I'm still trying hard to keep these posts from degenerating into nothing except deeply obscure VHS-only releases, but that's obviously proving a bit difficult given that deeply obscure VHS-only releases are about all I have left to cover. Nevertheless, we do have one exception this time around, in the shape of the OVA of the 80's sci-fi adventure series Zillion, and it's a bit of a corker, too. But does the fact that it's been deemed worthy of a shiny Blu-ray release mean it's better than three other titles that will probably never get anywhere near such a prestigious treatment? Let's take a look at Zillion: Burning Night, Rail of the Star, Dragon Slayer, and Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past...
There's an essay to be written about the outsided influence of director Walter Hill's bewildering '50's-styled, cyberpunk-presaging, neo-noir action movie Streets of Fire on the anime scene. Heck, it probably has been written, but I can't be bothered to find out and I'm not about to dig too deep and reveal my ignorance. For our purposes, though, suffice to say that Bubblegum Crisis, which in itself would go on to be enormously influential, homaged its opening scene and much of its style about as enthusiastically as it's possible to homage anything. Or so you'd think had you never seen Zillion: Burning Night, which came out a year later and goes even further in riffing on that wonderful opening sequence, then continues to lift the entire rest of the plot as well, albeit dropped into a setting that's just as weird a mishmash in its way as anything Streets of Fire managed.
All of which might come as quite the surprise to the viewer who'd made their way through Zillion the TV show's 31 episodes and came to this 45-minute OVA expecting more of the same. For Zillion was a fairly standard teen-oriented sci-fi action affair whose main distinction would have been its close association with laser tag guns and Sega video games had it not had the good fortune of being made by the team that was just about to become the mighty Production I.G. Though, actually, that's a little unfair: Zillion certainly looks far better than a late eighties anime TV show has any right to, but it's actually pretty delightful on all fronts and an unusually great example of something that could easily have been not remotely great, with some ingenious plotting, exciting action, and charming character dynamics.
Zillion: Burning Night sort of has all of the above. The animation is perhaps a slight step down, which seems counterintuitive for an OVA from a time when that really meant something, but then, you could step down pretty far from Zillion and still look plenty good, and Burning Night certainly does nothing to embarrass itself. On every other front, however, it feels very much like an attempt to carry over something of the vibe of the show but as little as possible of the actual content, which is why the heroic White Nuts who we last saw saving their home planet from aliens are now band members trapped in a bizarre steampunk Streets of Fire pastiche. And even beyond that obvious strangeness, there's something awfully tongue in cheek and subversive going on, as though everyone's secret goal was to see how far they could bend the format and still keep it just about recognisable, up to and including taking five minutes to stop the action dead and sit two characters down to delve into the show's gender politics.
This was always going to work for me, since one of my very favourite things about anime is that willingness to mess around with existing properties in silly and probably hopelessly uncommercial ways, and Zillion: Burning Night is one of the more outrageous examples of that tendency I've come across. Obviously, if you're the sort of viewer that would prefer to be offered more of what you've enjoyed, its likelier to be hugely annoying, both in how fundamentally different it is from Zillion the TV series and how amused it seems with itself over that fact. So thank goodness Burning Night is fun and goofy and thrilling enough that you can, if you want, simply watch it as just another late-eighties OVA that stands pretty much on its own two feet. And if you're yet to come across either the show or the OVA - which, surely, most people haven't, since they're hardly well-known in the West - then Funimation's complete and sensibly priced Blu-ray set is absolutely worth taking a chance on.
Pretty much everything that works in Rail of the Star is down to the narrative, and that's going to be all the truer for the viewer who's at least reasonably interested in the historical events it narrates and in the slant it takes to those events. Based upon an autobiographical novel of the same name by Chitose Kobayashi, it covers her childhood as the daughter of well-off parents living in Japanese-occupied Korea, from a little before the opening of World War II to the aftermath of the war's end, by which point the Kobayashi family are impoverished, grieving, and desperate to escape from a country that has good reason to hate them and no interest in making their lives anything but horribly difficult.
This places Rail of the Star both squarely in that subgenre practically unique to Japan, the tale of civilians suffering through the losing of a war told through the eyes of children, and somewhat off to one side, in that Chitose sees little of the actual military conflict and is touched by it only indirectly until after its end, as, for example, by her father going off to serve. Mostly, though, Chitose's story runs in parallel to the war, as her life gets increasingly bent out of shape by the global events happening just out of her, and so our, view. And arguably even that isn't the core of the thing; though some reviews would have you believe otherwise, the thread uniting most of Rail of the Star's scattered and episodic narrative is Chitose's slow awakening to the fact of Japan's oppression of the Korean people and her own culpability in that simply by being part of a family that's done pretty well out of the arrangement until recently.
Admittedly, this is sometimes frustrating. Since we're mostly bound to Chitose's perspective, the Kobayashis are nearly always front and centre and the Koreans who enter their lives hover on the periphery, helping or hindering and rarely coming into focus. And though Chitose lived through some incredibly dramatic and heartrending events, there's nothing particularly unique about her or her family, and as protagonists they're not the most inherently interesting of people. We'd like to learn more about those around her, and that's truest of the maidservant who, in one particularly gut-wrenching scene involving a misplaced clothes pin, she indirectly brings harm to. That's surely part of the point, though, and I don't know that being blunter in its themes or more overt in introducing information that Chitose couldn't have known or comprehended would help things any - yet it leaves us with a narrative that's unsatisfying and shapeless in all the ways lived experiences are, albeit with a brief framing narrative that goes a good way to tying everything up in a manner the central story can't.
Still, a mixed bag for the average Western viewer, I'd think, and all the more so for the Western viewer uninterested in or actively hostile to the tale it's telling and its very particular context. And as I said at the start, that's really the best that Rail of the Star has going for it: the animation is awfully barebones for a feature film, reminding me of nothing more than the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature series, and though Koichi Sakata's score has its strong moments, it also has a tendency to be cloying and manipulative. Likewise, the cast are fine without anyone leaving too much of an impression and Harata, as a director, seems quite happy making sure that everything gets from A to B without necessarily trying to play scenes for all they're worth. Whichever way you shake it, then, Rail of the Star isn't on a par with classics like Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen, or even the similar but more recent Giovanni's Island; but come to it with realistic expectations and there's an often moving, often fascinating account to be found of events that I, for one, knew almost nothing about going in.
In a way, what I found most frustrating about Dragon Slayer isn't that it wasn't better, but that it was as good as it is. Because, after all, there's a definite quality ceiling on something like this - that being a prequel to a JRPG video game that couldn't possibly be drawing upon more hackneyed elements if it tried, and, moreover, a prequel that's doomed to drag itself toward a non-conclusion that is, in fact, the beginning of the proper story everyone felt was worth telling. You could gin that up with the most glorious animation ever drawn by human hands, you could hire the finest of voice casts, you could bring in the most skilled writer and director, and what you ended up with could almost certainly never rise above "not too bad, considering."
The Dragon Slayer we got does not contain the most glorious animation, nor the finest voice cast, nor the most skilled writer or director, but you can tell, at least, that everyone was making a proper go of it. Certainly the thing looks pretty respectable, especially around the character work, and Urban Vision's dub is that rarity of the form that's something of an asset, with generally commendable actors finding just the right blend of tones for the material, which veers between leadenly serious fantasy cliché and mildly silly light-heartedness that's invariably more entertaining. Indeed, we could have done with more of that: the balance as it stands is fine for the tale everyone was stuck with telling, but nudging that in a goofier direction could have paid dividends. Alternatively, a shift further towards horror might have paid off: Dragon Slayer flirts with the genre, with the stock monster enemies being closer to demons than to, well, stock monsters, and one gloriously creepy moment near the start leaves you with hopes the remainder has no intention of meeting.
What's worse is that there's one element amid the rote "young hero sets out to avenge his dad and rescue his mum from the all-conquering big bad with the aid of his plucky chums" tripe that verges upon being novel and interesting, and wouldn't you know it but it's introduced bare minutes from the end and not remotely explored? I won't give it away - Dragon Slayer does deserve better than that - but suffice to say that there are the makings of a properly unusual romantic entanglement here, and I'd much rather have watched that story play out.
Ultimately, I feel bad for a creative team who were handed something of a poisoned chalice and had the decency to make what they could of it, and likely the drifts into humour and horror and relationship weirdness were their way of acknowledging that they had to do something to enliven what would otherwise be stunningly over-familiar. And yet I can't help wondering why they didn't go further. Maybe the answer is merely the limitations of a 40-minute run time, since even the most unoriginal of stories still needs to be kept on track, and that doesn't leave much room for doodling in the margins. But if there's a moral to be had here, it's that when your margin-doodling is the only memorable ingredient of your otherwise utterly cookie-cutter product, you might as well go for broke, because the alternatively is making reviewers three decades later grumpy, and nobody wants that.
My hope for Dog Soldier wasn't that it would be good, since that seemed an awfully long stretch based on the cover art and back-of-box description, but that an anime Rambo knock-off from the tail end of the eighties couldn't fail to be kind of fun-bad. And in this I was to be badly frustrated, since Dog Soldier isn't really that committed to ripping off First Blood and its sequel at all - though it does so enough to make clear that the similarities aren't accidental - and isn't very much fun, bad or otherwise. Like so many OVAs from the period, it's just kind of there, though it manages to shoot itself in the foot harder than most.
The story takes a while to coalesce, and this is actually a plus point, since the chaotic opening is as good as Dog Soldier will ever get. A frenzy of middlingly well animated action eventually gets around to introducing us to our hero, Japanese-American former Green Beret John Kyosuke Hiba, now a construction worker, who finds himself dragged by ludicrous coincidence into the attempted kidnapping of a beautiful female scientist carrying an experimental cure for the HIV virus. Events rapidly grow more convoluted, as said scientist apparently assists in her own capture, and who can the American authorities recruit to bring her back - along with the cure, which they want more because an enemy power could use the immunity it would grant to weaponise AIDS than through any humanitarian instinct - other than our hero? I mean, anyone else, obviously, but Hiba hates and distrusts the authorities and from their point of view is thoroughly disposable, regardless of his impeccable service record, and wouldn't you know it but he has a personal connection both with the scientist and the head of the organisation that's abducted her, so he's the one who gets dropped onto an island of unfriendlies to get the job done.
That's already a lot of setup for what really feels like it ought to be an action title, but we're not done yet: we still need to have the central love triangle explained to is in copious detail, or at least by copious flashbacks to the same snatch of footage, and we've already learned why Hiba lost faith with the US military, along with some muddled stuff about his general backstory that strongly suggests the filmmakers viewed America in the same way the average American of the time would have viewed, say, Libya. And that's the big problem: there's too much story and none of it's particularly fresh or special, and even if it was, it's never developed enough to be interesting in and of itself or to complement the present-day narrative. Or to put that another way, it wastes a lot of time that could be devoted to what surely any viewer would be here for, that being the action that, once we get out of that enjoyable opening, is barely a feature.
It helps not at all that we never get a sense that Hiba is especially good at soldiering, since the plot needs him to fail so we can have our full 45 minutes of running time. We're told he's exceptionally competent, but we barely see it, and Ebata further muddies the waters by turning him and his buddy (who serves no purpose beyond an early spot of exposition) into out-and-out cartoons at certain points, amid an otherwise fairly realistic cast, so that he spends probably more time being a buffoon than he does being the badass we're assured we're meant to be watching. Humour's a weird thing to even try for in such a title, and its brief presence is the clearest sign that nobody thought to sit down and figure out what this was meant to be, leaving us with an action title with barely any action, far too much narrative busywork, and a routine lack of anything for a viewer to latch onto, let alone enjoy.
-oOo-
I'd say that Rail of the Star's been done a little dirty, first by not getting much of a positive reception back in the day - and falling foul of the "How dare the Japanese talk about their own wartime experiences in a way that doesn't make them look like total monsters" crowd, who've even managed to get their hands on its shockingly off-topic Wikipedia entry - and then, subsequently, by being denied a more modern release that it warrants at the very least for the uniqueness of its material. Although, since it's awfully easy to imagine a better take on that material, I guess the injustice isn't all that, especially when there are a handful of similar movies that are flat-out masterpieces. At any rate, Zillion: Burning Night is terrific fun, and well-deserving of its rather baffling presence on Blu-ray, so there's that.
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