So here we are, the last ever "normal" post of Drowning in Nineties Anime - though I'm not sure what that would mean for a blog series that has spent so much time chasing up weird avenues and wandering off on strange tangents. I mean, were all those sexy anime specials normal? In hindsight, probably not. And while this isn't that, we do have the hint of a theme, in that I'm taking the opportunity to have one last trip back to the eighties and pick up a few significant strays that slipped through the net, or else - as in the case of our first title - got overlooked by virtue of being so damn significant that reviewing them felt like a fool's errand. But if writing 150 posts of vintage anime reviews isn't a fool's errand in itself, I don't know what is, so let's double down, wrap up those loose ends, and take a look at Akira, Space Firebird 2772, Adieu Galaxy Express 999, and Barefoot Gen 2...
The reason I've left possibly the most famous anime film of all time until our second-to-last post is simple: it's always felt extremely pointless for me to discuss it. For what possible use can there be in reviewing Akira in the year 2026, nearly four decades after it became, almost immediately, one of the most important and influential movies ever made? Heck, without Akira, there's a meaningful chance this very blog wouldn't exist and that I wouldn't be the hopeless anime nerd I am. Oh, Japanese animation would surely have made its way into the West in some form or another, but it's simply impossible to exaggerate the contemporary impact of Ôtomo's movie, and that's perhaps truer here in the UK than anywhere else, since the burgeoning Manga Video, who for an age would be practically the only voice in anime distribution, pushed the film relentlessly and seemingly for years after its initial release. For the longest time, Akira was anime and anime was Akira, in a way that perhaps no other film has so wholly defined its medium.
You know what? Whatever else I'll have to say about it, not all of which is going to be 100% positive, it earns every iota of that seismic cultural impact. We've certainly worked our way through enough anime by this point to acknowledge that Akira was part of a number of contemporary trends rather than the lightning bolt from the heavens it felt like for those of us who knew next to nothing about Japan's long tradition of animation: if nothing else, it couldn't have happened without the very specific context of a nation with money to burn and a willingness to burn it in sizeable quantities on animated cinema made exclusively for an adult audience, a combination that was, at that point, still almost unthinkable in the West. But bottomless heaps of money is only half the battle, and it's thanks to Katsuhiro Ôtomo and the many supremely talented individuals he gathered around him that the end result was a work of stupendous ambition in almost every possible way.
Above all else, Akira is a staggering feat of the animator's art. The level of detail is frankly ludicrous; the sheer number of sequences that would be the show-stopping pinnacle of any other film is absurd. There's effectively no corner cutting, not even of the most basic sorts that have been making hand-drawn animation economically feasible since the dawn of the craft, such as reducing the frame rate at points where only the pickiest of viewers would notice, let alone care. Only Ghibli and a very small handful of Disney films do anything comparable, and even then, there are aspects where Akira is untouchable: I don't know that anyone's ever created more fluid, detailed action sequences, and Ôtomo's dedication to reproducing the complexities of light is head and shoulders beyond what anyone else has attempted. It's not beautiful, as such, because it portrays quite a staggering amount of unpleasantness and ugliness over the course of its two hours, but it's awe-inspiring, a work that, even on what must have been my fifth or sixth viewing, made me want to gasp out loud at least every ten minutes.
I'd argue, then, that we really do have to regard Akira as a timeless classic regardless of its actual content: if it were the most generic nonsense imaginable, it would still be a must-watch. But whatever else we can say about Akira as a narrative, it's not generic. In a sense, it's maybe not all that original either, in that you can absolutely see where all the bits and pieces are coming from: a healthy dose of Blade Runner here, a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey there, a splash of American superhero comics deconstruction, along with plenty of Japan's idiosyncratic biker gang culture and various then-zeitgeisty philosophical notions. However, in place of absolute originality, what we get is the furious blending of ideas and influences that only a unique creative consciousness can produce, so that Ôtomo's take on Blade Runner, with its abandoned attempts at civic reconstruction, creeping industrialisation, and seemingly endless graffiti, would go on to be practically as influential in its own right.
More than that, though, Ôtomo's most interesting and distinctive quirk was to centre his big-ideas science-fiction epic around characters both distinctly normal by the standards of the genre and in many ways quite unsympathetic. While we get the usual mad scientists, tough military men, and corrupt politicians you'd expect of a story like this, our kind-of hero and our kind-of antagonist are, essentially, nobodies, albeit nobodies who spend their spare time tearing about on high-powered motorbikes getting into horribly violent high-speed battles. And this is where Akira becomes something almost unique, and also where it ever so slightly loses me. For all that Kaneda and Tetsuo make for a fascinating central duo, they can be pretty damn hard to be on side with; but even more crucially, the film spends a lot of its running time tying itself in knots to keep them towards the centre of the plot, and still has to sprawl off on some hefty diversions that leave the middle act especially feeling stretched and chaotic.
Yet I don't know that those issues are fixable or that I'd want them to be fixed: maybe Ôtomo could have streamlined his ideas into something clearer and more coherent, but the heart of the problem is that he wants his grand tale of human evolution to be centred on a couple of orphan biker kids who don't altogether fit there, and take that from Akira and you've lost something awfully special. It's an inarguably flawed film, I think, one that I have boundless admiration for but can't altogether love, though there are no end of individual moments I'd cheerfully lay down my life for if push came to shove; and I don't know where that leaves us, the more so since you've almost certainly already seen it and formed your own judgement years or entire decades ago. Still, I was glad of an excuse to revisit it, and it occurs to me now that it's one of only two films I own any merchandise for* - Kaneda is sitting on his too-cool-for-words bike, pointing his laser rifle at me as I write these words - so it obviously owns some major real estate in my heart.
Having already sat through it twice, I'm not about to test the hypothesis, but I do wonder if watching Space Firebird 2772 with the sound turned off would address some of its more glaring issues. It would at least save you from Yasuo Higuchi's clamorous, manipulative score, and while the plot would still be a nonsensical amble consisting almost entirely of diversions and dead-ends, at least you'd be spared the precise details. But more to the point, you'd be able to focus on the one aspect that does, more or less, work: Space Firebird 2772 is at its best - by which I mean, the dizzying heights of "quite good" - when it's operating as a showcase for animation that was, I imagine, at about the cutting edge of what anime was capable of in the year 1980, and which hits some genuinely sublime heights on a regular basis, even if it doesn't hit them all that consistently. Near the start, for example, there's a shot of a car travelling through a three-dimensional cityscape that's the most naked bit of showing off, and reminded me of similar showing off in other anime, except that it goes on for about three times as long and is even more needlessly complicated and extravagant, zooming in and out and shifting angles and never running out of ways to be ingenious.
There's also, to be fair, lots of stunning animation that actually serves a narrative purpose, but I picked on the fact that director Sugiyama thought it appropriate to put a hold on his story while his crew flexed their cityscape-drawing muscles because it's an example of a tendency that hamstrings Space Firebird 2772 throughout. The film has mostly been released in the West in a much shorter version of about 90 minutes, compared with the original's just over two hours, and I'm never one to advocate censorship, especially the kind that's just hacking at someone else's cultural works to make them slightly more palatable for the kids - plus, by all accounts, the shorter cut is incoherent - yet I'd be lying if I said that losing thirty minutes wouldn't have solved a bunch of my problems with Space Firebird 2772, or at least would have made it easier to stay awake.
Here, then, is the plot that Sugiyama and his co-director and producer, who happened also to be original creator Osamu Tesuka, felt needed two full hours to be told: Godo, a lab-grown human, is tasked with tracking down the titular space firebird, a dangerous cosmic entity of vast and mysterious powers, in the hope that it can save the dying Earth, which he does. There's more going on around the edges, of course, much more: before he can even head off into space, Godo has to fall in love with a woman from the ruling class and be packed off to a forced labour camp as punishment for stepping out of bounds - which illustrates, incidentally, the other profound problem with Tezuka's plotting, in that this society, in which everyone's assigned their social role at birth but somehow there's still a ruling class, which is or isn't hereditary based on the requirements of not even individual scenes but individual lines of dialogue, makes not the tiniest iota of sense.
Anyway, flabby and rambling as this is, squint hard and you can sort of see how it's meant to fit together, since it's important to the ending that Godo learns that human women are deceitful shrews and you're much better loving the sexy robot that raised you from a baby, especially since she can also transform into a sexy carry case, a sexy bike and a sexy jet. Because, oh right, Space Firebird 2772 has sexual politics that are horrifying even by 1980s standards! (Though still not as horrifying as Olga the robot nanny's transformation sequence, which is the rawest nightmare fuel.) The moral here really does seem to be that the only woman worth romantically involving yourself with is one who's obeyed your every whim since you were a baby, and if there was any doubt, the ending doubles down hard, while also erasing any last bits of sense or coherence to have strayed that far.
And goodness, here I am in the closing paragraph and I haven't even touched on the appalling comic relief characters, who include an alien who cleans incessantly and sometimes stops the plot dead to do little cleaning-based musical numbers, and an alien who's a dice for some reason. I swear, either of them on their own is worse than any comparable character from the lowest depths of Disney's canon, and the two together would be enough to shatter a much better film that this one. They point, I suppose, to the problem above all others, the one that makes Space Firebird 2772 misconceived from the ground up, which is that it hasn't the faintest clue what audience it's chasing and sees nothing wrong with butting apocalyptic dystopian science-fiction up against comic interludes of a sort that would struggle to amuse a bored toddler. It's a self-indulgent mess, and while editing would make it a shorter, more palatable mess, it couldn't hope to fix the incoherent world-building or the horrible attitudes towards women. And it's frustrating indeed that it's so stunningly animated at points that I can't discount it completely, so thank goodness for volume controls.
You might argue that writer and artist Leiji Matsumoto and director Rintarô were the perfect creative marriage, and you might equally argue that nobody could have been a worse choice to bring order to Matsumoto's evocative but incoherent science fantasies than a man who could be spectacularly great at putting any given scene together but whose greatest weakness became apparent when it was time to tie all those stylishly constructed scenes together. And, on the strength of Adieu Galaxy Express 999, I'd suggest that both of those arguments are right.
What doesn't work here comes down, largely, to plot, assuming you're basically on side with Matsumoto and happy to ignore things like characters that are essentially ciphers standing in for concepts and emotional states - and thus, with one or two exceptions, pretty dull. But I am, for the most part, willing to give Matsumoto the benefit of the doubt, since the things he did well, he did better than pretty much anyone: his wildly romantic, purposefully implausible flights of fantasy are something special and inimitable. Which is where, I suspect, the problems began, for - as I understand it, which I'm not sure I do - Adieu Galaxy Express 999 was specifically a sequel to the film Galaxy Express 999, but not necessarily to the TV show that film was compiled from nor Matsumoto's source manga, which in any case was incomplete at the time the first movie was made. Whatever the precise details, Adieu Galaxy Express 999 felt to me like a skilled imitation rather than something taken directly from its author's works, and one that was obliged to restart a narrative that had already been wrapped up quite tidily.
This, frankly, makes the first act or two of Adieu Galaxy Express 999 a bit of a slog - which sounds worse than it is, since the film has at least four and maybe five acts. At any rate, there's the need to reignite a conflict we had every reason to suppose had been wrapped up, then to set up a new quest for our youthful hero Tetsuro (whose soul character trait, now that I think, is "youthful"), and then to build a fresh mystery around the already fairly mysterious Maetel. And none of it's bad, but none of it's terribly engaging either, the more so since it's so beholden to Matsumoto's highly episodic mode of storytelling. Even having seen the film before, I was beginning to wonder by the mid point whether any of this was going anywhere, so it was a relief when the third act came along and finally kicked events into gear. (It's easy to spot given that it's introduced with a sequence, signalled by the stirring but derivative score's sole dive into electropop, that's one of the most sublime series of images Rintarô ever created.)
From there, Adieu Galaxy Express 999 manages to be quite spectacular for a while, and also to pay off on all the narrative threads it's been doling out, and if this were the conclusion, I think I'd be pretty well-disposed to the film. Unfortunately, as noted, that third act isn't actually the end, and we still have quite a chunk of story to stagger through, including the introduction of a new antagonist that serves no apparent function except to exacerbate what's already happening (but, in fairness, looks awesome) and a twist that might have been moderately clever had it not been telegraphed so extensively and also done much better by another science-fiction juggernaut a mere year before. Oh, and Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas turn up, because why not?
This also happens to be the point where the one thing that's been inarguably working until now, that being the animation and the often thrilling uses Rintarô puts it to, takes something of a nosedive. There's some appalling re-use of looping backdrops during the second climax, which are hard not to notice since you often get multiple instances of the same repeating figures and objects on screen at the same time, and which, once noticed, go a long way towards wrecking everything else. But shoddy though that is - and it goes on for what feels like a good five minutes - it's thankfully the exception rather than the rule in a film that's more often beautiful and filled to brimming with wild flights of fancy. None of that keeps Adieu Galaxy Express 999 from being a mess - as messy as anything on either of Matsumoto and Rintarô's CVs, which is absolutely saying something - and yet it's a beguiling mess all told, one that manages to throw up astounding bits and pieces at such a regular clip that it's hard to be genuinely bored or even unimpressed.
If the idea of a sequel to Barefoot Gen - a film, I'd imagine, whose reputation among those who haven't seen it is "that movie about Japanese kids in World War 2 that isn't Grave of the Fireflies" - seems a bit odd, then we ought to remind ourselves that both features are based on the many-volume autobiographical manga by Keiji Nakazawa, which would follow its youthful protagonist all the way through to his mid teens. Yet, as much as I hate to use such words to describe such a raw portrayal of human grief and suffering, there was something quite neat and tidy in the narrative arc of the first Barefoot Gen, which followed Gen through the horrors of the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima and left him at what felt like, at least by the standards of everything that had come before, a relatively hopeful point.
Barefoot Gen 2 gives the lie to that, in that the closest thing it has to a comparable arc - and this is a spoiler, I suppose, though you'd have to be seriously film-illiterate to not pick up on it - is Gen's mother's protracted death from radiation poisoning. Around that, we have Gen and his adopted brother Ryuta foraging for survival in what, even three years later, still looks very much like a postapocalyptic landscape, at first on their own and then later, once they've befriended a pack of street orphans, as part of a tiny, self-constructed society. This is presented, as you might expect from an adaptation of an autobiography, and much as the first film was, in a series of loosely linked episodes. And many of these episodes are great, plus there's no denying their cumulative power, as we're forced, over and over, to examine exactly what it means to survive in the debris of a city that lacks almost all the basic infrastructure we associate with survival.
Unfortunately, what blunts their effect is that this is a sequel to a film that did mostly the same things but in almost every way better. I say almost, because the animation here is probably a touch improved - though, at the same time, Hirata does nothing to push the medium in the sorts of ways Masaki did the first time around. At any rate, everything else is a small step down, and it does mostly result from that structure, or the lack thereof. The film is awfully shapeless, and it has less room for variety. I noted in my review of Barefoot Gen that it pulled off the unenviable task of mixing a cheery tale of boyhood high-jinx with some of the most wrenching horror ever represented in animation; but while it dips its toe into horror, Barefoot Gen 2 is necessarily more restricted to Gen and Ryuta's childish antics, which we're encouraged to view (if only by composer Kentarô Haneda's bouncy score, and boy is that a crewmember I'd have rather not seen return) from something akin to their own perspective. By extension, this means that we don't get much in the way of nuanced characterisation, and Gen, in particular, is unfailingly good and kind, even when he's doing things that, were we not so bound up in his perspective, might be viewed as pretty crummy.
I wouldn't say these aren't problems; they definitely are. No matter how well something works, no matter how poignant and important and revealing, impact is always going to get dulled by repetition, and the business of survival, stripped to its barest elements, is very repetitive indeed. As an example, by the midpoint, I'd lost track of how many scenes of characters crying I'd sat through, and I think it's undeniable that a third as many would have been just as moving, if not more so. Yet I do think that's a response unfairly coloured by the existence of the original Barefoot Gen, and while it's that bit harder to avoid with a sequel, it's dumb to be critical of art just because there's better art out there. Plus, Barefoot Gen 2 does carve out its own niche: the one inarguably smart decision made here was to jump ahead three years, so that, in part by bringing our own knowledge of how Japan would eventually drag itself back from this devastation, we can see Gen's struggle as part of the first tentative steps towards putting the trauma of the atomic bombing behind him. It's a worthwhile movie, then, especially if you've any interest in modern Japanese history, and much of it works very well indeed; it just suffers from being the sequel to a major work and being obliged to retread so much of the same ground.
-oOo-
* The other being the Armitage films, should anyone be interested.
** Yes, I'm including both Tales From Earthsea and Earwig and the Witch there, and yes, I'll fight you! Though, in the case of Tales From Earthsea, it'll probably be the sort of fight where I go down after one light slap and stagger off mumbling to myself.
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