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...
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.
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.
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.
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-
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