As we get increasingly close to running out of stuff to cover, so I get more frustrated with not being able to bunch what's left in any sort of sensible order. I was one title short of getting a Go Nagai special together, and odds are that once I've reviewed them all separately, that missing title will appear out of nowhere, but what can you do, eh? Well, I did have a fall-back plan, and we should be getting to that next time around - and then there's landmark post number 140, for which I have some definite plans, probably! - but in the meantime, I'll take some comfort from the fact that we have a lost treasure in amongst Space Warriors, Delinquent in Drag, Megami Paradise, and Sanctuary...
I'll let you in on a little secret that distributor U. S. Manga Corps didn't want you to know: Space Warriors is really the first OVA adaptation of the extremely long-running Locke the Superman manga, following upon the heels of the motion picture released five years earlier in 1984. And while I can totally see why they might not want to drop an adaptation of a middle chunk of a lengthy manga that presumably was effectively unknown in the West into the American market, it's nevertheless a little disappointing to see them getting up to the sort of shenanigans they pull here. And yes, I realise I'm perhaps the only person on Earth who thinks that highly of U. S. Manga Corps, and yes, I acknowledge that they perhaps oughtn't to have been putting it out there in the first place, but if there was one thing you could generally count on them for, it was treating their releases with the bare minimum of respect, which is to say, providing the option of subtitles and not messing with the source material.
Space Warriors, as we're obliged to call it, no matter that it's the most generic sci-fi title imaginable, was, so far as I can tell, that rare U. S. Manga Corps release that was only ever distributed in dubbed form, and that's presumably because enforcing a dub made it somewhat easier to get around how they'd tinkered with the original footage. Based on the available evidence, it was nothing more drastic than lopping off the intros and outros from a three-episode OVA to convert ninety minutes of material into a 75-minute film and adding one of those deeply aggravating "here's what's happening right in front of your eyes" style narrators, and the dub isn't horrible or anything, but it does seem like there were better ways to get to the same place.
Then again, probably it doesn't matter, since, whatever we call it, Space Warriors isn't terribly good. Nor, in fairness, is it terribly bad: it is, in fact, almost so perfectly mediocre that it warrants a title like Space Warriors. And this is almost more frustrating for the presence at the helm of Noboru Ishiguro, who had previously directed stuff like Macross and Space Battleship Yamato and Super Dimension Century Orguss and absolutely knew his way around a spot of space opera. In effect, this just means there are moments when something better and more exciting shines through Space Warriors' bland drama, which centres on the titular Lord Leon's attempts to revenge himself upon the evil corporate overlord Zog and our hero Locke's efforts to stop him, for, uh, reasons? I guess to ensure the operation of true justice, or somesuch, except that Zog is so brazenly awful and his crimes against Leon and his blind sister so blatant that it's tough to sympathise with Locke's motives or even to understand them. And this, unfortunately, leaves us squarely without a protagonist, since Leon is too much of a demented antihero and said sister is so dull that I can't be bothered to look up her name.
So there are some individually cool sequences, Leon's introduction being perhaps the standout, and even with a less than stellar budget at hand, Ishiguro knows his way around sci-fi spectacle and gets some mileage out of anything involving outer space and the rather nicely designed ships that navigate it. But he can't do much to rescue the thin human drama that makes up by far the larger part of the proceedings, and that in turn means it's tough to stay tuned in long enough for the next visually interesting thing to happen. Indeed, all that really distinguishes the material is an absolutely bonkers ending - one of the most bonkers endings from a period of anime where bonkers endings were no rare thing, I dare say - and that, along with U. S. Manga Corps's clumsy tinkering, are just barely enough to make it stick in the memory for a few hours.
The concept of Delinquent in Drag is more complicated than its title suggests, though not by much. Thanks to an administrative error, our protagonist, Banji Suke, finds himself enrolled in a new school under the wrong gender, and his father, who's largely to blame, tricks him into attending on his first day in a girls' uniform, setting up a misunderstanding that Banji - now going by the contracted nickname of Sukeban, or "delinquent" - soon decides there's little advantage in setting right. The wrinkle, though, is that Banji and his parents are all supernaturally strong and prone to outlandish violence, so that Banji rapidly earns the attention of everyone in the school with something to prove, including various bullies and athletes and even the school's mysterious head teacher.
What all of that boils down to is variations on four broad categories of joke, and I don't think I'm doing Delinquent in Drag a disservice by suggesting that every second of its 45-minute running time* falls into one of these. We have Banji's run-ins with various competitive and / or antagonistic pupils, which he generally wins effortlessly; we have Banji creeping on his new best friend, a girl who stubbornly refuses to see through his feeble disguise; we have high-jinks with Banji's parents, who alternate between trying to kill each other and lusting after each other in the most inappropriate circumstances; and as a sort of subset of that last one, we have an excruciating sequence in which Banji's mum, who we discover is only eleven years older than her son, decides to hit on him in sexy lingerie, to his father's very reasonable horror.
The parental stuff that isn't that is quite amusing, without ever rising to the level of actual gags. The same goes for Banji's clashes with other students, which are probably the highlights of the whole endeavour. On the other hand, Banji using his false identity to hit on his deluded female friend is as obnoxious as you'd expect, and a symptom of the deeper problem that, for someone who wrote so much of it, Go Nagai - whose work, unsurprisingly, this is adapted from - was pretty bad at sex comedy. Which is a subgenre that anime gets wrong as often as it does right, admittedly, but it's most noticeable here because the formula feels so similar to other, better works, most obviously Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2. And the difference is that, for Takahashi, the gender-swapping and subsequent misunderstandings are merely a jumping off point that leads to much funnier places. Here, when Banji molests his baffled friend, that's all the "joke" there is, and I doubt very much it would have landed better in 1992 than it does in 2024.
But the bits that do work work well enough, and they're in the majority, and there's enough energy and silliness to carry the OVA through its rougher patches. Director Yusaku Satsuki (or possibly Yūsaku Saotome, depending on whether you believe ADV's characteristically sucky packaging over Wikipedia) does nothing to elevate his material, but nothing much to harm it either bar letting its worst moments drag on past the point of common sense. However, the art style is awfully committed to Nagai's character designs, which don't work well in motion, so its not as if the visuals are a boon either. And then you get to the end and discover that Delinquent in Drag stops dead without resolving half the plot threads it's set up, and at that point it's hard not to feel that your time has been mostly wasted.
There's an unwritten rule around these parts that I try to review titles as the publisher released them, which is to say that if they were to, for example, do something as unscrupulous as pretending that the second half of a two-episode OVA less than an hour in total length was a sequel, then I'll pretend likewise. I mean, I won't, I'll grumble about it like mad, but that's how it's gonna get reviewed.
And this does poor Megami Paradise no favours whatsoever. There are surely OVAs so wonderful that they could get away with the sort of mercenary nonsense ADV pulled here - and why does it always seem to be ADV, eh? - but there's simply no mistaking Megami Paradise as anything besides a part one. It's barely even half a story; rather, it's the "getting the gang together" introduction before the actual story gets going. And, assuming there weren't further chapters planned and ADV didn't also release something unfinished, the odds are that all the meaningful events will be coming in part two. Though it's worse even than that, given that this is a video game tie-in for the RPG of the same name, and it very much plays as though it expects us to be aware of that and well-versed in the game's lore, since the alternative is taking in an inordinate amount of exposition and lightning-fast world-building while also keeping track of a largish cast and what plot there is across the course of less than thirty minutes.
I mean, it's not Game of Thrones or anything, but it's an odd enough setup that it would be nice to hang out and familiarise ourselves a little before the plot kicks off. The title translates as "Goddess Paradise", leaving the implication that everyone in the all-female society we're presented with is an actual deity, a possibility the script leaves wildly unaddressed. Certainly, nobody does anything terribly goddess-like, for all that magical powers and superhuman prowess seem to be pretty much a given. At any rate, our protagonist is Lilith - surely not the Biblical Lilith, but really, who knows? - who, as we meet her, has been chosen as bodyguard for the land's new ruler and tasked with recruiting her colleagues-to-be. This is complicated by how the role is viewed as largely ceremonial, to the extent that no-one worth having would consider it, but rather more so once a mysterious antagonist starts taking out promising candidates from the shadows for reasons that aren't so much as hinted at by the time the credits role.
So we've got a bit of fantasy, a spot of comedy, a touch of mystery, an action climax, and some uncomfortable fan service that feels awfully tick-boxy, though ADV felt the need to pointedly mention it on the packaging. That aside, none of those elements are really weaknesses, but only the comedy comes close to being a strength, and then solely on the strength of a likeable pair of leads, that being the put-upon Lilith herself and her accidental first recruit, Rurubell, a pleasant force of chaos in what would otherwise be an awfully join-the-dots narrative. And while the animation is reliably competent, there's precisely one sequence that genuinely impresses, and you can tell the animators knew it and put their hearts into every frame. The less-than-imaginative character designs are more hurtful, since this is the sort of thing that would benefit from some flamboyance, and the best that can be said for what we get is that you can tell everyone apart. Only the propulsive score does much to distinguish itself, but while it's great that there's something to make the action seem exciting, it doesn't stick in the memory.
A perfectly average, title, then, and generally I'm quite okay with perfectly average anime, given that the average of nineties anime is respectably solid. But one episode is one episode, however much you dress it up and add digits to the title of its second volume, and Megami Paradise is nowhere near the quality levels that would be required to make what ADV pulled acceptable. It's possible that the second half will be good enough to warrant a recommendation for the two together, and since they're bound to be on YouTube, that counts for something. But right here and now, we can only work with what we've got, and what we've got is over in the blink of an eye, which also happens to be how long you'll be thinking about it once it's done.
We've covered more than enough vintage anime by this point to know that, as a rule, "adult" translates almost entirely to "boobs and bloodshed". And this is certainly the case with OVA film Sanctuary, though - surprisingly for what's essentially a crime movie - there's a lot more of the former than the latter. Now, boobs are fine and all, but the problem, as we've seen more times than I care to think about by now, is, firstly, that the requirement of being titillation tends to get in the way of the requirement of telling a story, and secondly that once you've decided your main reason for including female characters is so their clothes can come off at regular intervals, the odds of getting complex, independently motivated female characters who aren't treated appallingly both by the narrative and the men in the cast tend to decrease exponentially.
I bring all of this up not to criticise Sanctuary, since what's the point of blaming something for being of its time and tied to the commercial requirements of an era when, even within Japan, the idea of marketing animation that wasn't actual pornography exclusively toward adults was deemed a bit of a weird and risky notion? No, I raise it because Sanctuary is the rare exception that has genuinely mature themes and content to go along with its implausibly sized breasts and splatters of gore. Indeed, our first glimpse of bare flesh, all of about a minute into the just-over-an-hour running time, is in an actual sex scene that treats both participants as actual human beings, though it has to be said that it doesn't serve much in the way of narrative purpose besides giving one of our two protagonists an opportunity to set out what will be our core theme for the remaining sixty minutes and change.
That would be Akira Hojo, childhood friend of and social counterpart to Chiaki Asami: the shadow and the light, as they term it themselves, since Akira is a yakuza while Chiaki is a political advisor with ambitions towards a place in the Diet. But really, Akira and Chiaki are working towards the same end, the sort of social reform that will make Japan a truly safe place for them - a sanctuary, if you will! - and they're willing to tear down whatever and whoever gets in their way, be it senior politicians in Chiaki's case or Yakuza heads in Akira's. The reason for their double-pronged approach is the realisation that any traditional route would take them decades and leave them as precisely the sort of compromised old men they find themselves set against. Except that, for all their fierce willpower, intelligence, and lack of mercy towards those who stand against them, the old guard is just as without conscience and has considerably greater resources to throw their way.
It's dynamite subject matter, as relevant now as it was three decades ago, and it's tough not to be on side with our antiheroes, for all that they're hardly complex characters; Chiaki, indeed, has little to do until past the midpoint, and Akira, by nature of his occupation, gets to be considerably more interesting. But since this is more than anything a battle of wits, it barely matters that the pair are cyphers: all we need is the tension to keep ratcheting up, and Sanctuary has that down and then some. Mostly terrific animation doesn't harm matters, either, since this would all fall flat without realistic character designs and realistic designs don't work well if they're not slickly animated and set against backgrounds that convincingly evoke the real world - even if, as here, it's a particularly stylised, noirish take on that world. The soundtrack, meanwhile, goes to some exceedingly of-its-time places, but in a mostly good way that feels an ideal fit for the material, and even flings in a couple of licensed tracks that I suspect might be one of the reasons this never got the DVD release it so obviously deserved.
To return to the beginning, then, it's faintly disappointing that Sanctuary wasn't willing to go all in and extend its boldness and complexity in all directions; by the standards of its era, it's not especially exploitative, but its failings are that bit more frustrating for being surrounded by so much brilliance, especially when it has the opportunity to really develop one of the tiny number of women in the cast who gets to actually do something, police deputy-chief Kyoko Ishihara, and tosses it away. Yet what works does so spectacularly, making for some mesmerising drama that only tightens its grip as the minutes pass by and the stakes grow higher. As such, while Sanctuary may not quite be anime for adults in all the best ways, it comes a heck of a lot closer than the vast majority of titles, and that it could pull that off while being so thoroughly entertaining and yet wind up as obscure as it has seems desperately unjust.
-oOo-
Well, that's only one recommendation, whichever way you shake it. There was nothing here I actively disliked, not even anything I didn't get a measure of enjoyment from, but Space Warriors and Delinquent in Drag just didn't have enough to distinguish them from similar and better titles and Megami Paradise, which actually charmed me quite a bit in retrospect, was still one damn episode stuck on a video tape that probably cost about $35 back in the day. But never mind, eh? Sanctuary is good enough to make up for all of them.
