have meant more if I'd seen the TV series, though it's not as if the writers do much with the concept besides raising questions about the ready availability of time-travel-inducing rocks that they haven't the faintest interest in addressing.
What they are interested in is providing a brief and bouncy slice of silly, slightly lecherous fun, and with a bar set that low, it's almost impressive that NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX can't flop over it a little higher. The character designs don't help - Ramune and Da Cider, in particular, seem to look markedly worse than they did a mere two years ago - but the animation quality is the main culprit. Mostly it's just doing the show no favours, but there are points where its cheapness and lack of ambition cause actual damage; once you notice that almost every shot with Gold Mountain and Silver Mountain is actually just one lot of character animation mirrored, it's annoyingly hard to ignore, and the last episode spends so long set against a featureless, abstract void that I forgot where the climatic battle was meant to be happening.
Nevertheless, there are laughs to be had, and since that's the bare minimum we can ask of what's primarily concerned with being funny, NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX manages to hobble its way past the finish line. Then again, it's hard to say if anyone else would laugh at those gags, the more so since they're never developed beyond the point of being gags: the Sailor Moon stuff always made me chuckle, but objectively it's just there, without ever, say, delving into the differences between the NG Knight Lamune & 40 and Sailor Moon franchises for comedic effect - the exception being serpentine mascot character Heavy Meta-Ko's impersonation of feline mascot character Luna, because a snake dressed up as a cat is inarguably hilarious. If you agree, you might find some enjoyment here, and it should at any rate provide a bit of fun for fans of the series, which is further than I'd have gone for NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX.
It's honestly kind of impressive how badly the makers of All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH! screw up what you'd think would be a largely unscrewupable premise. The original Nuku Nuku OVA isn't any kind of classic, but it's fun, likeable, and fairly ingenious, while having the decency not to lean too heavily on its central concept-stroke-gag, that our heroine is an android with the brain of a cat. The TV series that would follow five years later and air a few months before DASH! doesn't get things quite so right, if only because it sands off a lot of the sharper edges, but it's a pleasant enough diversion, and if nothing else it feels as though everyone understood what an audience might want to get out of a show about an all-purpose cultural cat girl.
DASH!, which is strictly speaking some sort of alternate-universe retelling, since there's no way to square its particulars with either of the previous iterations, has its own ideas about what the property ought to be, and every last one of them is terrible. I assume it began somewhere around, "But what if we made it darker and edgier," as so many entertainment industry meetings did in the late nineties, and went from there, digging ever deeper holes for the show to stumble into. What if Ryunosuke Natsume, previously the pre-teen son of Nuku Nuku's inventor Kyusaku Natsume, was aged up to the point where there could be some sort of love interest between him and Nuku Nuku? And what if Nuku Nuku herself was, like, really hot, in the very specific sense of that phrase meaning "has whopping breasts"? And what if, when she wasn't jiggling about doing superhero antics, she was quiet and subservient and mostly devoid of personality, acting as an unpaid maid for the Natsume family? And, oh, yeah, what if the whole thing with Ryunosuke's parents being divorced went out the window, but mum Akiko still worked for the evil Mishima corporation, though not as their CEO, and what if that was no longer any source of contention and indeed was accepted by basically everyone, even though Mishima were still the villains of the piece?
If the downgrading of Akiko Natsume is the most galling change from the OVA, what with Akiko being the best thing about it, the changes to Ryunosuke are the most annoying. That's because this new version of Ryunosuke is utterly dreadful, from his screamingly late-nineties design to, well, his entire personality. In a win for realism and nothing else, Ryunosuke reacts to the arrival of an attractive girl in his household more or less exactly as you'd expect a teenage boy to, lusting after her, getting increasingly jealous and possessive on the basis of a relationship that exists almost entirely in his own head, and failing to pay any actual attention to Nuku Nuku as a person to such an extent that he never for a moment suspects that she might, in fact, be both a robot and a cat or that she's the same person who keeps saving him from various Mishima-related shenanigans, only minus the wraparound sunglasses and spray-on leotard.
That broken core relationship is what pushes DASH! towards unwatchability, but it's not as though any of the stuff around it is picking up the slack. Kyusaku is as irrelevant to this telling as Akiko is declawed, the humour is largely absent and almost never funny, and the plot that we get in its place is generic sci-fi junk of the sort that didn't feel altogether fresh when Bubblegum Crisis did it so much better a decade earlier. And it probably won't surprise anyone at this point that the music is unmemorable, the designs are ugly, and the animation is barely functional and only gets that far by reusing every drop of footage it can get away with. I try to always find at least one positive, so I ought to mention that the manner in which everyone simply accepts how Mishima use the city as their personal weapons testing ground is kind of amusing, but that's how far I'm having to reach to find anything nice to say about a title that had the answers handed to it on a plate and chose instead to scribble rude pictures all over the test sheet.
-oOo-
Whew, not much of an argument for buying vintage anime blu-rays, huh? Except that three out of the four releases here come packaged with other, better titles (I'm assuming in the case of VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fire, but surely something on there must be some good) and both Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 and the All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku collection remain well worth your time, even if not for these particular entries. And the one thing that gets a disk all to itself was pretty great, so I guess the survival of physical media is justified after all. Phew!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
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