What was that I said last time about trying to avoid exclusively covering obscure VHS-only releases? But while I've failed miserably, we do have a title of note this time around, one of those that frequently comes up in "How the heck did this never get a DVD release?" conversations, so at least we're likely to get one hit from among Explorer Woman Ray, Grey: Digital Target, DNA Sights 999.9, and The Adventures of Kotetsu...
Everything that works in Explorer Woman Ray, and everything that doesn't - which is considerably more - is present from its opening prologue. Before we're introduced to our titular explorer woman, we meet two teenaged girls, Mai and Mami Tachibana, out on what looks to be a pleasant train journey through some vaguely South American country. But, shock! Barely have we had time to get our bearings before the seeming peasants in a passing truck are whipping out automatic weapons, leaving the twins to fight for their lives in an action sequence that's fun and ingenious, but so much less so than it ought to be because the animation is horribly wonky, and which makes little sense in retrospect given that there'll be endless scenes later where the baddies are careful not to shoot at the pair because their goal is to steal the artefact they're carrying.
So lots of action, then, and most of it perfectly fine on paper, and almost all of it undermined by animation so frequently bad that it feels genuinely unfinished, along with a plot that's full of nagging inconsistencies and gaping plot holes. Where do we go with all that? I could outline a bit more of the story, but Explorer Woman Ray doesn't care about it, so there's no reason we should. It's connective tissue for the action scenes, which isn't a problem in itself, except that we really do need something to hang onto, and the only cast members with anything close to a clear motivation are Mai and Mami, who want to get rich and then grudgingly decide to side with nominal hero Ray.
I say "nominal" because the twins get more screen time and because I'm honestly unsure what Ray is out to accomplish or whether she's in the right. The show gets a couple of relatively sympathetic bad guys, who aren't above killing people to meet their goals but would rather avoid doing so if they can, and all we see of what drives Ray is that she wants to stop them, but it's difficult to tell from the onscreen evidence whether the villainous Rig Veda's villainous plan is actually all that villainous. He wants to reawaken the technologies of an ancient race, but who knows, maybe that's a good thing? The first temple that gets destroyed (like all fictional archaeologists, Ray is dire at keeping ancient structures from being destroyed) makes it rain, and, annoying as it can sometimes be, rain isn't inherently evil.
All of which is to say that the plot is dumb and broken; but I could spend half a day reeling off good vintage anime titles with dumb, broken plots, and the thing that unifies almost all of them is how they aren't actively annoying to look at. There are moments in Explorer Woman Ray that work visually - someone clearly put their heart into some of the water shots - but they never last for more than a few frames, then things fall apart again. Sometimes that means an absence of shading, and routinely it means a lack of inbetweening, but most often it's that the characters drift so off-model that you start wondering if there were models or if the animators were getting instructions like, "Remember the woman with the dark hair? Draw her." Weirdly, the villains fare slightly better, whereas Ray hardly looks the same in two consecutive scenes and the twins are nearly as bad. And of course none of those problems are mutually exclusive, so we get a ton of scenes where everything goes wrong all at once.
I don't know that all this makes Explorer Woman Ray bad, exactly. Or, no, I do know that, but it's relatively easy to discern a version of this material that could have worked better, and we get enough glimpses that it's hard to hate what we ended up with. Whatever its failings, it's bursting with energy and its intentions are noble enough: an hour's worth of over-the-top, Indiana Jones-aping action is a fine idea in theory and one that's hard to botch entirely. Explorer Woman Ray isn't the worst conceivable version of itself, and it's evident it was made by people who cared for the material and had some sound ideas: director Hiroki Hayashi would go on to make the wonderful Sol Bianca straight after this, so the man wasn't without talent. But something clearly went very wrong here, and while it's certainly appropriate that watching Explorer Woman Ray feels like digging through the wreckage of an ancient disaster hunting for a little treasure, there's nowhere near enough there to warrant the effort.
All credit to Grey: Digital Target, it has a story to tell and has put considerable thought into how to tell it, and it's a story worthy of the investment, one that feels, especially in the early going, as though it might be something really special. Grey doesn't quite get there, mainly because the more answers we get, the more familiar its sci-fi tropes start to become, but it does enough that even once we can see the proper shape of where everything's heading, it's hard to feel too disappointed.
That's mostly because the world-building is terrific all the way through, achieving the thing that science fiction rarely pulls off or even seems to realise it ought to be aiming for of presenting us with a reality that feels fundamentally not our own and so keeping us always a little off-kilter, as though we're tourists in a foreign country frantically trying to catch up enough to not embarrass ourselves. Grey gets to this in a couple of ways, and one of them is admittedly terrible in theory. There are a lot of unfamiliar nouns flung about, for places, things, and concepts, and while most of them can be figured out with a bit of thought, we're never really specifically told their meaning, or anyway not until we really ought to have got there by ourselves. It's perhaps the laziest route to getting that sense of alienation, but here it's used as well as can be, in so much as it never feels as though the writers are bombarding us with all of this terminology; rather, it's coming from the characters themselves, for whom mutual understanding is generally a low priority. And that gets us to the second, much better way in which Grey keeps us at arm's length from its setting, the one that's genuinely impressive: from the beginning, we're thrown in with these characters and given only what information they share among themselves, which isn't much.
The reason all of this matters enough that I've devoted a full paragraph to it is partly that Grey: Digital Target is, more than anything, a mystery, in that the principle goal of its narrative is to keep us guessing as to what's really going on for most of the running time, but partly - and more excitingly - because all of this stuff is essential to how and why it works. As we're introduced to our antihero, Grey, he's walking away from a skirmish that's cost the rest of his squad their lives, and we soon learn that this is a regular enough occurrence that Grey has earned himself a reputation as a grim reaper. He's a consummate killer but a lousy team player, as becomes extremely evident once he's sent back into action with a new squad. But by then, we're already coming up against some bigger questions, like who is he actually fighting, and why does nobody seem terribly concerned about objectives beyond how much killing gets done and how many vehicles get destroyed, and what's all this talk of classes and citizenship, and why does no one appear to care about anything besides that last one when surely the others are way more important?
It's unfortunate that, three and a half decades after its release, the average viewer with more than passing experience of science-fiction will get out in front of Grey well before its end, because the story, the mystery, the steady unravelling of this strange and exceedingly dystopian future, is nearly all the film has going for it. The animation is entirely so-so, the designs are pretty goofy and all over the place (though I suspect that was at least partly intentional, and it does kind of pay off from a narrative perspective) and the action, of which there's a lot, is rarely very exciting, though its extremely blunt approach to violence still packs a punch. Grey: Digital Target is a title I'd love to be able to declare a lost classic, because its goals are admirably lofty, and it's a heck of a shame both that time hasn't been kind to it and that the budget wasn't there to give us the best take on this material. Still, science-fiction films that make a real stab both at telling a fresh tale and doing so in an unfamiliar fashion are rare enough that, if you've any fondness for the genre, it comes awfully close.
DNA Sights 999.9 feels very much as though it starts and ends in the midst of a much bigger story, with major events that might well have been as or more interesting than what we've watched off there to either side. And the tale it does manage to tell is one that our protagonist Tetsuro stumbles through without much agency or thought, being batted around by allies and enemies and his own unearned and unasked for abilities, until everything wraps up with an outrageous deux ex machina and some vague promises of how much excitement lies ahead.
But you know what? I've had a similar reaction to just about every Leiji Matsumoto adaptation I've seen, to the point where I've come to view it as almost more of a feature than a bug. Well, the whole "bigger story" thing anyway; that's definitely a chief characteristic of much of Matsumoto's genre work, and surely a part of why it's so loved, given how excited folks have been known to get about shared universes and suchlike. I'm absolutely not one of those people and I'd much rather my 45-minute OVAs have the decency to provide a beginning, middle, and end, and yet - perhaps because I've got so conditioned to Matsumoto - I couldn't really hold it against DNA Sights 999.9.
In part that's because, whatever's happening from moment to moment, for all that it frequently feels random and unmotivated and needs to be hurriedly followed by a burst of explanation for us to follow along at all, it's generally entertaining and frequently outlandish, as for instance when a bunch of amorphous beings from beneath the Earth's crust abruptly because a major plot element despite us having been given not the slightest indication until then that they existed. But they're a cool concept and - this being the other crucial point - they look pretty great, since the animation is mostly very good indeed, and director Kojima, who'd go on to get some tremendous work on his CV, understands how to make Matsumoto's shtick work in motion. Along with ensuring the spectacle is properly spectacular, he makes the wise choice of letting Matsumoto's goofier character designs hang around in the background while keeping Tetsuro and most of the other core cast members that bit more realistic, enough to anchor the show in some sort of concrete reality without losing any of the innate charm.
Normally, then, this would be an easy recommendation, barring the usual caveats about the difficulties of hunting down a lost, forgotten title that never got as far as a DVD release. And yet I do think - and I'm a little sad to say it about something I thoroughly enjoyed - that DNA Sights 999.9 is for existing Matsumoto fans only, if only because the ending relies so utterly on tangential knowledge of his wider works, and probably even then solely for Matsumoto completists. And if that's you, you've probably, by definition, already seen it; but if you haven't, hey, here's a likeable little slice of Matsumoto fiction wrapped up in cracking production values to round out your not-quite-complete collection.
When you've watched absurd quantities of vintage anime, it's easy to get a bit overly cynical and to come to a title like The Adventures of Kotetsu feeling you've seen it all before, when, in truth, it's not doing anything drastically wrong. Well, it is doing one thing drastically wrong, and that's incessantly showing its 14-year-old female protagonist in various states of undress, and for that matter it's true that there's nothing here that the average viewer well versed in nineties anime won't have come across somewhere else, so maybe I was being just the right amount of cynical, but... Look, let's start over, shall we?
The point I think I was trying to make is that The Adventures of Kotetsu is fine for what it is, accepting that what it is is pretty sleazy and inconsequential and quite obviously a taster of a longer manga. We get, within its two episodes, a sort-of-complete story, in that all of the major conflicts have been resolved and its cast are in meaningfully different places from where they started. Predictably, this is most true of Kotetsu herself, whose actual name is Linn Suzuki and whose nickname comes from the brother, Tetsu, that she arrives in Tokyo from Kyoto in search of and then forgets about for the remainder of the running time. She's also on the run from the ancient witch who's been teaching her the proper use of the demonic sword she's somehow in possession of, and rapidly finds herself roped into the affairs of Tetsu's former employer, detective Miho Kuon, who's got herself into some supernatural bother thanks to the case she's working on, and my goodness does The Adventures of Kotetsu have a lot of flailing plot threads once you stop to think about it.
The Kuon plotline gets wrapped up somewhat, though largely off-screen, and the business with Linn's master / mentor is a major element of the second episode and allows for the semblance of a proper ending, and I guess we can write the whole Tetsu thing off as a way in to the actual narrative, though it feels as if it must have been considerably more important in the manga. But whichever way you shake it, The Adventures of Kotetsu has a lot of plates spinning for what's essentially an excuse for a bunch of fights and bare boobs - the two of which, by the way, are in no way mutually exclusive.
Most of the nudity, as I mentioned, is exceedingly creepy given that Linn is portrayed as a particularly immature 14-year-old. That portrayal fits with the logic of the character, since we're led to believe she's grown up in isolation from the modern world - the show seems to think Kyoto is some sort of time tunnel to ancient Japan - and provides for some laughs, many of which arrive in the dub via Kay Hest's decision to play Linn with a posh English accent that's somehow funny in and of itself; but none of that makes up for how uncomfortable it makes the incessant gawking. Thankfully, the action side of things fares better: Yûji Moriyama, who handled all the first run of Project A-Ko sequels and peaked with Macross Plus, knows his way around this kind of material and injects plenty of energy into what could easily have felt inconsequential and too familiar.
And those, really, are the two poles of The Adventures of Kotetsu: on the one hand, Moriyama has the sense to keep the pace fast and those energy levels high, and the animation, while never actually impressive, is good enough not to hamstring his efforts. But on the other, while it's easy to imagine this developing its own personality with a couple more episodes, especially given how the second makes small strides in that direction, what we actually got brings nothing new to the table and distinguishes itself only by how exceedingly eager it is to show off a mostly naked 14-year-old girl at every opportunity. And ending on a statement like that doesn't leave much room for a recommendation, so I won't try, except to note that if you're in the mood for 45 minutes of hectic, pervy supernatural action comedy, The Adventures of Kotetsu does a satisfactory job of ticking all those boxes.
-oOo-
As you've probably realised by now, or else new all along, Grey: Digital Target was our ringer here, and I can definitely see why there's still a lot of fondness out there for what in many ways would have been a fairly minor science-fiction title at the time: it may not stick its landing or fully nail its execution, but there are some splendid, resonant ideas in there, along with a distinctive vibe that really lodges itself in the memory. And as predicted, it was the only proper recommendation this time around, though I did at least enjoy everything, which is always a win.
