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...
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.
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.
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.
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-
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