There are a couple of themed posts on the way - 145 will be part two of the Studio Ghibli roundup, and 144 will be, er, not that - but before we reach those, there's more random stuff to be gotten through. In a change from recent programming, however, that doesn't just mean desperately obscure VHS-only releases. We have something that made it all the way to DVD, but also, and much more excitingly, we have a brand new Blu-ray release that's (sort of) never seen the light of day before in the West. Yes, the good folks at Discotek have been at it again, and altogether that leaves us with Luna Varga, I Dream of Mimi, Digimon Adventure, and Techno Police...
The butt nakedness has mostly been addressed by midway through episode two, which isn't to say Luna won't be exposed quite regularly, in part because Varga's more portable form is a tail that protrudes from exactly the part of Luna you'd expect a tail to protrude from. And like I said, you can respond to all of this in one of two ways, or possibly bounce between the two extremes like I did, but at any rate, what we have here is four episodes of a scantily clad woman riding about on a dinosaur that's attached to her nether regions. Though having said that, I'm reminded of how much of Luna Varga busies itself with other stuff, such as wacky comedy, perhaps because the scenes where Luna and Varga are in full-on kaiju mode are invariably the action set pieces, and Luna Varga is rather thrifty by early nineties OVA standards - though thankfully Kageyama's energetic direction and some nice designs ensure that it never looks offputtingly cheap.
Nevertheless, I can't convince myself the version of Luna Varga we got quite works, and that's frustrating, since it really feels as though it ought to. It is, after all, effectively being a mech show where the giant robot is replaced by a giant monster and the boring male protagonist is replaced by a feisty princess, and that's surely a solid enough twist to keep a four episode OVA afloat. In fairness, it's not as if Luna Varga doesn't manage to get itself over the finish line reasonably intact, only that there's the persistent sense that nothing's quite functioning as well as it should be. The surrounding cast are varied and entertaining, and there are hints of intriguing world building: two of said cast, for example, can turn into animals on a whim, which is apparently a thing some people can do. But almost everything occurs more as an amusing idea than as meaningful content, and thus ends up feeling slightly like filler on the way to a final encounter with the big bad that's an awfully generic note to end on.
I guess my point is, if you're going to have a central premise as outlandish as "princess has dinosaur attached to her butt" and then pepper it with dark wizards who can only summon pterodactyls and people who turn into flying cats at the drop of a hat, you probably need to accept that you've gone to a weird place and run with it, whereas what we get here somehow ends up making all of that feel rather generic. As someone who has quite a fondness for generic nineties anime comic fantasies, I wasn't overly put out by that, and goodness knows there are plenty worse examples of the form, but there's no denying that an opportunity for something much more memorable was sitting there in plain sight.
OK, yes, I'm afraid I'm breaking the "no hentai" rule yet again, and again it's because some rando on the internet claimed that something was good enough that, with a bit of squinting, you could enjoy it on its non-pornographic merits. Now, I don't really agree, but I can sort of see how someone might have come to that conclusion about I Dream of Mimi, if only because there's some genuinely nice animation here, and some unusually good character designs, and a general sense that more than the usual thought has gone into the visual side of things, and not just for the sorts of reasons that hentai tends to focus on. Which is to say that by "good character designs" I don't just mean "well-drawn boobs". Though that too.
I care a fair bit about nice animation, enough so that I can ignore some pretty hefty failings, so that's a good start, and it's not even as if I Dream of Mimi has nothing else going for it: the humour worked enough of the time to keep me routinely amused, and since this is primarily a comedy when it's not being hentai - and quite often when it is being hentai - that's certainly a win. And the sexy stuff is all consensual and not especially graphic and relatively well woven into the plot, so in theory it's not as if its being hentai detracts from its other merits, either.
But in practice, by trying to do something awfully familiar but with a mildly pornographic twist, I Dream of Mimi leaves itself with not enough time to tell a decent story or to tell the one it's set itself very coherently. For what we've got here is one of those "nerdy guy gets magical dream girlfriend" shows that were, and no doubt remain, awfully common in the world of anime. They always had the potential to be kind of gross, and I've commented before on how miraculously they generally manage to sidestep being the worst version of themselves: heck, Oh My Goddess! is a personal favourite, and I doubt I could explain that to someone without making it sound deeply icky. Indeed, I remember singling out Video Girl Ai in my review on precisely that point, and being gobsmacked that it somehow wrung something heartfelt and witty from a premise that had every reason to be all sorts of unpleasant.
I won't quite go so far as to say that I Dream of Mimi is the version of Video Girl Ai that I praised Video Girl Ai for not being, but the possibility certainly occurred to me more than once while I was watching. Out story involves the nerdish Akira, who buys a computer from a dodgy fellow in the street and is surprised when he gets home that said computer is a naked girl, whom he eventually names Mimi. The show, incidentally, doesn't seem to know the difference between computers and robots, or indeed between computers and sexbots, that being effectively what Mimi is, since she immediately pledges herself to Akira for all eternity and seemingly has no functions that aren't powered by... Well, look, let's just say that if you'd care to hazard a guess at what Akira has to do to expand her RAM, or where her software needs to be inserted, then, unless you have the cleanest of minds imaginable, you're almost certainly right.
Given that we're in the realms of hentai, I guess there are plenty dumber reasons to jam a bunch of sex scenes and an awful lot of nudity into what's primarily a romantic comedy. But I Dream of Mimi never quite figures out how to balance those elements. Given that Mimi is a sex-powered machine, and an awfully possessive and demanding one at that, the romance doesn't function well at all, and the comedy keeps getting sidelined for what turns out to be the main plot, some action-heavy business about invading American computers that in turn doesn't gel with the ongoing business of Akira trying to hide from his friends that he's inadvertently married a nymphomaniac PC that looks like a teenage girl, and all in all this feels like a title that needed to pick fewer lanes and stick to them. If the concept appeals, it's certainly easy to imagine a worse version, and indeed a sleazier and more charmless version, but unless you're absolutely determined to have sporadic sex scenes in your magical girlfriend show, there are much better takes on that over-done setup to be had.
Digimon Adventure is quite a pointless title to be reviewing, but pointless for different reasons to how most of these reviews have been over the last two or three years, given that, thanks to Discotek and their recent Blu-ray, you can actually buy it in normal shops for a relatively reasonable amount of money. On the other hand, you almost certainly know in advance whether you'd want to - are you a Digimon fan, a Mamoru Hosoda fan, or both? - and given that Discotek's release includes the first three movies and that, at twenty minutes, Digimon Adventure is far and away the shortest, the odds are stacked against anyone splashing out for it in isolation, especially when they're also getting Hosoda's well-regarded follow-up Our War Game.
The logical thing to do, then, would be to review the release rather than the individual film. But I'm not going to do that because only Digimon Adventure came out during our decade of choice, and even if I do break my own rules here so often that it's become a running joke, I'm in a stubborn mood today. Yet thankfully, none of that matters, because if you fall into either of the categories mentioned above, then the first Digimon film, in spite of its miniscule running time, is damn near good enough to warrant the price of entry on its own.
Though, I dunno, maybe that's a little truer if you're in the Digimon fan camp? Hosoda brings an unusually visible amount of directorial presence, far more than you'd expect for a property like this, but I don't know that we can call Digimon Adventure a Hosoda feature in the way that, say, Wolf Children or The Boy and the Beast, or even his later franchise entry, the One Piece film Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, are. Yet Digimon Adventure manages to be a perfect approach to what a franchise movie should be, while at the same time feeling as if it's doing quite a bit more than what that would call for. The story is as simple and slight as can be - some years before the start of the TV series, Tai and his little sister Hikari have their first encounter with a digimon, then there's a big fight - but feels considerably more substantial and nuanced than that suggests. It starts out light-hearted, gets awfully dark before the end, and has as many delightful character moments as films four or five times its length. Plus, Hosoda being Hosoda, and having his shtick down apparently from even very early on in his career, the animation is wonderful, and in most of the ways his later work would feature wonderful animation, with tons of charm and subtlety of expression to the scenes that are primarily about two children trying to make sense of the cute but baffling monster that's inserted itself into their lives and a real sense of scale and weight to the climatic battle.
And you know what? I've changed my mind. In spite of a rather high price tag - sure it's three movies, Discotek, but they have a combined running time of one quite long movie! - I'd recommend this to any vintage anime fan, and to anyone who's interested in following Hosoda back to his roots. I know I said I wouldn't review the release, but Our War Game is pretty wonderful, spoiled only by some dated digital animation work and the fact that its director would return to the same well with both Summer Wars and Belle, leaving it feeling like something of a rough draft - albeit the rough draft of a skilled craftsman who already had most of what he needed to do figured out. And the third film, Hurricane Touchdown!!, is a perfectly serviceable, entirely rote franchise movie, which is okay because it just emphasises how elegantly Hosoda balances an auteur's instincts with the needs of his material, and so makes Digimon Adventure seem all the better for how much more it accomplishes with less than a third of the running time.
I try not to repeat what others have said better than I could, so rather than detail the origins of what would come to be known in the West as either Techno Police 21C or plain old Techno Police (I'm assuming, based on no evidence, that it had a different title in Japan), I'll just point you to this review. But short story even shorter, since it's handy information to know in advance: what we have here was intended to be a TV series that never got off the ground, and in desperation, the extant footage was cobbled together into something that, if you were being very generous in your definitions, could be regarded as a movie.
Though why anyone would be generous towards Techno Police is beyond me, since it isn't very good, and almost certainly wouldn't have been a good TV series, perhaps struggling its way up to "cheap and generic" in its better episodes. Here, those better episodes get translated into better scenes, of which there are maybe two, though I can only remember one, so perhaps I'm already being too kind. There simply isn't anything to get excited about, and I do wonder how things ever got so far as they did, since surely not even in 1982 was "futuristic cops are partnered with robots" such a ground-breaking premise that you could hang an entire TV show - or movie - off it without bothering to concoct anything in the way of interesting characters, settings, narrative or themes? And if I'm wrong and Techno Police had genuinely come up with a notion so radical and ground-breaking that it had to be thrust into the world by some means or other, even then, I refuse to accept that more couldn't have been down with it than ... well, than nothing, since Techno Police is content to go nowhere with its core idea. The closest we get to a hook is that the robot partners are essentially new-borns who have to be trained in the basics of police work and social behaviour, which translates to a brief montage of wacky misunderstandings, while also offering a fine example of the level this is operating on, given what an awesomely stupid jumping-off point "robot cops that don't know how to be cops" is.
Still, the robots serve us better than their human counterparts, since they at least get some mildly appealing designs, whereas the homo sapiens of the cast are bland as bland can be, both in appearance and whatever passes for character. They're not even stereotypes, and the only two traits I can recall about any of them are that the hero, Ken, is introduced to us as having a thing for trashing his police motorcycles that you might imagine would figure somewhere in the subsequent plot but doesn't, and Eleanor, the one who's a girl, gets an hilarious line in which she seems to suggest that getting into tanks is somehow her speciality. There's a third team member, but even looking at his picture on the cover and having watched this thing yesterday, I can't recall a single detail about him, and there are some recurring villains who I've also largely forgotten, and if there's a lower bar to clear than making your anime villains remotely memorable, I struggle to think what it might be.
Needless to say, the animation is resolutely threadbare, leaving multiple action sequences that feel like they probably ought to be mildly exciting as anything but, and an early score by Miyazaki's go-to guy Joe Hisaishi serves only to illustrate that even geniuses have to learn their craft somewhere. And with all of that said, and since I always try not to be wholly negative, I'll close by admitting that, in its incredibly modest and inept way, Techno Police did kind of charm me. It's not hatefully bad; you can sort of feel that somewhere deep beneath its bland and clunky exterior is the heart of something that somebody genuinely cared about - woo, robot cops!! - and however badly that spark got lost along the way, it wasn't altogether extinguished. Of course any modern child would be repelled by its incompetence and immense datedness, but I can imagine a kid in the late eighties stumbling across Techno Police on TV and kind of digging it for the course of eighty minutes.
-oOo-
I possibly got a bit more excited over Digimon Adventure than is altogether reasonable, but it's been on my want-to-see list for a good long while, and it's nice not to have been disappointed. However, in terms of recent good news, it's turned out to be a mere taste of what's to come. In particular, and after I grumbled hard about their past incarnation only recently, I'm feeling awfully positive about the new-look AnimEigo, who just made a bunch of very exciting announcements, including one that would feature high on my top ten of vintage titles that demand a Blu-ray release. And I don't know why I'm being coy, it's the Black Jack OVA series! Yay! So who knows, maybe we might even get another new title or two to look at before we hit the big 150?
