After a couple of (for me, anyway) more exciting posts, including the wild highs of the first part of our Studio Ghibli retrospective, we're back now to the usual random, obscure nonsense. But hey, random, obscure nonsense can be exciting too, can't it? And if lost gems are too much to expect by this point, there are at least a couple of minor treats in among Megami Paradise 2, Ogre Slayer, Dangaizer 3, and The Abashiri Family...
(Megami Paradise part 1 reviewed here)
It's obvious in retrospect that, in trying to show up ADV for releasing the two half-hour episodes of the Megami Paradise OVA as separate titles by reviewing them that way, I shot myself in the foot more than I scored any points against a long-defunct anime distributor. For here we are with part two, and what is there to add? Well, let's start with a spot of good news: my worry at the end of part one was that, for all I knew, this was an unfinished title and that was why not an awful lot happened in part one. That turns out not to be the case, but the flipside is that there wasn't a lot happening because there wasn't a lot to happen, and while we do get an ending, it's an ending designed primarily to lead into the video game series of the same name, leaving plenty of questions open to be answered there.
Which isn't to say that none of the threads left dangling from the opening chapter come to anything: we do find out what the mysterious villains we met there are up to. Only, it amounts to, "They're evil and they want to do evil stuff, for evil reasons," and even that still somehow leads to a cliff-hanger, if not a very compelling one. I'm not convinced I'd have rushed out to buy Megami Paradise the game to find out precisely what those evil reasons were - or, indeed, at all, on the strength of these two episodes.
Because part two is, like part one, perfectly adequate and almost entirely no more than that. Though it does, at any rate, get to be adequate at somewhat different things in a somewhat different fashion, meaning that we can't dismiss it as more of the same. The biggest shock is that our main character for part one, the nondescript-apart-from-her-name Lilith, gets taken out of play early and spends most of the running time comatose in her undies, meaning that protagonist duties are split between the remainder of the cast but land mainly on ditzy magic user Rurubell, who I recall considering the best thing about chapter one. That's not untrue here; I wouldn't want to watch an entire series about Rurubell, but she's fun in small doses, and there's no room for more than that. Though that would be less true if the structure weren't so weird: there's a chunk of exposition of the "Ha ha, now we will tell you our wicked plot!" variety, a bit where it looks like the baddies are sure to win and largely waste their advantage by inflicting kinky torture on their adversaries, and the inevitable final scrap, which I won't spoil because I have faith in you, reader, to figure out where all this goes. The weirdness, to be clear, isn't in the structure itself, which couldn't be more obvious, but in the length of time allocated to each element. Or, to put it another way, if you came for a grand climatic battle, you're likely to be disappointed, whereas if you wanted a scene of two women hung upside down in scanty clothing being whipped, you might well find yourself in (megami) paradise.
Or not, since I assume that even the kinkiest of viewers would appreciate some detail and nuance in their animation, and that sequence, for all that the creators seem to have considered it terribly important from a narrative perspective, doesn't receive anyone's finest work. Barring the odd lapse, though, the production values are largely identical to what we got last time. There's no single standout sequence to compare with the one in the first part, but mostly everything is fine and inoffensive to the eye, and the above-par soundtrack continues to keep the energy levels high even when the story is distracting itself with odd digressions. Which brings us to a conclusion that I'm itching to copy and paste from my part one review, because, again, what else is there to say? Megami Paradise is resolutely okay, with just enough quirky character to make it ever-so-slightly memorable, but it's hard to imagine anyone would have bothered with it back in the day given ADV's mercenary mean-spiritedness, and it's harder still to imagine why anyone would give it their time now.
Let's not make the same mistake again, even if it's a bit hypocritical not to: though Viz Video chose to release Ogre Slayer across two VHS tapes, and though they were sneaky enough to append a two to the second volume, implying that it was a sequel rather than the latter episodes of a four-part OVA, I'm going to cover the lot together and save us all some time. Though, frustratingly, Ogre Slayer would have been more worthy of two separate reviews, and there was at least some justification in the choice to break it in half beyond, "Woo, twice the money!" - a bit of corporate greed, incidentally, that didn't pay off, given that nobody appears to have paid it the least bit of attention. Though that may equally well stem from the same cause as my wondering if I shouldn't have treated these two tapes as distinct from each other, which is that Ogre Slayer is essentially an anthology series - and an anthology series of a particularly confusing sort, which probably never stood much hope of setting the mid-nineties anime scene on fire whatever Viz did with it.
I say "confusing", but that's more an acknowledgement of the contemporary reviews, what few there are, than a personal opinion. Once you get your head around the whole anthology aspect, it's substantially less odd that the person we'd expect to be our protagonist, the titular half-human, half-oni Ogre Slayer - that being both his name and the name of his sword, not to mention his sole occupation - is something of a guest character in his own anime. And accepting that immediately improves the whole endeavour and gives us something a bit more special than the many violent, sexually exploitative titles that Ogre Slayer resembles at a glance. I mean, it absolutely is violent and sexually exploitative, and the violence is front and centre throughout, but the anthology format means that it's never just that.
To go into more detail would be to risk spoiling four consistently good, occasionally great stories. What works reliably is the focus on female protagonists who are used to lives outside of the nightmarish kill-or-be-killed world they each, one way or another, find themselves thrust into. Probably that choice comes in part from a seedy, exploitative place, yet the result is an emotional depth beyond what we'd get if this were simply about a guy with a cool sword hacking up monsters. Though paradoxically, keeping the focus away from Ogre Slayer himself does allow him to develop, at least from our point of view, as we learn details that earlier perspectives hid from us, the more so since the first part introduces him as practically an antagonist. It's all rather neat and surprisingly sophisticated, and firmly the best thing Ogre Slayer has to offer. Takao Kato's direction is always competent without getting up to anything truly striking, and the same can be said for animation that never impresses with anything besides how much blood and guts it's willing to chuck at the screen, though it does conjure up more atmosphere than many a similarly gruesome title. Then again, it's Kazuhiko Toyama's score that does most of the heavy lifting on that front, especially when it's leaning hard into traditional Japanese instrumentation.
Ultimately, though, whether or not you're likely to get anything out of Ogre Slayer probably comes down almost entirely to how accepting you are of what it is, and likely that leaves a rather narrow demographic: the short story anthology aspect and the predominantly female cast makes it that bit more thoughtful and emotionally driven than what you might expect from something so eager to hurl gore and nudity at the viewer. Even then, the theme doesn't leave that much room for manoeuvre; for all that the four tales presented are impressively varied, they all ultimately boil down to ogres and the slaying thereof, putting this comfortably behind its most obvious counterpart, the wonderful Vampire Princess Miyu. Nevertheless, I for one am always grateful for something a little different, and for all its familiar trappings and uneven success, Ogre Slayer is definitely that.
I've broken so many of my self-imposed rules by this point that I really have no idea whether or not I out to be covering Dangaizer 3, a four-episode OVA that began in 1999 but ended in 2001, a year even I know wasn't part of the nineties. But it's awfully exciting to find anything these days I can buy on actual DVDs for vaguely reasonable prices, and more importantly, talking about Dangaizer 3 means we say one last goodbye to director Masami Ôbari, whose work has been a source of ongoing fascination for me almost from the beginning of these articles, to the point where I spent almost the majority of my Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer review discussing him instead. There I said that, as often intriguing and always individualistic as his projects are, none of them ever reach the dizzy heights of being better than okay. But is that true here, with his last gift to the world of film-length mainstream anime before a lengthy sojourn in the lands of hentai and serial TV?
I wish I could say yes, and I would have were it not for one factor, which we may as well get out of the way, since I wish I'd known it going in: Dangaizer 3 is unfinished, and not in that acceptable way where it still manages to tell a satisfying and self-contained tale but in that highly frustrating way where it just goddamn stops, with no doubt at least a couple more episodes planned with which to wrap things up. It's truly galling because, while in many ways Dangaizer 3 is extremely typical fare - our three underdressed heroines co-pilot a giant robot that battles other giant robots belonging to an evil corporation - there are enough wrinkles in the formula to suggest that interesting twists would arrive before all was said and done. Mostly this comes down to the Dangaizer being an ancient superweapon of last resort designed to sort out social malfunctions in the most drastic way possible, which immediately begs the question of whether the villains are remotely in the wrong, but around that is scattered an unusual degree of world-building and lore that further muddies the moral waters and leaves yet more unanswered questions.*
Aside from that, what sets Dangaizer 3 apart from its contemporaries and from the remainder of Ôbari's nineties work is some superlative animation, which is all the more shocking given how routinely bad animation got in the precise window this was released. There are signs of computer tinkering here and there, but mostly this has the look and feel of high-quality hand-drawn work, for all that said look probably couldn't have been accomplished without some deft use of computers, OVA budgets being what they were in 1999. It's a win-win basically, of the sort only a few directors managed to pull off before everyone got their heads around the new technology that was turning their industry upside down, and who'd have thought Ôbari of all people would be the man to get it right? Yet even that's less shocking than the developments in his character designs, which for once are unmistakeable assets, treading a fine line between distinctive and flat-out bonkers. And more unbelievable still, while there's the expected amount of nudity and female objectification - really, more than the expected amount, and it's not at all surprising Ôbari would leap into making hentai directly after this - some of the cast have quite realistic proportions and generally look like human beings who might conceivably exist. You could have told me Ôbari was capable of genuinely good work and I'd have believed you, but that he could draw a woman with breasts smaller than her head? Now, there I'd have called you a liar.
And if that's faint praise, then so be it. Dangaizer 3 is good, because it looks terrific and its action is often genuinely exciting and because it complicates its stock plot and cast just enough to add an element of intrigue, but there's reinventing the wheel and there's giving said wheel a bit of a polish and a new coat of paint, and this is definitely the latter. Nevertheless, it's a nice note to say our goodbyes to Ôbari on, sure proof of what he might have accomplished had he not got so stuck making mediocre fighting game adaptations, and I've not much doubt that it would have got a solid thumbs up if the darned thing had only received a proper ending.
My dislike for Go Nagai has cooled over the course of these reviews, in part because anything is going to be an improvement when you start with Violence Jack, but also, let's be fair, because there are a few excellent and quite a lot of pretty good adaptations of his work out there. So it's a mild disappointment to be parting ways with him on so sour a note as The Abashiri Family, a title that puts most of his worst traits and very few of his better qualities on display, and is a rubbish bit of anime in its own right.
I realise that doesn't leave much space for a nuanced review, but there's so little that's nuanced about The Abashiri Family that the attempt would be a waste of effort. I'm not nearly familiar enough with Nagai's work to know whether the manga this came from felt like such a rehash of old ideas, but there's nothing here he didn't do better elsewhere and no real hook either, though it seems at first as though there might be. The first episode offers a setup that could conceivably go to entertaining places, as it introduces us to a future so dystopian that we can just about pretend the titular thieves and murderers are in some strange way heroes, or at least as horribly violent and screwed up as they are because that's how you get by when you live in so nightmarish a world. Which isn't to say that the script cares terribly about getting us on side with the Abashiris, not when it can impress us with their cool murdering abilities, which range from clothes made out of explosives to flicking bullets up people's butts.
This isn't great, by any means, and it's not helped by animation that fizzles practically the moment it's done with the mildly cool opening sequence that introduces us to how ghastly this particular future is, but it's much better than what's to come. For the plot, you see, isn't really about the Abashiris and their criminal escapades, but one member in particular. By the end of that first episode, it's been revealed that sixteen-year-old Kikonosuke is not, in fact, the boy her three brothers took her to be, and that their latest bank robbery was actually some sort of epic, belated gender-reveal party. But with Kikonosuke's true identity out in the open, her father feels it's time for her to put her life of wanton violence behind her and get an education, a plan she's relatively on side with until it turns out that the particular school she's been sent to is every bit as dangerous as the outside world, what with the teachers being homicidal sadists and everything.
Now, I appreciate that no one comes to Go Nagai for sense, but my goodness does the whole school thing not have a lick of logic to it. We'll learn in due time that the staff are training their students to be assassins, but also kill the vast majority of them, and nobody ever graduates anyway, and just how exactly has no-one noticed any of this for the presumably numerous years it's been operating? Heck, we're even led to believe the place has a good reputation, which is patently impossible unless literally not a single parent has ever stopped to wonder why their kids have never come home. At any rate, the school section, which is effectively the entirety of the remaining running time, is both deeply familiar as far as Nagai's oeuvre goes and a wallowing in most of his worst instincts, with a particular emphasis on sexual violence that's a dreadful fit for the generally glib and cartoonish tone.
That, I think, is the biggest problem. There's a version of the school material that might have worked, or at least have worked better, but that would have involved treating it more seriously and excising the attempts at humour, since, while Nagai's more successful works managed to wring some gallows humour from similarly dark places, here the results are merely nasty, loud, and tiresome. Then there's the side business with the Abashiri family - you remember them, the supposed protagonists? - and though that works adequately in the first episode and probably could have sustained a better story had it remained the focus, it gets more and more dysfunctional when put alongside the school subplot. And while none of this is enough to push The Abashiri Family into the dankest depths of Nagai adaptations, if only because it's all too dumb and insincere for the unpleasantness to have any real effect, the dearth of high points and crummy animation are comfortably enough to make it best forgotten.
-oOo-
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* Actually, what Dangaizer 3 reminded me most of - and I doubt this was deliberate, because Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to have been far more of a conscious reference point - is late-eighties OVA series Hades Project Zeorymer, reviewed here under its Manga title of Zeoraima. But it's also awfully reminiscent of the excellent series RahXephon, which would arrive a year after its conclusion.
