For the first time in a while, and possibly the last time in a while, we have a theme, though not quite so ambitious a one as I'd hoped for. I was going for "lousy Western adaptations of anime kids' films", but Madman ruined that with a nice, respectful release - curse them! - and so we're stuck with just "anime kids' films", three of which happen to have been treated with hefty amounts of contempt by their distributors. Ah well! Let's have a look at The Dog of Flanders, Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy, Junkers Come Here, and The Secret of the Seal...
So low was my enthusiasm for The Dog of Flanders that it's been sitting on my shelf for literally years. And that had little to do with the film itself, though I'll admit that the subject matter didn't entirely grab me - and more on that in a moment. But primarily, it was to do with the knowledge that, in a bid to transform Japanese children's entertainment into American children's entertainment, distributor Pioneer had done a right old number on the film. That didn't account for the choice to go with a non-anamorphic, letterboxed print, mind you, but it certainly must have been the logic behind going dub-only and putting an unusual degree of effort and expense into said dub, up to and including casting actual famous actor Robert Loggia in a major role*. And it explains also - while making no less gross and unforgivable - the decision to heavily re-edit the footage, lose 11 minutes from a hardly bloated 103-minute running time, and replace the ending with a sappy montage.
The best case scenario, then, was great material mangled into a less than ideal form. Yet, on top of that, the original source for this - by which I mean not the beloved 1975 TV series that director Kuroda remade here but the 1872 novel A Dog of Flanders - sounds, in synopsis, like so much nineteenth-century misery porn, and that's a subgenre I've no fondness for at all. It can be done well, like anything, and Japanese cinema has produced more than its fair share of great but horrifyingly depressing kids' entertainment, largely thanks to their national disinclination for sheltering the young'uns from the sort of harsh realities that might scar their tender minds for life. But that brings us back to the Pioneer problem, and their bid to sand all the sharper edges off a work that, on paper, consists of not much besides sharp edges.
Pioneer, as it turns out, certainly do deserve a ton of blame, and while they couldn't quite wreck The Dog of Flanders, it wasn't for a lack of trying. However, for its first half, when the film is largely operating in a slightly gloomy but generally warm and kindly slice-of-life mode, the damage is minimal. Of the leads, Brady Bluhm as our ill-fated protagonist Nello is perfectly fine, Loggia brings some real sweetness and gravitas to the part of Nello's grandfather, and only the brilliantly named Debi Derryberry, as Nello's fiscally mismatched chum Alois, is actively harmful, leaning into a schmaltzy, juvenile mode that the film itself has little interest in.** And the narrative, buoyed by Kuroda's sensitive directorial touch and some simply designed but subtly lovely animation, trundles along absorbingly, keeping its focus firmly enough on its core human cast and titular pooch Patrash that it's almost possible to ignore the thunderclouds of tragedy gathering on the horizon.
Even when those tragedy-clouds burst, it's not like everything that's been working up until then simply vanishes. Nevertheless, I did find that last third something of a slog, and not a very rewarding slog at that. But this is probably the point to admit that I can't imagine loving the Japanese version of The Dog of Flanders either, or that it could fix my biggest issue. The fact is, me and The Dog of Flanders were never going to be on the same wavelength, since for all its kindly humanism, it seems awfully determined to find something noble and uplifting in the suffering of Nello and Patrash, even though most of it is caused by awful rich people and a society built from the ground up to ensure that they'll almost invariably win and the likes of Nello will likely as not get crushed, no matter how good-hearted, honest, and talented they may be.
It's possible that the 11 minutes of cut footage mostly consisted of furious Marxist sabre-rattling, but I think it's likelier that they were just scenes that might make small American kids feel sad. Whatever the case, the re-edited ending is a disaster, transforming the message from one I already wouldn't have a great deal of sympathy with - something like "It's terrible that good people suffer, but what can you do, plus it's all part of God's plan" - to one more along the lines of, "It's terrible that good people suffer, but as long as little rich girls get to grow up and be happy nuns, we needn't worry about it too much." There are those, I'm sure, who'll find even the American cut adorable and heart-rending; if you've a soft spot for classic Japanese children's films and can bear with a mildly unsatisfactory dub, that might be you. And yet, politics and all else aside, I think most viewers will ultimately be left feeling short-changed by a work that was so obviously sabotaged by its distributer out of a lack of faith in its audience.
If we absolutely have to have anime heavily mangled to fit Western markets, then, for me, Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy is one of the less obnoxious ways to go about it, taking a goofy bit of entertainment for Japanese kids and transforming it into a goofy bit of entertainment for American kids in such a fashion that the result is effectively a new thing that can't really sully the reputation of the original.
Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy is the second of two movies mashed together out of footage from the long-running, much-adored seventies show Time Bokan, though with such drastic liberties taken that it almost seems justifiable that Jim Terry gets a sole director credit on the IMDB page. And already I've gone and called Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy a movie and given it more credit than it really deserves, since reconstructing a TV show with, presumably, not much in the way of ongoing narrative into a coherent feature film is way beyond the level of ambition that anyone brought to this project. Rather, we get bits of a half-dozen episodes, with something of an introduction to get us past the fact that we're already well into what story there is and a vague sort of conclusion that can't even wrap up the sole plot thread we've had dangling in front of us for the last hour and change and hints at further adventures that were never to come. With hacking together ninety minutes of cogent storytelling from 60-some TV episodes off the cards, the actual localisation comes down to erasing as much of the Japanese-ness as possible by renaming everyone and everything*** and then plastering on lots of songs, because songs are a thing kids' movies have, right?
The dub is fine, mostly, with decent work from everyone who gets to put on a silly voice - that includes the villains, clear highlights, the professor whose genius for inventing half-assed time travel devices is the prime mover for everything that goes on, and a pair of talking parrots - and competent work from everyone else, barring Kathy Ritter as female lead Starr, who gets the sole character trait of "simpering". And only now do I discover that Ritter was also playing pretty much every other female character, including the main villain, my favourite performance by far, so I can't be too hard on her, but my gosh is Starr grating. She also gets the absolute worst of a batch of songs that never rise past tolerable, a soapy love ballad directed, worryingly, at her grandfather; though, to its credit, it's one of the rare moments where the soundtrack does more than describe exactly what we're watching but with some execrable wordplay to conjure up a pretence of humour. Thank goodness, then, that none of them last for more than a minute or two.
So not an adaptation for the ages, then, for all that it's more harmless than not. But the creators made one good choice, at least, and that was the show they picked to build their parvum opus out of. Time Bokan is a wacky bit of fluff for kids, but it's good at being that, with a ton of visual imagination and joyful energy and wholehearted commitment to cartoon logic; really, the fact that we have characters time travelling into fairy tales is evidence enough of that. And this was, and remains, the only incarnation of Time Bokan to reach the States (barring the much later OVA Time Bokan: Royal Revival, covered here) so it's nice to get a glimpse of what it had to offer. The problem is that by the 45-minute mark, we've had that, and with a format every bit as inflexible as most early children's TV shows, the remainder is merely more of the same except with increasingly grating music. At 60 minutes, I suspect I'd have been quite kindly disposed to this, and I still sort of am, but I was also ready for it to stop well before it did.
After such a very long time spent reviewing vintage anime, you'd think I'd have a pretty comprehensive grasp on what was out there. The last time I was blindsided by the existence of a DVD release was with Hermes: Winds of Love, and that turned out to be because it's an enormously terrible film made by an honest-to-goodness cult to spread their crazy about, and the world had sensibly responded by quietly pretending it didn't exist. But lo, here we are with Junkers Come Here, a film that somehow managed to pass me by for the longest time, for no reason I can put my finger on. It's simply never talked about in vintage anime circles, and at first I blamed that on its being out of print and / or only ever released in Australia, but no, there was a US release, and while it does indeed appear to be no longer in circulation, copies are easy to come by at sensible prices.
So, with all of that, it's got to suck, right? Well, no, it's actually very good indeed, and only falls a little shy of greatness. That's almost entirely down to one thing, which we may as well get out of the way: Junkers Come Here is kind of slow, and kind of awkward in its pacing, and probably didn't quite need all of its 105-minute running time to accomplish the stuff that it does so well. I recall reading - and I can't find where, so it's possible I've got this wrong - that the film was originally released in short episodes and subsequently cobbled together into a movie, and whether or not that's the case, that's certainly how it feels. Most scenes are strong in their own right, but sometimes they play out fractionally longer than they need to or reiterate information we've already absorbed or just suck air from the pacing at points when forward momentum would do the movie more favours.
These are, mind you, all fairly innate problems to the anime slice of life genre, and Junkers Come Here is absolutely that, first and foremost, with a gentle vein of comedy humming along in the background and a mounting shift towards heavy drama past the mid point. Our heroine is 11-year-old Hiromi Nozawa, perched so awkwardly on the cusp of young adulthood that she doesn't even have the capacity to be wowed at the fact that her pet schnauzer Junkers can talk and, as she'll eventually learn, perhaps also grant wishes. So I guess we need to add magical realism to our list of genres, as well, except that Junkers Come Here is as grounded as a tale of a girl and her talking dog could hope to be, and while it thankfully doesn't lean too hard into the customary "is this animal really talking or is this child just desperately lonely" business, it wouldn't take much massaging to convey these same events without any supernatural elements whatsoever.
Because, oh yes, Hiromi is desperately lonely, though that's a slight spoiler, I guess, since it takes the major events of the film to force her to confront the isolation she feels, as in short order she learns that the live-in tutor she has a crush on will soon be leaving to marry his girlfriend and that the parents she almost never sees are contemplating a divorce that would place them on different continents. That's as much plot as there is, barring the occasional magical intervention from Junkers: the bright, smart, precocious Hiromi is forced to acknowledge her own mounting pain and so to act upon it, if she possibly can. And heck, that sounds rough doesn't it? But partly because Hiromi is exceedingly likeable and self-aware and partly because we always have Junkers on hand - one of the more charming and least anthropomorphised talking animals you're likely to come across - it's never out-and-out depressing, though it's perfectly possible you'll shed a tear or two before the end.
Barring a single sequence towards the end, this isn't the sort of material that demands to be animated, and despite the presence of a heavy-hitter director in the shape of Jun'ichi (Sailor Moon) Satô, Junkers Come Here rarely gets up to anything too flashy. The designs are simple and appealing, while the animation - which looks awfully rotoscoped in places, whether or not it was - is only as complex as it needs to be to sell the reality of the film's settings, and sometimes even that's a bit much for the budget. Nevertheless, with its soft storybook backgrounds, distinctive characters, and careful balance of realism and abstraction, it's about as good as you could hope for from a non-Ghibli film aimed principally at children. And indeed, that was an aspect I found especially satisfying by the end: though we might make comparisons, most obviously to Kiki's Delivery Service, Junkers Come Here is that rare anime work in the for-kids-but-good-enough-for-adults-to-love-too genre that doesn't feel terribly indebted to Ghibli's overwhelming presence. It's very much its own thing, and regardless of the slightly lethargic pace and the odd animation hiccup, that thing is lovely, thoughtful, and insightful, handling difficult subject matter with exactly the right combination of delicacy and brusque honesty.
Nor did their ambitions stretch to anything beyond the most shabby, barebones of translations, with one exception: there are a couple of original English-language songs on the soundtrack, and though both are gratingly awful and lyrically destitute, they probably cost at least something. Indeed, while it may be my natural bias in assuming that Japanese composers are by and large less crass and lazy when it comes to this sort of thing, I'd be willing to bet that quite a chunk of the soundtrack was replaced: a tune near the start that couldn't sound more like hold music if it tried has the definite stink of Western tinkering to it, whereas the odd piece later on is legitimately pleasant and works to enhance the visuals rather than providing a tooth-grinding distraction.
But that, anyway, is as ambitious as things get. The dub is mostly ghastly, full of adults pretending badly to be children, and since that accounts for most of the cast and since Christine Cavanaugh's take on our protagonist Tottoi is an extreme low point, that's a definite problem. Granted, rotten dubs are to be expected with this sort of thing, but Celebrity Home Entertainment decided to take things a step further. Presumably at some point The Secret of the Seal was presented in some sort of serialised form, or possibly they just had no faith in their material, because every few minutes, one of the characters narrates a comment along the lines of "As much as everything seemed fine, disaster was around the corner!" Not one of these adds any information the film doesn't otherwise provide, a couple of them are flat-out lies, and every time it happens, it kills whatever momentum has been building.
Which, admittedly, is never much. As fun as it would be to get terribly indignant about how Celebrity Home Entertainment ruined a masterpiece, the truth is that they took a mediocre movie and made it into a bad movie. The plot, such as it is, follows the bland Tottoi as he and his little sister get dragged off to his father's Sardinian homeland after their mother's death from "pollution-related illness" - the second indication we get, after an opening shot of smoke-belching factories, that the film doesn't intent to be remotely subtle in its environmental message. And, to be clear, I'd have no problem with that if its environmental message was a coherent one, but sadly it's just the usual kiddie-movie claptrap. Tottoi finds a mother seal and her cub, though he's been told they've been made extinct by intensive fishing, and his stupidity and spinelessness nearly get them forced into captivity, until the film eventually has to wrap itself up with a happy ending that falls apart when you think about it at all. And though credit is deserved for not anthropomorphizing its non-human characters and having the sense to acknowledge the threat an adult seal poses, the moral still ends up as the same one these things almost always trot out: "We have to protect animals, so long as it doesn't cost us anything much and so long as they're mammals and not something we find weird and unattractive, like octopi, because screw those guys!"
Combine that ill-thought-out moralising with a crawling pace and animation that, barring the odd nice underwater sequence, screams made-for-TV, and indeed, made for TV by people who weren't inclined to put in the work necessary to make this anything special - just how do you make the stunning vistas of Sardinia look this bland? - and you have a movie that's tough to recommend. Add in the efforts of Celebrity Home Entertainment, though, and it becomes almost impossible to imagine an audience that might find any measure of joy here. Perhaps you could use it to teach your kids what not to do if they have any interest in becoming conservationists? Failing that, you're left with a mediocre anime movie drawing on what was likely a mediocre book, and rendered less than mediocre by a distributor who never once seem to have considered that not worsening their source material might be an option.
-oOo-
Given that my express goal was to review a bunch of anime that was mishandled by its US distributors, I suppose this was never going to produce much in the way of classics, so probably it's for the best that I had to fill out the post with something that was treated with more respect and also happened to be rather wonderful and a clear standout: Junkers Come Here is a really good children's film that ought to be better known, so at least I have that to recommend. And The Dog of Flanders certainly has its virtues, even in the form that Pioneer chose to release it, so I guess the moral here is that all anime children's films ought to be about dogs, or something? Or, at any rate, not about seals or parrots.
** Disappointingly, Sean Young, as her barely credited adult counterpart, does nothing to set things right.
*** The only example of this that actively annoyed me is perhaps the most necessary: at one point, the villains get a shape-changing tanuki robot to ride around in, and so adamant is Time Fighters in the Land of Fantasy that what we're looking at is a cat that we even get a song to that effect.
