Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 141

After a couple of (for me, anyway) more exciting posts, including the wild highs of the first part of our Studio Ghibli retrospective, we're back now to the usual random, obscure nonsense.  But hey, random, obscure nonsense can be exciting too, can't it?  And if lost gems are too much to expect by this point, there are at least a couple of minor treats in among Megami Paradise 2, Ogre Slayer, Dangaizer 3, and The Abashiri Family...

Megami Paradise 2, 1995, dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima

(Megami Paradise part 1 reviewed here)

It's obvious in retrospect that, in trying to show up ADV for releasing the two half-hour episodes of the Megami Paradise OVA as separate titles by reviewing them that way, I shot myself in the foot more than I scored any points against a long-defunct anime distributor.  For here we are with part two, and what is there to add?  Well, let's start with a spot of good news: my worry at the end of part one was that, for all I knew, this was an unfinished title and that was why not an awful lot happened in part one.  That turns out not to be the case, but the flipside is that there wasn't a lot happening because there wasn't a lot to happen, and while we do get an ending, it's an ending designed primarily to lead into the video game series of the same name, leaving plenty of questions open to be answered there.

Which isn't to say that none of the threads left dangling from the opening chapter come to anything: we do find out what the mysterious villains we met there are up to.  Only, it amounts to, "They're evil and they want to do evil stuff, for evil reasons," and even that still somehow leads to a cliff-hanger, if not a very compelling one.  I'm not convinced I'd have rushed out to buy Megami Paradise the game to find out precisely what those evil reasons were - or, indeed, at all, on the strength of these two episodes.

Because part two is, like part one, perfectly adequate and almost entirely no more than that.  Though it does, at any rate, get to be adequate at somewhat different things in a somewhat different fashion, meaning that we can't dismiss it as more of the same.  The biggest shock is that our main character for part one, the nondescript-apart-from-her-name Lilith, gets taken out of play early and spends most of the running time comatose in her undies, meaning that protagonist duties are split between the remainder of the cast but land mainly on ditzy magic user Rurubell, who I recall considering the best thing about chapter one.  That's not untrue here; I wouldn't want to watch an entire series about Rurubell, but she's fun in small doses, and there's no room for more than that.  Though that would be less true if the structure weren't so weird: there's a chunk of exposition of the "Ha ha, now we will tell you our wicked plot!" variety, a bit where it looks like the baddies are sure to win and largely waste their advantage by inflicting kinky torture on their adversaries, and the inevitable final scrap, which I won't spoil because I have faith in you, reader, to figure out where all this goes.  The weirdness, to be clear, isn't in the structure itself, which couldn't be more obvious, but in the length of time allocated to each element.  Or, to put it another way, if you came for a grand climatic battle, you're likely to be disappointed, whereas if you wanted a scene of two women hung upside down in scanty clothing being whipped, you might well find yourself in (megami) paradise.

Or not, since I assume that even the kinkiest of viewers would appreciate some detail and nuance in their animation, and that sequence, for all that the creators seem to have considered it terribly important from a narrative perspective, doesn't receive anyone's finest work.  Barring the odd lapse, though, the production values are largely identical to what we got last time.  There's no single standout sequence to compare with the one in the first part, but mostly everything is fine and inoffensive to the eye, and the above-par soundtrack continues to keep the energy levels high even when the story is distracting itself with odd digressions.  Which brings us to a conclusion that I'm itching to copy and paste from my part one review, because, again, what else is there to say?  Megami Paradise is resolutely okay, with just enough quirky character to make it ever-so-slightly memorable, but it's hard to imagine anyone would have bothered with it back in the day given ADV's mercenary mean-spiritedness, and it's harder still to imagine why anyone would give it their time now.

Ogre Slayer, 1995, dir: Takao Kato

Let's not make the same mistake again, even if it's a bit hypocritical not to: though Viz Video chose to release Ogre Slayer across two VHS tapes, and though they were sneaky enough to append a two to the second volume, implying that it was a sequel rather than the latter episodes of a four-part OVA, I'm going to cover the lot together and save us all some time.  Though, frustratingly, Ogre Slayer would have been more worthy of two separate reviews, and there was at least some justification in the choice to break it in half beyond, "Woo, twice the money!" - a bit of corporate greed, incidentally, that didn't pay off, given that nobody appears to have paid it the least bit of attention.  Though that may equally well stem from the same cause as my wondering if I shouldn't have treated these two tapes as distinct from each other, which is that Ogre Slayer is essentially an anthology series - and an anthology series of a particularly confusing sort, which probably never stood much hope of setting the mid-nineties anime scene on fire whatever Viz did with it.

I say "confusing", but that's more an acknowledgement of the contemporary reviews, what few there are, than a personal opinion.  Once you get your head around the whole anthology aspect, it's substantially less odd that the person we'd expect to be our protagonist, the titular half-human, half-oni Ogre Slayer - that being both his name and the name of his sword, not to mention his sole occupation - is something of a guest character in his own anime.  And accepting that immediately improves the whole endeavour and gives us something a bit more special than the many violent, sexually exploitative titles that Ogre Slayer resembles at a glance.  I mean, it absolutely is violent and sexually exploitative, and the violence is front and centre throughout, but the anthology format means that it's never just that.

To go into more detail would be to risk spoiling four consistently good, occasionally great stories.  What works reliably is the focus on female protagonists who are used to lives outside of the nightmarish kill-or-be-killed world they each, one way or another, find themselves thrust into.  Probably that choice comes in part from a seedy, exploitative place, yet the result is an emotional depth beyond what we'd get if this were simply about a guy with a cool sword hacking up monsters.  Though paradoxically, keeping the focus away from Ogre Slayer himself does allow him to develop, at least from our point of view, as we learn details that earlier perspectives hid from us, the more so since the first part introduces him as practically an antagonist.  It's all rather neat and surprisingly sophisticated, and firmly the best thing Ogre Slayer has to offer.  Takao Kato's direction is always competent without getting up to anything truly striking, and the same can be said for animation that never impresses with anything besides how much blood and guts it's willing to chuck at the screen, though it does conjure up more atmosphere than many a similarly gruesome title.  Then again, it's Kazuhiko Toyama's score that does most of the heavy lifting on that front, especially when it's leaning hard into traditional Japanese instrumentation.

Ultimately, though, whether or not you're likely to get anything out of Ogre Slayer probably comes down almost entirely to how accepting you are of what it is, and likely that leaves a rather narrow demographic: the short story anthology aspect and the predominantly female cast makes it that bit more thoughtful and emotionally driven than what you might expect from something so eager to hurl gore and nudity at the viewer.  Even then, the theme doesn't leave that much room for manoeuvre; for all that the four tales presented are impressively varied, they all ultimately boil down to ogres and the slaying thereof, putting this comfortably behind its most obvious counterpart, the wonderful Vampire Princess Miyu.  Nevertheless, I for one am always grateful for something a little different, and for all its familiar trappings and uneven success, Ogre Slayer is definitely that.

Dangaizer 3, 1999, dir: Masami Ôbari

I've broken so many of my self-imposed rules by this point that I really have no idea whether or not I out to be covering Dangaizer 3, a four-episode OVA that began in 1999 but ended in 2001, a year even I know wasn't part of the nineties.  But it's awfully exciting to find anything these days I can buy on actual DVDs for vaguely reasonable prices, and more importantly, talking about Dangaizer 3 means we say one last goodbye to director Masami Ôbari, whose work has been a source of ongoing fascination for me almost from the beginning of these articles, to the point where I spent almost the majority of my Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer review discussing him instead.  There I said that, as often intriguing and always individualistic as his projects are, none of them ever reach the dizzy heights of being better than okay.  But is that true here, with his last gift to the world of film-length mainstream anime before a lengthy sojourn in the lands of hentai and serial TV?

I wish I could say yes, and I would have were it not for one factor, which we may as well get out of the way, since I wish I'd known it going in: Dangaizer 3 is unfinished, and not in that acceptable way where it still manages to tell a satisfying and self-contained tale but in that highly frustrating way where it just goddamn stops, with no doubt at least a couple more episodes planned with which to wrap things up.  It's truly galling because, while in many ways Dangaizer 3 is extremely typical fare - our three underdressed heroines co-pilot a giant robot that battles other giant robots belonging to an evil corporation - there are enough wrinkles in the formula to suggest that interesting twists would arrive before all was said and done.  Mostly this comes down to the Dangaizer being an ancient superweapon of last resort designed to sort out social malfunctions in the most drastic way possible, which immediately begs the question of whether the villains are remotely in the wrong, but around that is scattered an unusual degree of world-building and lore that further muddies the moral waters and leaves yet more unanswered questions.*

Aside from that, what sets Dangaizer 3 apart from its contemporaries and from the remainder of Ôbari's nineties work is some superlative animation, which is all the more shocking given how routinely bad animation got in the precise window this was released.  There are signs of computer tinkering here and there, but mostly this has the look and feel of high-quality hand-drawn work, for all that said look probably couldn't have been accomplished without some deft use of computers, OVA budgets being what they were in 1999.  It's a win-win basically, of the sort only a few directors managed to pull off before everyone got their heads around the new technology that was turning their industry upside down, and who'd have thought Ôbari of all people would be the man to get it right?  Yet even that's less shocking than the developments in his character designs, which for once are unmistakeable assets, treading a fine line between distinctive and flat-out bonkers.  And more unbelievable still, while there's the expected amount of nudity and female objectification - really, more than the expected amount, and it's not at all surprising Ôbari would leap into making hentai directly after this - some of the cast have quite realistic proportions and generally look like human beings who might conceivably exist.  You could have told me Ôbari was capable of genuinely good work and I'd have believed you, but that he could draw a woman with breasts smaller than her head?  Now, there I'd have called you a liar.

And if that's faint praise, then so be it.  Dangaizer 3 is good, because it looks terrific and its action is often genuinely exciting and because it complicates its stock plot and cast just enough to add an element of intrigue, but there's reinventing the wheel and there's giving said wheel a bit of a polish and a new coat of paint, and this is definitely the latter.  Nevertheless, it's a nice note to say our goodbyes to Ôbari on, sure proof of what he might have accomplished had he not got so stuck making mediocre fighting game adaptations, and I've not much doubt that it would have got a solid thumbs up if the darned thing had only received a proper ending.

The Abashiri Family, 1991, dir: Takashi Watanabe

My dislike for Go Nagai has cooled over the course of these reviews, in part because anything is going to be an improvement when you start with Violence Jack, but also, let's be fair, because there are a few excellent and quite a lot of pretty good adaptations of his work out there.  So it's a mild disappointment to be parting ways with him on so sour a note as The Abashiri Family, a title that puts most of his worst traits and very few of his better qualities on display, and is a rubbish bit of anime in its own right.

I realise that doesn't leave much space for a nuanced review, but there's so little that's nuanced about The Abashiri Family that the attempt would be a waste of effort.  I'm not nearly familiar enough with Nagai's work to know whether the manga this came from felt like such a rehash of old ideas, but there's nothing here he didn't do better elsewhere and no real hook either, though it seems at first as though there might be.  The first episode offers a setup that could conceivably go to entertaining places, as it introduces us to a future so dystopian that we can just about pretend the titular thieves and murderers are in some strange way heroes, or at least as horribly violent and screwed up as they are because that's how you get by when you live in so nightmarish a world.  Which isn't to say that the script cares terribly about getting us on side with the Abashiris, not when it can impress us with their cool murdering abilities, which range from clothes made out of explosives to flicking bullets up people's butts.

This isn't great, by any means, and it's not helped by animation that fizzles practically the moment it's done with the mildly cool opening sequence that introduces us to how ghastly this particular future is, but it's much better than what's to come.  For the plot, you see, isn't really about the Abashiris and their criminal escapades, but one member in particular.  By the end of that first episode, it's been revealed that sixteen-year-old Kikonosuke is not, in fact, the boy her three brothers took her to be, and that their latest bank robbery was actually some sort of epic, belated gender-reveal party.  But with Kikonosuke's true identity out in the open, her father feels it's time for her to put her life of wanton violence behind her and get an education, a plan she's relatively on side with until it turns out that the particular school she's been sent to is every bit as dangerous as the outside world, what with the teachers being homicidal sadists and everything.

Now, I appreciate that no one comes to Go Nagai for sense, but my goodness does the whole school thing not have a lick of logic to it.  We'll learn in due time that the staff are training their students to be assassins, but also kill the vast majority of them, and nobody ever graduates anyway, and just how exactly has no-one noticed any of this for the presumably numerous years it's been operating?  Heck, we're even led to believe the place has a good reputation, which is patently impossible unless literally not a single parent has ever stopped to wonder why their kids have never come home.  At any rate, the school section, which is effectively the entirety of the remaining running time, is both deeply familiar as far as Nagai's oeuvre goes and a wallowing in most of his worst instincts, with a particular emphasis on sexual violence that's a dreadful fit for the generally glib and cartoonish tone.

That, I think, is the biggest problem.  There's a version of the school material that might have worked, or at least have worked better, but that would have involved treating it more seriously and excising the attempts at humour, since, while Nagai's more successful works managed to wring some gallows humour from similarly dark places, here the results are merely nasty, loud, and tiresome.  Then there's the side business with the Abashiri family - you remember them, the supposed protagonists? - and though that works adequately in the first episode and probably could have sustained a better story had it remained the focus, it gets more and more dysfunctional when put alongside the school subplot.  And while none of this is enough to push The Abashiri Family into the dankest depths of Nagai adaptations, if only because it's all too dumb and insincere for the unpleasantness to have any real effect, the dearth of high points and crummy animation are comfortably enough to make it best forgotten.

 -oOo-

I promised a couple of treats at the top there, didn't I?  And here we are at the bottom and I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking.  Probably that Dangaizer 3 was a bit better than it was, though had it been finished I do think we'd be looking at something kind of special.  But perhaps the only real standout was Ogre Slayer, a title I feel should have a little bit more of a reputation than the one it currently possesses, what with it having being totally forgotten and everything.



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

* Actually, what Dangaizer 3 reminded me most of - and I doubt this was deliberate, because Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to have been far more of a conscious reference point - is late-eighties OVA series Hades Project Zeorymer, reviewed here under its Manga title of Zeoraima.  But it's also awfully reminiscent of the excellent series RahXephon, which would arrive a year after its conclusion.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 140

I've broken practically every rule I set myself to try and keep the scope of these Drowning in Nineties Anime posts at some kind of manageable level, but one I hung on to for quite a while was to steer away from the recognised classics, partly because I was too emotionally attached to most of them to say anything useful and partly because, well, what would be the point?  You don't need me to tell you that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a great movie.  And while that, too, fell to the wayside eventually, there was another line I was less willing to cross.  Because there's classics and there's classics, and some stuff you really don't need me to tell you is good, not when it's reached the level of beloved world classics.

But obsessive completism is obsessive completism, and so here we are, with part one of what will eventually be three posts covering all of Studio Ghibli's pre-2000 output (plus a small cheat, which you'll find immediately below.)  And yes, this is certainly pointless, but it means I get to rattle on about some films that I adore beyond all reason, and then annoy myself by attempting to be remotely critical about them, and what the heck, right?  Let's talk about Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Laputa, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbour Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies...

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

What struck me most, coming back to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Blu-Ray, was how little the passage of four decades has harmed it.  I guess nobody's ever likely to mistake it for a modern film, but if someone were to adapt Hayao Miyazaki's manga today, staying faithful to his distinctive designs and not leaning too visibly on CGI, the results would be awfully similar to what he put out all those many years ago - though I suppose that's ignoring the fact that only a tiny handful of directors could possibly marshal the sorts of resources these days to produce hand-drawn animation of such astonishing quality.

But that, in any case, isn't really what I was getting at; it's as much, if not more, to do with the themes and attitudes and ethos that the film presents.  And obviously that's partly a consequence of its enormous influence, and the enormous influence of everything Miyazaki would go on to do subsequently, but regardless, there's not a lot from 1984, animated or otherwise, that offers such a complex, fully-formed female protagonist, or such nuanced villains, or such intricate, elaborate world-building, or such a sophisticated, persuasive environmentalist message.  And that last has never really been bettered, except perhaps by Miyazaki himself and his career-long collaborator Isao Takahata, for it's easy to say "We have to learn to exist alongside the natural world or terrible things will happen" and difficult indeed to weave that message into the core of your narrative in such a manner that it's both utterly convincing and barely the slightest bit preachy.

Granted, Nausicaä herself gets the odd speech in that direction, but her attitude is more one of desperation than condescension, and mostly it's the imagery that does the brunt of the work: we're given just enough time to get to know the Valley of the Wind as a location of delicate peace and harmony before it comes under threat, and since we know what the world beyond its borders has been reduced to, there's something profoundly wrenching about the sight of, say, a stray fungus spore attached to the root of a tree.  It's easy to forget just what a spectacularly good director of horror imagery Miyazaki can be, but there are moments of real nightmare fuel in Nausicaä, and the nightmare is one of nature made sick and warped and inhospitable.  Though, notably, the film never tries to persuade us that the insect-ruled wastelands that hem in its few last human habitations are in and on themselves a bad thing.  Indeed, they're routinely portrayed as having their own strange beauty and majesty, and that's nowhere truer than in the case of the enormous Ohmu that comprise its main non-human threat.  They're alien and potentially dangerous, but, as we'll learn, also absolutely necessary - and so, Nausicaä argues persuasively, the only rational response is to coexist.

This is all of a heck of a lot for a sort-of-debut to be even attempting, let alone pulling off with such easy grace.  True, Miyazaki had a ton of TV work behind him, including the splendid precursor that was Future Boy Conan, and of course he'd already made one extremely good movie, albeit one that probably nobody would describe as a passion project; but you can see why, for a lot of people, this is the first Miyazaki movie proper.  This is the point from which everything we've come to think of as the elements of a Miyazaki film began, and even if there would be modifications - the villains, for all their interesting shading, are inarguably villains, a storytelling crutch he'd rapidly abandon, and it's hard to imagine the Miyazaki of later years showing off quite so much of his female protagonist's bum - the vast majority of the pieces were firmly in place from the beginning.

For so ambitious a work, its imperfections are awfully trivial.  The pacing is arguably a bit off, somewhat languid in the early going and rather rushed in the last third, to the point where I always have a slight struggle to keep track of where everyone is and what exactly their motivations are in that moment; there are odd shots that a later Miyazaki wouldn't have let slip through, though that's an absurd standard to hold anything to; and while I very much like Joe Hisaishi's score, and while its main theme is one of his finest, it never quite gels into a coherent whole the way his later works with Miyazaki would, and a couple of pieces are the sole element of the movie that feel distinctly of their time.  But stacked against those small, small flaws are such astonishing achievements!  We've had time to get used to Miyazaki's greatness in the intervening years, but what must it have been like to encounter Nausicaä back in 1984, a science-fictional animated film of a scale, lavishness, intelligence, and emotional breadth so wildly beyond what almost anyone had attempted prior to that point?  Pretty mind-blowing, I'm guessing, and forty years really haven't done a whole lot to dull that impact.

Laputa, Castle in the Sky, 1986, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

I couldn't possibly be more biased towards Laputa: it's the first anime movie I ever saw, way back before I knew what anime was, and even though I came in halfway through, and even though I had no idea what I was watching, and even though I wouldn't learn its title until many years later, it blew my young mind.  It's fair to say that the fact I'm writing this post for this blog series at this very moment can be traced back to that day, and planting the seeds of my anime geekdom was only one of many ways in which Miyazaki's third movie has influenced me.

So while I'll try to be objective, let's accept that it's a fool's errand, and also that any criticisms I manage to provide come from a place of deep and implacable love.  Let's start, then, by acknowledging that, compared with what Miyazaki conjured a mere couple of years earlier, and indeed with almost the entirety of his later output, Laputa feels kind of trivial and goofy.  I don't know that it has any themes beyond "weapons of mass destruction are bad, as are the sorts of people who would use them," and even that it never takes especially seriously.  It's not a very serious film on any level, and if seriousness was all we cared about, we might grumble that it was a step back after the epic gravity of Nausicaä.  Certainly it feels more of a piece with what Miyazaki was up to before that, most obviously Future Boy Conan, which it borrows from in ways big and small; but I'd argue that of his preceding two films, it's The Castle of Cagliostro that Laputa shares most DNA with, for all that, in being a science-fictional action adventure with teen protagonists, it's Nausicaä it superficially resembles.

I like Miyazaki when he's in serious mode, but I'm also very happy indeed with a Miyazaki who's content to cut loose with almost non-stop action sequences that aren't terribly committed to things like gravity and physics when the alternative is to be absurd and thrilling.  There's arguably no real story at all: we learn of the existence of a floating island full of treasures and ancient technologies by the name of Laputa, we meet various folks who'd all like to go there for one reason or another, and then go there they do.  Even the animation is a touch slapdash by comparison with Nausicaä, with a notable absence of shading in places and a frequent descent into cartoonishness, though being a Studio Ghibli film - indeed, being the first true Studio Ghibli film - it's still stunning by any reasonable standards, with a fair number of individual sequences that are practically without peer.  Oh, and while I'm nit-picking, having just praised Nausicaä for its timelessness, Laputa feels distinctly like a product of the mid-80s, albeit in almost entirely good ways.

If this was all Laputa had to offer - charming characters hurtling through gloriously animated, thrilling action set piece after set piece in search of one of cinema's greatest McGuffins - I'd still love it.  Obviously I would!  But then we arrive at the third act, set almost entirely on the titular island, and immediately Miyazaki raises his game.  That's no mean feat given how wonderful everything that's come before is, but my goodness, the third act of Laputa is simply breath-taking, paying off perfectly on what's come before and escalating the action whilst also becoming rich and satisfying and emotive in ways even Nausicaä never quite managed, or at any rate not so consistently.  It's the combination of a truly awe-inspiring location brought to life with flawless imagination - no wonder those robot gardeners have become one of the signature Ghibli images! - and a genius director firing on all cylinders, backed up by a genius composer who seems to have finally tuned in to exactly what the material needs.  Laputa as a whole may have been the film that birthed the greatest animation studio of all time, but it's arguably in its third act that Miyazaki the peerless master of his artform was born, along with one of the greatest director / composer collaborations of all time.  Both would go on to do work that was better as a whole - indeed, arguably in the immediate future! - but for forty or so glorious minutes, Laputa stands toe to toe with any masterpiece of animation out there.

My Neighbour Totoro, 1988, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Such an integral part of anime culture has it become in the three and a half decades since its original release that it's hard to get your head around what a drastic swerve My Neighbour Totoro was in Miyazaki's career.  Until that point, his trajectory was certainly interesting and varied, but there were plenty of common elements between his major projects, and particularly between Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa, Castle in the Sky, both of which were grandiose, elaborate fantasies with a heavy element of science-fiction centred around young adult characters and their perspectives without necessarily slanting towards younger viewers, and both were pretty damn long by anime movie standards.  Then in 1988 came a Miyazaki film that was practically none of that: one set primarily in our own world, one with child protagonists, one on a much more intimate scale and with a comparatively brief 86-minute running time.  And accordingly, but shockingly if you're watching these things in order, even the character designs shifted toward a simpler aesthetic - toward something that, arguably, looks kind of like a kids' movie, albeit one that still has some truly lavish animation by any reasonable standards.

Fortunate, then, that My Neighbour Totoro is a stone-cold masterpiece, and pity the poor viewer who can spend more than a few minutes in its presence and still rue the fact that Miyazaki had no intentions of being anything approaching a one-trick pony.  I confess that everything he did up until this point is theoretically more up my alley, but I'd also argue that that's perfectly okay given that Totoro definitely is a film aimed first and foremost at children.  And its miracle - one of its miracles, rather, since it's a fairly miraculous piece of work from top to bottom - is that it manages to be that in a manner that's still completely inclusive to an adult viewer.  Or this adult viewer, anyway; I can't speak for everyone, though I've never met anyone who doesn't love this much-loved film, so I reckon the point holds.

And the thing of it is, Miyazaki gets there by about the hardest route imaginable.  Though there are adult characters too, a small handful of them, we're never really encouraged to treat them as our point of engagement.  I undoubtedly have more in common with Satsuki and Mei's father than I do with either of those young girls, yet never once while watching have I felt the urge to line myself up with his perspective.  No, while I'm watching, it's always little Mei I'm on side with, and to a marginally lesser extent her older, slightly wiser sister.  And that, when you think about it, is a heck of a thing, the more so since Miyazaki doesn't really try and soften the pair to fit in with an adult sensibility.  Mei is absolutely a toddler, with all the wild energy and mercurial moods and mad tangents of thought that entails, and yet somehow - again, I'm inclined to just put it down to magic and leave it at that - we're caught up in her view of the world almost from the off.

This is crucial for making My Neighbour Totoro that rarest of things, a true family film - rather than a children's film with the odd rude joke thrown in to keep the parents from getting too bored - but it's also crucial to how the fantasy works.  I said Totoro was set in what's recognisably our world, albeit quite a few years in the past and in a rural part of Japan I imagine would be unfamiliar to even many native viewers, but it remains a fantasy movie of a different kind.  And something that always strikes me when I watch it is how almost any other director would have encouraged us to doubt the fantastical elements, to chalk them up to childish dreams or imagination, whereas in Totoro, the very notion of suggesting that Mei and Satsuki's strange brushes with the otherworldly are anything but real feels like a cruel betrayal.  That's partly because those otherworldly elements are so absurdly delightful and off-kilter that we want them to be real, and partly because the grown-ups are so willing to accept the possibility of their existence even though it's made clear that adulthood has shut them off from such encounters forever, but ultimately it's down to how determinedly Miyazaki erases the easy distinctions between reality and fantasy, physical presence and metaphor.  Totoro is a force of nature in the most literal sense; he's also so thoroughly tangible that you can practically smell him.  And to Mei, and to Miyazaki, and to you the viewer while you're caught up in Miyazaki's tale, there's no contradiction in that at all.

I could go on and on: for all that it's not even an hour and a half long, My Neighbour Totoro feels bottomless in the way that it always manages to surprise me, however many times I come back to it.  It's awfully shapeless and plotless in the early going, tied up in something that's almost but not quite dream logic, and that makes it hard to piece together in retrospect.  But by way of one last thought, I'll just note the extent to which the film, for all its sweet, kind, good-naturedness, doesn't shy away from darkness.  Its third act is driven by the possibility of death, and by the fact that Mei is just barely old enough to conceive of a world in which death could snatch away her mother, and later, Satsuki is made to reckon with a similar possibility, leading to a scene that's almost heart-stoppingly distressing if you pause to think about it too hard.  (I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so suffice to say it involves a shoe and a pond.)  The fantasy stuff is a little scary too: Totoro is never exactly a safe presence, and the catbus is awfully close to being the stuff of nightmares.  But it's okay, because Miyazaki isn't trying to tell us the world is safe and free of dangers, only that it's full of wonder and goodness if you're willing and able to look.

Grave of the Fireflies, 1988, dir: Isao Takahata

I spent the entirety of my latest watch of Grave of the Fireflies feeling faintly puzzled that it wasn't having more of an emotional impact on me.  Hadn't it hit me like a freight train in the past?  Hadn't I put off this rewatch precisely because I wanted to schedule it for an evening when I felt emotionally sturdy enough to take it on?  But here I was, dry eyed.  And then the final scene arrived - I won't talk about it, except to say that I'm baffled by the comments I've seen suggesting it's in any way a happy ending - and something finally broke, and there I was, sobbing my heart out.  And not good sobbing, not the cathartic kind that leaves you feeling as if you've worked something out of your system; no, this was hopeless, physically painful even.  I didn't feel one iota better by the time I finally got a hold of myself, and how could I?  We live in a world where children die slow, painful deaths, and more, a world in which those deaths can pass practically unnoticed.

Any movie that can provoke that kind of an emotional response isn't one to be approached lightly.  But the flipside of that is, any film that can provoke that kind of an emotional response is one you absolutely need to experience, when so much art makes us feel nothing, and so little is willing to leave us a little scarred and wounded if that's what it takes.  If Isao Takahata was a master of one thing - and obviously, he was a master of a whole heck of a lot of things - but if we really had to strip down his genius to one single element, it would be his ability to treat emotive material with a certain unflinching sentimentality, almost a pragmatism, that makes it connect with us in a manner almost unequalled in cinema.

Grave of the Fireflies never really prods at us to feel sad, and though there are what we might describe as sad scenes, they're arrived at honestly: they present us with necessary details rather than merely sitting there tugging at our heartstrings.  But then, it's a film about two young children trying to survive in Japan in the last days of World War 2, and by extension of two young children failing to survive, a fact made exceedingly clear to us in the opening sequence, and what need could a director of Takahata's calibre have to try and make us feel sad?  Honesty is more than enough.  Heck, Takahata barely even insists on our sympathy.  Throughout, Seita makes his share of questionable decisions in his quest to protect his little sister Setsuko, and a couple of those decisions are actively frustrating to the point where you want to yell at the screen.  But that in turn forces us to acknowledge that we have the advantages of both adult knowledge and the wider context on our side, and so we can recognise, for example, that the odds of Seita and Setsuko's sailor father returning to rescue them are slim indeed.

Then again, wider context isn't something the film is especially interested in.  This explains, I think, one of my few quibbles, which is that at times the animation is lacking in the sort of background detail you might expect, with still images of smoke and flames standing out particularly.  Conceivably it was a cost-cutting measure, but I suspect the intention was rather one of limiting anything that might distract us from the character animation in the foreground, which has to do so much of the emotional heavy lifting and so ably meets the challenge.  Always, Takahata's focus is on his two protagonists, for all that they barely register as characters in the usual sense: beyond some trivial details, we learn little about their past circumstances, their hopes and dreams, their likes and dislikes.  We never really get to know them, yet we feel as if we do, because Takahata keeps us in such inescapable proximity to them for ninety minutes.  And that's not to say Seita and Setsuko are abstracts, stand-ins for every child that suffered a similar fate - though the final scene does go there, somewhat, and that's part of why it left me such a blubbing mess.  But for the vast majority of its running time, the tale Takahata's telling isn't that of Japan's last, tortuous months of being on the losing side of a war, but rather, and with singular intensity, the small, inexcusable, soul-rending tragedy of two children that wouldn't live to see its end.

-oOo-

And there we have it, part one of the Drowning in Nineties Anime Studio Ghibli special  For anyone wondering, part two will be coming with post number 145, and I'm saving up the last entry for the big 150, our probably final post.  Spoiler alert, there are no pre-2000 Ghibli films I don't complete love, so don't expect much in the way of drama and controversy!  More gushing praise, on the other hand, now that there'll likely be a fair bit of...



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 139.5

Before we get to the big 140 and the beginning of something a bit special that I've been planning for ages, there's just time for a little diversion that I've also mulling over for quite a while now.

Having been at this nonsense for the better part of a decade, I think it's fair to say that I'm not the same vintage anime reviewer I was when I started out.  In particular, I'm much more of an animation nerd these days, and a bit more informed about the craft that goes into these things.  On the flip side, I've also probably got a bit less discerning, or else more forgiving of the sorts of flaws that were endemic to anime way back when.  As such, there are plenty of older reviews I'd like to go back and tweak.  Fortunately for my sanity, since I started providing scores on the summary pages, I sort of can without going all out and writing a fresh review.  But there are certain titles where my opinion has changed not just slightly but radically, and where I simply can't stand by my original reviews.  And that aside, there are anime releases that are available in a variety of forms of less-than-equal value, and I didn't always get to the best version on my first go round.

Therefore, hopefully as a one off, lest this all get even more out of hand than it already is, this time through I'll be revisiting four titles I reviewed in the dawning days of these posts, those being Black Jack: The Movie, X, Armitage III, and Metal Skin Panic Madox-01...

Black Jack: The Movie 1996, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Way back in 2015 - and seriously, have I been at this for nine whole years? - I had very little nice to say about the first motion picture adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's feted manga Black Jack.  Indeed, so unimpressed by it was I that my hostility carried over into a general dislike of everything else I came across by director Osamu Dezaki that stayed with me for the longest time, and only really dissolved in earnest, ironically, when I encountered the Black Jack OVA series from which I take the film to have been a sort of spin-off.  Now my feelings toward Dezaki are a good bit kinder, and that, combined with the fact that distributor Discotek  brought the movie out in a proper, remastered, anamorphic edition*, seemed reason enough to give it another chance.

Of the two factors, maybe that second one is the biggie.  Up until Discotek rescued it, the only edition we had of Black Jack: The Movie was the crummy non-anamorphic one Manga put out way back when, which, like many of their screw-ups, could only be watched in a double-letterboxed window in the middle of your widescreen TV.  And when a film relies on its visuals as heavily as this does, that's ruinous.  Manga couldn't, of course, make it look bad, but they could certainly suck a lot of the impact from it, since even the finest animation doesn't benefit from being squinted at.  But watch it as was intended and the quality is often gob-smacking.  One thing that struck me is the extent to which Dezaki refuses to rely on the traditional cost-cutting measures that make anime commercially viable: extensively reusing backgrounds, looping sequences that are just long enough to hide the repetition, that sort of thing.  There's a crowd scene toward the end, and I'd swear every background figure was individually animated, though it's the kind of detail you'd never notice unless you were really looking.  But look that closely and Dezaki's attention to detail is remarkable.

Which is an odd thing to say given that one of my main criticisms last time around was that the film felt random and slapdash.  What can I say?  I was wrong.  Dezaki makes plenty of weird choices across the movie's ninety minute run time, and I'd struggle to argue that every one is right or sensible, but on a rewatch, it was clear that at the very least a good deal of thought had gone into every scene and edit.  Indeed, the general feeling is that Dezaki was directing as though this were live action, choosing his shots first and figuring out how the medium could keep up afterwards, as a very secondary concern.

And then there's the plot, which I was also pretty mean about, and also for reasons I struggle to figure out in retrospect.  Here, perhaps the decisive factor is having a portion of the OVA under my belt, because Black Jack is a series that largely plays by its own rules, and knowing them going in is a definite advantage.  Still, it's hard to see how I could have been so hostile to the tale presented here: it's deep, smart stuff, asking meaningful ethical questions and finding notes of real, wrenching horror in its answers.  And its lead character is fascinating: that's not rogue surgeon Black Jack as you might expect, incidentally, but another doctor and surgeon, Jo Carol Brane, who drags the film's namesake into her investigation of the supposed superhumans who've begun to appear, only to decay at a startling rate.  Like Black Jack, she's neither hero nor villain, and it only became apparent in this reappraisal the extent to which the plot is a duel between the two, professionally but more so morally.  Certainly the actors come alive when they're paired together, and for the first time I really appreciated just how good Akio Ôtsuka's performance as Black Jack is.  There's a one-word line reading - an outraged "nani" in Japanese, "what?" in English - that he nails so perfectly that it literally sent a shiver up my spine.

All of which is to say, at some length, that I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I first reviewed Black Jack: The Movie, though in fairness I'm sure it had a lot to do with trying to get past the limitations of Manga's subpar release.  At any rate, I'm happy to call myself a convert: this is one of the most unique, stylish, and intelligent anime features to come out of the nineties, and if you can lay your hands on the Discotek release, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

X, 1996, dir: Rintaro

At the risk of letting on just how long I've been cobbling this post together for, it was watching Harmagedon that made me want to revisit X.  I suppose I figured that if I could find enjoyment in that, with all its obvious flaws, then there'd be something more to be had from a release I'd only really criticised on a single point: that for all its obvious virtues, its relentless nihilism rendered it no fun to watch.  My expectations remained low, but I happened upon a copy for fifty pence, at which point the decision rather made itself.

And, I don't know, maybe I just caught it in the right mood that second time around - which was to say, a rather dark one - but I was so much more impressed that it's ridiculous.  Now I'm hovering around calling X a masterpiece, and I suspect that if someone would replace Manga's traditionally crummy non-anamorphic release with a blu-ray edition, I'd go there.  I remember noting the first time through how good it looks, but I hadn't seen anywhere near as much anime at that point and so didn't fully appreciate how consistently gorgeous Rintaro's movie is.  It really is exquisitely animated, and the director's visual imagination, which I've come to appreciate more and more despite his frequent failings as a storyteller, ensures that every scene is hypnotic in its own right.  So even if I were to accept the point of the earlier me that there's nothing going on here except for stunning animation, I'd still have to recommend it, wouldn't I?  Stunning animation isn't something to be sniffy about, no matter how much the story it tells is basically a nose-dive into the depths of hell.

Here's the thing, though: yes, X is unrelentingly dark, and yes it delivers no tension.  We're told the world will end, we're told approximately how, and then we watch those events unfold, with all the subtlety and surprise of an executioner's axe falling.  You can respond to that in one of two ways, I suppose, and I'm not about to say my reaction was altogether wrong the first time; X is thoroughly brutal and that brutality isn't pleasant to experience.  Yet it's also far from straightforward: one thing I apparently failed to note, for example, was how neither side of the conflict that's set to annihilate Tokyo and then the world are categorically wrong, or even categorically bad people.  Oh, perhaps they're a bit too eager to follow absolute ideologies, but then they're not the ones setting the rules.  And from that perspective, X is rather fascinating, and intelligent as well.  It has a lot to say, most of which I apparently missed or ignored.

Heck, I even don't dislike the CLAMP look of big eyes and pointy chins anymore!  In fact, I found the character designs as impressive as the rest of the visuals.  Oh, and how did I not mention the soundtrack?  It's extraordinary, and as Rintaro notes in the interview provided on the disk, it's the beating heart by which he paces every other aspect of his movie.  X is a tough watch by any measure, but what I realised coming back to it is that it's not violent and nihilistic for the mere sake of being so, and it offers a host of compensating pleasures.  The day it gets a proper release it will become indispensable; for the moment, I'm only promoting it to highly watch-worthy.

Armitage III, 1995, dir: Hiroyuki Ochi

I'd very little bad to say about the movie Armitage III: Polymatrix, which I reviewed way, way back in December of 2015.  As cut-down film versions of anime adaptations go, it's startlingly respectful and successful, and the presence of two genuine stars in the lead roles does it little harm.  (In the first draft of this review, I quipped, "even when one of them is Elizabeth Berkley" at this point, but you know what, I genuinely like Berkley's take on Armitage.  And she's great in Showgirls too, so there!)  Nevertheless, I did note back then that "...another half hour, a bit more time for the story and relationships to cook, and we might really be looking at a classic."  And ever since, that prospect nagged at me: I'd returned to Polymatrix a couple of times since, and grown awfully fond of it, but I always ended up with that same sense of being ever-so-slightly short changed.

What do you know?  I was right.  Well, not about everything; I overestimated how much cut material there was, for a start: ignoring the credits, it's probably not even quite that half hour.  But what there is makes a heck of a difference, albeit a subtle one, if that makes any sense.  Put simply, it turns what's very much an action movie into far more of a science-fiction mystery, and an absorbing one at that, even for the viewer who thought they knew the story backwards and forwards.  In its OVA incarnation, Armitage III is notably more plot-driven, and indeed surprisingly action-light; this, by the way, is no bad thing, given that the action's as good as it is.  In fact, the moments of violence are a good deal more impactful for the otherwise slower tone, not to mention the greater investment in characterisation.  And, as someone who'll always prefer a sub over a dub, it's great to hear the original Japanese performances.  Hiroko Kasahara, in particular, is a subtler, less emotive Armitage, and for all that I don't want to knock Berkley's interpretation, that restraint does benefit the character considerably.

Elsewhere, everything is precisely as good as it was in Polymatrix - only, again, with less emphasis on pace and more room in which to absorb the outstanding soundtrack and superlative design work.  I don't know that I'd entirely appreciated how gorgeous the background art in Armitage III is, or how wonderfully realised its futuristic Mars setting; there's a sense that's rare, in anime or elsewhere, of a place that might actually fit together and have been built by human beings for a genuine purpose.  It's a stunning world, a visual treat but also rich in depth and history.  Along with some of my favourite character designs anywhere in anime, and the strong writing, and the excellent performances, it's enough to make a somewhat pulpy science-fiction tale into a work of real heft and heart.

Which is still not to say it's a classic in the way that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a classic: Ochi has an excellent handle on his material, but he's no Oshii, despite having such distractingly similar names that I wish I'd picked a different film to compare with.  It's merely an excellent bit of science-fiction anime, and in the higher echelons of what the decade would produce.  (Oh, and for my money, a vastly better sequel to Blade Runner than the one it actually got, and which is founded on exactly the same conceit that Armitage III covered more authoritatively two decades earlier!)  Nevertheless, I'd urge anyone with the vaguest interest in the genre to track down a copy.  Watch Polymatrix if you have to, since it's infinitely easier to get hold of, but if you can find it, the OVA is comfortably the superior version.

Metal Skin Panic Madox-01, 1987, dir: Shinji Aramaki

To some extent, Madox-01 is here as yet another of that wealth of titles I covered when they were only available in unsatisfactory editions and failed to imagine how good they might be if only their distributors hadn't let them down.  That certainly couldn't be truer here: Madox-01 in its original Japanese and in a high-definition print is a world away from what Manga dropped out long ago as part of their budget Collection range.  But that's not the whole of the truth, because, whatever you do with it, Shinji Aramaki's directorial debut remains something a bit special, and in suggesting the precise opposite on my first go around, I thoroughly missed the mark.

Perhaps, though, you need to be something of a hardened vintage anime fan to really get the best out of a title that feels very much as though it was made both by and for that particular demographic.  It is, to be clear, a perfectly fine short science-fiction film, and that's not nothing: indeed, every time I watch it, I'm a little more impressed by the extreme economy with which Aramaki and co tell a complete tale with a beginning, middle, and end and some moderately developed characters and what feels like about half a dozen big action set pieces and somehow cram the lot into 42 minutes counting credits.  But still, come for the story and you may find yourself feeling mildly let down, as I did on my first encounter: it is, after all, quite a silly one, and if there's one thing you definitely can't accomplish in 42 minutes, it's making the notion of a teenager accidentally trapping himself in a suit of experimental robot armour and using it to track down his girlfriend before she vanishes off to live abroad seem more plausible.

Mind you, I doubt any number of minutes could have truly sold that concept, and I doubt, too, that plausibility was high on anyone's list of priorities.  No, what I suspect was in the forefront of everyone's minds was coming up with a unique, cool-looking mechanical design and chucking it into plentiful battles, and that Madox-01 does with great aplomb.  The narrative machinations needed to get us there may not be terribly believable, but the Madox itself certainly is, as much so as any comparable design that's ever come out of anime.  And if you're of a certain inclination - which is to say, if you're a big old nerd for meticulously thought-through mecha designs - then it's a joy to behold, the more so since Aramaki himself is evidently nerding out as much as any viewer possibly could and wants us to see as much of his cool robot suit as possible, doing as many cool things as possible.

Madox-01, then, is a title that does one thing extremely well - two if you choose to separate out the mechanical designs and the action sequences they're flung about in - and while that wasn't enough for me way back when, especially with Manga's dub working to distract me from those virtues, it more or less is now.  Actually, watching in the original Japanese perhaps did more to change my opinion than the uplift to Blu-ray: Madox-01 got one of Manga's less bad dubs, but its great mistake is to make the comedy the core of the thing, where the Japanese cast are content to play the straight scenes straight and not worry about a spot of tonal whiplash, meaning that, for example, we get a much more compelling villain who actually feels like a meaningful threat.  But what I started to say is that, if you're to enjoy Madox-01, you really do need to be there for the robot action, because everything around that is merely good.  Nonetheless, now that AnimEigo have gifted us with a shiny Blu-ray, I'd certainly err towards saying give it a chance regardless: it's no masterpiece for the ages, but Madox-01 has earned its place in anime history, and there aren't too many movies of a comparable length I'd rank above it.

-oOo-

This was probably a bad idea - in that I'm already wondering what else I desperately need to revisit! - and yet I'm glad I got to set the record straight in more public fashion than my usual sneaky tweaking of the scores page that probably no-one ever looks at.  These reviews have never been meant to be anything but wildly subjective, but still, there's wrong and there's completely, stupidly wrong, and I definitely strayed towards that latter with a couple of the titles here.  Now, let's just hope I got it more or less right this time, eh?  I really don't want to have to do this again in another few years...



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* Which, sadly, is now out of print and pretty rare in its own right.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 139

Whoever would have imagined there could be enough sexy anime left to cover for another sexy anime special?  Wait, no, that's actually the least surprising thing imaginable, isn't it?  After all, sex and violence were pretty much the bread and butter of vintage anime - though I wouldn't want to have to say which was which in that analogy.  And ultimately it's probably not worth worrying about, not when we've got quite the interesting selection this time around, with four titles that come at the topic via distinctly different angles, in the shape of Hanappe Bazooka, Weather Report Girl, My My Mai, and The Sensualist...

Hanappe Bazooka, 1992, dir: Yoyu Ikegami

For all that his work thrives on pushing the limits of morality and taste, to call author Go Nagai a provocateur is probably giving more credit than he deserves - so let's go instead with button-pusher.  And Hanappe Bazooka finds him in a very button-pushy mood indeed, as a brief plot summary should illustrate: the titular Hanappe, a born loser who responds to his daily bullying by peeing himself and running away, inadvertently summons demons while masturbating to a pornographic video he's stolen, and said demons, once they're through seducing his parents and sister with untold wealth and some good, old-fashioned demon sex, grant him the power of a magical finger that allows him to destroy at will and force any woman to do his bidding.  You can probably imagine by this point what Hanappe's bidding involves.

I don't mind a bit of provocation, but having my buttons pushed is usually a sure way to wind me up.  The former can be a means to make us question our assumptions or step out of our comfort zones; the latter is a cheap bid to shock for the shake of being shocking, and that's not even hard to do, since as long as you know where the boundaries lie, all it takes to overstep them is the confidence you'll get away with it.  And so, in theory, I'm no fan of Go Nagai.  Yet, to my mild irritation, I find myself liking the adaptations of his work more often than not, and here with are with Hanappe Bazooka, 45 minutes of the most obvious shock tactics imaginable, and I honestly kind of loved it.

Self-awareness, I think, is what makes all the difference.  Well, that and some rather impressive animation, that being one of the surest ways to get the best out of adapting Nagai's oeuvre.  Good animation can inject a bit of nuance that's not necessarily there in the script, or sell a gag that could easily fall flat, or make us warm up to characters who are basically horrible, and all of that's the case here, with the two demons that Hanappe finds himself saddled with - the marvellously named Mephisto Dance and Ophisto Bazooka - being clear highlights.  Much of what they get up to is objectively horrifying, yet Ikegami and crew keep them bound to a delicate line between nightmarish incarnations of gleeful evil and cartoonish buffoons, while also somehow making them kind of sexy when that's what the plot requires, as it frequently does given that Hanappe's family are more than pleased with the prospect of finding themselves the centrepieces of a demonic harem.

That's quite the needle to thread, but Hanappe Bazooka manages it, finding laughs in the most awful places, and somehow even conjuring up something of a redemption arc for the patently irredeemable Hanappe.  When, in its last quarter, we're expected to buy a drift towards seriousness and register Hanappe as an actual human being, it feels more like yet another leg pull than a genuine lack of tonal consistency, and that brings us back to the self-awareness: it's the difference between someone trying to shock or finagle us and someone openly admitting they're messing with us, and look, this is how we're going about it - boy, you never thought we'd go there, huh?  We're in on the joke, and wherever the material heads, the goal is always for us to have fun, even if it's the sort of fun that comes from giggling at absurd displays of debauchery.

Now, I appreciate that many people aren't ever going to chuckle at scenes of a middle-aged couple having outlandish sex with enormous cartoon demons, and that those people are almost certainly more in the right than I am on this one, the more so since this belongs to a breed of cheerfully tasteless anime that had been rendered largely extinct by the end of the last century.  Heck, I suspect that, from distributor ADV's perspective, it didn't last even that long: at the point Hanappe Bazooka was released on VHS, you could presumably get away with this sort of thing, whereas a DVD a year or two later might have whipped up a degree of outrage wholly out of proportion to so trivial a title.  But that's as may be; personally, all I ask of a nineties comedy OVA, even one so depraved as this, is that it looks great and makes me laugh, and Hanappe Bazooka manages both of those with aplomb.

Weather Report Girl, 1994, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

Weather Report Girl, it turns out, is the hybrid of Network and Showgirls that I never knew I needed.  From the former it borrows the basic concept of a struggling TV show exploiting an anchor's eccentric, damaged behaviour to boost their ratings, while from the latter it takes a female protagonist who's altogether happy to treat her body as a tool with which to gain the success she craves and to trounce any woman who dares compete with her - oh, and lots of boobs and cattiness and general depravity.  And it shares with both an absolute black-heartedness and a mercilessly dark sense of humour, though, this being nineties anime, that doesn't mean we can't have the odd thoroughly silly joke too.

We can safely assume Showgirls wasn't actually an influence, since it released a year later, and though Network seems more plausible, Weather Report Girl being a fairly obscure, hentai-adjacent title from three decades ago, I doubt very much I'd ever be able to find out.  Still, the similarities are more than superficial on both fronts, and even if this was just a case of parallel evolution, the intent is much the same: to point accusing fingers at a media that's always hunting for new lows to sink to in search of the slightest bump in viewing figures and then to point out that they only get away with it because that's precisely what people want from them.

At the heart of this particular media storm is our antihero Keiko Nakadai, a raging monster of ego seemingly without any capacity to think of anyone but herself, but with a great body, precisely the combination of characteristics she needs to seize on the big break of a shot at being Channel ATV's stand-in weather girl.  And seize on it Keiko does, finding a tenuous excuse to show her pants to the viewing public, a stunt that almost gets her fired until the execs notice how their ratings have shot up.  From there, there's no stopping Keiko, and certainly the former incumbent of the job she's just stolen doesn't stand much of a chance, no matter how underhanded her tactics.  She's quick to learn a lesson that the execs take a while longer over: Keiko is an uncontrollable force of nature on nobody's side but her own, and now that she's got a taste of the big time, nothing and no-one will stand in her way.  Which might suggest we ought not to be on her side either, but like all great movie psychos, Keiko is awfully fun to watch, in precisely the sort of car-crash-entertainment manner the show is mocking us for enjoying.  It's not so much that we want her to succeed, or even that we don't sympathise with the poor souls who get trampled along her road to success, but her antics are so unpredictable and so gloriously lacking in restraint, taste, or decency that it's impossible not to want to see what she'll get up to next.

In keeping with its protagonist, Weather Report Girl manages the feat of being simultaneously well made and kind of unpleasant to experience, especially when it comes to the character designs.  It affects the women more than the men, who are mostly just bland, as though the designers were no more interested in them than the female cast are - it's startling, incidentally, how little time the show has for even the possibility of heterosexual relationships! - while they, and Keiko in particular, are offputtingly angular and freakishly wide-eyed.  That may seem a strange choice for an anime that makes a show of selling itself on sex appeal, but it works well for the satire, leaving no doubt whatsoever over which of Keiko's attributes are sending those ratings sky high.  And even when it's not exactly pleasing to look at, it's always visually interesting, as you might expect from director Kunihiko Yuyama, who built himself quite the CV throughout the eighties and nineties before he sold his soul to the dark gods of Pokémon.  Possibly that makes Weather Report Girl a title he'd quite like to forget he ever had a hand in, grubby and disreputable and mean-spirited as it is, but sometimes grubby, mean entertainment is precisely what the doctor ordered, and this crams quite the dose into its brisk ninety minutes.

My My Mai, 1993, dir's: Osamu Sekita, Hiromichi Matano, Nanako Shimazaki

My My Mai brings us to a couple of landmarks: I'm reasonably sure it's the last U.S. Manga Corps DVD release we'll be covering here, and that also makes it the last of their nervous attempts to introduce some slightly hentai titles into the US market, a bold move surely destined to fall flat given that a) America and Japan have exceedingly different attitudes towards sex and b) none of what they licensed was terribly good.  Which isn't to say I haven't enjoyed some of them, if only for the excuse to comment on the distributor's amusing attempts to toe a line they were clearly making up as they went along, selling titles on their sexiness while steadfastly pretending they weren't so sexy as all that.

My My Mai falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, in that sometimes it's awfully obsessed with sex and sometimes, even for fairly long stretches, it's content to be a silly comedy with an exaggeratedly buxom heroine who's not great at keeping her clothes on.  The concept, certainly, is suited to going either way: Mai is an all-purpose problem solver of sorts, and since she's apparently not old enough to vote and her primary assets seem to be of a physical nature, it's often the case that problems get solved with a spot of disrobing.  The packaging seems to think she's a counsellor of sorts, but I'd be willing to bet that any psychiatry qualifications she has were bought on the internet, and it's puzzling that her services are so in demand that clients seek her out by name.  All of which is to say that, even by the standards of mid-90s anime sex comedies, My My Mai doesn't make a ton of sense, and since it doesn't care much about its own setup and largely ditches it for much of the second episode, that only becomes truer as it goes on.

Still, let's meet Mai halfway and agree that, yes, she's a counsellor who just happens to do most of her counselling in her underwear, for all that the first story - there are four, split across two episodes of 40 or so minutes - takes pains to make clear that she's a good girl who certainly wouldn't work in a hostess bar unless she got shanghaied into doing so.  This happens, incidentally, because she's trying to track down a mysterious rogue doctor, and it's only when said doctor turns out to be a client of said club, and then turns out to have a multiple personality disorder that makes him turn into a monster, that My My Mai begins to show its true colours - which is to say, this is one strange, silly show, and equally as interested in being strange and silly as it is in getting Mai out of her clothes at every opportunity.

Perhaps that explains the look of the thing, which is about as sexy as an algebra exam.  It leans hard into grotesquery, and while Mai gets off fairly lightly compared with some of the cast, that's not to say there's much about her design that's actively pleasant.  Even if that weren't the case, the animation is mediocre enough to suck most of the energy from any scenes that are meant to be titillating, and it's hard to imagine the viewer so starved of stimulation that they'd come to My My Mai for that reason.  

This is a problem for the first episode, which struggles to take the nonsensical setup somewhat seriously and can't get the balance of tones right and ends up being weird in ways more off-putting than fun.  But by episode two, there's evidently been something of a behind-the-scenes reshuffle, and while Mai is still nominally in the sexy counselling business, it doesn't matter much.  Of the two tales there, the first, picking up on a trivial thread from episode one and running with it in preposterous directions, is most entertaining, but the second, a haunted house story of sorts that gets increasingly demented as it goes along, isn't far behind.  Both are still quite ugly, but the ugliness is at least in tune with the material, and all in all there's quite a good time to be had.  Who knows, perhaps if we'd got a third episode, that would have been something genuinely special?  Yet in its absence, we're left with a puzzling little curio that's just about odd enough to be worth a look if oddness is your thing, but nothing more than that.

The Sensualist, 1991, dir: Yukio Abe

Truly, I take no pleasure in recommending titles that are unreasonably difficult to get hold of.  In my perfect world, all anime would be available to everyone whenever they liked, the creators would be getting properly recompensed each time, everything would be sunshine and rainbows, and we certainly wouldn't ever have to deal with anything as appallingly hard to find as The Sensualist.  We've been mostly discussing for a while now stuff that never got past a VHS and perhaps a laserdisc release, with the luckier cases curated by those copyright-neglecting folks at YouTube.  But The Sensualist blows that out of the water: not only was it exclusive to videotape, it was exclusive to British videotape, and then only from the wildly obscure and short-lived Western Connection, whose dodgy handful of releases were routinely shamed by the average fansub.  And this absolutely sucks, because it's wonderful, and if its visuals are dazzling on a scruffy, badly produced video print, it's painful to imagine how they'd look on Blu-ray.

An impossibility, surely; The Sensualist is almost entirely forgotten these days, and it's highly unlikely there's a single decent print left out there, the more so since you can't even get hold of it in its native Japan.  And of all the injustices we've encountered here in our long trawl through vintage anime, that's one of the more anguishing, because a world that remembered The Sensualist had been made, and that, yes, artsy, sexy, trashy, gorgeous, hypnotically paced adaptations of historical novels are a perfectly valid thing for animation to be doing, would be a better one than ours.  As it is, this feels like something that dropped in from another reality, one in which the boundaries of anime were much broader, its assumptions about what an adult audience might be prepared to digest much less constrictive.

The historical novel in question is Saikaku Ihara's Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko, which documents the sexual escapades of its hero, Yonosuke, from young childhood to old age.  The Sensualist, wisely, doesn't try and cram all of that into a 55-minute runtime, opting instead to focus on a particular incident with an older Yonosuke assisting a dim-witted friend who's gambled a particularly precious asset on the possibility of bedding a prostitute so high class that, without Yonosuke's intervention, she wouldn't so much as speak to him.  But twining around this, we have a loose overview of Yonosuke's life, conveyed in blocks of text and often abstract scenes, frequently but not always involving human bodies and their interactions, along with images of nature and sometimes of nothing much at all, though there's always just enough cohesion to remind us that, whatever else is going on, this a tale primarily about sex.

I said that The Sensualist seems like the product of another reality, and if that's partly due to the subject matter, it's as much down to the animation, which feels like a simulation of what might have happened had anime blossomed in a Japan that had never experienced industrialisation or Westernisation and had somehow carried the sensibilities of Edo art intact into the modern era.  Since we're already dealing with feature-quality animation helmed by a director more familiar with being an art director, The Sensualist was always going to look nice, though by the usual metrics of frame rate and such, we're some way off the top tier.  But as a florid, dizzying reproduction of another age through its own art and sensibilities, there's simply nothing like it.  The imagery is routinely exquisite, not to mention imaginative almost to the point of obtuseness - there's a particularly memorable shot that gets terribly caught up in geometry for no obvious reason but to great effect - and Keiju Ishikawa's score is almost better, if that's possible, doing its own bit to first reproduce the artistry of a long-bygone age and then ever-so-steadily merging it into the present.

To what end?  Well, there we come the tiniest bit unstuck, in that, if you tried to convince me The Sensualist is nothing but exorbitantly pretty soft pornography, I don't know that I could talk you round.  It's neat that Abe and his team manage to make their material feel contemporaneous without even slightly sacrificing its historicity, but it doesn't actually do much to elevate a narrative that's fun, funny, erotic, and shaded with a touch of darkness (since we're introduced to a Yonosuke who's well past his prime and hardly glad about the fact) but not in and of itself up to anything very sophisticated.  But then, perhaps that's the point: The Sensualist, for all its gorgeousness, for all the superficial glamour of the culture it reproduces, isn't about sophistication, it's about sex, and the many and varied joys of that extreme intimacy, and if it's sometimes a bit overly blunt in getting there, nevertheless you're unlikely to see a more lovely, entrancing, and convincing take on that particular topic.

-oOo-

I'm going to miss these sexy anime specials - which isn't to suggest we're all done with sexy anime, only that the odds of getting four such titles together in the eleven posts we have left seem rather slender.  All joking aside, I do think there's often something fascinating about them, since sex is a topic that's at once as universal as anything can be and culturally specific in ways that are often not immediately obvious.  It's evident by now that throughout the nineties, certain corners of the industry were experimenting with what they could - and should - get away with, and to what ends, while half a world away, the US market was asking the same questions while also struggling to adapt them to an audience with very different views and tolerances, and I for one find that all quite fascinating.

As this post illustrates, that's not to say the results were always, or often, works of great meaning and genius, but they were routinely good entertainment.  And that just occasionally a work like The Sensualist would slip through makes it awfully sad that by the twenty-first century, everyone had mostly concluded that the way to mix sex into their anime was with intrusive, objectifying "fan service" that was as much a genuine way of engaging with the topic as the average action movie is a searing examination of the psychological consequences of violence.  Sexy nineties anime, for all your many and varied failings, you made the world a more interesting place, and I for one will mourn your passing.

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]