Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 147

If there's anyone out there who's actually following this blog in real time, then yeah, it's not your imagination, things have certainly slowed right down over the last few months.  I'm tempted to blame this on the black hole-like time-distending properties of approaching the end of such an epic enterprise, but actually I've just been really, really busy and, as a direct result, really, really tired.  Nevertheless, with our final post so near that I can practically smell it, I'm still  determined to make that last push and stagger over the finish line.  Thankfully, Christmas is a thing, and while I'm not much for all that seasonal jollity nonsense, it is a chunk of time in which to get down to some serious vintage anime watching.  But that's still a little ways off, and for now we might as well take a look at The Tale of Genji, Master Keaton, Dragon Century, and Yu Yu Hakusho: Eizou Hakusho...

The Tale of Genji, 1987, dir: Gisaburô Sugii

Bless Central Park Media, for all their many failings, they were perhaps the only anime distributor in history that genuinely went out of their way to try and educate their audience a bit about the breadth of Japanese culture in the midst of keeping them amused with all the blood, nudity, violence, and tentacles they'd come to expect.  Who else would have put out a title like The Tale of Genji, an art-house adaptation of the world's oldest novel that has no time at all for the viewer without a solid knowledge of the source material and the courtly Heian culture in which it was set?  And you have to wonder what exactly their expectations were for a title that, historical and literary baggage aside, is still pretty impenetrable, plonking its viewer into the middle of a narrative with little to nothing to orient themselves by and expecting them to gather enough crucial details along the way that by the mid point they might have some idea of who's who and what's what.

Which sounds negative, I realise, but I did open with, "Bless Central Park Media," didn't I?  And I meant that earnestly, in part because it's truly admirable that they put the effort into titles like this that were absolutely never going to see mainstream success but much more so because The Tale of Genji is wonderful.  Yes, director Sugii expects you to meet him more than halfway, but his compensation for that is some exquisite animation set to one of the most gorgeous scores you're ever likely to hear, both of which strongly evoke the Heian era without being unnecessarily beholden to it, so that the willing viewer is at once ushered into a far-distant age and given just enough of a modern hook that the experience never feels altogether off-putting and alien.

And this is true of the approach to the material as well, which, for all that it seems purposefully impenetrable in many ways, actually does a splendid job of finding themes that the modern viewer can hang onto without sacrificing the sense of a world and culture utterly different in almost every material way.  I lack the knowledge to say anything useful about The Tale of Genji the book, or how The Tale of Genji the film works as an interpretation of said book - but, for me, the movie was a psychosexual nightmare painstakingly detailing just how badly a patriarchal society can screw up and screw over everyone involved.  Genji, a noble and son of the emperor, is a man who can have anything he wants, and what he wants is practically every woman he sets eyes on, but what he really wants is the mother he was deprived of when he was too young to even remember her face.  So he falls in love and lust again and again, leaving broken lives in his wake, finding no satisfaction, seemingly oblivious to the depravity of sleeping with the woman who's effectively his stepmother and then her daughter, who he adopted while insisting, with apparent earnestness, that he'd never do precisely that.  He's a monster, but such a sad, lonely, eerily beautiful monster that we can't really do more than pity him, and it's easy to understand why women time and again let themselves be sucked into his terrible orbit - though, as he himself makes clear, it's not as though they have a great deal of choice in the matter.

Now, obviously, this isn't and was never going to be for everyone, and even if you do happen to find yourself on its wavelength, it's not perfect.  There are points where The Tale of Genji is simply too hard to follow, and while those passages invariably swim into focus later on, a little more effort being made to key us into when, say, months have passed between scenes would be no bad thing.  And while the film does a solid job of picking an end point that lets it wrap up its story in a relatively satisfying fashion without attempting to cram in the whole vast scope of the novel, some choices made in that ending, such as an effects-led sequence that seems to have blundered in from 2001: A Space Odyssey, are probably not the best way of getting there.  On the other hand, I can't bring myself to be too critical of a film that sets itself so bold a task, makes so few compromises along the way, says so much with relatively few words, and manages to do all that while being utterly gorgeous both to the eyes and the ears.  Some movies are best off being a mite flawed, and while The Tale of Genji doesn't quite reach to masterpiece status, in failing to do so it gets to some awfully bold and fascinating places.

Master Keaton, 1999 - 2000, dir: Masayuki Kojima

I don't know that I even ought to be reviewing Master Keaton here, and I certainly don't know if there's any point; at any rate, I can't recall another title that's clashed quite so hard with my rule of only reviewing films and OVAs and definitely not reviewing TV shows (unless someone asks me nicely or I feel like it.)  For the thing is that, while the last fifteen episodes of Master Keaton were released straight to DVD and so are counted as an OVA, you absolutely would never know that to look at them, since they're functionally identical to the TV episodes that preceded them in terms of quality and even have the same opening and ending sequences - not to mention how Pioneer's release further muddies the waters by lumping TV and straight-to-DVD episodes in with each other on the fifth disk of their eight-disk set.

Probably I'm the only person in human history who's attempted to watch those fifteen OVA episodes as a separate entity, and even I wasn't pedantic enough to ignore the TV episodes that appeared on disk five - that is, my disk one!  So we return to the question, what's the point in reviewing them separately except to stick to my own arbitrary rules?  And the answer is, I've watched them with the intention of covering them here, and damn it, I'm gonna do just that - but also that there's actually no good reason why you shouldn't cherry-pick Master Keaton, since it's terribly hard to find any of it, let alone all of it, these days.  To pre-empt the conclusion, it's a really good, frequently great show that happens to be remarkably consistent, to the extent that I'd have to think awfully hard if I had to rank the four disks I watched, and so if you see a Master Keaton DVD going cheap, be it TV or OVA episodes, you should probably jump on it regardless.

And now we're two paragraphs into a review and there's a good chance you haven't a clue what I'm on about, since it's fair to assume that the unreasonable difficulty in tracking down Master Keaton and the seeming lack of a collected edition have gone a long way towards robbing it of its rightful place in the pantheon of top nineties anime shows.  So let's start again: what we have here is the adventures of the titular character, whose actual name is Taichi Hiraga-Keaton and whose profession is an insurance investigator for Lloyd's of London.  Though already I've misled you quite a lot, in that the episodes flit all across Keaton's varied career, so that at various points he's an archaeologist and a soldier in the SAS, and while he certainly does have adventures, it's equally possible that any given entry might find him doing not much of anything or being sidelined almost altogether so that another member of the recurring cast or even a one-off protagonist can step into the spotlight.

This is a big part of what makes the show so good - and also, I suppose, what keeps it from being better than it is, for it's really closer to being a short story compilation than a series, and even the best short story compilations have their ups and downs.  For me, a down came early and soured me on the experience for a good long while, until I finally learned to forgive and appreciate what was on offer: it was, for the record, episode 23, which is set in the Lake District, an area of England I know pretty well, or well enough anyway to understand that it's not an enormous swamp.  After that, I found myself nit-picking more than was fair, and certainly more than I should be doing here, given that episode 23 isn't even one of the OVAs.  Point being, there are odd weaker episodes, and a few stunners, and the majority settle around good to very good; it's a respectable batting average, but it also means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, since you never know what will come next, but you can be confident there's a high chance of enjoying it.

What's more consistent is the animation, which benefits from some distinctive and more-realistic-than-usual character designs and in general hovers somewhere above what you'd expect of a nineties anime TV show, though somewhere below what you'd hope for from an OVA: it rarely wows and never lets the side down, but its sheer reliability is impressive in itself given the vast range of settings and enormous cast.  There are some neat directorial flourishes along the way, too, and the general sense is of a show that intends to be serious entertainment for grown-ups, though not so serious as to sacrifice a sense of fun and whimsy.  If Master Keaton never quite perfects either, with the occasional lapses in research and logic dinting its smartness and the more action-centric episodes feeling lightweight among more sophisticated company, the very fact that it presses its hand so boldly is exciting in itself: it's a thoroughly ambitious show with a marvellous central character, one that hits much more often than it misses and impresses even at its worst.

Dragon Century, 1988, dir: Kiyoshi Fukumoto

There are, of course, vintage anime titles that are great by any metric, that are masterpieces of filmmaking beyond the specifics of their time, place, and medium.  And, more commonly, there are no end of vintage anime titles that, if you're into the sorts of things Japanese popular culture was fixated on at the time, are wonderful and well-made works of entertainment, even if they don't quite transcend their genres to the point where anyone can enjoy them in the way that, say, most Ghibli films do.  Those two categories, it's fair to say, have provided us with the vast majority of our positive reviews here.  But there's a third category that's harder to pin down, though if I had to describe it, would be something like "Vintage anime that's great if you happen to be really into vintage anime - but, like, really into, maybe to a slightly unwholesome degree."  Here we find those rare titles that perhaps aren't what you could call objectively good, but are amazing at condensing all the stuff of eighties and nineties anime into a pure cocktail of giddy awesomeness.  They're never going to convert a new audience, and probably plenty of people who dig anime will find them off-putting in their refusal to play by basic narrative rules when they could be chucking more cool stuff into the mix regardless of whether there's room for it or not, but if you happen to be on their wavelength, they'll carve themselves a permanent place in your heart.

Fight! Iczer One gets there for me, as does Battle Royale High School, but I'm not sure if Dragon Century mightn't have just claimed the top spot.  It's so absolutely disinterested in being anything other than the precise thing it is, so unwilling to waste even a second of its running time in dealing with the sort of fundamental storytelling you might expect, nay demand, of something built on the most bonkers foundations.  Dragon Century burns through more setup in its opening five minutes than many a full-length TV series will ever get around to, as in short order we discover that dragons are suddenly real, they've invaded our world, and though they haven't yet made their way to Japan, that nation is serious enough about the threat to cobble together a (very small) anti-dragon task force led by a man who, based on the world's shortest flashback, doesn't have a lot of love for dragons.  This is, I stress, not the plot of Dragon Century, and indeed not even the plot of the first of its two episodes, but merely the minimal amount of setup allowed to get us into the actual plot, with our actual protagonists.  But that I beg you to discover for yourself, since so much of the pleasure of Dragon Century is wondering where the heck it will go next, then being blindsided by a choice you almost certainly wouldn't have predicted.

This ought to be chaos - the more so since since the second episode starts again after a lengthy time jump and has to rush through any entirely new setup so that it can tell an entirely different story - but Fukumoto does a fine job of keeping things on the rails, though not so on the rails that it's not all delightfully mad.  Sure, it's streamlined within an inch of its life, but Dragon Century is never obtuse, and we always have as much knowledge as we need, albeit with the sense that there's an enormous amount of additional information we could be benefitting from if there was only the space for it.  Admittedly, this borders on the ludicrous at points, as when a dragon just remembers that it can speak fluent Japanese, but then that returns us to my opening point: do you want exposition, or do you want the raw stuff of vintage anime jetted in your face at a hundred miles an hour?

Thankfully, Dragon Century looks the part as well, hailing as it does from that brief window at the tail of the eighties in which something like this would receive a respectable budget and the attentions of animators eager to show off what they could do.  The action fares well, the backgrounds are detailed, and reuse of footage is kept to an agreeable minimum.  The only really questionable choice is that the dragons look awfully humanoid, despite being based on the classic Western folkloric template, and they take a bit of getting used to, until you realise they have to be that way because how else would we get dragons wielding machine guns?  And that, really, is the crucial point that should help you decide whether this is something that warrants the effort of tracking down and devoting fifty minutes of your life to: dragons with machine guns, yes or no?  Probably there's no right answer, but there's certainly one that proves you've fallen far too far down the vintage anime well - and if that's the case, you might as well make the best of it and bask in the crazy delights that Dragon Century has to offer.

Yu Yu Hakusho: Eizou Hakusho, 1994 - 1996, dir: Noriyuki Abe

There are two reviewing practices I've never been very proud of on this here blog, and I'm about to do both of them at some length.  One is reviewing something I lack the wider context to give a fair assessment of, and given that my entire experience of the Yu Yu Hakusho franchise consists of the less-than-half-hour first movie and the actually-movie-length second movie Poltergeist Report, but none of the TV show's 112 episodes, it's fair to say that I barely have the faintest idea of what I'm talking about.  Then the second is reviewing the release rather than the product, is a heavy feature of many of my earlier posts, which date from that dark and woeful age in which the odds of seeing vintage anime on Blu-ray were vanishingly rare.  And given that the version of Eizou Hakusho I'll be talking about is that of Funimation's hugely lacklustre DVD release - with a forced 16:9 aspect ratio, dreadful audio mix, and a print that looks like it was ripped from someone's old VHS copy - it's tough to make fair judgements when it comes to things like animation and music, since Funimation have taken pains to ensure that everything looks and sounds about as bad as it possibly could.

So, I dunno, maybe take it with a pinch of salt when I say that Eizou Hakusho sucks, and sucks so badly that it's one of the very few vintage anime releases I genuinely regret devoting a chunk of my life to.  The more so since what we have here is actually two OVAs bundled together, and only the first, which Funimation call Scenes From the Dark Tournament, is actually soul-draining to watch.  In essence, it's an hour of out-of-context fights - from a dark tournament, you see - and is thus, for someone who's not much of a Shonen fan, pretty much a vision of hell.  Not, you understand, that I don't enjoy a good fight scene, but firstly I do generally need to have some idea of who and why and what the heck's going on, and secondly, I'm not convinced that any of these snippets, (bar perhaps the last, which understandably gets more attention), are any good at all.  They're extremely formulaic, and the formula amounts to "enemy with one specific, mildly interesting power seems to be getting the upper hand, until, for no obvious reason, our hero abruptly wins."  Good animation or imaginative direction could make that watchable, but, even putting aside Funimation's washed-out, blurry print, there's nothing terribly exciting happening on the visual side of things, and while there's a quite staggering number of songs playing over both this and the second OVA, you could count the ones that make any impact on one hand and probably still have enough fingers left to play the piano.

Eizou Hakusho part two is, as I say, something of an improvement, though that's extremely relative.  Each of its four episodes is devoted to a particular character, each starts with a short music video-style thing showing them off, and each then delivers a few chunks of plot, some of which I take to be recapped from the TV show and some of which, presumably, consist of material that would have been new to viewers.  As such, while they don't really have stories as such, they have bits of stories, and that's meaningfully better than an hour of random fights - though, of course, there are still plenty of random fights in here too, including some we already got to see in part one.  It's watchable, anyway, and the prints are marginally better, though the audio still sucks, and by the end I had a vague handle on who the main cast members were, though not so much that I was itching to track down the TV show, or indeed wanted to ever watch another second of Yu Yu Hakusho.

Does that make Eizou Hakusho only for the fans?  In a sense, obviously, yes, in that there's absolutely no reason you'd want to watch this if you hadn't already made your way through everything else Yu Yu Hakusho-related.  But even then, it feels awfully vapid and mercenary, and I struggle to imagine the fan who was clamouring for this precise thing, rather than, say, a meaningful side story or epilogue or even a reanimating of some of the key moments covered here.  To put it another way, I can't think of a franchise that I've ever been so devoted to that I'd consider something like this a worthwhile buy.  So no, not even one for the fans, but one for the completists, the more so since the DVD includes the previously unavailable first movie, which was at least OK, and you can, at time of writing, pick it up fairly cheaply.

-oOo-

That ended on a sourer note than I'd have liked, and it's just possible I was being extra harsh because stumbling upon a release from a major franchise that I hadn't known existed was kind of exciting at the time.  I mean, I don't think that's the case, it genuinely was nigh-on unwatchable, but who knows?  At any rate, let's focus on the positives: we have three new recommendations, and a holiday spell of finally catching up on the last leg of my vintage anime reviewing is just around the corner.  Until then, why not go hunt down Dragon Century?  It has dragons with machine guns, don't ya know...   

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 146

Pleasant as it was last time around to cover some of my all-time favourite films in the second part of our Studio Ghibli special, this month's batch of deeply obscure oddities feels so much more in the spirit of Drowning in Nineties Anime.  Though, thinking about it, it's fair to say that all four entries here are actually products of major franchises - it's just that they're major franchises that never made a meaningful impact outside of Japan.  And so we have an Osamu Tezuka adaptation, a hugely popular magical girl, a spin-off from an enormous video game series, and an OVA from a major action-comedy franchise, and there's still an extremely good chance you won't have heard of a thing from among Ambassador Magma, Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, Fire Emblem, and Saber Marionette J Again: Plasmatic Crisis...

Ambassador Magma, 1993, dir: Hidehito Ueda

It's always nice when a title exceeds your expectations, though nicer, it has to be said, when those expectations were above rock bottom.  Ambassador Magma the OVA series is a slice of vintage anime that I've never once known anyone to mention, which was released by not one but two publishers you've almost certainly never encountered: Kiseki in the UK, L A Hero in the US.  Heck, I'm not convinced Kiseki even put out the full series, given that there's no trace of more than three volumes that I can find; the US version spreads the 13 episodes over six tapes, and I assume they'd planned to do likewise.  And while in the plus column we have as source material a much-loved, in Japan anyway, manga from the legendary Osamu Tezuka, nostalgic reboots of classic sixties properties are every bit as likely to go awry in Japan as they are anywhere else.

Yet, with all of that, Ambassador Magma is thoroughly okay and frequently quite good, and if that hardly sounds like a recommendation, I do intend it to be, albeit with a few caveats.  The one you might expect would be that you're unlikely to ever find the thing, except that it's apparently reared its head on US streaming services, having skipped a couple of decades of intermediary formats.  That aside, the negatives are mostly trivial, and largely come down to an acknowledgement of what he have here: for all that I get the impression the creators were doing quite a bit to make their material feel more current than its source, they certainly didn't go so far as to erase its innate goofiness or to worry unduly about setting it apart from a million other "boy and his giant robot buddy have exciting adventures" anime properties.

Which isn't to suggest that's all it's up to; one of Ambassador Magma's weirder quirks is how little screen time the titular golden giant gets in favour of our teenage protagonist Mamoru, his parents, a handful of reporters, a bunch of military folks, and indeed Magma's arch-nemesis Goa, all of whom feel more significant to the story as it unfolds than the huge shiny guy who occasionally pops up to batter a monster.  Indeed, this was Ambassador Magma's best surprise: for all that it has a definite 'cartoon adaptation based on a 60s comic aimed primarily at kids' vibe, the actual plot veers all over, including to a few places I'd have never anticipated, and spends as much time dipping into horror and weird sci-fi and smaller scale action as it does focusing on the sort of giant-robot-battling-monsters shenanigans you'd have every reason to expect.  The plot has its share of flaws, including a few points where, in the dub anyway, it's downright incoherent - Goa's backstory with humanity, in particular, seems to change on a scene-by-scene basis - but generally it does a respectable job of finding thirteen episodes of content with which to keep itself occupied and building towards its climax with a proper measure of escalation.

At which point I'm starting to feel like I'm describing a show that's better than "thoroughly okay", and arguably my reason for landing there comes down largely to personal taste.  The more so since it's mostly due to the look of the thing, and I can't really fault the animation as a whole: it's never less than competent and often rather ambitiously flashy.  But the character designs are just horrible.  The goal, I think, was to keep the simplicity of Tezuka's art while bringing it into the present, and Ambassador Magma fails on both counts, losing every iota of Tezuka's charm but still looking dated even by nineties standards.  Moreover, it's the main cast who get the worst of it, which becomes all the more noticeable later on when a couple of designs that actually work show up.  It seems like it ought to be an inconsequential bother when stacked against the virtues elsewhere, but in practice it's an awful drain on the show's energy, making it too often look like the kiddie cartoon it mostly manages not to feel like.  And so we end up back at "thoroughly okay", with the caveat that if the designs don't bother you, and if you're a fan of Tesuka and that era of Japanese sci-fantasy, you might find plenty to love here.

Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, 1985, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

If we were to discuss Gigi and the Fountain of Youth by its more accurate-to-the-Japanese title, we'd be talking about Magical Princess Minky Momo: La Ronde in my Dream, which, as you might notice, hasn't a single word in common and also apparently has a different protagonist.  Quite an accomplishment, you'd think, but the fact is that we're back in the world of Harmony Gold and Carl Macek, and if you have any familiarity with those names, you'll both know better than to be surprised at a spot of drastic misnaming and have already set your expectations to a barrel-scrapingly low level.  For their collaboration was mostly one of treating Japanese animation as raw product to be mangled in whatever way they saw fit, so long as it could be made vaguely palatable to small American children.

I say "mostly" because here we are and the dub of Gigi and the Fountain of Youth is actually pretty great, Gregory Snegoff's script is a solid piece of writing in its own right, and while I have my doubts as to how much any of this is a faithful adaptation of the original Japanese - the apparent lack of ten minutes of running time sets off alarm bells even before you get to some obvious translation liberties - the truth is that it works just fine.  And to be fair to all involved, bringing the second OVA spin-off of a long-running, much-loved-in-its-native-country magical girl series to a Western audience that almost certainly wouldn't have the faintest knowledge of it was no small task, and we can hardly blame those involved if they chose, for example, to slap a bit of narration over the opening credits to key us in on some crucial information.

But already we get to why this is the rare dub that works on its own merits.  What starts with an upbeat but faintly dry narrator tossing us some bare-bones information rapidly devolves into an argument between said narrator and Gigi's dad, the king of some magical realm that the adaptation makes no efforts towards explaining.  For all that it's an obvious idea, the execution is legitimately amusing; but more than that, it does a fantastic job of setting our expectations, since, though the narrator will vanish soon enough, the foreknowledge that we're in for lots of freewheeling weirdness with the barest respect for the fourth wall or narrative convention is extremely valuable for what's to come.

And this I don't think we can pin on Macek, Snegoff, Harmony Gold, or any of the game American cast trying to navigate through the madness; it certainly feels in keeping with other Japanese kids' movies of the period, where pure dream logic and whiplash tonal shifts were par for the course.  However, nor are any of the American creative team trying to rein the material in, and thank goodness for that, since once you settle into Gigi's rhythm, it's a delight.  Or should that be lack of rhythm?  Certainly, the first twenty minutes or so, in which Gigi and her friends set off to rescue her parents from an airline crash and stumble upon an isolated island that houses what's basically Neverland from Peter Pan, feel as close to incoherent as any narrative I've seen that wasn't being purposefully surreal.  That seems pretty baked in to the franchise, too: take Gigi's magical girl power, which isn't to transform into a single alternative persona, as is usually the way with these things, but to turn into literally anyone she wants to be.  Granted, her choices here only extend as far as "sneak thief" and "pilot", but it remains a uniquely disorientating approach to that particular trope.

Nevertheless, bear with Gigi and the Fountain of Youth and there is an actual plot here, with something like a beginning, middle, and end.  Granted, that beginning, middle, and end cover a dozen different genres, from comedy to conspiracy thriller to musical, and get awfully cluttered with whatever ideas happened to strike the creators in any given moment, but they're there.  And crucially, keeping up never feels like a chore.  At worst, it's a bit confusing in the early going, which really is a whirlwind of seemingly unrelated stuff happening.  But while it's never less than busy and deeply eccentric, the bones are those of a solidly entertaining and even, in places, an unexpectedly poignant movie.  And while the animation budget seems more in line with some polished episodes of the TV show than an OVA, it's really only the frame rate that suffers, with there never being a sense that the spectacle - which gets pretty darn spectacular in places, as the absurdity reaches epic heights - is being compromised.  For all its strangeness, there's the sense that everyone involved was giving their all to Magical Princess Minky Momo: La Ronde in my Dream, and let's be glad that the same can be said of Gigi and the Fountain of Youth.  It's a heck of a shame we never got more of Minky Momo's bewildering adventures in the West, but at least Macek and co recognised the gem they had and tried to do it justice.

Fire Emblem, 1995, dir: Shin Misawa

To start with some positives that set Fire Emblem a little apart from your average two-part OVA, and indeed your average nineties anime video game adaptation, it's an awfully slick and detailed piece of animation made by a director who's making actual choices that go beyond ensuring that everything's legible and on budget.  Misawa constructs scenes interestingly throughout and stages some bursts of legitimately exciting action, and he and his team have put meaningful thought into such age-old problems as how to distinguish past from present and how to keep a large cast easily identifiable.  To expand on that latter example, not only do we have some easily readable designs and a spot of well-used colour coding, the central characters are drawn to a notably more exaggerated, big-eyed aesthetic compared with the relative realism of the minor players.  It may sound like damning with faint praise, but there's much to be said for good nuts-and-bolts filmmaking, especially when you've got a lot of material to work through and not much time in which to do it.

Except that I was damning with faint praise, because none of the above is enough to save Fire Emblem.  I mean, I guess that it's saved from being an unmitigated disaster and nudged into the heady realms of mildly ambitious failure; I'll never be the one to argue that above-par animation and more-than-competent direction count for nothing.  But they can't substitute for good bones, and Fire Emblem has such dodgy bones that it's amazing it can stand up straight, let alone stagger along for the better part of an hour.

We might lay that at the door of its being an adaptation of a video game that was never about to have its plot squashed into fifty minutes, and we might also point to the fact that it feels awfully like there was intended to be more than what we ultimately got, but, though both points surely didn't help, I think we'd be making excuses for some pretty fundamental failings.  Because if you only have two episodes, you have to make sensible use of that time, and Fire Emblem doesn't do this to such a degree that I truly couldn't tell you what tale the first episode thinks it's telling.  If I were being generous, I'd propose that it's to do with the young prince-in-exile Mars working past his doubts and the caution of his elders to re-enter the conflict that claimed his father's life, but even then, what I've summarised there is basically just a series of events: "hero sits around, finally decides to act" is a jumping-off point, not a story in its own right.  And while part two feels somewhat less shapeless, it commits the identical sin and adds a new one of its own, splitting the focus onto a side character who also spends twenty minutes dithering before finally deciding to act for reasons we the viewer have barely been made privy to.

Not finding enough of a narrative through-line is annoying, but I guess it's understandable given how much game there was to cram in here - though, again, we might argue that trying to cram so much in rather than picking out a couple of chunks that would be satisfying in their own right is precisely where things began to go wrong.  At any rate, what pushes Fire Emblem over into being properly annoying is how much of a slog it is to follow even when there's so little happening.  I praised Misawa for differentiating his flashback footage, for example, but the method he chose just looks like someone mucked up the contrast, and even then, opening with a flashback when you've not established anything to flash back from is pretty shoddy.

Fire Emblem does a lot of that kind of thing, not to mention at least one moment of flat-out incoherence: there's a scene in which the side-protagonist of episode two appears to rescue a young couple from bandits, yet when we next encounter them, one's back in captivity and the other is having their injuries treated by our heroes, and I was so bewildered that I watched the sequence again to be sure I hadn't missed something.  But no, we're presumably just meant to guess what occurred in the meantime, or maybe to have played the game, in which case why bother adapting it to a different medium at all?  Put all those niggles together and the results are actively frustrating: such a straightforward bit of cheesy fantasy ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep up with, not a puzzle in constant need of unravelling.  And, if anything, it only adds to the frustration that Fire Emblem gets so much right; there were obviously a bunch of talented people here putting in the effort to make something special, and it's a shame the good stuff was undone by such fundamental mistakes.

Saber Marionette J Again: Plasmatic Crisis, 1997-1998, dir: Masami Shimoda

I was unreasonably excited to come across Saber Marionette J Again, given that, before I stumbled upon it, I'd pretty much convinced myself I knew of every bit of nineties anime there was that had made it as far as a DVD release.  And my only prior history with the Saber Marionette franchise - which is surprisingly vast for something so widely forgotten - was the OVA Saber Marionette R, which I'd quite enjoyed, particularly for the extravagant amount of world building it managed to fit into a relatively brief running time.  Saber Marionette J Again, at six episodes long, had twice the space to work with, so what could go wrong?

Looking at the back of the DVD case, I can see at least one reason why I was foolish to get my hopes up.  It's not the quality of the artwork, which is hard to judge from still images: they can't convey the jankiness of late-90's animation that's relying too hard on computers to do things on the cheap, at the behest of animators who seemingly have no idea how to hide the seams, to the point where there's invariably a digitised line or two flickering aggravatingly somewhere.  (Though I do think you can spot the floatiness of digital foregrounds plastered over painted backdrops if you look carefully.)  But no, the actual giveaway is that, of the seven images chosen by Bandai to promote the show, not one shows off anything more dramatic than a conversation.

You might think that, if you were trying to sell buyers on your light-hearted action show, you'd want to include some action in there - but we oughtn't to criticise whoever designed that packaging for failing to emphasise something that Saber Marionette J Again could hardly have made a lower priority.  Our first hint of excitement comes, I swear, towards the end of the fourth episode, and only number five could legitimately be described as action-heavy.  I'm not saying a six-episode OVA has to be action-packed, not even when it's the sequel to a TV series that was; I'm sure I could come up with examples of similar things I love that are heavier on the talking than this.  But the problem is that Saber Marionette J Again does so little to fill that void with anything else, and indeed so little to warrant its running time.

What we get is pure anime spin-off boilerplate: the cast are reunited for tenuous reasons and a new character is introduced, who'll prove to be crucially important until they vanish at the end, never to be heard from again.  Here that character is Marine, and her arc is a great illustration of the leaden pacing.  If I remember rightly, she doesn't even properly appear until episode two, where she's set up as an antagonist in a thread that's rapidly dropped.  We then get an episode of her being incorporated into the show's ongoing harem comedy shenanigans, before, well into episode four, we get the aforementioned action scene as a lead-in to - well, to the plot, essentially, or at any rate to the particular (and yes, plasmatic) crisis that Marine will be required to deal with.  Like I said, it's purest boilerplate, but it's terrible at being even that, what with its somnambulant pacing and plenty of enormous, unnecessary plot holes and baffling character decisions, as when the nominal villains spend an episode trying to kill the one and only person they know can save the world on which they themselves live.

In a sense, though, such criticisms are maybe missing the point.  Or it might be fairer to say that, in saddling Saber Marionette J Again with any sort of high-stakes drama, the creators were the ones missing the point of their own property; either way, the plot's dumb because nobody cared about it and because the show has no place for existential threats when it would rather be hanging out with its silly, one-note characters making goofy jokes.  And who knows, if you were a fan of the series, maybe that would be enough?  Purely on its own merits, though, Saber Marionette J Again is functional, kind of ugly, and ultimately sunk by devoting any energy at all to a narrative it couldn't be less invested in.

-oOo-

You'd really think I'd know better than to have any sort of expectations by now, yet Fire Emblem and Saber Marionette J Again both managed to disappoint, so more fool me.  On the other hand, my hopes were low indeed for Ambassador Magma and Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, and those both proved to be nice surprises, particularly the latter, which has become a minor new favourite.  And, you know what, with only four more posts to go because we've covered basically everything there is to cover, or three if we exclude the end of the Studio Ghibli special, it's pretty great that there are still some unexpected treats waiting to be found.  Plus, I'm far enough into the next post to know that we haven't seen the last of them, and that we may yet get to wrap up this marathon through the vast world of vintage anime with slightly more of a bang than a whimper...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 145

 It's post number 145, which means part two of the Drowning in Nineties Anime Studio Ghibli special, and specifically a look at the four films released by Ghibli between 1989 and 1993.  They're fascinating for any numbers of reasons, of course, but what struck me was that here, already, three movies into their lifespan, we were into the troubled stage in which the studio tried to figure out how the heck it could be more than just an outlet for its two genius creators, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.  Spoiler alert, except not really, since we both live in the present day: they'd never quite work that out, and the whys and wherefores of that failure would lead to some fascinating and even somewhat tragic places over the succeeding decades.  Though the flip side, and another thing that's awfully evident here, is that the mere act of trying, and the determination to not coast on early successes, led them to some equally interesting places and - as we're about to see - a wonderfully diverse output.

Let's take a look at Kiki's Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, and Ocean Waves...

Kiki's Delivery Service, 1989, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Kiki's Delivery Service was originally intended to be a short film - at a planned 60 minutes, short by Ghibli standards, anyway - and to be directed by Sunao Katabuchi, until Hayao Miyazaki's involvement as producer because so extensive that he took over as director too, at which point the running time ballooned, as did the budget, to end up being among the highest for an animated film at that point.  At the time, perhaps no one would have thought much of Katabuchi being shouldered out by his considerably more experienced and respected producer, but now we have the benefit of nearly four decades of hindsight and know that he'd go on to become a master animator in his own right, with In This Corner of the World in particular standing as one of the great achievements of 21st century anime.  So it's interesting to wonder what might have been had Miyazaki held back, and to speculate to what extent all this was the result of a troubled production, as, not for the last time, Miyazaki tried and failed to expand Ghibli's directorial base beyond himself and Isao Takahata.

Whatever went on, Kiki's Delivery Service is a markedly less flawless film than anything Ghibli had produced up until that point.  Indeed, at the level of raw plot, it's really kind of a mess.  Miyazaki's screenplays have a tendency to be kind of shaggy, but none of them rely so heavily upon contrivance and happenstance as this does, and none feel so aimless until well past their midway point.  A single example to illustrate: having set off alone at 13 to find her way in the world, young witch Kiki has more or less accidentally set up a delivery business, since being able to fly on a broom is handy in that line of work.  For her first proper job, she's tasked with delivering a bird cage that contains a toy black cat that so happens to be the spitting image of her familiar, Jiji.  But mid journey she's caught by a gust of wind, the toy cat gets lost during a run-in with some angry crows, and Jiji is obliged to play dead to act the part until Kiki can recover the real thing.  This she does by noticing it in the window of an artist who lives in the depths of the woods - said artist will become an important character, not to mention something of a deus ex machina, later - and the problem of swapping Jiji with the toy turns out to be no problem at all thanks to the intervention of a kindly old dog.

Write it down like that and it really is just ten minutes of stuff happening, without much rhyme or reason and without much in the way of character agency.  While Kiki ignores a warning about the wind and does a bit of housework as payment for the return of the toy cat, nevertheless it mostly feels as though neither her travails nor her successes are due to anything she has or hasn't done.  And such woolly plotting isn't the film's only flaw, either: I'd forgotten how irritating the character of Tombo, Kiki's kind-of love interest, is, at least until we get to know a bit more about him past the midway point - since it very much seems we're meant to find him off-putting until then, as Kiki herself does.  I'd even propose that Joe Hisaishi's score isn't up there with his best efforts, with a tendency towards a chipper Continental vibe that's a perfectly fine match for Miyazaki's purposefully nonspecific hodgepodge of a European town but doesn't elevate the material the way his finest works do.

Yet I love the film wholeheartedly, and would rate it in the top half of any list of my Ghibli favourites.  And feeling that way doesn't require me to ignore its flaws, as I hope I've made clear, or to pretend they're all somehow intentional.  I do think they're somewhat intentional, and in a way only a genius like Miyazaki could pull off, but that's not to say that, for instance, having a major character who's downright annoying for half the running time should be ignored.  Nevertheless, a Kiki's Delivery Service without its imperfections would undoubtedly be worse, since the thing it's exceptionally good at, which happens to be the thing Miyazaki stated as his intention for the film, is to capture the sort of crisis of faith you can only really have as a teenager, as you realise that the world isn't fair or rational, and sometimes bad things happen for no reason, just as sometimes you're rewarded for getting things wrong.  You wildly misjudge situations and people; you sulk and often don't even know why; you can be overwhelmed with joy and wonder one minute and sunk in self-loathing the next.  And few films convey that turmoil half so successfully, or with a central character half so well-formed and charming as Kiki, a protagonist markedly more complicated than any Miyazaki had offered prior to this point.

Plus, the plotting may often feel arbitrary, but when every moment is so perfect in and of itself, it's hard to care.  Take that sequence I critiqued earlier: sure, it's set off by a random mishap, but my goodness is the scene of Kiki being flung about by gale force winds an exquisite bit of animation - indeed, the flying sequences consistently rank among the most terrific of Ghibli accomplishments - and lucky break that it may be, my goodness are the scenes with Jiji and Jeff the elderly dog funny and adorable and sweetly melancholy.  It's as though Miyazaki, through enormous force of will, is invariably finding the best possible version of material that theoretically oughtn't to work half so well as it does and that, in lesser hands, could slip into being aimless and twee in a heartbeat.  And while I don't know that I'd describe Katabuchi as "lesser hands", I can certainly see how, so much nearer to the start of his career as he was then, he might not have been able to read between the lines of Miyazaki's screenplay the way its author could.  Which is okay, I think; ultimately he'd go on to make a couple of near-perfect coming-of-age movies of his own, and we got to have Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, one of the loveliest and most empathetic family films of all time.

Only Yesterday, 1991, dir: Isao Takahata

A couple of personal anecdotes to start with.  First up, Only Yesterday was the film that turned me around on Isao Takahata, who until then I'd regarded as that other guy from Studio Ghibli, and knew only from Grave of the Fireflies, a film that's almost impossible not to admire and equally nigh-impossible to love.  But Only Yesterday, now there's a movie that you can fall in love with, and I did, and I love it still - indeed, I was slight surprised, returning to it, to realise just how big a place it holds in my heart.  That being anecdote number two, as I discovered to my shock that I've been quoting one particular stretch of dialogue practically verbatim for years without appreciating where it had come from or that I was quoting at all.  For those who've seen it, it's Toshio's mini-lecture in response to Taeko's joy at being amid what she sees as untouched nature, to which he responds that every stream, every wood, every hedgerow has actually been arranged and controlled by the people who live there, generation after generation, in service of their needs.

Only Yesterday is full of such insights.  It's long, at narrowly under two hours, and has the bare minimum of plot: Taeko takes a working holiday in rural Japan as a break from an office job in Tokyo that she's starting to realise isn't fulfilling her needs at all, reminisces about the brief spell in her childhood that made her want to visit the countryside in the first place, and hangs around with Toshio, a local organic farmer, who already has quite the crush on her and who she slowly discovers she's falling for in return.  Really, laying it out like that suggests a more plot-heavy and overtly structured film than the one we get, which is episodic in the extreme, often spending minutes at a time exploring a particular incident in ten-year-old Taeko's life, varying from the triviality of trying fresh pineapple for the first time to the momentousness of the one occasion her kindly, rather distant father struck her.

It ought to be messy, and yet it's so perfectly controlled and so constantly engaging that it never feels that way.  I think that part of why I was once a little cool on Takahata is that his films can feel kind of unfocused and overloaded with stuff, and sure, that stuff is all wonderful, but does it absolutely all need to be there?  Watch Only Yesterday closely and the only possible conclusion is that yes, it does, or at the very least that Takahata strongly believes it does, and has given his utmost to ensure that not a frame feels wasted or superfluous.  It's intoxicating, almost but not quite too much of a good thing, and just as with Grave of the Fireflies, I was a helpless, blubbering mess by the end; but this time it was the happy crying that comes from watching something completely transporting and genuinely life-affirming, not because it feeds you platitudes but because it reminds you that goodness exists and change is possible.

And obviously it's gorgeous, that ought to go without saying at this point, but even by Ghibli standards, Only Yesterday is gorgeous in some particularly distinctive ways.  That extends to the soundtrack, surely the most complex of any of the studio's movies, with a mix of licensed tracks, an original score, and most strikingly, traditional Eastern-European folk music that lend the scenes it appears in a haunting, off-kilter energy.  Visually, meanwhile, Takahata makes the perhaps obvious choice of making the present-day scenes essentially realistic, while the flashbacks to Taeko's childhood have the washed-out, faded-edge impression of old photographs, an approach that would have been easy to abuse and which he manipulates sublimely to convey the ebbing and flowing vividness of Taeko memory.  And though it's easy to think of Miyazaki as Ghibli's resident perfectionist, not much in his canon can compare with the attention to detail in the the present-day scenes: what they lack in gimmickry, they more than make up for in quality, rendering prosaic elements like a night-time car journey so painstakingly that they end up feeling not at all prosaic.  There's truly not a frame I could nit-pick, just as there isn't a moment I'd trim or change: it's daft to talk about perfect films, of course, and yet for the life of me I can't imagine a better version of Only Yesterday than the one Takahata created.

Porco Rosso, 1992, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Porco Rosso is a lark, a word I'd use to describe nothing else in Hayao Miyazaki's filmography, not even the relatively frivolous Castle of Cagliostro or the non-stop high adventure of Laputa.  Almost always there's a basic seriousness to Miyazaki's work, which in turn demands that we take it seriously, no matter that its subject matter might, on the surface, not seem to warrant such treatment.  Partly, perhaps, it's a consequence of the sheer artistry involved, and partly that whatever he's making, there's always a depth to the world-building and characterisation, and partly it's that, even in his lightest works, themes tend to creep in around the edges, along with an awareness that, however much we might wish otherwise, the world isn't always a safe place full of good people.

Porco Rosso sort of still has all that.  It would be hard to claim otherwise of a film that spends its entire running time under the encroaching shadow of fascism and ends by acknowledging that the high times it's shown off for 90 minutes are done with, never to return.  Heck, our hero is a former soldier with a tragic past that he's trying to outrun, outlast, or perhaps just give as little thought to as possible.  But he's also, like, a pig.  I mean, a humanoid pig, sure, who wears clothes and can talk and fly a plane and do basically all the things people do, but nevertheless, a pig.  And the film doesn't dance around this, so that we can never forget for an instant we're watching a movie about a humanoid pig who's also a fighter pilot.  But even if that weren't the case, even if Porco Rosso the character - it means "Red Pig", see what I mean about not letting you forget? - were merely a rather Humphrey Bogart-coded tough guy making his mercenary living taking out sky pirates above the Adriatic, this would still, I think, be light-hearted in a way practically nothing else Miyazaki put his mind is.

This is amply illustrated by the opening sequence, in which a band of said sky pilots semi-inadvertently kidnap a class of school girls, who couldn't possibly be less nonplussed about the situation, and don't start to take it any more seriously once Porco arrives to rescue them via the questionable means of shooting their plane down.  This ought to be at least mildly concerning, but since no one within the film is concerned - not the kids, not the pirates, and not our hero, who, to be fair, is suitably careful in picking his shots - we the viewer can't be concerned either.  And so it goes: though serious things will happen, and though the spectre of fascism is always hovering close by, nevertheless the overwhelming mood is one of joy, because who wouldn't want to live in an alternate mid-war era when mercenaries and sky pirates fought thrilling battles in one of the lovelier places on Earth?

I think we can safely assume that Miyazaki did.  More than anything in his CV, this feels like not merely a passion project but a reward for reaching a point in his career where he could make something so wilfully odd and go so all-in on the one obsession that's been a constant across practically all his work: that of flight and particularly the brief age of mechanised flight we see portrayed here, in which the nascent science of aviation relied as much on luck, persistence, and magical thinking as it did on - well, science.  Porco Rosso is brazenly obsessed with this stuff: the entire middle act is effectively just one scene after another of Porco's plane being repaired, while what plot there is ticks away gently in the background.  It ought to be deadly dull for anyone who doesn't share Miyazaki's passion, but then Miyazaki's a man never bettered at expressing through the medium of animation precisely why he feels as strongly as he does about any given topic.  Plus, by this point we have the film's secret second protagonist in play, Fio the teenage mechanic, and Fio is fervent and open and excitable in all the ways Porco isn't, such that we want her to succeed almost as much as we want to see Porco back having thrilling midair duels.

Because the advantage of having a director indulging himself on a subject he's wildly enamoured with is that he throws everything at the flying scenes, pushing the medium about as far as it will go and indulging in sequences that would send most animators scurrying for the hills.  Water is tough to animate; complex objects moving in three dimensions are tough to animate; it follows, then, that no one in their right mind would build their hand-drawn animated film around aircraft fighting mostly over the ocean.  But passion projects aren't meant to be pragmatic, are they?  And if I were to really nit-pick, I might add that they're maybe not always meant to be loved, either, since they're made, first and foremost, for their creators.  Having had nothing but positive things to say, I'd have to admit that, for me, Porco Rosso is still lesser Miyazaki.  Granted, that's barely a criticism, just an acknowledgement that the film, while delightful, is a little trivial-feeling in the company of masterpieces - though from anyone else it would certainly be at least a fondly remembered cult classic, which goes to show what a stupid bar for Miyazaki films holding them up to other Miyazaki films is.

Ocean Waves, 1993, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki

Ocean Waves was a departure for Studio Ghibli in just about every possible way.  The standout, of course, was that for the first time they'd be putting out a work by someone other than its two founding fathers, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, a notion they'd flirted with before with Kiki's Delivery Service - and we've seen how that went.  But this time, Miyazaki and Takahata were serious: Ghibli had to be more than just the two of them, and so it was time for a project that gave some of their hot young talent a chance to shine.  Only, by way of mitigating the obvious risks of putting out a Ghibli project without the name of either of its two resident geniuses attached, it was going to have to be something a little more contained in scale: a TV movie with a suitably smaller budget and less ambitious animation, and a story to match, not a sweeping epic but a high-school drama confined to a handful of locations, with a 72-minute running time that would barely quality it as a feature film in the West.

Ocean Waves went over-budget, of course; even without Miyazaki and Takahata, Ghibli was still Ghibli.  Nevertheless, what Tomomi Mochizuki eventually delivered was effectively what the brief had demanded, which perhaps inevitably left it as noticeably cheap-looking by comparison with their previous output and comfortably the worst film they'd released up until that point.  But let's flip that on its head and clarify my position early: even if Ocean Waves was, in 1993, Ghibli's least great film, that's not to say it wasn't pretty great in its own right.  And cheapness, too, is extremely relative: there's some jolting animation that would have looked out of place in, say, Laputa, but there's also some lovely and effective backgrounds and some incredibly nuanced character animation, that being a speciality of Mochizuki's, as he'd proven with the similar and thoroughly wonderful Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day five years earlier.  Ghibli's idea of budget animation was not anyone else's, then or now, and there have been no end of cinematic releases that couldn't hold a candle to their idea of made-for-TV.

The same goes for the narrative.  In no way did the shift in material mean that Ghibli were abandoning their standards for smart, empathetic, complex storytelling.  Though, granted, on the surface, Ocean Waves offers a fairly traditional coming-of-age tale centred around a high-school love triangle: in the coast city of Kōchi, close friends Taku Morisaki and Yutaka Matsuno both become involved with a new transfer student, the beautiful, troubled Rikako Muto.  For Matsuno, that means immediately falling for her and doing practically nothing about the fact, while Morisaki, our protagonist, inadvertently finds himself developing a more complex relationship with Muto, beginning when she borrows a large sum of money from him while on a school trip.

Common enough ingredients; however, it's fair to say that the traditions to which it hews closely were less ingrained then than now, and more importantly, that Mochizuki's interests go beyond the usual limits of the genres he was working in.  Indeed, it would be hard to argue, for most of its running time, that the film cares much about the question of who might end up with who at all.  Rather, it's the process of looking back on these events that preoccupies Ocean Waves, and especially the idea that, particularly in our most formative years, it's awfully hard to pick out what's important and significant to our lives from amid the chaos.  Retrospect reshapes everything, and while sometimes that means distorting the past to fit a shape we'd have preferred or turning the molehills of small hurts into mountainous injuries, it can also mean that we see more clearly and understand much better, especially when it comes to gauging our own actions and making sense of those of others.

From all of that, you might fairly claim that Ocean Waves is a perfectly fine example of a particular type of story rather than the sort of ground-breaking masterpiece Ghibli had been trafficking in almost exclusively up to that point, and you'd be right, more or less.  Yet I've always thought that it did break ground in its way, and while it's impossible to gauge, for me its influence routinely shows up in the many subsequent anime that treat the travails of teenagerdom with honesty and respect.  Is it really a stretch to suggest that a film like A Silent Voice or a show such as Toradora! has a dash of Ocean Waves DNA in there?  Whatever the case, if lesser Ghibli means doing the familiar exceptionally well rather than expanding the breadth of cinematic animation, that's a low bar I'm happy to live with.  Granted, it has its flaws - the biggest, for me, being Shigeru Nagata's score, which goes too far in trying to dictate mood and routinely opts for the wrong one - and while I greatly admire Mochizuki, no one could claim he was on a par with his fellow Ghibli directors.  Yet he proved himself, here and elsewhere, as being absolutely terrific at honestly representing the emotional landscape of teenage life, and while I can imagine an objectively better version made by Miyazaki or Takahata, it would surely lack much of what I admire in Ocean Waves, where the smallest gestures and moments carry such a wealth of meaning.

-oOo-

Five more posts to go, then, with the big 150 seeing the end of our Ghibli tour.  In the meantime, there's plenty of interesting stuff left to cover, at least by a given definition of interesting that assumes everyone involved to be hopeless vintage anime nerds.  There's a few more VHS-only releases, and more surprisingly, a handful of things that made it as far as DVD and even Blu-ray - in part because there's a classic or two I've neglected and need to tick off for the sake of completism.  On top of all that, there's likely to be an Armored Trooper VOTOMS special, what with it producing a quite hefty number of spin-offs across the eighties and nineties, and the only real question mark comes down to whether I can finish watching the TV series in time.  I mean, I will, it's really good, but damn is there a lot of it.  Anyway, that certainly won't be next time, so expect a bunch of stuff you've probably never heard of...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating] 

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 144

There's a very good chance you haven't heard of UK anime distributor Western Connection.  Actually, it would be strange if you had; they only ever released on VHS, managed to put out all of about two dozen titles, then vanished without a trace.  And what they did release was mostly pretty obscure, not to mention what a hash they generally made of doing so, with badly timed subtitles, tissue-paper-thin inlays, bafflingly worded descriptions, horribly cheap and unreliable tapes, and a money-saving hack of cutting out episode credits to pass off OVAs as films.  Heck, those weren't even their worst offences, as we're about to see - because, yes, this time around we're looking exclusively at titles from this most would-be-notorious-if-anyone-had-heard-of-them of distributors!  So let's see what mess they managed to make of Slow Step, Dancougar, Galactic Pirates, and Hummingbirds...

Slow Step, 1991, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

Upon starting the second of Slow Step's five 45-minute episodes, a couple of things occurred to me.  The first was just how much had been set up in the first episode, for all that it had seemed to be ambling along in a fairly aimless slice-of-life mode - yet here we were and there were numerous characters in the mix with multiple plot strands around them, half of which had crept up on me unawares.  Which led directly to the second revelation, that I was already thoroughly caught up in those character dramas and eager to find out how things would pan out.

This, it turns out, is basically the game Slow Step is playing throughout, ushering its plot and cast towards you with the lightest of touches while at the same time developing them with sufficient care and attention that it's hard not to get absorbed.  I guess, then, that a third surprise was the realisation that I was watching something kind of special: superficially familiar in a bunch of ways, sure, but stamping its own personality on well-worn themes and even sometimes using that familiarity to surprise.  For example, by the beginning of episode two, our female lead Minatsu has managed to stumble her way into a situation where she's dating two different boys, one of them while wearing a fairly obvious disguise.  It's remarkable how plausibly we get to that point, and the disguise, which amounts to a wig and glasses, is obviously preposterous, but the character designs sell it nonetheless.  However, with so much vintage anime behind me, I was starting to dread the narrative convolutions that would be needed for Minatsu to keep her double life up and how tired that was likely to get with another three hours of running time to go.

Only, Slow Step doesn't do that.  The dual identity shenanigans last for precisely as long as they need to, and when Minatsu's charade inevitably falls apart, it does so in a manner that both advances and deepens the plot - which, remarkably, is how more or less everything works.  We have not one but two interlocking love triangles and a show that's both a baseball anime and a boxing anime, but somehow none of those elements stumble over each other or detract from the whole.  The sports bits arguably gets the shortest shrift, but only in so much as their value, asides from providing a bit of action, is in how they matter to and affect the characters.  Even the comedy is never there purely for its own sake, with a general lack of overt gags or goofiness.  And for all that, Slow Step manages to be awfully funny when it wants to be: I didn't laugh constantly, but I laughed hard in a fair few places, and often it was at a joke that had been gathering steam in the background only to catch me off guard at the crucial moment.

The writing, then, if I haven't already made that clear, is very good indeed.  How much of that we can pin on Manga creator Mitsuru Adachi I daren't say, since I can't find a credit for a scriptwriter anywhere, but it's certainly splendid source material: Adachi, as I understand it, was quite a big deal in Japan, yet for whatever reason his work has barely found its way to the West.  Our loss, clearly, and all the more so if this is the sort of adaptation he gets.  I've had cause to say nice things about director Kunihiko Yuyama before now, and while he's not up to anything radical here, with the animation rarely having to do much besides make the most of Adachi's charming designs and keep the sports sequences lively, he certainly deserves kudos for the spot-on pacing and nice use of colour palate to build mood.  As stylistic choices go, it's all familiar stuff, but familiar stuff done so impeccably that it feels awfully fresh and exciting nonetheless, which is really Slow Step all over.

Dancougar, 1987, dir: Jutarô Ôba

Before we can begin to talk about Dancougar in terms of content, we need to get past what it was and what Western Connection did with it.  Most of that is the sort of sneakiness and shoddiness we've grown awfully familiar with in this long tour of vintage anime, and if you've made it this far, you'll hardly blink an eye at the discovery that what Western Connection put out as a standalone film was in fact an edited version of the three-part OVA God Bless Dancouga, second sequel to the 38-episode show Dancouga - Super Beast Machine God.  Granted, while there's scant effort made to reintroduce the concept or characters, it remains a bit more forgiving to the unfamiliar viewer than that might imply - and a good thing, too, since pretty much every viewer would be unfamiliar when this was dropped into UK stores because said TV show hadn't been released outside of Japan.  But we're still not really breaking new ground, and though we might add in Western Connection's bargain-basement production standards, none of that was unique to them either.

You know what was?  Releasing a title with the edges of the animation cells in shot, that's a new one on me.  I concede here that I might not do the best job of describing this, because I'm nowhere near having the technical knowledge to explain how Western Connection botched as badly as they did, but essentially, there are shots - and not just a few! - where the images appear unfinished at the top and bottom of the picture.  That unfinishedness is nothing weird in and of itself, it's how hand drawn animation was done in those days: you painted what was intended to be visible in the finished product and fudged the rest, and of course it would never occur to an animator that someone might be bonkers enough to release their hard work in such a state.  The practical effect varies from distracting to incoherent, since sometimes your brain just registers that something looks kind of off, but sometimes characters are missing their legs and appear to be floating in mid-air.  Put it all together, though, and it's the sort of bewildering mistake that the best anime in the world would struggle to survive.

If Dancougar is hardly that, it's fine for what it is, which is to say, an obviously unnecessary sequel that has all the usual problems unnecessary sequels are prone to, like having to spend an inordinate amount of time re-establishing its setup and then introducing a new conflict.  And to its credit, it even plays with those issues a little: there's an interesting thread teasing the notion that all our heroes have accomplished until now is to get rid of an external threat, leaving the usual bad actors to make everyone's lives miserable, since it hardly takes an alien invasion to make human society rubbish.  Had more been done with that idea, we might actually be on to something, and once it becomes apparent where everything's leading in the closing third, it's hard not to be disappointed, especially if you're one of those viewers new to the franchise who were naively hoping for a climax that didn't rely heavily on foreknowledge you couldn't possible have.

Admittedly, if you can get past Western Connection's ruinous cockup, the animation's rather nice, particularly during the giant robot action; but then there's not enough of that, and aside from the plot briefly threatening to go to interesting places, that's about the only significant positive I had.  Would that have changed if I'd been familiar with the rest of the series?  Marginally, perhaps, in that knowing the cast might enliven some of the character drama that bogs down the opening minutes; but I do think that, Western Connection's astonishing ineptitude aside, what really harms Dancougar is the sense that this story doesn't need telling and everyone new it.  So I guess we can be glad that what they chose to ruin in so unique a fashion wasn't some lost masterpiece but a serviceable, disposable sequel made for no other reason than that somebody supposed it might sell.

Galactic Pirates, 1989, dir's: Shin'ya Sadamitsu, Katsuhisa Yamada, Kazuo Yamazaki

One of the nice things about Western Connection was that they didn't generally go in for dubs - assuming you're like me and have no love for them, which is a big assumption, I'll admit, and probably in a perfect world they'd have done what the majority of publishers at the time did and released in both formats.  But they didn't, and because of that, the vast bulk of their titles are subtitled, a fact of which I, at any rate, have been glad.  But then we come to Galactic Pirates, which bucks that trend in a big way.  For not only was it solely put out as a dub, it's the sort of dub you're most definitely going to have strong feelings about.  And for most of the presumably small number of people who ever experienced it, those feelings were no doubt negative, because it's obvious within seconds that notions like respect for the material and restraint and faithful interpretation were not so much off the table as never in the room to begin with.

This manifests most obviously in a volume of swearing that would have put the curse-happy folks at Manga to shame and in the decision by one of the leads to play his character - a human-sized, talking cat, mind you - as though they'd just wandered in from a particularly tacky seventies Blaxploitation movie.  Since the cat's black, you see?  It's certainly a bold choice, and we might say the same for the director who didn't shoot the idea down immediately and the rest of the cast who didn't march their colleague out into the carpark for a sound kicking.  And yet, I dunno... it sort of works?  Oh, not in the traditional sense of good dubbing, in that it never stops being wrenching and obviously apart from the source material.  But it does have a certain "go big or go home" quality, and the performance, in itself, has a measure of enthusiastic charm, and sometimes it brings a spot of humour that wasn't there on the page, and I can't honestly claim I hated it.  In fact, from the perspective of someone with no time for dubs, this one sort of worked for me, and make of that what you will.

That is, anyway, on the level of the performances, and to some extent the humour, if you can get past the tendency to chuck in swear words in place of actual jokes.  And since Galactic Pirates is a comedy above all else, that actually gets us a fair way.  But there is a plot, quite the convoluted one in fact, and where the script translation - by someone named Dr. D. Shoop, who I'm inclined to suspect may not have been a real doctor - falls down is in losing said plot at every turn.  What's not gags and swearing seems to consist entirely of proper nouns, many of them variations on "cat" - a word that may be one of our protagonists, one of our villains, or a sentient AI that makes imagination a reality, depending on context - and following along winds up somewhere between a chore and an impossibility.  I couldn't manage a plot summary, and if I did, it would disintegrate by the last episode, by which point numerous characters and factions are following various agendas that seem to relate only tangentially to each other.

That's a problem, obviously, but it would be worse if there wasn't the impression that Galactic Pirates was always meant to be chaotic and that the script is, at worst, exacerbating an existing and somewhat intentional issue.  More to the point, the plot doesn't matter all that much; indeed, if there's a real flaw here, it's that the complex but aimless narrative gets the emphasis it does when the comedy, characters, and action are what works.  Thankfully, those better elements get foregrounded more often that not, with the wider story frequently sidelined almost entirely.  The second episode, for example, features a baseball match in which no-one knows how to play baseball, or even can agree on whether hand grenades and intervention by sentient spaceships are allowed, but everyone argues incessantly over the rules nonetheless, and it's genuinely hilarious in places.  If nothing else is quite that good, we never go too long without a solid joke or cheerfully weird concept to liven up events, and even in the weaker moments, distinctive designs and some fairly impressive animation help keep things lively.  Top it all off with an English-language heavy rock soundtrack by metal band Air Pavilion, which is somehow better for being such a weird fit for the material, and you're left with an interesting curio that works more often than not, despite - and very occasionally because of - the less-than-ideal treatment it received at the hands of those wacky folks at Western Connection.

Hummingbirds, 1993, dir: Kiyoshi Murayama

It's obviously bad practice to review the title you were expecting rather than the one you got, and yet the version of Hummingbirds I had in mind makes so much more sense than the one that was actually released that I had a hard time getting over it.  If you have an anime in which, for reasons unknown, the Japanese military has been entirely privatised and the only ones daft enough to take them up on the offer are idol groups, you'd surely think the central joke would be along the lines of, "Wouldn't idols make terrible pilots, on the grounds of them not having any of the relevant skills and there being basically no connection between being a popular musical performer and controlling a piece of state-of-the-art military hardware?"

Hummingbirds begs to differ.  Instead, our five protagonists, the Toreishi sisters, are all hotshot pilots to begin with (despite their youngest member being all of 12 years old) who happen to also want to be idols, and so are uniquely well suited to these bizarre circumstances.  And I'm all for avoiding obvious jokes, but there's nothing to say an obvious joke can't be funny, and by the same measure, dodging one is really only a virtue if you have another to replace it with.  I've read reviews that suggest Hummingbirds is a biting satire, but personally I couldn't see it: it has little to say on the topics of either the Japanese military nor idol culture, except for noting in passing that the two would make for quite the awkward fit.  Indeed, I'm not even sure we can regard Hummingbirds as being primarily a comedy of any stripe.

With all of that out of the way - and I do wish I'd known it going in, so perhaps it's worth so much emphasising - we can finally consider what Hummingbirds is rather than what it isn't and acknowledge that the show has quite a bit going for it.  The animation, for one thing, is mostly pleasing, particularly in the air combat sequences, which generally look pretty great, albeit at the price of some occasionally rough character work elsewhere.  After the action, most of the money seems to have gone on the song and dance numbers, which are as regular as you'd expect from a show about idols.  You might also expect some really standout tracks, and thus find yourself mildly disappointed, but everything's catchy and certainly good enough that having the brakes jammed on for five minutes of musical interlude never gets annoying.  And the cast are a charming bunch to be around; the sisters are a little indistinguishable beyond their effective designs and obvious age differences, but in episode two the rival Fever Girls arrive and bring a considerable spark to the proceedings, something the creators some to have realised given how much they become the centre of attention in the latter half.

So a neat four-episode OVA that fails to exploit the daftness of its core concept, but opts instead for being an appealingly character-led show about idols with solid production values and plenty of catchy tunes, along with some unexpectedly exciting bursts of action.  Put like that, it's hard to fault Hummingbirds, and I strongly suspect that when I return to it, as I'm sure I will, I'll enjoy it even more for taking it on its own considerable merits.  Which would be a nice, positive note to end on, but since this is the Western Connection special, we'd better take a moment to consider how said distributor managed to muck up this particular release.  Only, this time around, it's slightly tragic, in that they put out just the one volume, containing the first two episodes, before they finally went bottom up.  What's worse, it's a solid release, perhaps suggesting they were getting their act together towards the end.  Thankfully, all four episodes - under the original, obviously better title of Idol Defence Force Hummingbird - are up on YouTube, which is surely a better option than tracking down a phenomenally rare video tape and then feeling sad that you'll never get to see the ending.

-oOo-

I suppose it would have been best if these titles had sucked, given that it's all but impossible that any of them will see the light of day ever again. Yet I'm personally glad that they didn't, and that Western Connection, for all their eccentricities and sometimes almost unbelievable lack of care and common sense, managed to put out such a respectable and cheerfully eccentric catalogue.  Indeed, had they continued, and had their quality control improved substantially, I've no doubt they'd be one of my favourite distributors, and even with their small output, I have a definite soft spot for them: after all, aside from what we've covered here, they were behind stuff like Samurai Gold, Ai City, Grey: Digital Target, and The Sensualist, all of which I've raved about to a greater or lesser degree.

Though they did also release Kama Sutra, so, yeah, maybe they got what they deserved.

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