Okay, so it's another all-VHS-only batch, with nothing that anyone except the most hardcore of vintage anime fans would be likely to have heard of, excepting, just possibly, an adaptation of a work by the exceedingly famous Rumiko Takahashi. But so what, I say! Everything's probably up on YouTube, and we've long since established that a few real gems slipped through the DVD net, so there's always reason to be hopeful. And sure enough, there are a couple of treats in this batch, along with probably the single most enjoyable piece of vintage anime I've watched in months - though, as you'll see, enjoyable for absolutely all the wrong reasons!
This time around: Wanna-be's, Junk Boy, Crystal Triangle, and One-Pound Gospel...
There's not a lot of anime set in the world of pro wrestling, so that's one thing Wanna-be's has going for it right off the bat, and given how much time I spend grumbling about how the medium had a tendency to rehash subject matter well beyond the point of reason or good taste, an unusual setting is a definite plus. Granted, Wanna-be's does squander that advantage pretty heavily, as if certain themes were so ingrained into the anime mindset of the era that to leave them out was practically inconceivable, and so we end up with a show about professional wrestlers being secretly trialled on super-soldier drugs by an evil corporation in which the climax involves a deliriously dumb-looking monster that the plot hasn't set up even slightly. But that still leaves us with roughly half the 45-minute running time devoted to a topic that feels quite fresh, and that's more than can be said for the majority of these shorter OVA movies.
Originality, of course, is no guarantee of quality, but in this instance, it does work out that way: Wanna-be's is invariably at its best when it's inside the ring. That's partly because the action is a strength, but it's notable how much less true that is when it involves that aforementioned dumb-looking monster, so it's fair to say that the wrestling is the key ingredient. And I don't know that you even need to like or care about wrestling for that to be the case, given that I've never been much of a fan and, perhaps more so, how little this has to do with the real-world sport. In Wanna-be's, you see, professional wrestling is one hundred percent real, and our heroines just want a fair fight, so that when their antagonists, the Foxy Ladies - who, inevitably, are neither foxy nor very ladylike - cheat constantly and shamelessly, we're meant to find this weird and shocking rather than par for the course. It's a bit of a hurdle to get over if you've seen any wrestling at all, but it proves to be the right approach, since we end up with the best of both worlds: the fights are ridiculously violent and over the top, yet there's still a measure of dramatic tension, since we're expected to believe that our heroines really are being horribly mauled, the more so because the opening sequence is a false start with a different pair of protagonists who end up on the wrong side of the Foxy Ladies and their shenanigans.
So some fun wrestling scenes in a wrestling-themed anime, and that's definitely a win, but the running time and the misjudged monster battle ending mean that we only actually get a couple of them, which is unfortunate given that nothing else works anywhere near as well. Wanna-be's has a fair bit of talent behind it, enough to nudge it into the realms of just-above-average animation-wise, with some appealing Kenichi Sonoda designs for its stars, mechanical designs from the soon-to-be-more-famous Shinji Aramaki, and direction from Yasuo Hasegawa, of Riding Bean and Megazone 23 fame, and all of them make the most of what they have to work with. But what they're working with is an overstuffed script that never finds an organic way of marrying the wrestling stuff with its evil corporation side plot, and instead lets them trundle along next to each other until they're suddenly mashed together in the final third, to the benefit of neither.
Maybe, then, I'm giving Wanna-be's too much credit for dipping into subject matter we don't see much of, in anime or elsewhere, and maybe I'm a sucker for stuff like this - it reminded me of Ayane's High Kick and the Grappler Baki OVA, both of which I liked a fair bit - but I had quite a lot of time for this one. It's daft, energetic, and full of personality, and that remains true all the way through; I can't exaggerate how cheesy and out of place that final monster is, yet I don't know that I'd swap it out if I had the option, because what kind of vintage anime fan would turn their nose up at professional wrestlers battling a boggle-eyed slime monster? Well, a more sensible one than me, obviously, and if that's you then stay clear, but just know that you'll be missing out on a pretty good time.
If you're not wholly sold on Golden Boy, the six-episode series that follows lecherous genius Kintaro through a series of adventures that play out like The Littlest Hobo if the littlest hobo was a sex pest, then, "It's like Golden Boy but with a less likeable protagonist and only 45 minutes long" is unlikely to be much of a pitch. And sure, Junk Boy got there first, but history has no end of duff prototypes that would go on to spawn infinitely better finished articles. At any rate, it's apparently impossible to discuss Junk Boy in any way that isn't a comparison with its near namesake; I couldn't find a single review that made the effort, so I'm certainly not about to try. Nope, Junk Boy is the lousy version of Golden Boy by inarguable consensus, and if you already suspected, as I do, that the first couple of episodes of Golden Boy were the lousy version of that particular setup, there's no obvious reason to be giving this one a chance.
But Drowning in Nineties Anime isn't about doing what's obvious, or sensible, or likely to be of interest to anyone on the planet other than me, it's about reviewing every last bit of nineties and nearly-nineties anime out there for my own weird amusement, and so here we are, with a title that, for once, the consensus has dead to rights. Yes, Junk Boy is Golden Boy but worse in every meaningful way. And yet, I confess, there were a few minutes at the start where I dimly hoped this might prove not to be the case, or at least that Junk Boy was enough of its own thing that the derogatory comparisons were slightly missing the point. Because from the off we're encouraged to sympathise with Kintaro, even if we're unable to condone his pervy antics, whereas Junk Boy spends a good half of its brief running time seeming quite happy for us to regard its protagonist Ryohei Yamazaki with the same revulsion and contempt that everyone in the cast does.
Who can blame them? Ryohei is a completely wretched human being without the slightest hint of self control, who gets his big break on the staff of the nonsensical magazine "Potato Boy" thanks to his unerring ability to get an erection at the slightest provocation, making him the ideal candidate to pick which saucy pictures they ought to publish in what we're led to believe is pretty much the Japanese version of The New Yorker, only with much more porn. This is inordinately dumb, but since we're laughing at Ryohei rather than with him, that doesn't altogether stop it being funny in places, and I was beginning to wonder if I mightn't have stumbled on not Golden Boy's crappy progenitor but its subtle antithesis, a show about a creep that absolutely knows he's a creep and discourages us from showing him the least glimmer of sympathy. Well, Junk Boy sure suckered me, and in so doing - and abruptly positioning Ryohei as a valid love interest for Potato Boy's star reporter - effectively sets itself on fire and runs around screaming for the remaining twenty minutes.
Narratively, then, Junk Boy is mostly irredeemable, but on one point I'll break from the consensus: it looks pretty good, and director Katsuhisa Yamada makes capable use of his medium to keep things visually interesting, even beyond the basic visual interest of lots of scantily clad women and a "hero" with a semi-permanent boner. Making Ryohei an out-and-out cartoon amid a generally quite realistic cast isn't the most outlandishly imaginative of ideas, but it works, and does more than the narrative itself to sell his slender redemption arc, since it's inherently easier to sympathise with someone who begins to look basically human than someone whose mouth takes up half their face. Goodness knows, that's not a reason to watch it, since we've covered dozens upon dozens of works that featured solid, well-directed animation without being actively painful to spend time around for a good portion of their length, but it made it harder to flat-out hate, so there's that.
The thing with movies that are so bad they're good is that they're hard to spot in the moment: either films that are actually just flat-out lousy get awarded a cult status they don't deserve or else the true works of misguided genius are ignored due to their obvious and abundant flaws. And so we come to Crystal Triangle, a title that received no love whatsoever back in the day and vanished without a trace, not being picked up for a DVD release by even the notoriously undiscriminating U. S. Manga Corps. And yet, with the benefit of an awful lot of hindsight, Crystal Triangle is a joy, treating with stony-faced seriousness a plot so deliriously preposterous that it's impossible to predict from scene to scene and often from shot to shot. It reminded me quite a bit of Spriggan, a film that gets away with its bonkers narrative by distracting us with superlative animation and some of the better action scenes ever animated, and Crystal Triangle, with its middling budget and decidedly action-averse hero, isn't capable of pulling that same trick. But that's OK, because who would want to be distracted from a tale that opens with the news that the biblical ten commandments were merely a footnote to the real message God intended for humanity and then proceeds for ninety minutes to find the absolutely weirdest approaches to material that never stood a hope of being anything except weird.
Now, to be fair, when I say that Crystal Triangle is bad, it's this commitment to pushing a fundamentally ludicrous setup in all the silliest directions whilst at the same time apparently failing to notice how mad it's being that I'm referring to and not the actual craft on display. I mean, the script, obviously, is an hallucinatory mess that feels like something an AI might throw up after watching too many of those "What if God was an alien and the pyramids are really cosmic radio antenna?" so-called documentaries; but that aside, it's apparent that everyone knew what they were doing, even if they failed to realise what a lunatic exercise they were doing it in service of. It may never approach the heights of Spriggan, but not much does, and judged by realistic standards, it looks quite nice, with distinctive character designs, detailed backdrops, some imaginative direction from Okuda, and the odd sequence that genuinely impresses, such as the massive dogfight that takes up quite a chunk of the finale.
Then again, I can see why those contemporary reviewers failed to notice such virtues, since to acknowledge how well animated said dogfight is requires dealing with the fact that it's happening in the first place, and and why, and what other lunacy is going on at the same time, and since you've already been making those sorts of mental gymnastics for over an hour by that point, it's probably easier to dismiss it all as shonky crap and move on to something less intellectually demanding. Still, not every experience in life needs to be easy, and not every masterpiece needs to be rational or coherent, and sometimes it's fun to watch something going off the rails with unstoppable, fearless determination. Crystal Triangle is exactly as hard to find as you'd expect of a VHS-only anime that was forgotten almost as soon as it was released, but that's not to say you shouldn't flog one of your less useful organs to get a copy, because this thing deserves a cult following that consists of more than just yours truly.*
I realise it's perhaps a ridiculous thing to say about someone who's had such immense success and influence, and whose three biggest hits are all readily purchasable on Blu-ray, but I feel like Rumiko Takahashi has been done a bit dirty in the West when it comes to the availability of the anime adaptations of her works. Because, sure, Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha are great, and much-loved, and easy to come by, but what about Maison Ikkoku, eh? And, for our current purposes, what about her splendid shorter works, so many of which came out on VHS back in the day only to vanish into the ether?
I don't know that One-Pound Gospel is definitely the best of them - Mermaid Forest is awfully worthwhile, and its sequel Mermaid's Scar is arguably even better - but it is, at any rate, a thoroughly delightful bit of work and amply good enough that you'd think someone would have wanted to get it out there on DVD, especially with the benefit of Takahashi's name being attached. Yet now it's thoroughly lost and largely forgotten, and while we've had to wrestle with bigger and more tragic injustices over the years here at Drowning in Nineties Anime, still, it's sad that something so sweet and charming and top-to-bottom well crafted should suffer so crummy a fate.
If I had to guess at a reason, other than the likeliest one of sheer bad luck amid a confused and competitive market, I'd say that maybe One-Pound Gospel's misfortune was to be neither fish nor fowl in a world where it's always easiest to sell something when you can easily tell people what it is. And when that's a romantic, lightly comic boxing drama, it might already seem as though you have at least one genre too many for the average viewer, the more so when one of the participants in said romance is a nun. Oh, and also the boxer in question, Kosaku Hatanaka, has an eating disorder that's wrecking his burgeoning career, which is what brings him into the orbit of the kindly but somewhat fiery Sister Angela, and already we have a lot of wheels spinning for a work of less than an hour in length.
Yet everything fits together elegantly, with the main narrative thrust coming from everyone around him - increasingly including Sister Angela - trying to persuade Kosaku to stop pigging out before bouts to the point of making himself sick, and then the romance building steadily in the background, and the comedy hovering around the edges, rarely rising to laugh-out-loud funny but keeping something that could easily be a bit grim and off-putting gentle and warm. One of Takahashi's great virtues as a writer is to never set herself above her characters, even when they're being dreadful, and One-Pound Gospel's protagonists are considerably easier to be on side with than the likes of, say, Urusei Yatsura's Ataru. No jokes are aimed at Kosaku's uncontrollable love of food, nor at Sister Angela's slightly muddled faith, for all that we can see that these two have flaws they really need to move beyond if they're ever to succeed in their chosen paths. Indeed, what's really surprising is how seriously One-Pound Gospel takes the boxing material and the travails of making a career out of so physically demanding a sport; never is it taken for granted that Kosaku necessarily should keep fighting, and his decision whether or not to do so is as much a source of narrative tension as the more obvious matter of his pre-bout gluttony.
None of this is the sort of relative subtlety I'd necessarily associate with director Osamu Dezaki, but working under the pseudonym of Makura Saki, as he does here, seems to have lightened his touch somewhat, and the only real bursts of his characteristic style come in some painted stills towards the end. Kenji Kawai's score is similarly unimposing, and the animation, while consistently good, is rarely showy. The only truly standout aspect is some striking character work on the two leads: both of them are so pleasant to look at that the designs practically sell the romance in themselves, since who wouldn't fall in love with such an adorable pair? And, really, the same goes for One-Pound Gospel itself, in that I struggle to imagine how anyone could spend the better part of an hour with this little charmer and not come away feeling awfully warm and snuggly towards it.
-oOo-
That felt like a good batch, in spite of the presence of Junk Boy, and even Junk Boy redeemed itself in some small degree by being marginally better than I was expecting, or at least better animated. But both Wanna-be's and One-Pound Gospel were thoroughly enjoyable, and indeed among the better short OVA movies I've come across, and their obscurity is exceedingly unearned. Though not so much as that of Crystal Triangle, a masterpiece of absurdity so wondrous that it ought to be taught in elementary schools. Seriously, go watch Crystal Triangle this very moment, every second of your life that you spend without experiencing its delights is a waste you'll regret. And certainly don't go and check the actual score I've given it on on the index pages, because it's totally an 11 out of 10, honest.
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