I'm emphatically not going to make a habit of reviewing series here, but I am very bad at saying no to people, and especially when those people have done considerably more to bring readers to this blog that I practically go out of my way not to promote than I ever have. So when Winston Jackson asked me nicely to cover the first two seasons of the Slayers TV show, I foolishly committed to twenty hours of watching, something I justified to myself on the grounds that I still had the two OVA sets to cover, and I'm a sucker for a theme post. And so here we are with Slayers: Book of Spells, Slayers: Excellent, The Slayers, and Slayers: Next...
Slayers: Book of Spells, 1996 - 1997, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe
It's early days, of course, but if there's better Slayers out there than the three OVA episodes contained here, I'm going to be very surprised indeed, because it's an absolutely stonking collection. And already I'm struggling to pin down quite why that is and wondering if I've maybe just been away from the franchise for too long and nostalgia's kicking in, because, after all, there's nothing terribly new here. In the first episode, a mad sorcerer tries to persuade Lina to be part of the monstrous chimera he has his heart set on and along the way creates a battalion of Naga the Serpent clones; in the second, the pair are tasked with training up a weedy young lord by his exceedingly overprotective mother; and in the third, they set out to retrieve a magic mirror with the power of creating a physically identical but temperamentally opposite duplicate of whoever appears in it, and guess which pair of magic-flinging heroines are going to be its first victims?
Set out like that, there's even a bit of crossover between the first and third episodes, and those two are definitely the strongest; the middle one gets a little bogged down reprising the same gag, though it's a perfectly fine gag. But you'd think that, with a bunch of Naga clones in one episode and a magical duplicate not an hour later, a certain sense of repetition might creep in, and that the similarity barely registers while you're watching is a testament to how much these ninety minutes of Slayers goodness are firing on all cylinders. I had a lot of time for the films, even the films that weren't altogether great, but most of them felt a touch stretched. Thirty minutes, on the other hand, turns out to be the perfect delivery mechanism for this stuff, with the extra room over TV episode length letting the stories develop in slightly weirder, twistier ways and jokes to be built up with more loving care. And what jokes! Even when they're obvious - pity the viewer who doesn't hear about that magical mirror and immediately guess where things are heading - the way they play out is downright flawless.
There are a bunch of reasons for that, and I don't want to downplay what excellent work series regular Watanabe is up to on the direction front or how extremely solid the writing is, but Slayers: Book of Spells is a heck of an example of how top-quality animation can sell a gag for maximum effect. These OVAs look remarkably good for what they are, with a level of complexity and detail that feels like overkill for some goofy fantasy comedy, except that there are times when having the budget to do a joke real justice is completely game-changing. Take the first episode and the mob of Naga the Serpents: the extra budget lets Watanabe push the absurdity levels up as far as they'll go, and there's a particularly splendid sequence that goes on for quite some time, one that feels like showing off at the same time as it gets funnier purely by virtue of refusing to end. Plus, even when it's not benefiting the humour, the artistry makes Slayers: Book of Spells a joy to be around, meaning that the jokes aren't stuck doing all the heavy lifting. The same goes for a fine soundtrack, and the last episode actually puts itself on hold a couple of times just to let tracks play out, which would be annoying if they weren't such catchy tracks. Really, there's nothing to complain about here, and a high point for Slayers is a high point for comedy fantasy in general; I'd be hard pressed to think of anywhere I've seen that subgenre done better.
The worst thing I have to say about Slayers: Excellent is that it's not quite so across-the-board strong as Slayers: Book of Spells, and I think that comes down more or less entirely to production values. Book of Spells felt like an OVA, in that indefinable way that suggests everyone was shooting a mite higher than they could reasonably have done for even a top-tier TV episode, whereas Excellent never quite hits that same level. I mean, it obviously is an OVA, because the episodes run to thirty minutes and the animation is undoubtedly a notch above what the average TV show would have been capable of in 1998. Though even that's ever-so-slightly damning praise; it's fair to propose that 1998 wasn't so good a year for anime budgets as 1996 was, and the whole project just feels that little bit cheaper.
But that's a trivial concern when all's said and done, and the more so if you're not the kind of person who fusses over lavish animation, in that the batting average for good Slayers stories here is comfortably on a par with and perhaps a fraction above what Book of Spells had to offer. And in one way at least, it has more of an OVA vibe: whereas BoS was content to offer up a trio of standalone tales that could, with a spot of trimming, have fit comfortably into a TV show, Excellent presents something more significant, in the shape of the very first meeting of bickering frenemy sorceresses Lina Inverse and Naga the Serpent, and in so doing provides a thread to tie its three episodes loosely together.
Granted, that seems like more of a big deal than it ends up amounting to, since Lina and Naga's first meeting, entertaining as it undoubtedly is, merely serves as a jumping-off point for an adventure that could as easily have been set later in the befuddling Slayers continuity. The benefit is more that we get a slightly new slant on a relationship that by this point had already been explored extensively and perhaps had few places left to go: seeing Lina getting exasperated with Naga's eccentricities for the first time has a definite charm, and meeting Naga - one of my favourite characters across all of anime - afresh is definitely a delight. Indeed, the focus is generally skewed toward Naga this time around, and that's no bad thing, whichever character you happen to prefer, in that not even the most devoted fan could argue there's a lack of Lina Inverse across a franchise where she's the one consistent element.
Ultimately, all a three episode Slayers OVA has to do is offer up three really good Slayers episodes, and Excellent pulls that off comfortably. The first, which flings the pair together and then sets them both up against a vampire, and the second, which sees Lina serving as bodyguard for a wealthy merchant's daughter who's constantly reminding her of Naga, are definitely the strongest, with the third falling back on the by this point rather too tried-and-tested trope of placing the two on opposite sides of a conflict, though "battling seamstresses" is at least a novel angle. Regardless, what all three get right is what Slayers is best at, taking a relatively straightforward-seeming fantasy concept and then cranking it up and swerving it askew until what you're left with is something hilariously unpredictable, and that's enough for Excellent to largely live up to its name.
With the films and OVAs behind me, two things about this first season of the Slayers TV series took me by surprise, and neither in a good way.
The first really oughtn't to have: obviously a TV show wasn't going to have a film or OVA budget and so, equally obviously, it was going to look cheap by comparison. But quite this cheap? The Slayers does pick up to a degree as it goes along, but its early episodes are rather shabby even by the standards of televised anime in 1995, with no end of obvious cost-cutting and a general feeling of being rushed and small-scale. It's not the biggest of deals, and there are some compensations, in the shape of a nice, watercolour-esque aesthetic and some expectedly appealing character designs. Yet, all things being equal, this isn't a show where the visuals are much of an asset.
The second surprise was a nastier one: The Slayers has a plot. Obviously, it's not altogether true to suggest that the films and OVAs didn't have plots, but they certainly didn't have ones that dragged on for 26 episodes, and even when they ran to, say, the length of a feature film, they were made up more of silly digressions than what we traditionally think of as story. Truth be told, it simply hadn't occurred to me that a Slayers property would think to do otherwise. I'd assumed the TV series would consist of one-and-done adventures or, at most, short arcs that allowed for plenty of diversions along the way. So that The Slayers, for the most part, settles down to the telling of a single tale that occupies some nine or so hours of screen time was something I was wholly unprepared for.
I suspect that would always have been a problem, given that finding the balance between committing to a core narrative and dabbling around the edges was almost always something anime struggled with throughout the nineties. However, there are ways it could have gone much better than this, and the reason is entirely straightforward: the story is neither interesting nor well told. It's the most boilerplate swords and sorcery fare imaginable, and even that would be fine if The Slayers was more than casually interested in pointing out how silly the clichés it trades in are. There's a bit of that - this is still Slayers, after all - but what we see far more of is the plot and comedy standing at odds to each other with very little interconnection. There are whole episodes that pass with barely a joke, and what we get instead is a lot of deeply average fantasy fare revolving around a hackneyed big bad with predictable villain goals, and a good deal of action, this being where the limits of the animation make themselves most distressingly evident.
If that were all there was to The Slayers, this would certainly have ended up being the negative review it's surely looked like until now. Thank goodness, then, for a middle section that does manage to largely bin the main plot in favour of goofing off and making dumb jokes and generally being comedy-fantasy rather than a fantasy show that occasionally jams the brakes on for a quip or reaction shot. And that aside, the main reason those better episodes work is that they focus on The Slayers' core strength: even when it's being somewhat dull, it's doing so with better-than-average characters. Not as much as I'd have hoped, I admit: the supporting cast largely merge into a blob of similar roles and abilities and comic functions and only rarely get the chance to shine. But Lina Inverse is one of anime's finest protagonists, and the dumb-as-pencil-shavings Gourry, our other main lead, makes for a satisfying foil. With the pair of them at its heart, The Slayers manages to stay mostly fun and always likeable, and that in turn saves some of its more humourless patches from becoming a chore. I'd hoped for much better, but if you're happy with a Slayers entry that puts its fantasy ahead of its comedy - and I know many people even prefer it that way - then there's a tolerable diversion to be had here.
I can't prove that the makers of Slayers NEXT travelled in time, read my review of the first season, and went out of their way to fix all their previous mistakes this second time around, but it surely does seem like quite the coincidence given how precisely this evolves in all the ways I'd have hoped it would. Although, thinking about it, you'd imagine they'd have gone back a little further and sorted the issues with the first season too, or possibly bought a bunch of shares in Facebook and become billionaires, or something, and okay, maybe it's actually a coincidence given that my complaints were fairly obvious ones, but nevertheless, it's always nice to feel your grumbling has been taken on board.
Most obviously, this is a matter of animation that, while nothing stellar in the grand scheme of things, is a considerable step up and thus finally working in service of the show rather than against it. Partly that means being generally easy on the eyes, and partly it's about action and spectacle that are genuinely exciting, but most important is that the show's visuals are front and centre in selling the humour. This is a huge boon for something that relies so heavily on character-driven gags and reaction shots - though, regarding the latter, never so heavy-handedly as in the first season, where they frequently felt as though the creators had realised minutes had gone by without a joke and they really ought to throw the audience something.
Granted, the humour is still mostly grounded in playing the fantasy setting relatively straight and then pulling the rug out with an acknowledgement of how basically silly this all is, but there's more going on this time around, and the balance is infinitely better. Though again the general drift is away from light-heartedness in the last few episodes, before that point there's much more out-and-out comedy, and even after the plot has shifted to the forefront, there never comes a point where what we get is effectively a straight fantasy show with the occasional wink to camera. Plus, that plot, while still far from ground-breaking, feels considerably more thought through, with some satisfying twists and turns and enough shorter arcs with their own focus that it never seems as though we're slogging towards an inevitable end.
It's also a narrative that does far better by its characters, making everyone distinct and giving us clear reasons to care about them. In theory, I'm unsold on the idea of a developing romance between our two leads, acid-tongued sorceress Lina Inverse and thinking-impaired swordsman Gourry, but the show makes it work, just about, and that's really the weakest element on the story side, while the biggest win is probably Martina's advancement from uninteresting villain to lead comic relief. If everyone besides those three gets slightly shorter shrift, that's not altogether a bad thing: where the first season felt as though it was perpetually expanding its cast to no real purpose, here the tighter focus gives everyone a degree of individuality even when they're not doing anything terribly meaningful.
For all that Slayers NEXT is reliably good, though, and gets better as it goes along, I'd have to concede that there are only a handful of standout episodes or truly memorable moments. But that aside, my only real frustration - barring my doubts over that dubious romantic pairing! - is the extent to which knowledge of the first season is a prerequisite at points, not the wisest move when you've done such a fine job of showing up everything that didn't work in said first season. Yet stacked against those modest failings is the reliable pleasure of hanging out with a bunch of thoroughly likeable characters as they goof around and have ludicrous but still fairly thrilling adventures, and given that that's precisely what I'd ask of a Slayers TV series, I really can't complain too hard.
-oOo-
It saddens me that the one thing here I haven't much nice to say about is the original TV show, which no doubt many people are extremely fond of. And I really was wondering if I hadn't been overly harsh until the second season came along and proved itself to be so obviously better in every meaningful way. Then again, it's worth pointing out before we go that, from what I've seen, there's really no such thing as bad Slayers, and that's a nice note to end on, isn't it?
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