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...
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.
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.
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.
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-
