Having a couple of posts with stuff that's readily available was obviously too good to be true, and so here we are, breaking with that trend about as hard as we can with another bunch of VHS-only titles, most of which are pretty obscure even by that already pretty high bar. But wait! There's a twist! My perhaps-unfair criteria for judging these releases that never made it past the humble medium of video tape has been whether or not they actually deserved to do so, or whether languishing on an extinct medium was an appropriate fate. But that's all out of the window this time, because I'm happy - or, I guess, sad - to declare that everything here comfortably clears that requirement. This is all good anime, and the question is more of how good and why the fates chose to bury these treasures in the mists of time and defunct media.
So, with thumbs pointed firmly upward, let's have a look at Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, Kabuto, Blue Sonnet, and Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals...
Kunihiko Yuyama went on to have a weird old career that involves a quite horrifying number of Pokémon movies, but there's the odd bit of great work on his CV prior to that, and one of the common elements to his best efforts is a real understanding of how to play to the strengths of his medium. Here, Yuyama constantly switches up techniques to pull out what's best for a given scene, or even a given handful of frames, and is happy to sacrifice a bit of visual consistency if that means an action beat is more exciting or the introduction of a new setting is more giddily fantastical. This is perhaps most noticeable in the opening sequence, possibly the most visually lovely The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko will be throughout its perfectly paced seventy minute runtime, and during which you might easily jump to the conclusion that you were in for an artsy romance rather than a sci-fantasy adventure full of transforming giant robots and boob armour and talking dogs.
Because, oh yes, one of the relatively tiny number of main characters is a talking dog, and that proves yet another illustration of what Yuyama is up to on the animation front, because said verbose canine, Lingam, gets an altogether different art style from our teenage heroine Yohko, who in turns looks not much like the villainous Zell. That approach can easily go wrong, and I've grumbled before now about works where it very much looked like all the designers were in different rooms and never spoke to each other, but in The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko it simply feels right in a way that trying to hammer a single aesthetic onto those three very different characters couldn't.
Still, there's no getting around the fact that chucking a talking dog into your sci-fi swords and sorcery movie is kind of goofy - which is probably all for the good. As I started off saying way back when, The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, stripped to its bare bones, couldn't be much more cliched if it tried, with Yohko getting transported to another world whose head villain has designs on conquering her own and quickly discovering her chosen one status while buddying up with a team of allies to set things right. And even within that, it's not like there are many twists on the formula, though there are individual details - like how the central McGuffin isn't a sword or somesuch but a piece of music Yohko's written to woo the guy she's crushing on - that add a nice bit of texture.
Don't come to The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko for strikingly original fantasy storytelling, then, but also don't let that lack of originality be a reason not to seek it out. And the same, surprisingly, goes for the aforementioned boob armour, which turns out to be about as sexualised as Yohko ever gets in a story that actually winds up feeling slightly progressive by the standards of 1985. Even if a big part of her motivation is the attentions of a boy who possibly doesn't know she exists, she still gets to be tough and brave and decisive, and there's a terrific scene towards the end where all those elements come together and we get to see how much she's grown across the relatively brief running time. It's characteristic of a film that's wonderfully well thought out in its every detail, and even if that's in service of a plot you can predict every beat of, that still adds up to something utterly charming.
Not for the first time, I find myself baffled as to why UK distributor Manga put out some absolute dross in their budget Collection range and yet failed to relicense some of their better VHS titles for DVD. Because Kabuto - or Raven Tengu Kabuto in the US, or Raven Tengu Kabuto: The Golden-Eyed Beast in its original title - feels like the very epitome of what The Collection was about, except for the part where it's pretty good.
And, OK, "pretty good" is hardly gushing praise, but it's a hell of a lot further than I'd go for the likes of Vampire Wars, and Kabuto, to its credit, gets there by exceeding its inherent limitations in a few unexpected and satisfying ways. We could grumble about the animation, for example, but I never feel good about doing that when a title is obviously pushing its budget to the limits in the hands of a director who's going out of their way to make interesting visual decisions. Kabuto has its fair share of style, and roughly half the time it looks great thanks to some detailed, realistic designs; so long as nobody moves too much, it's actually quite splendid in places. The flipside is that the action suffers the most, and the action could have done with some flashy animation since it's the aspect Terasawa has the least grasp on, with every sequence boiling down to variations of one character swinging their sword or otherwise doing something violent and another character dying unpleasantly, with not much in the actual way of fighting.
This is frustrating, since good action would have really elevated a title that has quite a lot of the stuff. Fortunately, Kabuto is such a busy genre hybrid that it's allowed to let a few aspects slide, even ones that theoretically ought to make or break it. It's nominally a samurai drama, but very much at the end of that spectrum that wouldn't be at all upset if you mistook if for a Spaghetti Western, though that's not as easy as it might be when it also chucks in a fair bit of science-fiction and tops the whole weird confection off with a heavy dose of horror. Those last two are where Kabuto really threatens to excel, though the brief running time never quite allows it to get there. Still, there's some absolutely terrific imagery scattered around, getting great mileage from the incongruity of muddling genre material into what, for most of its running time, would function quite happily as historical drama.
That's all for the good, because strip out the genre shenanigans and you have the most basic of tales left behind, one enormously familiar to any viewer who's seen more than the slightest bit of classic Japanese cinema: our hero, Kabuto, returns to the village of his youth to find it taken over by bad folks and sets out to rescue his childhood sweetheart from her captors. But the familiarity is easy to ignore when the head villain is actually a perpetually naked villainess of the most cackling and self-amused sort and her hench-weirdos are a guy who seems to have wandered in from a samurai-themed version of The Terminator and a genius inventor smart enough to have harnessed advanced robotics while everyone around him thinks horses are pretty high-tech. Oh, and Kabuto himself can sprout wings and fly, because apparently there's a martial arts school that lets you do that, and heck, even Manga's dub is quite respectable for a change, and all in all, trivial and flawed though it is, Kabuto is about as thoroughly and delightfully nineties anime as you could hope to get.
It's not like I need to be reminded of why I love vintage anime, but still, every so often it's nice to be, and usually what does it isn't the really mind-blowingly terrific stuff but a title that absolutely nails the nuts and bolts. So it was with Blue Sonnet, a five-part OVA that, from its plot synopsis, couldn't sound more generic if it tried and probably wasn't a good deal fresher back in 1989. The 16-year-old Sonnet Barge is both a psychic and a cyborg, and she's in the employ of an organisation called Talon, working under the transparently evil Dr. Josef Merekes, but poor Sonnet, who's never known anything except misery and abuse, isn't well equipped on the moral compass front. So when she finds herself sent to Japan to stalk innocent-seeming high school girl Lan Komatsuzaki, who may or may not be another powerful psychic, she finds nothing about the situation especially suspicious, except for how posing as a normal teenager means that people are suddenly showing her the sort of kindness and decency she's been so deprived of until now.
Actually, I seem to have unintentionally made that summary a bit less cliched than I intended, and in doing so touched upon one of the things that makes Blue Sonnet special in the face of so many apparently commonplace ingredients. Though it has all the graphic violence and nudity you'd expect from a 1989 OVA about battling psychic warriors, the source material in this case was actually a Shōjo manga, and perhaps that's why it goes down the unusual route of treating its twin heroines like actual human beings and letting in some genuine notes of emotion and tragedy. By the mid point, I was quite shocked to realise how caught up I was in the fates of Sonnet and Lan, and by the end I was fairly stunned to look back and see how much ground had been covered in the space of two and a half hours. Blue Sonnet uses its running time exceedingly well, and does as good a job as any title I can recall of making each episode self-contained and meaningful whilst also gradually building the wider conflicts and setting up what's to come. Though it's hard to notice in the early running, when the show is largely aping a typical high-school drama, there's no real flab anywhere, and though there are a couple of hefty diversions - part three is a neat retelling of some of the best bits of Ringu, except for how it got there first by a couple of years - everything ends up pointing in the same direction, even if it's only to make some of the later character choices feel believable and impactful.
All of this is wrapped up in animation that's never a great deal better than it needs to be, and Kanda is hardly show-offy in his direction, but he does a fine job of ensuring that the budget goes where it needs to and that the art is always working in service of the storytelling. It's hard to say whether the same is true of character designs that look as if they've wandered in from a good decade prior, and no doubt there'll be viewers who feel they overly date the material. For me, they worked just fine, sometimes by injecting an air of innocence to the proceedings and sometimes by seeming thoroughly incongruous as limbs are torn off and heads explode. Blue Sonnet, incidentally, has some exceptionally well-used gore, especially by the none-too-subtle standards of 1989, doling it out just enough that it feels shocking and consequential and selling us on how powerful its protagonists are rather than conjuring up a world where stubbing your toe is enough to make you explode in a shower of blood.
It's fair to say that Blue Sonnet caught me in precisely the right mood, which is to say, when I was absolutely ready for something pulpy but not dumb, and it's also fair to say that nothing here is what I'd call objectively great, barring a shockingly catchy opening theme and a generally splendid and well-used score. There are aspects, such as the sequence that runs under that terrific opener, wordlessly depicting some of Sonnet's overwise barely touched upon childhood traumas, that might be bold and heartfelt or tacky and exploitative depending upon the eye of the beholder, and perhaps, there and elsewhere, the truth lies somewhere between those two poles. Or maybe it's truer to suggest that Blue Sonnet is quite capable of being bold, heartfelt, tacky, and exploitative by turns, and sometimes all those things at once, and that's probably even a big part of why it works so damn well.
We've covered any number of titles whose absence from any medium more modern than VHS tapes is strange and frustrating, but here at last we come to one where it's downright inexplicable. The very fact that Legend of the Crystals is the first attempt to adapt the enormously long-running and popular Final Fantasy JRPG series to the screen would, you'd think, be enough in itself; but add in the fact that this was directed by Rintaro, of Galaxy Express 999 and The Dagger of Kamui and Metropolis fame, among much else, and cap that off with animation by the famed studio Madhouse, and you're into the realms of the truly baffling.
Or rather, there's one obvious explanation, and that would be that everybody involved was so embarrassed by what they'd come up with that they decided to disappear it from the world as well as they could. I can't say for sure that wasn't what happened, but if it was, they were enormously bad at judging their own work, because Legend of the Crystals is a strong effort by everyone's standards. Rintaro had and would go on to produce things that were more creatively interesting and visually spectacular, but there's not much on his CV so consistently good, especially when this bucks his usual trend of getting so caught up in the imagery that he lets the story get away from him. By his and Madhouse's standards, there's not much here that's terribly showy, but the animation is reliably impressive, the framerate is high even for an early nineties OVA, and the integration of the marvellously designed characters with some simply coloured but especially detailed backgrounds is really standout stuff. And as for the Final Fantasy series, well, the next time Square took a stab at this would be with uncanny-valley-fest The Spirits Within, and enough said about that.
Though, no, let's say one more thing. Among the more obvious ways in which The Spirits Within missed the mark was by doing nothing with the Final Fantasy license besides throwing in a few arbitrary references and emulating its busy, over-cooked approach to narrative lore, something ill-suited to the limitations of a feature film, while later attempt Advent Children would learn from that mistake but arguably go too far in the other direction by hewing so closely to its source material as to be incomprehensible to anyone but the existing fanbase. And that's all the more embarrassing when Legend of the Crystals got it right first time, acting as a sequel to Final Fantasy 5 but with a mostly new cast, allowing it to tell its tale without getting too bogged down in worldbuilding or exposition.
It helps, in fairness, that it's as boilerplate a tale as can be, but it helps considerably more that the cast are pretty wonderful, with the definite highlights being Rouge the kinkily underdressed sky pirate with a passion for stealing anything not nailed down and her opposite number, the brash and bulky Valkus, whose better judgement quickly falls foul of his developing a massive crush on her. The leads are slightly less fun, though they do better than their counterparts in many an actual Final Fantasy game, and speaking of which, I'm baffled at how any series fan could fail to love this when the female lead is a summoner who can only summon Chocobos! Admittedly, that's a sure sign that Legend of the Crystals isn't taking its Final Fantasy-ing as seriously as it might, and if you prefer the games at their more angsty, this probably isn't for you. For everyone else, though, it's a delightfully light-hearted gem brought to life with splendid animation by a director with talent and vision to spare, and I'm genuinely bewildered as to why it's been allowed to muster away in the VHS dungeons the way it has.
-oOo-
Man, what happened there, huh? Did nineties anime companies not want to make money? Did they really prefer to put out junk and leave splendid titles to gather dust? Or is it just that I don't have the faintest idea how anime licensing works and there were actually vast and complicated factors that consigned these gems to the trashcan of history? Who knows? Given that I'm not willing to go the extra mile and do some actual research, not me!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
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