Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 84

Is it possible to watch too much Dragon Ball Z?  Because I definitely feel like I've been watching too much Dragon Ball Z.  And I can't altogether blame that on the fact that I was intending to review it here: truth be told, these things are kind of compulsive.  In so much as I get the appeal - which, as you'll see, I still do and don't in roughly equal measure - that's definitely the level on which I most feel I've synced minds with the fandom.  The franchise undeniably has a junkfoody appeal, and especially these movies, which tend to be short and easily digestible and full of sugary fun.  Late at night after a long day, it's easy to turn to them in favour of the more demanding disks on the to-watch shelf.

And I realise that introduction was closer to criticism than praise, so I guess it's time to address the question of just what I made of this second batch (you can find the first four films here.)  This time, let's have a prod at Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, Dragon Ball Z: Return of Cooler, Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13! and Dragon Ball Z: Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan...

Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, 1991, dir: Mitsuo Hashimoto

It's taken five movies, or eight if we count the original Dragon Ball, but here, finally, we reach the point where Dragon Ball Z becomes everything I'd initially expected and feared it to be.  The plot is this: An alien villain named Cooler turns up, there's a fight, then another fight, the end.  And I'd love to say I'm exaggerating for effect, but no, aside from a brief introduction to set up said villain and a short, mildly comedic interlude and a fetch quest in the middle where young Gohan sets out to find medicine for his father that's probably the best sequence the film offers up, I'm entirely doing it justice.

And, like, they're not even particularly interesting fights!  If there's a core problem here, it's that everyone involved seems thoroughly checked out, as though they've already lost interest in adhering to such an inflexible formula.  So Cooler has the usual Dragon Ball hench-villains, but they're the dullest bunch yet, and if you'd told me they were reused designs from earlier films, I wouldn't have blinked an eye.  As for Cooler himself, aside from a final stage that's somewhat different from the general Dragon Ball aesthetic, he's enormously dull, from his motives - avenging his brother, apparently a significant antagonist in the TV show - to his power set to his dialogue.  We're told repeatedly that he's more than a match for Goku, and Goku takes a nasty injury early on to hammer home this point, but there's never a second where you feel any real sense of threat or danger.

I praised director Mitsuo Hashimoto the last time we saw him, at the helm of Lord Slug, but here he seems as disengaged as everyone else.  And okay, my praise only went as far as commending his impression of series regular Daisuke Nishio, but that's still more than he manages on his second attempt.  It's journeyman work, with only the occasional shot injecting any kind of energy.  There are no dreadful choices or anything like that, but he's certainly not elevating the lacklustre material.  And the animation is very much on the same level, which is a level noticeably below what the last three movies were managing; it's stilted and TV-like and full of trivial but noticeable flaws.  To pick on one example that bugged me unduly, there's a point where Gohan has to climb a tower, and it's obvious that his movements aren't lining up with the background, as though he's Spiderman or something.  It's the sort of laziness that hasn't any right to make it into a major franchise movie.

But then, I suspect that's the crux of the problem.  If the Dragon Ball Z films haven't exactly felt as though they were the work of creators with a burning desire to express their deeply held visions, they at least had a fair degree of artistry and a sense that everyone involved cared about their craft.  Cooler's Revenge feels like product, banged out to a demanding schedule.  Of course, I'm conscious that I'm not the intended audience here, and obviously the fact that Dragon Ball Z is still going strong suggests that there are many people who want nothing more than what this has to deliver, even when that's only twenty minutes of uninspired action padded with a few scenes of nothing much.  For me, though, the thought that this is what the series was happy to sink to, and the possibility that there might be more of the same to come, isn't exactly encouraging.

Dragon Ball Z: Return of Cooler, 1992, dir: Daisuke Nishio

Given that Cooler's Revenge was comfortably my least favourite Dragon Ball Z film so far, you can imagine my enthusiasm to discover that said antagonist was back for another round, despite a very terminal ending the last time we saw him.  And wouldn't you know it?  Cooler, or rather his inclusion in a movie that would work a damn sight better with an original enemy in his place, is by far the weakest element.  As much as I've learned to expect a certain amount of ludicrous improbability from this franchise, the explanation for his presence really does stretch credulity past its limits, and in completely unnecessary fashion.  There's simply no reason to have him back, and its not as though he was that memorable in the first place.

Fortunately, Cooler isn't ruinous.  Unlike in the last film, there's enough happening around him that he's not the drain he was there.  It helps a great deal that we finally get the odd element that feels fresh and different in a series that seemed all too eager to grow stale as fast as it could.  Though we've had plenty of alien incursions, Return of Cooler is the first of these to take place away from Earth, and that, among other things, gives it a bit of proper sci-fi flair that we haven't seen for quite a while.  It helps, too, that Daisuke Nishio is back in the director's chair: while he isn't up to anything majorly thrilling (and if he was, the pedestrian animation would undermine it anyway) Nishio can at least be relied on to find the right tone for these movies, along with the right balance and pace.  There's enough humour and exposition and spectacle here to avoid the perennial Dragon Ball Z trap of feeling like nothing except over-the-top fighting.  Plus, the over-the-top fighting is actually mostly enjoyable, with an ingenious scrap against a mob of robots and Cooler's new form posing some unexpected problems that provide the sense of threat that was so lacking last time.

With all of that, it's easy to imagine a version of Return of Cooler that really succeeded, and rose to the top tier of what these movies are capable of.  Only, it would have to not be called Return of Cooler, because, as much as the new version of that villain on offer is pretty neat and in all ways an improvement, they divert the film in needless ways that do it no favours.  Without drifting too far into spoilers, we eventually learn that Cooler is allied with a second baddie, the gigantic planet-sized computer intelligence we saw attacking another planet in the excellent opening sequence, and once the details of that are in the open, it's tough to see how not keeping the focus on an omnivorous gestalt supercomputer wouldn't have made more sense that resurrecting a tedious lizard dude.

But, I dunno, twenty-four hours later and I'm not sure it's quite as big a deal as I took it to be at the time.  Cooler's presence is undoubtedly stupid, but if you can get past that, there's a fair bit of pleasure to be had.  As I say, Nishio's up to some solid work, the concept feels fresh, the action is relatively strong, and the series' regular composer Shunsuke Kikuchi delivers a particularly present and engaging score.  Given my personal biases, it's perhaps the case at this point that I'd recommend any Dragon Ball Z entry that strayed from being a big old tedious fight, but anyway, I enjoyed this a good bit more than I expected to.

Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13!, 1992, dir: Daisuke Nishio

I always try to find positives, so here are some positives.  Daisuke Nishio was a talented director who brought a certain warm, appealing tone to his copious Dragon Ball work, and was probably incapable of making a genuinely bad movie in this franchise.  Wherever he's present, you're guaranteed a few cracking scenes and some superlative moments of animation.  And Super Android 13! contains one of the best, in the shape of the introduction of two of its villains, a sequence that finds them marching through a busy city centre, oblivious to anything in their way, swatting aside anyone who interferes, and tracking down Goku with unwavering intent, in a manner that's both legitimately threatening and quirky fun at the same time, despite those being two tonal registers that clearly oughtn't to go together.

And with that, I'm out of positives.  This was Nishio's second Dragon Ball Z movie to be released in 1992, after the unusually strong Return of Cooler, and the lack of inspiration is palpable.  Actually, make that the lack of anything; even by the standards of a series that seems comfortable with substituting gigantic fights for actual narrative, this is a decidedly empty piece of spectacle.  More so than any other entry, it boils down entirely to the formula of: some enemies turn up, everyone fights, Goku unleashes a super-special move, Goku wins.  The enemies aren't interesting - one gets a slightly wacky design, but the other two are so bland that it balances out - and the fight isn't at all remarkable and the climax is more or less exactly the same as the climax of at least one more of these, so it's not even like Goku's whipping out a power or an evolution or a whatever that we've never seen before.  For crying out loud, not only is it empty spectacle, it's recycled empty spectacle!

I can't even find it in myself to be annoyed by Super Android 13!; it is, after all, not outstandingly bad in any meaningful sense.  Other than its lack of plot or originality - and okay, those aren't trivial issues, but they're far from new or crippling problems where Dragon Ball Z is concerned - there's not much that's flagrantly wrong.  Actually, the comic relief is dreadfully lame, and given that Dragon Ball Z is capable of delivering perfectly respectable comic relief, especially with Nishio at the helm, that's frustrating; it wouldn't have saved the film, but it would have provided something to remember it by.  And being unmemorable is more of a sin than would usually be the case, because this nonentity would be Nishio's last movie contribution to the series he made such an enormous contribution to, and it's without doubt his worst, and indeed probably the most perfunctory Dragon Ball Z film so far.

Dragon Ball Z: Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan, 1993, dir: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

Watching Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan made me realise just how low I've set the bar here, or rather, to what extent I've had to make up a whole new bar to accommodate this series: more than once during its genuinely feature-length running time did I think, "Wow, this is actually like a proper movie!"  It has a plot of sorts.  It has characterisation and character arcs.  It has rising action, and indeed, its big action climax doesn't even get started until halfway to the end.  Also, and in no way coincidentally, it's pretty good.

That plot doesn't bear much probing, but then, we don't need Shakespearean levels of scene-setting here, what we need is sufficient context that the fisticuffs have some stakes and a genuine sense of threat once they arrive.  And this Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan does markedly well, digging into the normally tedious background of Goku's Saiyan heritage and conjuring up a real demon of an antagonist to pit him and the gang against.  Broly is actually quite dull when you get down to it, motivated by not much more than an unexplained grudge and an innate desire to do evil, but paired with a manipulative father and tarted up with Saiyan lore - and drawn as the Incredible Hulk's whiter, nastier cousin - he serves the film's purposes just fine.  And crucially, this is the first bit of Dragon Ball Z in recent memory where I believed, however superficially, that our heroes might not win, or even might not survive.  Broly may be a dumb, undermotivated lunk, but he's scary, and a significant step up in the franchise's endlessly escalating power level one-upmanship.

Director Yamauchi, who also helmed my two favourite Saint Seiya movies, is clearly a dab hand at this sort of business.  He keeps the early sections pacey and engaging and the comic interludes peppy and on the right side of irritating, but he knows his job is to deliver one hell of an action climax and that much he certainly accomplishes.  There's an argument to be made that it goes on too long, especially when the fight is so one-sided for most of its length, but it remains a proper spectacle.  A lot of that can be chalked up to some intermittently stunning animation; in the early setup scenes, it's mostly at the level of getting the job done, but that's hard to begrudge once it becomes clear that the animators were saving their energy and budget for where they could show off to best effect.  This is the first bit of Dragon Ball Z that's genuinely wowed me on occasions: a comet that's established to be terribly important to the plot and then isn't is at least a gobsmacking bit of craft, but there are plenty of wow moments along the way, usually involving destruction on an epic scale.  It's easy to get these god-level battles wrong, but Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan mostly nails it, by retaining just enough of a human element but also by being so routinely thrilling that it's hard not to be drawn in.

Going back to my opening point, whether all this adds up to a good film in any wider sense is questionable, but then it's fair to say that judging Dragon Ball by the usual rules of film-making is a fool's errand.  On its own terms, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan does everything the series requires and does all of it well, while having enough meat on its bones to function as a proper narrative.  Given how often Broly would be brought back - we'll be encountering him twice more in these nineties movies alone - it's obvious this entry had quite the impact, and for once, it's easy to see why.

-oOo-

I guess what's strange here, other than how I'm devoting such a lot of energy to a franchise that's absolutely not to my tastes, is how many of these I've finding positive things to say about.  Cooler's Revenge and Super Android 13! were functional on their own terms and fairly dire in the context of the wider series, but that's two movies out of four that fulfilled my worst expectations, leaving two that took those expectations and managed to more or less turn them around.  So, going back to my original point, I do sort of get the appeal: when all the stars align, and the balance of comedy and crazy spectacle and cartoon violence is on track, and the direction and animation are up to task, these movies can be a lot of fun.

Nevertheless - that's quite enough Dragon Ball Z for the moment!

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 83

We're in largely familiar territory this week, as I continue to pick my way through the Black Jack and Lupin franchises, and get to another Leiji Matsumoto adaptation, the third in the Galaxy Express 999 series that I've turned a blind eye to before now, since I've so far managed to avoid going back as far as the seventies in these nineties anime posts.  (Okay, so Adieu Galaxy Express 999 was 1981, so we might see that here one of these days, especially since it's pretty great.)  However, last up we have a random fighting game adaptation, and if ever there was a category with the potential to go badly wrong, it's that.  But then, one of the great things about nineties anime is how often it manages to surprise you!

So what surprises await among Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy, Black Jack: Infection, Lupin the Third: Dead or Alive, and Art of Fighting, eh...?

Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy, 1998, dir: Kônosuke Uda

I won't say the issue with Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy is that it's an unnecessary sequel, because the world of anime is full of great unnecessary sequels, and indeed the original Galaxy Express already had quite a splendid one, in the shape of 1981's Adieu, Galaxy Express 999.  Also, frankly, it's not like the Galaxy Express universe is one of neatly tied off plotlines; Leiji Matsumoto's hallucinatory tales of a bizarre future in which no-one finds travelling the galaxy in a steam train remotely weird are primarily constructed out of diversions and loose ends, and there's no reason you couldn't keep spinning new stories in such a limitless, logic-unbounded galaxy for precisely as long as you wanted to.

Which is all well and good if you're Matsumoto, who wrote the manga that Eternal Fantasy draws on, but not so much if you're the poor soul with fifty-five minutes of movie in which to try and encapsulate that manga.  There's big problem number one: not to suggest that you couldn't make a great space opera in under an hour, nor even that you couldn't make a great adaptation of a Leiji Matsumoto space opera, but you'd need a vastly more focused script than what's on offer here, which takes half its running time to begin making clear its stakes or conflicts and only really finishes doing so five minutes from the end.  That end being big problem number two: it isn't much of one, because there was supposed to be a sequel to this sequel, which never materialised.

What we have, then, is an unnecessary story that doesn't really build on its predecessors, and instead sets up a new scenario that it promptly does very little with because it ends just as it's finished starting.  And I guess you can't blame the creative team for that, since presumably they genuinely believed the follow-up would happen, and that the dawdling pace and introductions of characters that serve no purpose and the enormously frustrating cliffhanger ending were all for the greater good.  Nevertheless, there's not blaming and there's suggesting the results are a success, and sadly, there we cannot go.  Eternal Fantasy simply doesn't work as is, bar the odd scene.  It's well made - actually, very well made indeed, excepting some CGI shots that don't function as they need to - and given that its flaws are similar to the flaws of its predecessors, I'm ready to believe that whatever this was originally conceived as would have wound up being pretty marvellous.  For that matter, there's undeniable appeal in seeing such iconic characters tricked out in some of the finest animation 1998 had to offer, and I'm too much the animation nerd to turn my nose up completely.  But in the form it exists, Eternal Fantasy is useless as an entry point to the franchise, and even existing fans may find themselves frustrated both by how it does no favours to its predecessors and how it fails to tell a meaningful narrative of its own.

Black Jack: Infection, 1993, dir's: Osamu Dezaki, Fumihiro Yoshimura

By necessity more than choice, I've been reviewing these Black Jack releases out of order; they're not easy to lay hands on, to say the least!  But here we are, finally, at the beginning.  And while what's on offer would be surpassed by later entries, it's a fine start all the same, and one that benefits greatly from U.S. Manga Corps not being the cheapskates they'd rapidly become: two episodes of about fifty minutes each makes the effort of tracking it down feel that bit more worthwhile, especially given the remarkable quality control that went into this show.

To take them in order: first up we get Iceberg, Chimaera Man, the tale of a billionaire with an agonising disease that's only eased by drinking outrageous quantities of water, his philandering wife, and the irate villagers of the island on which he's built his preposterously large home.  Of the two, this feels much more what I've come to regard as a typical Black Jack story, insomuch as you can apply that word to something so reliably weird.  Black Jack broodingly investigates, subplots are established that will end up helping to unravel the central mystery, and not an immense amount of anything really happens, though there's so much atmosphere and menace to go around that it never feels slow.  Between the sea that surrounds the island and the rain that perpetually lashes it and the central medical conundrum, water's the crucial element here, and Dezaki seizes on the opportunity to go all in on exploring every interesting way you can animate said substance, be it waves or whirlpools or puddling sweat.  It's visually thrilling stuff, and right from the beginning the animation quality is unusually high, even if it can't quite match what latter episodes would offer.

(A brief side note: both episodes credit Dezaki for storyboarding only and Fumihiro Yoshimura as director, yet not many directors have such a distinctive approach as Dezaki and his fingerprints are on every scene.  So who did what?  I can't say, but this show was so clearly Dezaki's baby that I'm comfortable referring to him as the director, even if he was more of an incredibly hands-on producer.)

On to episode two, A Funeral, The Procession Game, and it's perhaps not quite so strong.  This one, in which a random event during a trivial stopover between jobs finds our hero becoming entangled in the affairs of a group of four unlucky schoolgirls, very much doesn't feel like a traditional slice of Black Jack drama.  And that's to its benefit, in that it's positive to see a departure from a formula that can feel rather visible, but has the unfortunate side effect of making the mechanistic fashion in which these narratives unfold too apparent: it's especially unclear how the various pieces will eventually fit together or why we ought to care.  Still, the ending, when we get there, is worth the trip, and its breaks from tradition give it extra clout.  It doesn't, however, fare quite so well on the visual front, and Dezaki (or Yoshimura imitating Dezaki?) leans too hard into the favourite Dezaki trick of freezing on painted stills of significant images, to the extent that the style sometimes works against the material rather than for it.

Putting all of that together, I suppose we're left with a comparatively weak entry in an extraordinarily strong series.  But, especially given that we get two episodes, that feels like splitting hairs: even if neither of these are absolutely top-tier Black Jack, they remain thoroughly impressive by any usual standard.  Plus, they gain a lot from being paired, since their approaches are so different.  So while this might not be the most indispensable of U.S. Manga Corps releases, that's not to say Black Jack: Infection isn't pretty damn indispensable.

Lupin the Third: Dead or Alive, 1996, dir's: Monkey Punch, Jun Kawagoe

So it's the mid-nineties and you're about to release a new theatrical entry in the immensely long-running Lupin the Third series, but you feel like maybe something extra wouldn't hurt this time around, perhaps to set it apart from the many TV specials you've been churning out.  What could be better than getting original series creator Monkey Punch - aka Kazuhiko Katō - on board to direct?  That's a great idea, right?

Well, yes and no.  But mostly no.

For a start, Monkey Punch is only credited as head director, co-directing with Jun Kawagoe, and maybe he was just being modest in interviews when he said he largely sat back and let the younger man, who'd been working in the anime industry for some years by this point, do the heavy lifting, but you suspect not.  And with that, you have to wonder how much of the script was his doing, and how much that of co-writer Hiroshi Sakakibara, especially given what a not terribly inspired or exciting script it is.  And once you've got to that point, you might as well ask yourself if Monkey Punch's involvement was much more than a gimmick to spice up an otherwise run-of-the-mill piece of Lupin media.

Harsh?  Maybe.  But the most striking quality of Dead or Alive is how much it feels like an awful lot of other Lupin entries.  Being a cinematic feature, it of course looks better than most, and certainly someone, be it Monkey Punch or the team around him, were bringing a good amount of visual flair to the proceedings: on a scene-by-scene basis, it's undoubtedly well directed.  Really, the plot is the problem, and even then, it's mostly only a problem because it feels so familiar: Lupin and the gang are on an island to steal a well-protected treasure, but find themselves drawn into the local political maelstrom, which has been especially ugly since a certain General Headhunter took it upon himself to seize control.  There's nothing intrinsically wrong there, other that unoriginality, but where it tends to fall down is in finding ways to combine the Lupin material with the wider narrative, with the threads more jockeying for position than playing off each other.  The film largely figures this out by the end, but until then, there are points where a definite aimlessness creeps into its brisk running time.

I don't want to suggest the thing isn't good; if you hadn't see much Lupin, the plot would certainly feel fresher, it's fine on its own merits, there's some terrific action, and aside from the occasionally languid pace, it does nothing you could categorically say was wrong.  Plus, for those of us who are fans of bumbling cop Zenigata, it's nice to see him get to be cool for a change*, just as it's nice that Fujiko, while underused, is at least not reduced to a treacherous pair of breasts as in certain Lupin entries we could point a finger at.  And I don't want to imply that you shouldn't watch a perfectly fine Lupin film if you're on side with the franchise; for that matter, this would make a satisfying starting point to see what all the fuss is about.  It's just that, if you stick the legendary Monkey Punch's name on an entry, and a cinematic one no less, you'd expect it to be something hellaciously special, and for all its relative virtues, Dead or Alive ain't that.

Art of Fighting, 1993, dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi

It's to the great credit of Art of Fighting that, rather than do the obvious things that adaptations of beat-em-up video games tended to do, it opts instead to be a nineties action buddy movie.  I mean, the nineties bit probably wasn't a conscious choice, but the action buddy movie?  That's what saves Art of Fighting from being lousy and pushes it into the dizzy heights of worth a watch.  And since we're in the realm of fighting game adaptations, that's not such measly praise as it might sound.

We join our heroes, martial arts instructor Ryu and wealthy sleaze Robert, as the former is in the middle of trying to catch a lost cat in the hope that the reward money will keep the lights on for another day or two.  Somehow this leads the two fiscally mismatched friends to break into a stranger's apartment and witness their brutal end at the hands of gangsters working for the notorious Mr Big, who gets the misguided impression that the pair are in possession of the diamond the murdered man was hiding.  Following traditional villain logic, Mr Big decides that kidnapping Ryu's sister Yuri is the quickest route to recovering the treasure, and that leaves Ryu and Robert stuck with not only rescuing the ineffective Yuri but also seeking the missing diamond by way of collateral.

So buddy movie boilerplate, basically, but Fukutomi, who in the same year directed the Battle Angel Alita adaptation, knew his way around putting together a short film like this, and he keeps things breathlessly light and breezy.  Ryu and Robert are likeable to be around, as is the police inspector who's also on the diamond's trail, and the villains are distinctive enough to make an impression.  On the technical side, the animation is respectable, rising to pretty good during the many action sequences, and though the character designs are a bit shonky, the backgrounds, mostly cityscapes, are noticeably lovely.  Sure, I realise nobody comes to a fighting game adaptation for nicely drawn buildings, but they lend a touch of class to a film that's urgently in need of one.  So, for that matter, does the playful, jazzy score, which - like the entire movie, come to think of it - very much has the feel of being based in somebody who's never been to America's impression of what the country's like.  Indeed, what this reminded me of more than anything was the Jackie Chan vehicle Rumble in the Bronx, while in anime terms there are definite shades of Riding Bean.

It's all very dumb and insubstantial, but in mostly good ways, focusing its energies in productive directions that don't stretch a TV movie budget past its limits.  And still, all of that would only give it a bare passing grade but for the last five minutes, and the glorious Bruce Springsteen-but-in-Japanese end theme, which nails the perfect note to wrap up the preceding three quarters of an hour on.  Okay, so Art of Fighting isn't what you could honestly call exceptional, and obviously it would be crazy to track it down when there are a million better titles out there, but it kept my thoroughly amused throughout its brief running time, and for that I can only commend it.

-oOo-

I guess I've been on a run of good stuff lately, because that seems like a disappointing batch, and yet there was a time when I'd have been glad of a post where nothing was worse than okay.  Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy and Dead or Alive certainly weren't wholly successful, but neither could justly be described as bad.  Though the flip side is that, by any reasonable definition, Art of Fighting couldn't be called good, for all that I enjoyed it.  At least Black Jack continues to be a reliable presence, and it saddens me that I've nearly run out of those and that the last couple of disks I need to complete my collection are horrifyingly hard to find.  Come on, world, it's time for that blu-ray release I keep asking for.  You know it makes sense!

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

* Though his design is tremendously off this time around, with a chin so cleft that it looks like some sort of alien sex organ.  In general, the designs aren't a strength in Dead or Alive, which is a weird failing given who was ostensibly at the helm.

Not Us in Nightmare, and Other News (or the Annoying Lack Thereof)

 If you're a regular reader of the blog and have been getting frustrated with the fact that for weeks now I've been posting endless anime reviews and nothing in the way of writing news then, believe me, I share that frustration.  And the fact of the matter is that there should be news: about the fourth Black River book, Graduate or Die, which is finished and ready and yet not out for reasons I'm not privy to, and about a novella that's similarly done and dusted, and about another major project with Digital Fiction that's seemingly in limbo, if not somewhere worse.  I hope those are all still happening.  I hope they'll all be happening really damn soon.  But I don't know for a fact, because I don't have that information.  I mean, I guess that's 2020, right?  Whatever else this year has been, it most definitely hasn't been the year when things went to plan.  And obviously, the minute I have some solid and meaningful information to share, I'll be doing just that.

Fortunately, I do have another major project nearing completion, and it's immensely exiting, and by "nearing completion" I mean "pretty much just waiting for a cover" - but the other thing it's waiting for is an official announcement from the publisher, and while I sort of have permission to discuss it, I figure it'd be nicer for everyone if I hold off until they're comfortable letting the cat out of the bag.  So for the minute I'll just reiterate what I've already cryptically said: it's a genre and topic unlike anything I've attempted to cover before, but a subject matter unusually close to my heart, and it's with one of my absolutely favourite publishers, who I'm very excited indeed to be involved with.

But there is a single concrete bit of good and announce-able news, and that's my real reason for finally getting around to a proper post: in what's turned out to be a mostly crummy year for short fiction (and, let's face it, everything) one of the few legitimately brilliant things to happen was selling my story Not Us to splendid horror 'zine Nightmare.  This is my third piece there, and my shortest at a trim 3000 words, and I'm not going to say it's my best because realistically that's probably Great Black Wave, but it's definitely one of the better horror stories I've written.  I mean, if it is a horror story; I suspect it's one of those pieces that very much gives back what you bring to it, and I'm curious to see what the response will be.  At any rate, I'm always grateful when I manage to sell something this thorny and hard to categorise.

If you just want to read Not Us then - well, that's cool and all, you're certainly allowed to, but you'd be missing out on some good stuff.  Nevertheless, if you really do, you can find it at the link here, along with a podcast version read by Stefan Rudnicki.  Oh, and there's an interview with me, too, where I talk about the story a bit, but mostly ramble at excessive length about movies and comics and whatever else came into my head.  Really, though, the thing to do would be to buy the entirety of issue 97, because that way you'll also get three more stories, in the shape of Furtherest by Kaaron Warren, The Monkey Trap by Adam-Troy Castro, and The Secret Of Flight by A.C. Wise.  And needless to say, you'd also be supporting a fantastic horror fiction venue that entirely deserves to be supported.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 82

Woah, this one's really all over the place!  Rare is the collection of four reviews that manages to bring together medical horror, a high-fantasy video game adaptation sequel, a comedy about female fighter pilots, and a couple of classical literature adaptations.  I don't know that bundling together such an unconnected bunch of stuff is remotely good reviewing practise, but it's certainly a nice insight into the sheer scope of nineties anime.

This time around, then: Black Jack: Mutation, Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: Botchan and Student Days, Ys 2: Castle in the Heavens, and 801 T.T.S Airbats...

Black Jack: Mutation, 2000, dir: Osamu Dezaki

The conclusion I've come to with director Osamu Dezaki is that he wasn't one to stretch an inadequate budget or rescue an irredeemable script.  Given too few or the wrong resources, he was capable of some dire hackwork.  But the flip side is that, presented with a stellar budget and top-tier material, he could do wonders.  And with the Black Jack OVA series, he reliably had both.  Osamu Tezuka's fantastical, horror-tinged medical drama is an inspired concept, and it's evident that Tezuka Productions were determined to do it justice.  This ninth OVA features some gloriously slick and detailed animation, and Dezaki seizes on the opportunity thereby offered to crank his style up all the way to eleven.  At his worst, Dezaki lazily relies on a handful of showy tricks, but at his best - and here he's absolutely there - he deploys a startling range of techniques and ideas that all serve to enhance the material.  Whether it's ingenious split-screen shots or fish-eyed lenses or dutch angles or his regular favourites such as cutting to a painted still, Mutation is a fascinating visual experience, given extra energy by the question of what Dezaki might pull out of his hat next.

With all of that in mind, I hope you'll see that, when I say the narrative isn't quite up to the production it's wrapped in, that's not much of a criticism.  It's a fine story, as all these Black Jack episodes I've seen so far have been, but it has its issues.  One is the inevitability of a major twist: as wizard unlicensed surgeon Black Jack is called in by a wealthy heir with what appears to be a sentient tumour, a separate thread details a police investigation into two apparently unlinked cases connected by the fact that the suspects, who can't possibly be the same person, nevertheless have matching fingerprints.  The knowledge that these threads must eventually tie together makes it nigh impossible not to figure out the rough shape of that big twist, and it's hard to see how that could have been avoided.  But Mutation sidesteps the issue in neat ways, and very much seems to accept that we're bound to get ahead of it, so it's not the problem it might have been.  The same goes for the role of Black Jack himself, which is fairly insignificant to the proceedings; if he's more spectator than protagonist this time around, it's not a game wrecker.  Aside from the superlative animation and Dezaki's stylistic smoke and mirrors, Mutation papers over the cracks by encouraging us to concentrate on its characters, even the most minor of which are richly drawn in both senses.  Indeed, the best sequence finds Black Jack and his assistant Pinoko (who's a delightful presence this time around) getting caught up in a night's drinking with the somewhat hostile cop who's stuck investigating the B-plot.

It's maddening to be saying this about a series that's out of print and enormously hard to come by, but the Black Jack OVAs are some of the best anime ever created, a deep, rich, profoundly weird show buoyed by excellent technical values and an intermittently brilliant director firing on all cylinders.  It's hard to rank them, and of course I haven't seen them all yet, but Mutation is definitely a strong entry.  It has some narrative issues, but it handles them well, and in any case, they pale before the bravura direction and tremendous animation on display - not to mention some legitimately unnerving body horror that makes this more gut-wrenching that many a more openly gory title.

Animated Classics of Japanese Literature: Botchan and Student Days, 1986 / 1987, dir: Eisuke Kondo / Akiko Matsushima

I'm sure I've expressed my admiration in the past for how Central Park Media - generally referred to around these parts by the name of their genre label U.S. Manga Corps - were willing to release just about anything into the American anime market, regardless of whether it had any reasonable chance of selling.  Commercially it made zero sense, yet it brought across titles no other distributor would have thought to touch, and suggests that their slogan of "world peace through shared popular culture" was more than mere wordplay.  And nowhere is that more evident than in the case of Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, the title under which they imported some nine episodes of the long-running show Sumitomo Seimei Seishun Anime Zenshū.  Clearly, these were never going to set the market on fire, but what could be truer to their self-imposed mandate?

Given that the Wikipedia entry offers scant context, it's hard to tell precisely what these were intended to be.  You'd assume the target was younger viewers, and that's certainly what the Japanese title suggests, yet neither of the works on offer are exactly kiddie-friendly.  The two-part Botchan, which follows the lightly comical adventures of an arrogant young teacher trapped in a post at a school out in the boondocks and getting on the wrong side of students and teachers alike leans more in that direction, but even then, its humour is of a gentle brand, arising mostly from how the teacher narrates his own adventures and thus is blind to failings we can't help noticing.  As for Student Days, its tale of a student convinced that passing the entrance exam for his favoured university will win him the heart of the girl he's fallen for opts more for gentle melancholy, before it gets very melancholic indeed in its last five minutes.  Particularly bookish teenagers aside, it's tough to see either appealing to a youthful audience, but then perhaps that's me revealing my ignorance of Japanese culture and this stuff was the Pokemon of the eighties, who can say?

I think not, though, judging by the production standards.  They're certainly not terrible; the fact that different directors were brought in to give each story a look that matched its material attests to a genuine intent to treat these works with respect, and Botchan and Student Days have a markedly different design aesthetic to them.  Actually, those designs are frequently the best thing that either piece has going for it on an artistic level, and that's especially true of Botchan, where some of the character work is particularly appealing.  For that matter, the backgrounds are generally pretty nice and the animation is, if not detailed, at least fairly smooth.  There's the inescapable sense of material that's more eager to be educational than entertaining - and for some reason, neither director seems to have a clue how to make good use of the boxy 4:3 TV ratio - but, by the same measure, there's enough artistry at play that the animation is always more of an asset than a diversion.

And here I am, four paragraphs in, and ignoring the elephant in the room.  What possible interest can there be for the average Western viewer in a nineties release of an eighties Japanese TV show adapting classic Japanese literature?  The honest answer has to be not much at all.  Unless you're wanting to dip a toe into those waters and are happy to use animation as an entry point, there's not going to be anything here for you; neither story is so compelling or well presented that it transcends the limitations of what it is.  With that in mind, while I commend Central Park Media with all my heart for putting something like this out, I do wish they'd been a bit more sensible about it, and also a bit more generous.  Because while I'd recommend this to anyone with a serious interest - Botchan is a real pleasure and Student Days makes for a satisfying accompaniment - it's a recommendation that's all the harder to make when the total running time isn't much over an hour.

Ys 2: Castle in the Heavens, 1992, dir: Takashi Watanabe

It seems necessary to start by saying that Ys 2 is better in every way than its parent title, the seven-part OVA series that preceded it by three years, but that's also not a helpful statement: lots of mediocre anime is better than the original Ys, a show that started poorly and managed to end up at just about acceptable.  But perhaps the important takeaway there is the every way part: it's astonishing how much Castle in the Heavens succeeds in improving on every single aspect.  And while there are things it merely does well, for reasons that obviously have a lot to do with budget, there isn't one element that's notably weak in the manner that basically all of Ys was.

That starts at the level of story.  Ys was faintly charming but mostly obnoxious in its determination to be as much as possible a direct adaptation of a game that apparently didn't have a ton of plot to make use of.  Ys 2 does away with that, and my impression is that it sequels the anime more than the first game; based on Wikipedia and guesswork, I'd say that its faithfulness extends to borrowing a few concepts from Ys II the game.  At any rate, it has a proper plot, and one that feels closer in tone to something like Dark Souls than the twee, fetch-quest-focused high fantasy of the original.  Our hero Adol - a somewhat less boyish and more troubled figure than last time around - finds himself in a new land with some deeply screwed up circumstances, which get all the more screwed up as it becomes apparent that most everyone is fine with the status quo, even when it involves routine sacrifices to keep the local monsters who've declared themselves gods on side.  One of the few noteworthy aspects of Ys was its gentle commentary on blind religious observance, and Ys II brings that back while kicking the "gentle" part to the wall: it's downright savage in its condemnation of those who put convenient beliefs over inconvenient facts.  One particularly impressive sequence sees Adol trying to convince the locals that the sea of clouds beneath their floating homeland will soon break to reveal the outside world they deny the very existence of, while they impatiently insist that he's lying, preferring to kill him and keep on living an illusion rather than waiting a minute to make sure.  On the whole, the narrative is a definite virtue, with a great deal crammed into two hours, including strong characterisation, proper stakes, and a definite sense that anything might happen, no matter how bleak.

All of this is propped up by animation that, under the guidance of director Watanabe, gets a lot out of what presumably wasn't much at all of a budget.  Watanabe opts to keep the camera tucked in close for the most part, sacrificing the epicness that Ys tried and failed at but selling the character beats and providing some legitimately exciting action.  There's nothing really stunning going on here visually, but there's plenty that works well, and no trace of the hackwork that made Ys such a chore.  One example that stuck with me is the moment a character's talking in a rainstorm and the animators go the extra distance to draw the drops pooling and dropping from her chin: it's the sort of attention to detail that brings a scene to life rather than just plonking it out there.  Oh, and the soundtrack is yet another improvement; the one genuinely splendid feature Ys had to offer, its stunning closing theme 'Endless History', has carried over, but the rest of the score is rousing stuff as well.

Really, it's maddening how good Ys 2 is, for a couple of reasons.  First is that it's nigh impossible to get hold of, either on its own or in the "legacy" box set that brought all three disks together.  And second is that I don't know that it stands alone; actually, one of its most remarkable features is the extent to which it builds upon not terribly strong foundations to make a weak three-hour plot into a strong five-hour one, and in so doing crafts a beguiling, weighty mythology.  Which unfortunately means that to get the best from it, you'd have to track down and sit through its largely unsatisfying predecessor.  As much as I enjoyed it - and I really did - I can't honestly claim that it's quite that good.  But it pains me to say so, because it's dreadfully unfair that one of the best dark fantasy titles in that overstuffed subgenre should be doomed to such obscurity as Ys 2: Castle in the Heavens has found itself in.

801 T.T.S Airbats, 1994-1996, dir's: Yūji Moriyama, Junichi Sakata, Tōru Yoshida, Osamu Mikasa, Shin Misawa

Ah, nineties anime, always able to find fresh ways in which to be surprisingly feminist and yet thoroughly sexist at one and the same time!  And rarely is that truer than with the opening episodes of the seven-part OVA series 801 T.T.S. Airbats.  Its setup, about an all-female elite aerobatics team striving to be taken seriously in the misogynistic world of Japan's Air Self-Defence Force, is a solid foundation, and also pleasantly different; these sorts of underdog stories aren't, perhaps, entirely rare, but the real-world setting distinguishes it and adds a certain extra significance.  All of which is for the good, but how does 801 T.T.S. Airbats choose to exploit its interesting, progressive premise?  Why, with a love triangle, that's how, one in which the unit's two dangerously competitive star pilots battle over the affections of nerdy newbie mechanic Takuya Isurugi, despite a series of initial accidents that give them every reason to suppose he's a pervert and an idiot.  (He manages to see them both naked within the space of a minute, while holding a pair of pilfered panties, and sure, it's because he was being chased by a vampire bat, but who's going to believe that?)

In fairness, none of this makes 801 T.T.S. Airbats bad as such, only familiar and far from being the best version of itself.  Those two pilots, goody-goody Miyuki Haneda and snarky, troubled Arisa Mitaka, aren't inherently awful characters, and Takuya isn't such a hopeless goof that we can't sort of see why they might go for him, and if you can get past the fact that surely nobody comes to a show about female pilots struggling to make their mark in a man's world to watch said pilots fighting over some dork, it's all sufficiently well done that the first three episodes - the only ones with a continuous plot - slide by amiably enough.  Plus, the obviously better take on this material is close enough to the surface that you can just about pretend that's what you're watching; at the very least, the makers don't shy from the fact that Miyuki and Arisa are skilled professionals being held back by bigotry, even if they're also held back by how they keep nearly killing each other over a guy who's surely not worth the bother.

That gets us to just under the halfway mark, at which point, 801 T.T.S. Airbats takes a good hard look at itself and concludes that really what it ought to be delivering is a bunch of one-shot episodes that don't necessarily have a heck of a lot to do with female aerobatics pilots and their dubious love lives.  And shockingly, this proves a good decision: the quality leaps immediately, and one of those four episodes is genuinely excellent, for all that a ramen-eating contest is surely the least logical place to take the show imaginable.  But probably everyone had realised by this point that the one major strength here is the characters, and particularly the subsidiary characters, who suddenly start to hog much more of the limelight.

Though we can wish it had found a better angle, probably we needed something broadly akin to the initial story arc to get the setup in place for the remainder to work.  In particular, the last episode, following a totally separate romance between two of those minor characters, already a weird note to end on, would have been utterly bizarre if we hadn't had time to grow fond of them.  That's the sort of show 801 T.T.S. Airbats is, ultimately: the sort that sets you down with a likeable cast and lets you enjoy hanging out with them.  And that's made all the easier by some thoroughly respectable technical values; Airbats is easy on the eyes and often downright impressive, with a lot of that effort geared, as you might expect, toward some thrilling flying sequences.  Really, its all very slick and charming and easy to spend time with, and it's just a shame that's all it is: a bit more ambition, a bit less cleaving to dated conventions, and we might have had a genuinely special title here.

-oOo-

This is a definite personal favourite selection from among the recent posts.  Admittedly it didn't produce any absolute classics, with the proviso that the Black Jack OVAs taken together absolutely warrant that description, but there was a lot that I enjoyed.  Ys 2 was an enormously pleasant surprise, especially given that I'd been hunting a copy forever, since the trailer looked promising, 801 T.T.S. Airbats was an enjoyable way to while away an evening, and Botchan was at least thoroughly different to anything I've seen - not too stunning on its own, maybe, but the kind of thing I'd gladly watch more of given the chance.

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 81

Doing eighties posts in a series about nineties anime is all well and good (I mean, it's not, it's dumb and I should never have started it, but that horse has well and truly bolted) but it's a bit unspecific, isn't it?  Like, what if we could have a post that only reviewed titles made in either 1981 or 1986?  Wouldn't that be something?

Well, whether or not it would, that's apparently what the fates have handed us, in the shape of Sea Prince and the Fire Child, Voltron: Fleet of Doom, Ai City, and Space Warrior Baldios: The Movie...

Sea Prince and the Fire Child, 1981, dir: Masami Hata

For what's unquestionably intended to be a children's film, Sea Prince and the Fire Child is awfully concerned with sex and death.  And not just any sex; this is that rare children's film that decides that what youngsters are eager to learn about is the heady notion of incest.  It's right there from the beginning, as we discover that the goddess of fire and the god of water, who happen to be brother and sister, used to be decidedly intimate until Argon, Lord of the Winds, wrenched them apart with a few well-placed rumours.  Soon they've isolated themselves, one on the land and one in the sea, with their two kingdoms divided by a rift of enmity that no-one dares cross.  That is, until the sea god's son Syrius happens to stumble across the fire goddess's daughter Malta and the pair fall instantly in lust - quite explicitly so for what, let's reiterate, is very definitely a film intended for children.  If you've been following along so far, it's perhaps occurred to you that Syrius and Malta are also quite possibly brother and sister.

From there, events proceed much as you might expect, if what you were expecting was a kiddified Romeo and Juliet with Verona replaced by a world of mythological anthropomorphism and adorable sea creatures.  And frankly, it's difficult to know what to do with any of this, especially once things get very dark indeed toward the final third.  I suppose it's the training of a Western filmic mindset, but you don't expect to encounter a kids' film that has characters who might well be siblings waking up together in what looks to be an awfully post-coital fashion, or cutesy side characters meeting violent deaths, or events so apocalyptic that for one lengthy section the sun literally turns black.  Even armed with the knowledge that Japanese culture is less inclined to mollycoddle kids than Western culture, the whole business is fairly bewildering.

It's also weirdly irrelevant to the process of actually watching Sea Prince and the Fire Child, for the simple reason that the movie is absolutely gorgeous.  I often find myself making comparisons with Disney, and here's its unavoidable; but where generally that means taking into account the relative differences in budget, this time there's no such requirement.  Sea Prince and the Fire Child is up there with all but the very finest Disney titles in terms of craft, with a smoothness and detail of animation that you almost never see in anime.  Granted, that comes at a minor cost; while the character animation is phenomenal and the backgrounds are lush, there's frequently the impression that the one is floating across the other rather than interacting with it.  Also, while the leads are perfectly fine, there's the odd character design that's fairly hideous, harking back to Japanese kiddy 'toons at their worst.

Nevertheless, for all its trivial imperfections, Sea Prince and the Fire Child is stunning.  One sequence is up there with anything I've seen in either Eastern or Western animation, and the general standard is astonishingly high.  This can't mask the film's wider problems, it's true, and those problems are fairly substantial: in particular, there's the fact that Syrius and Malta really are just horny teenagers, and it's tough to view this as some grand love story, or to argue that even if it was, their desire to be together warrants the chaos that ensues.  In general, also, it falls into that age-old trap of being too adult for children and too childish for adults; indeed, I'd struggle to point to any work that tumbles into that valley quite so eagerly.  And all of this definitely matters, how could it not?  Only, it matters less that you'd think it ought to, because that animation is so good, and the film so committed to what it's doing.  I don't know that I ever quite got past the weirdness, and I've a high tolerance in that direction, but I was also rarely less than enthralled by this wild, mad, beautiful, wholly unclassifiable film.

Voltron: Fleet of Doom, 1986, dir: Franklin Cofod

Voltron the series was, not uniquely in the American cartoon landscape, a mashing together of multiple and unrelated anime shows, in this case Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV.  I confess a certain basic antipathy to it on those grounds: ripping up anime and mashing it awkwardly into the restrictions of a US kids' cartoon seems to me a basically obnoxious thing to do, even if similar acts of bastardisation did provide me with the odd fond childhood memory.  At any rate, Voltron's twisted genesis would lead to one of the more bizarre instances of the practise in 1986, when its "creators" World Event Productions realised the only way they'd ever be able to get the two Voltrons together - that is, Dairugger and GoLion - was to invest in some brand new footage to tie up the loose ends of their usual cobbled-together nonsense.  And thus was born Fleet of Doom, the TV special that might generously be described as the one and only Voltron movie.

It's possible to imagine how something not terrible might arise out of such a Frankensteinian act of creation, but, having seen a bit of the Voltron show(s) via the two episodes offered up on AnimeWork's release, it's hard to conceive of it happening under the Voltron name.  There's the voice acting, for a start, which varies from blandly flat to nails-down-a-black-board excruciating.  However, the finest of casts would have floundered over the lines they're expected to come out with.  And writer Stan Oliver's script for Fleet of Doom surpasses even the expected levels of trite silliness you'd expect from a cheap kids' science-fiction show, by setting itself the rule that nothing can occur unless a character describes it in detail.  As an example, there's a lengthy sequence in which the main protagonist for the purposes of the special, the thrillingly named Keith, is trapped in a dream reality, and drawing his pistol, he's shocked to see it turn into a snake, a shock he expresses by saying something along the lines of "What's this?  My gun's turned into a snake."  It's hard to imagine how any child old enough to string words together wouldn't feel patronised by dialogue that considers them too stupid to use their own eyes.

While this is ruinous, it's not as though the basic foundations are all that terrific.  I don't mean Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV - the poached footage is generally fine, though more so in the case of the latter than the former - but it couldn't be more obvious that what we're watching is two separate episodes from two separate shows mangled together without a shred of grace.  The Dairugger team get the worst of it; less than twelve hours later, I can't remember the most basic details of their plotline, if they had one at all.  And indeed the Beast King GoLion scenes are inherently decent, with that aforementioned dream reality chucking up some weird and grotesque imagery, even if it's always deflated by Keith mouth-breathing something like "Boy howdy, that sure is weird and grotesque!"  But it's self-evident that none of it fits together, and the attempts to make it do so range from the hilarious - one team having flashbacks to the japes they had with their companions before they found themselves in two different shows, er, universes - to the embarrassing.  Distressingly, it's the big action climax that's the point of this mess that fares worst: the awesome battle that finds the Voltrons standing together to defeat a foe neither could handle alone consists solely of key frames without inbetweening - which is to say, it's a slide show.  And not an especially well-drawn slideshow, either.  Also, if we're being petty (and I guess I'm already well past that point!) I certainly got the sense that the film's big bad was within the capacities of just one Voltron.

You might ask what the point is in wasting so much vitriol on a TV special from a thirty-five year old cartoon, and obviously there isn't much of a one, except that it's fun to rant sometimes.  The reviews on Amazon suggest that many people out there get a nostalgic kick from Fleet of Doom, and I guess that if non-critically recreating your childhood experiences is your bag, you might too.  But for everyone else, Voltron: Fleet of Doom is pretty much garbage, managing to sabotage itself out of the sort of light-hearted pleasure you might expect from a well-loved cartoon property by being fundamentally incompetent in every way.

 

Ai City, 1986, dir: Kōichi Mashimo

Had you wanted to pitch an eighties anime film to me, you couldn't have come up with anything much more persuasive than "It's what Kōichi Mashimo made directly before Dirty Pair: Project Eden, and kind of the same thing, only more so."  Project Eden's glorious excesses of style, colour, character, music, and everything else it's possible to offer up in excess have steadily grown in my estimation to become one of my personal highlights from the decade; there's simply nothing else like it.

Except, of course, there is.  Because a year prior, Mashimo had a trial run of just how far it was possible or sensible to push the envelope of anime stylisation, in the shape of one Ai City.  And though he was developing an established manga property, there's the definite sense that he was working under fewer constraints: all that keeps Project Eden close to being a conventional narrative object is that it has to vaguely conform to what we expect from the Dirty Pair and their universe, whereas with Ai City, there's the impression from the beginning of a narrative being flung together at high velocity and according to no known rules.  People switch sides at the drop of a hat, enormous concepts are hurled in with startling casualness, vital backstory is presented in what amounts to dream sequences, and the beginning, middle, and end are all focused around radically different circumstances and situations.

It helps somewhat that there are no particularly unfamiliar elements here, excepting perhaps the gloriously silly conceit whereby the battling psychics that make up most of the core cast have a digital readout on their foreheads displaying a number representing the level of their power at any given moment.  But otherwise, if you've seen much anime, even if it's only a certain movie called Akira that would arrive soon after this, the essential ingredients won't surprise you.  However, almost every detail and scene, taken on its own terms, is basically nuts, so those recognisable ideas soon become lifebelts in a very stormy sea.  And all of this narrative excess is encapsulated in Mashimo's gloriously over the top fever dream of a style, with a colour palette that borders on the expressionistic and a constant vibe of animators experimenting for no real reason other than that they can.  If it wasn't so exciting, it would be slightly obnoxious, and if we're being honest, by the midway point it's already a bit much.  But even if a spot of reining in would have produced a traditionally better film, it's hard to be offended: there's always something thrilling or dizzying or weird around the next corner, and there are plenty of movies out there that resemble the conventional version of Ai City, but there's only one Ai City.

Whether that's an argument for you watching it depends on what you come to anime for in the first place.  If ninety delirious minutes of neon-and-primary-coloured delirium with a story that's like watching Akira while on mushrooms sounds at all appealing, you absolutely need to track it down - and while it's only ever received an Italian DVD release, there's an excellent fansub on Youtube, so doing so isn't difficult.  If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who isn't terribly bothered about animation for its own sake and likes to spend more than five minutes of an hour-and-a-half-long movie feeling you know what's going on, it's safe to say you can skip this.  But if that's the case, I feel a bit bad for you, because if you're willing to meet it halfway, Ai City is a hell of an experience.

Space Warrior Baldios: The Movie, 1981, dir: Kentarō Haneda

It's unfortunate that the element of Space Warrior Baldios that it takes its name from is also the only aspect it does tremendously badly.  Baldios, you see, is the giant combining robot that plays almost no part in the movie, but was probably a meaningful component of the TV series that this is both a recap of and a conclusion to, what with the series being canned before it could reach its end.  Anyway, Baldios the robot is crap, a clunky design indistinguishable from many a giant combining robot in many a giant robot show, even its transformation sequence is woefully uninspired, and the few scenes containing it are utterly generic takes on one of the most tapped-out subgenres in eighties anime.

I'd love to say that everything else about Space Warrior Baldios: The Movie is great, and I very nearly could, but we'd better just concede as well that it looks pretty crummy for the most part.  I don't know how much this is new footage and how much it's combed together from the show, but rare are the moments that you feel you're watching something that belongs anywhere near a cinema.  Thankfully, Baldios aside, the design work is solid, and unlike Baldios, the animation is never distractingly poor, it's just never much of an asset.

Phew!  Now that's out of the way, we can get around to how excellent Space Warrior Baldios is - assuming you can get past the above, and the inevitable datedness of a movie that's almost four decades old.  That's noticeable in the animation, and it's very noticeable indeed in the giant robot bits, but when Baldios is doing what it's great at - being an enormously bleak slice of science-fiction coupled with an equally bleak doomed romance - it's hard to fault.  Its story begins straightforwardly enough, at least by early eighties SF anime standards, as our hero Marin gets on the wrong side of the fascistic Gattler, who's decided the solution to his planet's environmental catastrophe is to find a replacement, and announces this by having Marin's scientist father, who's on the verge of a far less militant solution, brutally assassinated.  Marin takes his revenge on the killer, and in so doing incurs the wrath of the man's sister, Afrodia, even though you could cut the instantaneous sexual tension between them with a knife.  Gattler sets off to invade a new world, which of course turns out to be Earth, Marin inadvertently gets there first and teams up with the locals, and Afrodia vigorously stamps down on every hint of her personality or morality in her determination to be a good officer for the invaders and ultimately to punish the man who took her brother's life, while ignoring the fact that he had a clear justification for doing so and that she desperately wants to jump his bones.

But all of that's only the first ten minutes or so, and to say more would ruin some ingenious and frequently gut-wrenching storytelling, along with an enormously satisfying and well-handled twist.  I'm afraid this is one of those titles where you'll just have to take my word: if you can look past the dated, TV-level visuals and the occasional drifts into being a juvenile robot show, you'll find one of the best narratives in all of eighties science fiction, anime or no.  That is, if you're watching the Japanese version; I haven't tried the heavily cut US adaptation, but I understand it to be much poorer and dumber.  Stick with the original, though, and you'll be in for a rare treat, a bold and brutal fable that takes its superficially familiar ingredients to fascinating and unexpected places.

-oOo-

I feel like that might have been the strongest of these eighties posts, for all that Voltron was unutterable garbage and not even really anime in the traditional sense and certainly drags the selection down pretty hard.  Ignore that blip, though, and we have three titles that come awfully close to being classics, and in that satisfying way of missing out through being too weird, experimental, or crushingly sombre to quite fit in to the usual categories.

As is probably obvious by now, I'm really starting to appreciate the eighties stuff, and so let's have a grateful nod in the direction of Discotek Media, who are responsible for both the Sea Prince and the Fire Child and Baldios releases, and in general have done wonders with bringing these older titles over to the West - even if they're atrocious at keeping them in print.  But hey, nobody's perfect!

Next time, though, we'll be back in the right decade, and back to the usual randomosity...

[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 80

I've already covered the Dragon Ball movies - and been surprised by how much I liked them on the whole - but that was just dipping a toe into this leviathan of a series.  Even ignoring TV specials, follow-up Dragon Ball Z would go on to produce over fifteen feature films of its own, and wouldn't you know it but the vast majority of those came out in the nineties.  Which means I still have me plenty of Dragon Ball reviewing to do, despite my strong suspicion that the best is already behind me.

Anyway, here's where we begin to find out, by way of Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone, Dragon Ball Z: The World's Strongest, Dragon Ball Z: Tree of Might, and Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug...

Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone, 1989, dir: Daisuke Nishio

I went into this first Dragon Ball Z movie with certain negative preconceptions, and I'd say it bore them out to the tune of about eighty percent: I was expecting some of the clunkiest character designs in anime and lots of mindless fighting, and that was largely what I got.  Thank goodness, then, for that other twenty percent, which was appealing enough to keep the experience on the right side of horrible.

Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone feels made for fans of the series in a way none of the four Dragon Ball movies did.  There's enough information given that you can basically follow everything that happens and appreciate broadly who everyone is without a recourse to Wikipedia, but you sure do need to be paying attention, which seems against the spirit of what's evidently supposed to be a brief burst of mindless entertainment.  But then, that brevity is half the problem: Dead Zone doesn't even quite make it to forty-five minutes, and though there's hardly a lot of plot, what there is gets flung at the viewer so rapidly that it routinely loses all impact.  There are ingredients here that certainly ought to have a bit of weight - a major villain uniting the dragon balls and using them for nefarious ends, what appears to be a battle for literal godhood, and a climax featuring the titular dead zone, which must be important for the film to be named after it - and yet most of them flit by in a couple of minutes, as the movie hurtles onto the next thing.

I'd recount the story in more detail, but it hardly seems worth the effort.  There's that big bad, who's undermined from the off by having the preposterous name of Garlic Jr, and as part of his fiendish plan, he sort of accidentally kidnaps Goku's annoying son Gohan, and rather than do the sensible thing and chalk it up to bad luck, Goku feels the need to intercede, with the eventual aid of various other characters who just sort of blunder into the film.  There's much fighting against Garlic Jr's three hench-monsters, all of whom look so crap that I can't bring myself to think about them, before a final showdown against Garlic Jr himself, who also looks quite crap.  Seriously, am I the only person who hates how these characters look?  They're like fan art of Lord of the Rings orcs drawn by a teenager who grew up reading nothing except Rob Liefeld comics.

But I said there was a twenty percent I had more time for, and I guess, in the interests of unbiased reviewing, I ought to finish with that.  The designs may be trashy and the colours garish, but the backgrounds are mostly lovely, and I like Nishio enough as a director to concede that, outside of the rather listless fights, there are two or three really terrific sequences here, where he's evidently amusing himself by pushing things in directions that are outrageously trippy and / or apocalyptic.  For example, Gohan redeems himself slightly by stopping the proceedings dead for a couple of minutes to deliver a drunken musical number that's the high point of the film, and later there's some hellish imagery that's legitimately interesting.  And, again perhaps due to Nishio, who presumably knew how to get Dragon Ball right better than anyone, there's a breezy energy that keeps the whole business on the right side of watchable.  That's faint praise, I know, but it's all I can stretch to; there's not a lot here for the first movie in such a mammoth series, and what there is could do with a more engaging style and a good fifteen minutes more of running time.

Dragon Ball Z: The World's Strongest, 1990, dir: Daisuke Nishio

If, as I fear, these Dragon Ball Z movies are merely going to be a series of ever-escalating fight sequences, then The World's Strongest is how I'd like to see them go about it: this second film is a leap above Dead Zone in every way I can think of.  It helps significantly that the running time has been stretched to just shy of an hour, allowing for some breathing room and what plot there is to develop at a reasonable pace.  Watching it only emphasised the extent to which Dead Zone muted its impact by barrelling through what should have been major moments.  Here, similar scenes unfold at a reasonable speed and so feel as though they actually have meaning.  It's not like The World's Strongest hangs around or anything, but it has the space it needs to do the material justice.

Probably an even bigger deal, though, is that the villains are interesting, and not burdened with names that ought to be restricted to culinary ingredients.  Here again, every aspect, from the voice acting to the designs to the manner in which they're introduced, is that bit more successful.  And even their disposable underlings are much better, bringing quirks to the table that turn the fights from slapping matches into strategic puzzles.  It's a little thing on the face of it, but it immediately gives the action - of which there's still an inordinate amount - a degree of tension and intrigue that was sorely lacking in Dead Zone, not to mention lending each confrontation a distinctive flavour.

And I realise I'm once again onto the third paragraph and haven't mentioned the story, but in honesty, it's the one element that's barely improved.  There are villains, one of them's the still-living brain of a genius scientist who wants the body of the world's strongest fighter to really round out his CV, and after a mix-up in which they mistakenly abduct Master Roshi, they settle on Goku, who's more than up for a scrap.  The only reason I'm trotting this out at all is so that you can hopefully see how a mad scientist brain in a jar and his only slightly less deranged assistant would make for fun antagonists.  And that's perhaps the crucial point: The World's Strongest is fun.  Even when it's dealing with events that theoretically should be quite serious, it keeps its tongue close to its cheek, and while I'm missing the out-and-out wackiness of the Dragon Ball films, this makes for an acceptable substitute, especially once it gets into its final third and the battle stretches to the sort of preposterously epic proportions only anime can deliver.

Oh, and the visuals are another major leap.  The World's Strongest looks rather fine, all told, with routinely gorgeous backdrops, smooth animation, and, if I'm not mistaken, some tweaks to the design aesthetic that push it back fractionally in the softer, rounder direction of Dragon Ball.  Or maybe I'm simply getting used to them?  At any rate, there's nothing to complain about on the technical side.  All in all, the sole significant problem - and problem, in this context, is an especially relative term, since I get that lots of people adore this series - is that the narrative is no more than an engine to keep the action flowing.  Since that's what it apparently means to be a Dragon Ball Z movie, I guess we're back with what I said at the start: if this is the basic shape of what these things are going to be, The World's Strongest is close to the best version of that template I can imagine.

Dragon Ball Z: Tree of Might, 1990, dir: Daisuke Nishio

It's surely not possible that these movies are just going to keep improving, yet here we are on number three and it's possibly the best so far, not a small feat when The World's Strongest was already a standout.  And okay, maybe Tree of Might doesn't precisely better it, though that argument could certainly be made, but it's every bit as good.  What makes the difference, I think, is that it's the first Dragon Ball Z entry to crack an hour (and indeed, the first Dragon Ball film to full stop) and that extra running time, though it only amounts to a handful of minutes in the case of The World's Strongest, makes all the difference.  It allows for a pacing that's almost leisurely in places, and thus builds up the conflict in a weighty, meaningful fashion, so that when the inevitable fighting comes, we're well aware of both the stakes and the rationale behind it.  Moreover, that conflict is, in itself, a big leap up from what we've seen thus far, with a villain whose links to Goku and Goku's mysterious past make him feel that bit more significant, and a world-ending catastrophe that's unusual and interesting and genuinely dreadful enough that it seems to matter.

I won't spoil any of that - except to say that apocalypse by tree isn't something I've personally come across before - because it's probably best arrived at without much foreknowledge.  And also because, truth be told, there's yet again not a great deal of plot here, and it still ultimately amounts to the usual "there's a super-strong baddie with a bunch of hench-folks and Goku and his friends have to fight them" template that I struggle to imagine a Dragon Ball Z movie breaking away from.  Tree of Might is just built on better foundations than something like Dead Zone, and also a whole lot better made.  These things have never looked shoddy, but this is still a leap forward; it's often spectacular, and in ways I wouldn't have anticipated Dragon Ball Z bothering with.  In particular, the broad palette of intensely vibrant colours and the way certain scenes restrict that palette for effect is more sophisticated than anything we've encountered so far.  And the animation isn't far behind.  There are some stunning sequences, many of them involving the titular tree, and roots growing and twisting and thrashing in a destructive fashion that would make Akira proud.  It really is a treat for the eyeballs, and cinema-worthy in a fashion that the franchise has only flirted with before.

Of course, great animation is mere eye candy without great direction, and while I've never had cause to fault Daisuke Nishio, this is a definite high point.  The breathing room of the extra running time and the evidently lavish budget allow for a level of artistry beyond the deft, slick film-making he's previously exhibited, and there's room for things like actual themes that don't revolve around people punching each other: maybe there's nothing inherently profound about how he explores different aspects of nature throughout the film or keeps cutting back to locations and motifs to convey the wider impact of events, but it's fine storytelling all the same.  Indeed, the biggest surprise here is that we have a Dragon Ball film that almost totally eschews the light-hearted adventure and comedy that were the bulk of what I'd been enjoying up to this point, and still kept me entranced for the space of an hour.  Between this and The World's Strongest, I struggle to conceive of how the franchise can better itself going forward, or even keep up such a level of quality, but I'm beginning to dare hope I might be wrong.

Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug, 1991, dir: Mitsuo Hashimoto

For the first twenty minutes or so of Lord Slug, I continued to toy with the unlikely conviction that these things really might keep getting better.  The opening is good enough to warrant such mad optimism, for numerous reasons.  One is that, for the first time in a while, we get a scene that returns us to the goofiness which made the original Dragon Ball films so appealing, with a song and dance routine (of all things!) that's a hilariously joyful note to get things moving on.  (That it later turns out to be in there for legitimate plot reasons spoils it only slightly.)  Then the actual conflict kicks off, and its a belter, with some outstandingly economic storytelling hurling us into another crisis that feels suitably major and presenting an antagonist who's appropriately powerful and dangerous.  Moreover, all this is wrapped up in some sterling animation: the aesthetic seems to have drifted back into a more traditional Dragon Ball mode, with everything becoming very soft and round and simple, and that scaling down not only makes Lord Slug easy on the eyes, it allows for some striking sequences.  In particular, the inevitable destruction really looks the part, and helps to sell the notion that we're witnessing truly world-threatening events.

The threat this time comes from the titular Lord Slug, another alien invader, but one who wastes all of about three minutes in subjugating the Earth, and manages to kill a couple of his own underlings in the process, not to mention gathering the dragon balls and restoring his youth, so there's not much doubt he means business.  Nevertheless, it's a disappointment when the setup has to give way to the traditional Dragon Ball Z third act, if we can call something that takes up fifty percent of the film a third act.  There's lots and lots of fighting, and it's pretty good fighting, with enough wrinkles to avoid the feeling that super-powerful people are taking it in turns to shoot super-powers at each other, and the ultimate battle - spoiler warning for people who can't predict a Dragon Ball Z plot! - between Goku and Lord Slug is suitably epic, so there's no arguing the movie doesn't do a perfectly acceptable job of what it sets out to accomplish.  It's only that what its aiming for has been done three times already in three preceding films, and we're at the point where I for one am ready for something even slightly different.

Moreover, at around fifty minutes, Lord Slug bucks the steady trend by which these films were getting longer with each entry, and that doesn't do it any favours either; when epicness is such a crucial component of their makeup, that extra few minutes can make all the difference, as Tree of Might amply proved.  This seems like a step back in the Dead Zone direction, even if in every other meaningful way it's an improvement on that wonky beginning.  And here it's worth a nod to director Mitsuo Hashimoto, who picks up the reins so smoothly from Daisuke Nishio that I honestly wouldn't have noticed the change had I not known in advance.  There's no question that he delivers a thoroughly solid Dragon Ball Z movie; it's just a shame its beginning offers more than it can deliver, and that the two previous entries showed that the franchise is capable of more than solidness.

-oOo-

So that went better than I expected - which is weird, in a way, because it also went more or less exactly the way I expected.  Probably it helps to go at these things with your eyes open, and for me, I'm sure it helps too that I'm enough of an animation nerd to enjoy well-made films even when they're very much not to my personal tastes.  I mean, I do sort of get the appeal here - except for those character designs, which I'm just about at the point of finding tolerable - but I also don't understand why the fandom and the creators couldn't get together and arrange for a bit of variety.  Like, what if every fourth Dragon Ball Z film had an actual story?  Would that be such a disaster?

Oh well.  Given that I watched these four in a box set and two of the four movies were pretty great and only one was actively poor, I at least feel I got my money's worth.  And the knowledge that there are another nine entries to go?  I guess I'll manage somehow...

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