One last post for 2024, which has been a rather dramatic year for Drowning in Nineties Anime if the Blogger stats are to be believed, in that people appear to have been actually reading these things in considerable numbers. This seems deeply unlikely - why do you never comment, oh phantom readers? - but at least it's been nice to imagine that I'm not rambling into the void. And of course it would be even nicer to finish the year with something momentously exciting, but that was never going to happen, so we'll have to settle for a very tenuously themed post. Our four titles this time have one thing in common, and that's that they all clock in at well under an hour. It's not much, but it's all we've got, so let's take a look at Guyver: Out of Control, Baoh, Shonan Bakusozoku: Bomber Bikers of Shonan, and On a Paper Crane: Tomoko's Adventure...
By this point, it's mostly to be expected that the releases I cover here are lost and forgotten; there was just so much of this stuff coming out, and the law of averages dictates that a lot was bound to fall by the wayside. But then sometimes I come across something I'd definitely have expected to leave at least some trace, and Guyver: Out of Control falls hard into that category. That there's an entire entry of the Guyver franchise nobody ever seems to mention? Well, that took me by surprise, given the extent to which the OVA series was one of the seminal titles from among the first major wave of anime exports. It's still a fondly remembered show, and though I've never seen it, I know the later TV series has its defenders; heck, there are even people who like the first live-action adaptation, though goodness knows why.* But try as I might, I can't find one person who has a nice word for Guyver: Out of Control, the first attempt at adapting the property, a mere year into the lifespan of a manga that would go on to run to a whopping 32 volumes.
So let me be that person. Guyver: Out of Control is a long way from perfect, and it's probably fair to say that it's inferior to the bulk of the later OVA series, and from what I've read, it plays fairly fast and loose with its source material. But as an attempt at doing the whole Guyver thing in under an hour? It could have turned out plenty worse. Out of Control is something of a whistle-stop tour, and it's evident that there were boxes to be ticked. Gore? Check. Gratuitous nudity? Check. Every possible combination of humans, guyvers, and zoanoids fighting each other? Yup, a big check there. And if words like "guyver" and "zoanoid" mean nothing to you, you're probably not the target audience, but there's certainly enough information here to follow along, and much more would be a flagrant waste of running time. We learn that zoanoids are humanoids that change into gross monsters and that they're bad; we learn that guyvers are suits of biomechanical armour and that they're icky but awesome. We learn that when the latter punches the former real hard, they tend to explode in showers of blood. For me, that's about all you really need.
Okay, I'm joking slightly. On its dramatic merits alone, Out of Control is thin stuff, and that's particularly apparent with our hero Sho, whose characterisation is effectively nonexistent, and still more than his love interest Mizuki (who the subtitles insist, distractingly, on calling Mizuky) ever gets, unless you consider "being kidnapped" a personality trait. The bland, big-eyed character designs do them few favours either; from what I can tell, they don't appear to have been ported over from the manga, and those slightly cartoonish designs are a poor fit for the material. Thankfully, though, and more importantly, Out of Control does right by its zoanoids, which are satisfyingly gross, and mostly manages not to screw up the guyver itself: it's kind of gangly compared with the later OVA, but it looks cool in motion, and the manner in which it bonds with its hosts goes hard on the body horror in a manner that makes for some interesting visuals. This is hardly big-budget stuff, but it's more than efficient, and Hiroshi Watanabe - right at the start of what would go on to be a pretty good and impressively lengthy directorial career - injects a measure of personality without going so far as to distract from the crucial business of bloody violence and naked ladies.
Whether you'll find much enjoyment in Guyver: Out of Control, then, probably comes down to a bunch of variables, and obviously having a soft spot, or at least a high tolerance, for the schlockier end of vintage anime is a vital step in the right direction. But maybe the bigger issue is your relationship with the Guyver franchise. No idea what I've been on about for the last three paragraphs? Then there are similar and better OVAs and movies from the period mining similar material, and in such a condensed form, I doubt this one would stand out to the virgin viewer. An enormous fan of the series, with every panel of the manga burned into your memory? Then the liberties taken here and the slight but constant shonkiness will likely drive you up the wall. But if you're somewhere in the middle, with a degree of fondness but no great loyalty to other entries in the franchise, there's something quite appealing about a bite-sized chunk of Guyver that plays the hits and then clears the stage before it can remotely outstay its welcome.
I've been thinking a lot lately about publisher AnimeEigo. I've always had a soft spot for them, and found their slight amateurishness to be charming: with their rightfully beloved liner notes, their small but carefully curated catalogue, and their obvious passion for those few titles they put out, it seemed unfair to begrudge them their flaws. But there's amateurishness that's appealingly quirky and there's amateurishness that's more annoying, and their recent reliance on Kickstarter campaigns** for titles that surely could have just been released the old-fashioned way had been something I'd been eyeing suspiciously for a while, and which came to a head when I realised - as someone who'd need to import it to the UK - that I'd been priced out of what I was willing to spend for their Dagger of Kamui Blu-ray, which I'd been hoping for for an age.
All of which is a long way of getting around to how Baoh isn't AnimeEigo's finest moment. I suppose their putting it out at all warrants a thumbs up, though at the time it must have seemed like an obvious choice, for reasons we'll return to. But, like a small handful of their output, Baoh would go on to become quite astonishingly rare, which is the first annoying thing: something went very wrong somewhere to make a release this ludicrously hard to find. Still, every publisher ended up with one or two unfathomable rarities, so we can't judge too harshly on that point - and who'd want to, when I could be getting incensed by some of the most astoundingly poor subtitling I've ever seen? Granted, I used to do this for a living, so I realise I'm touchier than the average viewer, but I also know what I'm talking about when I say that whoever subtitled Baoh somehow managed to break every rule of the trade, not to mention a couple I'd never so much as considered, because why would you break them? Why, for instance, when you had three whole words to work with, would you ever think to split them across two lines? It's lunacy, yet a good three quarters of the subtitles here are operating at that level of stupidity.
Oh, and they managed to mistranslate the protagonist's name, so there's that.
And if the fact that I've spent two lengthy paragraphs without once touching on the actual content of Baoh is making you suspect I don't have much to say, then yeah, you got me. Baoh is, to be clear, pretty great - which is a large part of why I got so wound up over things so arguably trivial - but it's mostly great at doing things that were all sorts of obvious for its time and place. There's not a single element anywhere in amongst "moody antihero gets bonded with sentient armour and teams up with a psychic girl to take down the evil scientist who's responsible by punching his way through an army of colourful weirdos" that hadn't been touched upon elsewhere in the world of late-eighties anime and wouldn't be done to death in the near future. It's just that Baoh does a better job of them than nearly all its competitors, in large part because it's less than an hour long and hardly bothers to pretend these are fresh ingredients when it can cannon-blast them into our faces instead. I love nuance and subtlety as much as the next person, but I also love a villain so enthusiastic about their mad science that they frequently forget about everything else, and that's very much the level Baoh's operating on.
Granted, I'm heavily biased by the fact that the animation is rather splendid from beginning to end, with a slickness and attention to detail that's accentuated by Yokoyama's enthusiastic direction and sense of style. Granted, too, that most of that slickness and enthusiasm is devoted to such extremely gross sights as people's faces being melted - Baoh sure loves its melting faces! - and, to a marginally lesser extent, to cool action stuff. If it's not icky bloodshed or cool action, Baoh isn't much interested, and even then there's really only the one standout sequence, though it's a belter, as exposition and backstory get delivered mostly through the medium of horrible violence, that's then neatly cross-cut with a major moment of character development (and yet more horrible violence.) And I can't really pretend that one terrific sequence and some overly familiar ideas delivered with an unusual degree of craft and ingenuity make for a reason to track down one of the rarest releases in existence, but Baoh's fun enough that I can at least say it deserved better than the treatment it got.
Oh, look! It's AnimeEigo again, and this time, we get to be a bit kinder about them, because Shonan Bakusozoku is the sort of unusual, non-commercial title that a bigger, perhaps more sensible publisher would have steered well clear of. And while AnimeEigo didn't exactly back it to the hilt, with a VHS release that's awfully hard to find these days and no subsequent return on DVD, it's nice that they took the chance.
Though the subtitling, it has to be said, is still dreadful.
But unusual and non-commercial I said, and the latter follows directly from the former, in that biker gangs, in the specific form they're portrayed here, are just not a thing anywhere else in the world, and it's one of those subcultures so insular and specific that it's awfully hard to convey it in a manner that the non-Japanese viewer can get any sort of a handle on. Shonan Bakusozoku gets around this a little by giving us a protagonist with one foot outside of that world - he's really into sewing, a detail the show has the good grace never to mock him for - and a viewpoint character who's excluded from it altogether, and thus also manages to duck the issue of how the rest of the cast and their lifestyle of choice aren't terribly sympathetic. You might argue that this is trying to have your cake and eat it, but the balance is largely right: we're invited to understand why riding around at irresponsible speeds at the dead of night and getting into bloody fights could be awfully appealing to those who indulge in it, without necessarily being asked to ignore that it makes them kind of jerks.
There's a story in all of this, of course, but that's the point where Shonan Bakusozoku comes a little unstuck, with too many similar characters to keep track of and too much hopping between them - that being what you get when you try and cram a big chunk of a 16-volume manga into 50 or so minutes, I guess, and also what you get when a US distributor only brings over the first of 12 OVA episodes. Were Shonan Bakusozoku more invested in storytelling and less invested in style and action, this all might be quite a problem, but aside from a brief spell in the middle when I got mildly lost amid the tangle of plot threads, it turned out to not matter much at all. It's the sort of tale that's clearer in retrospect, once we have the entire cast together for the big action climax, and everything comes together nicely enough that it's easy to forget the odd muddle along the way.
Likewise, some fairly rudimentary animation never really gets in the way of matters. A degree of visual simplicity is the right fit for the cast and the show's punky attitude, and in that sense I was reminded of the more recent (and highly recommended) On-Gaku: Our Sound, which similarly uses visual simplicity to get to the heart of characters with an equally simple approach to life. Granted, in the case of Shonan Bakusozoku, I suspect it had more to do with budget, but that's not to say there aren't a few cool sequences, and they're right where they need to be, emphasising the thrills and danger of the biker gang lifestyle. Still, it's not a title to seek out for its technical virtuosity, and taken purely on its artistic merits, Shonan Bakusozoku is maybe nothing terribly special. But as a window into a particular subculture in a particular time and place, it's rather neat, and if you're the sort of vintage anime fan who likes diving down odd rabbit holes, there's definitely something of interest to be found here.
On a Paper Crane: Tomoko's Adventure, 1993, dir: Seiji Arikara
I'd had a bit of an emotional few days, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a topic I've put a lot of thought into over the years, and even written about, and I'm generally kind of a wimp, so perhaps you shouldn't read too much into the fact that I blubbered through pretty much the entirety of On a Paper Crane's brief twenty-some minute running time. Nevertheless, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that it absolutely wrecked me, if only because what we have here is a short film designed expressly to be shown to children, and I honestly can't say whether I'd be willing to put anyone in that target audience through the experience. Which speaks, I suppose, to our culture and the times in which we live, because even as I find Peace Anime no Kai, the organisation that created this thing all those many years ago, hopelessly naïve in their faith that putting out a short kids' movie about one of the most appalling events in human history would turn the world's youth against nuclear weapons and war in general, I 100% agree with their goal and consider it precisely the sort of thing we ought to be doing as a civilised society, trying to steer the little'uns away from our worst mistakes even if that means traumatising the heck out of them a little.
It's fair to say, then, that, more than almost anything we've covered here, your mileage is going to vary with On a Paper Crane, because if you're not at least somewhat on board with its message and intentions, there's not going to be a lot in an openly propagandist mid-budget film of less than thirty minutes that's likely to hold your interest. The animation is fairly nice, and obviously the work of professionals - not necessarily a given with a project like this - but the simplistic character designs didn't altogether work for me, and since On a Paper Crane is focused mostly on its two central characters, that was something of an issue. Reijirô Koroku's score is more successful, hitting the obvious note of lots of weepy strings, but hitting it awfully effectively - a large part, I suspect, of why my tear ducts went into overdrive so hard.
Koroku had the right idea, though: subtlety was nowhere on the agenda when it came to the making of On a Paper Crane and nor should it have been, for what use is a film about the bombing of Hiroshima that makes you feel just a little bit sad? Still, I was taken aback by how up front the film gets about the topic of what nuclear weapons do to a human body, pushing about as far as you could possibly go and still stay remotely on the side of being watchable by small children. The moment that first set me off is a sequence where our protagonist, sixth-grader Tomoko, who's taken it upon herself to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum for a school project, is spurred by objects and images in the display to imagine the last moments of those who left them behind. It's an obvious idea, but that doesn't make it any less effective, or any less distressing, and that's equally the case when Tomoko starts hanging out with the ghost of Sadako Sasaki, who spares nothing in filling her and us in on what it's like to die of radiation poisoning before you've reached your teens.
Which I'm sure is another clue as to whether this is something you'd be remotely interested in, and surely for the majority of people, the answer is going to be a resounding "no" - which I get, I do, because who wants to track down exceedingly rare vintage anime just to be preached at about horrible historic events? Even if you're on side with what On a Paper Crane has to say, that's not altogether a reason to watch it, and if you've been reading this and thinking, "Man, I really need to get a copy of this for my kids," then I'm kind of worried for you. Yet I adored it, and it rocked me hard, and I'd like more people to experience it. That's all the more true because the tape is a lovely artefact in itself, with a case that matches nothing in my collection and an enclosed booklet that's eager to tell you everything you could ever want to know about nuclear war, and then quite a bit more. But that tape's about as rare as you'd expect it to be, and I can't even find the film on Youtube, and so I find myself yet again in the position of raving about something that's basically lost to the world.
-oOo-
* Now, its sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero, that's pretty great.
** A thing of the past now, apparently, due to a change in management that seems to be bringing some welcome changes, and fingers crossed for a more standard-priced version of Dagger of Kamui arriving somewhere down the line.
