Short Story News - May 2021

Apparently, it's been almost a year since I last did a short fiction round-up, which I guess isn't that surprising since I haven't had a lot to tell, but there have been a few snippets of good news along the way, and I reckon they've piled up enough by now that they warrant a quick post, especially since I've had three stories out in recent months that I didn't do I great deal to draw anyone's attention to.

The first of those saw my return to excellent horror 'zine The Dark, with a story by the title of A Cold Yesterday in Late July.  Like seemingly most of the horror I've been writing in recent years, this is another introspective one, and seems all the more so in the light of the last year.  A Cold Yesterday is about isolation, about falling between the cracks, about depression somewhat, about the inescapability of the past, and about the slivers that aging cuts from us - but actually, given that that stuff is all pretty universal, what makes it feel so personal is that it's about hiking and I drew a lot of the vibe from my own adventures ambling around the countryside.  Funnily enough for something so bleak, I had quite a bit of fun writing it, mainly because it's amusing to make up names for out-of-the-way villages and the sort of odd rural landmarks you only tend to stumble across when you get far off the beaten track.  Even more strange, it's been well-received from what I've seen, with a particularly nice and detailed review here.  Oh, and if you should want to read (or listen to) the story itself, here's a link for that.

A much more cheerful tale all round is Love in the Age Of..., which appeared in The Fox Spirit Book of Love, out last month.  I'm yet to see a contributor copy, so I can't comment on the collection as a whole, but if my story's at all representative, it's going to be a weird old beast.  Love in the Age Of... was a heck of a tough sell that probably would never have got picked up for any book but this, in that it pulls the sort of stunt that makes it all but impossible to win over slush readers, who, let's face it, can't always be relied on to get past the first page.  And that makes things tricky if your first page is unicorn porn.  Look, you'll be glad to hear that I didn't actually go sending out unicorn porn (unless you're anything like the friend who felt the need to point out how disappointed she was with me for making promises I didn't keep) but I can see how a feint in that direction might have put some folks off.  Not Chloë Yates, though, and much credit to her for that!  Indeed, this ended up as one of those rare cases of landing a story with an editor who seemed to properly get it, and the edits were an unusually pleasant process.

Next, and also a very strange tale, because I guess that's what I write these days, we have M.A.T.E.R Knows Best, which - well, I'm not going to try and convince you it's not a James Bond pastiche, because it certainly is, but that's not really what it's about.  What it's about is my finding James Bond films for the most part pretty screwed up in a lot of ways, but especially Skyfall, a film so staggeringly misogynistic that I'm at a loss as to how some people missed it (or, bewilderingly, ignored all the evidence to the contrary and declared the film to be a step in the right direction ... you do you, The Guardian!)  I only came across this essay today, having realised I was too lazy to try and make its arguments myself, but I agree with pretty much every word and it's a great summing up of what I was trying to get at with M.A.T.E.R Knows Best.  But that all sounds kind of heavy, so I probably ought to mention that it's actually quite a fun, blackly comic story, except maybe for when it gets a bit more serious at the end.  Anyway, it was another piece I'd given up much hope of selling due to its extreme nicheness, so hats off to Distant Shore Publishing for seeing that as a virtue instead of a flaw.  Plus, it's another one you can read for the princely sum of bugger all, at the link here.

And while that's everything I've had out lately, I've made another couple of sales that are well worth a mention.  On the surface, Fall to Rise is a relatively straightforward, action-heavy story of the sort I don't generally write, but from my perspective it was actually an experiment in crafting a narrative bound almost entirely to a single location and with some very weird physical rules.  Like everything here, it's eccentric enough that it didn't expect it to be an easy sell, so I was extra-happy when it went to my 'zine of choice, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  And that was doubly true for An Exchange of Values, Conducted in Good Faith, a story I wrote specifically with a market in mind, something so risky that I wouldn't normally take the chance.  Then it ended up being far longer than intended, drifting into novelette territory, and I really thought I'd shot myself in the foot - except that said market happened to up their word limit enough that it slipped through and, thank goodness, they liked it enough to say yes.  Since the ink's not yet dry on that one, I'd better not say who it was yet, so I'll settle for noting that with the year not yet half done, it's already proving to be one of the best I've had for short story sales, which is awfully appreciated given what a train wreck 2020 was on that (and every other!) front.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 99

It's fitting that, here on the cusp of the big one hundred post, we should go all in on the randomness, and this is definitely among the oddest selections we've had yet, if only for how I've somehow ended up with gross-out body horror placed next to a charming kids' movie about a friendly whale.  Aside from our first entry, finishing off the Lupin the Third marathon I've apparently been crawling my way through since way back in post 28 and November of 2017, there's nothing here that could remotely be considered famous or well-regarded.  And part of the reason for the obscurity is that, of the four titles here, one of them only ever came out on VHS and another seems to have had about the most limited DVD release imaginable, so you could definitely argue that there's a bit of barrel-scraping going on.

But no, let's try and be optimistic!  Surely there's got to be something worth a damn in among Lupin the Third: The Columbus Files, Kama Sutra, Apocalypse Zero, and Fly Peek: Peek the Baby Whale...?

Lupin the Third: The Columbus Files, 1999, dir: Setsuo Takase, Shin'ichi Watanabe

It's a lot of pressure to be the last of your kind of the millennium, so perhaps we shouldn't be unduly harsh toward The Columbus Files for being so mediocre as it is.  There's even an argument to be made that by the numbers was the way to go here, capping off a decade of TV specials that often hit considerable heights and sometimes pushed gently at the Lupin envelope but generally were content to turn up and get the job done.  And since that's mostly true of The Columbus Files, I'm again left to wonder how much my lack of enthusiasm for it was down to the fact that it was both the last Lupin TV special of the nineties and the last one I'll be covering in these reviews.

The immediate answer to that question is that, sure, there are many ways in which The Columbus Files is fine but not outstanding.  The artwork and animation are the one that stands out most: it's pleasing that the film doesn't try to veer too modern, but it just ends up looking very clean and crisp and thus a touch bland in the way anime from 1999 had a tendency to do.  There's nothing conspicuously wrong, and that's far from a given with Lupin specials, but two nights on and I struggle to think of a single scene or image that really wowed me.  Which is equally true of the narrative, at least in its broadest sense of a series of incidents: The Columbus Files rattles along from set piece to set piece, chucking in the odd comic interlude and pause for exposition, and it's all perfectly entertaining while you're watching, if somewhat overfamiliar if you've seen as many of these as I have.

Stripped down to its nuts and bolts, however, the plot is the one element that goes really, conspicuously wrong, and in rather a frustrating fashion, too.  The Columbus Files chooses for its focus Lupin's on-and-off lover and perpetual rival in the art of thievery Fujiko Mine, and specifically concentrates on their relationship and the matter of what actual feelings might or might not lie beneath all of Lupin's clowning and Fujiko's femme fatale games-playing.  This is a good angle for a Lupin film to cover, one of my favourite things about the series is that these relationships have plenty of potential depth for the creators willing to dive into them, and there's definitely gold to be mined here.  Unfortunately, The Columbus Files chooses to go about its self-imposed task by giving Fujiko amnesia, which is awfully cheesy, but might still get us somewhere interesting, except that Fujiko Mine with amnesia is pretty much not Fujiko Mine at all.  The version of the character we get instead is scarcely more than a plot device, a blank slate for Lupin to interact with and a victim to be protected and rescued; put all that against the regular Fujiko, a wily, back-stabbing, outrageously sexy master thief who's always two steps ahead of anyone in the room and ... well, you see the problem.*

The makers address this by introducing a second female protagonist, Rosaria, but that doesn't help because she isn't very interesting either and suffers from being tied into the main story in ways that do her no favours.  Come to think of it, The Columbus Files has one of the series' least interesting or thought-through McGuffins and dives so deeply into supervillain-of-the-week territory that it frequently ceases to feel like a Lupin-esque treasure hunt at all.  And here we are at the end of the review, and I've almost convinced myself that calling this one mediocre at the start was too kind.  But that's not true, I don't think; for the most part, I enjoyed it fine while I was watching, and though I wasn't blind to the narrative problems, the minute-by-minute high jinks were engaging enough to keep me from dwelling too hard.  Still, in a world where there are a staggering number of Lupin TV specials to choose from, it's fair to say that this one's more toward the bottom of the pile than the top.

Kama Sutra, 1991, dir's: Chihata Miyazaki, Masayuki Ozeki

It's almost impressive, really, how bad Kama Sutra manages to be at everything it attempts.  And for a forty minute OVA, it attempts quite a bit: at one point or another, it's an historical drama, a goofy comedy, an action movie, and an erotic thriller, at the very least.  To do none of those things with more than the barest modicum of competence, well, you don't just luck your way into a film-making mess like that.

Normally at this point I'd take a stab at a bit of a story summary, but among the things Kama Sutra is inordinately lousy at is communicating its plot, so the most I can do is offer up the bare bones.  We open in ancient India, and some bad guys are attacking some presumably non-bad guys, and there's a princess whose bodyguard gets killed, and then we cut to the present, at which point archaeologists have found the princess, who's been asleep all this time and has now woken up, which possibly has something to do with a magic sex cup - I definitely remember the magic sex cup being important - and then the main hero has sex with the archaeology professor's assistant, then his girlfriend turns up, then the bad guys arrive again and for some reason the main bad guy isn't dead either, and maybe there was a car chase?  I'm pretty sure there was a car chase.  And then more stuff happened and, look, I really wasn't concentrating by that point.  I mentioned the plot revolves around a magic sex cup, right?

Anyway, none of this is done even the slightest bit well, and also none of it fits together in any practical or productive way.  The action is devoid of thrills, the comedy is wacky and wholly lacking in actual jokes, the historical elements and the portrayal of India in general are as crass as you'd expect, and the erotica ... well, I'm torn between thinking that deserves a paragraph all of its own and wanting to skim over it as lightly as possible.  Given that the animation is as bad as anything I've ever seen in anime, there was never any hope of it succeeding, but the extent to which Kama Sutra screws up - if you'll pardon the pun - what you'd assume to be it's raison d'être is genuinely special.  There's only really one substantial sex scene, and not only does it take place in some bizarre sex pyramid that feels like something out of the movie Cube (and if you're half as prone to claustrophobia as I am is even more terrifying), it's hilariously unadventurous.  If most Go Nagai titles feel like the work of an excitable, slightly psychotic twelve-year-old boy who's just discovered his dad's hidden magazine collection, Kama Sutra takes that to a whole new level, and its notions of sex are absolutely those that said twelve-year-old would hold.  I mean, this is a supposedly erotic title that considers the woman being on top to be outlandish enough to be worthy of note!

There's a small part of me that wonders if Kama Sutra edges its way into so-bad-it's-good territory; I suspect parts of it will stick in my memory when scenes from merely mediocre anime have long since faded, and there's a fair chance that the nightmare sex pyramid will haunt me until my dying days.  But is that a reason to watch it?  No, it's most certainly not.  However, it is on Youtube, and while normally I'd get a bit sniffy about that socially acceptable piracy site, in this instance, I feel like the only person you'd really be stealing from if you spent ten minutes chuckling over the weirder and more absurd scenes in Kama Sutra is yourself.  So if all this talk of sex pyramids and magic sex cups has roused your curiosity, I guess that's an option - but just know that I take no responsibility!

Apocalypse Zero, 1996, dir: Toshiki Hirano

Apocalypse Zero has been sitting on the to-watch shelf for a very long time now, after I bought it out of a vague sense of duty and curiosity - could anything really be as nasty as this famously vile title was rumoured to be? - and then commenced to avoid it at every turn because I'm just not that much of a gore-hound and so much of the anime that's remembered solely for how horrible and boundary-pushing it was has turned out to be a depressing chore.  So colour me surprised: I didn't hate Apocalypse Zero.  Heck, I even quite enjoyed it.  I even got to the end and found myself wishing there was more; the plan was for an entire eight more episodes to finish off the tale begun in the two here, and while I perhaps couldn't have stomached that many, a couple more wouldn't have hurt.

Quite possibly this means I'm not a healthy or well-balanced human being, because there's no getting around it, Apocalypse Zero is phenomenally repellent.  Barely five minutes have gone by before we're watching an obese, mostly naked monster-woman sucking the face clean off someone's skull, and there's worse to come from there, all of it running along much the same lines: if you're at all uncomfortable with sexuality played up for maximum grotesqueness or weaponised genitalia or shots of body parts that really ought to be on the inside very much ending up where they shouldn't be, then Apocalypse Zero is going to push your buttons with maniacal determination.  And that, I think, is what ultimately made me warm to it; anyone can animate exploding bodies or deformed monstrosities, but to put this much effort and imagination into your unpleasantness?  On those terms, Apocalypse Zero is flat-out ingenious, to the point where it not only shocked me but surprised me, jaded film nerd that I am.

Now, I realise I've got this far without making any attempt to explain what the show is actually about, and while I could, I'm not convinced it would do anybody much good.  There's nothing original here except the levels of gore and general offensiveness, and on the whole, that's possibly for the best.  Because the gore's a lot to process in and of itself, and also clearly where everyone's creative attentions were focused, and likely a searingly original plot would only have got in the way.  Apocalypse Zero robs openly from things like Fist of the North Star and Violence Jack with its post-apocalyptic setting and from the likes of The Guyver with its sinister organic super-suits that look nearly as screwed-up and threatening as the villains, and it even dallies with a bit of high-school drama, à la more shows than I could name.  But in so much as it cares about any of this, it's on a level somewhere around pastiche, except without any of the overt humour that implies.  Apocalypse Zero takes itself entirely seriously, even when things are happening that surely we can't be expected not to find ridiculous, and after a while I came to suspect that was the joke: push the clichés of violent anime far beyond their breaking point, then push a bit further, and dare the audience to either switch off or to laugh.

Like I said, I'm probably a dreadful person, because I did laugh more than once, and frequently it was that gleeful sort of laugh you get from watching creators go to places you never expected them to go to, because there are levels of depravity that most of us - and even the creators of nineties anime video nasties - tend to back away from.  Then again, it may simply be that I'm a sucker for well-made animation, no matter what awfulness it's showing, and I'd have given Apocalypse Zero a pass on those grounds alone: compared with many of its peers that went for shocks over content, it's actually rather skilfully and thoughtfully put together.  Or just possibly there was a part of me that's been missing the kind of gonzo horror that, for example, a young Peter Jackson used to make in his Bad Taste and Braindead days.  Whatever the case, if you like your horror gross and deliriously weird, and you reckon you've seen everything, maybe you could do worse than tracking down Apocalypse Zero and discovering how wrong you can be.

Fly Peek: Peek the Baby Whale, 1991, dir: Kôji Morimoto

In so much as there are reasons to be talking about Fly Peek: Peek the Baby Whale, they mostly boil down to factors not directly relating to the film itself.  Historically its greatest importance is surely that, a couple of years later, Hollywood would - arguably! - file the serial numbers off the story and release it under the title of Free Willy, a film that would go on to be bewilderingly successful and spawn an even more bewildering number of sequels.  I mean, I guess there's no proving it, or else we'd surely have heard about the lawsuit, but the two movies are exceedingly similar, down to some very specific details that are hard to rack up to parallel evolution.  And then, on a less contentious note, we have the fact that this is the sole feature-length work of director and producer Kôji Morimoto, who's had quite a fascinating career over the years, as both the co-founder of Studio 4°C and the man who's surely contributed to more anthology movies than anyone alive: Robot Carnival, Genius Party, The Animatrix, Short Peace, if you can name an anime anthology, he's probably in there.

None of this should be taken to suggest that Fly Peek - or whatever we choose to call a film that distributor Kiseki would only ever release on VHS and under an unholy splodge of a title - isn't worth discussing in its own right.  Actually, it's very much good enough to make Morimoto's lack of a return to directing features quite saddening.  If I say that it has the feel of a minor Studio Ghibli work from around the same time, that's also not meant as a criticism.  It's very much a kids' movie, though with enough depth and edge to reward any adults who happen to be in the room, and though its character designs are simple and rather old-fashioned for the start of the nineties, the animation is detailed and the backgrounds are lavish, and also actively Ghibli-esque in places: the city that the back half of the film takes place in feels like a semi-remembered fever dream of a European coastal town more than an actual, physical space in ways that work to the considerable benefit of the material.

There are, it has to be said, some narrative problems along the way.  The extent to which the film breaks into two clean halves is frustrating, even if it's not particularly damaging when all's told.  In the first half, we follow brothers Kai and Moito, who find a way to deal with the grief surrounding their drowned father** by caring for a stranded albino baby whale that they name Peek.  This all gets wrapped up when a nasty bit of bullying toward the two brothers leads to the rest of the village learning their secret, which in short order means that Peek becomes the property of a nearby sea circus and its unscrupulous owner, who sees the infant whale as a potential attraction and has no qualms about keeping it imprisoned for the rest of its life.  Once Kai learns of the obvious deception he's fallen for, he heads off to set things right, at which point the film basically reboots itself and forgets about Moito, to the extent that he never appears in a scene beyond that point.  Along with that, there's a noticeably different tone and the introduction of an all-new major character in the shape of the sea circus owner's daughter Maila, and while both halves are up to good stuff on their own terms, it's by and large very different stuff, especially since the back end is a good deal more action heavy.

We know it's possible to navigate this sort of narrative with more grace and coherency because ... well, I'm only going off the synopsis here, having never seen it, but I get the sense that Free Willy managed to iron out the weirder glitches and streamline those two chunks of plot into one.  On the other hand, there's something quite charming about the way Fly Peek is so willing to buck storytelling common sense and just keep the focus where it needs to be, no matter if that means ditching what we'd been led to believe was a crucial character.  And even with that odd flaw, and its strange character designs, and a theme that feels somewhat overfamiliar here in 2021, there's a lot else that's charming, enough to make the film's almost total vanishment from the world seem as sad as its director's vanishment from the realm of feature-length movie making.  Fortunately, it's made its way onto Youtube in a surprisingly nice (if annoyingly cropped) print, so if you've burned your way through all of Ghibli and fancy a sweet, ever-so-slightly dark, lovingly made anime kids film, this one's definitely worthy of your time.

-oOo-

Despite what I suggested above, I feel like I can't really go recommending Apocalypse Zero to other human beings, what with how completely depraved and wrong it is almost from start to finish, so ... er, let's just pretend I never said that, all right?  Which leaves us with just Fly Peek, not quite a lost treasure but certainly a film that deserved a far better reception than it got in the West and is long overdue a DVD or Blu-ray release.  Or alternatively, if you just want to laugh at something startlingly awful, there's always Kama Sutra!

And with that, there's nowhere left to go but across the Rubicon and into post number 100.  This is the big one, folks!

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

* In the interests of fairness, I will say that the point at which Fujiko finally gets her memories back is one of the character's most hilariously bad-ass highlights, so that's something.

** A drowned father, incidentally, that the dialogue seems to uncritically suggest was a whaler, making for a film that's apparently much more comfortable with the killing and eating of whales than the idea of keeping them in captivity.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 98

We're in the ballpark of having a proper unifying theme for our four entries this time around, which is always a surprise.  Granted, its a theme that covers quite a bit of anime from the time, but all of these titles were attempts to pick up a beloved franchise years or even decades after its heyday and to take it in a bold new direction.  This is something anime can be unusually good at, and for me that has a lot to do with a willingness to go against the apparent grain of what made a property popular or successful and try to find an excitingly different angle, meaning that, while the results aren't necessarily always great, they at least tend to interesting.

Do these four manage to pull that off, though, or do they just end up as crass imitations?  Let's dig into Gatchaman, New Hurricane Polymar, Tekkaman Blade II, and New Kimagure Orange Road: Summer's Beginning...

Gatchaman, 1994, dir: Akihiko Nishiyama

Resurrecting a classic property years later is a tightrope walk.  Alter too much and you risk losing the original appeal; alter too little and you've made a rehash rather than a reboot.  Go too dark, go too funny, go too campy, change the characters, don't change the characters ... there are no end of ways to get it wrong, and because you're dealing with something that was once - and you're presumably hoping, still is - much-loved, the ire you'll receive when you screw up, or even just go a little bit awry, is liable to be far harsher than if you'd messed up on a fresh idea.

Gatchaman - that is, the 1994 reimagining of the seventies TV series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, which reached the West in mangled form under the title Battle of the Planets - absolutely nails it.  And though the reasons it does so are many and varied, I'd argue that the primary source of its success is an absolute, unshakeable conviction that Gatchaman, and more specifically the superhero team that goes by that name, is the coolest thing ever.  Practically from its opening moments, Gatchaman grabs you by the throat and screams, "Look at them!  They're science ninjas, damn it!  Ninjas!  With science stuff!  And they're dressed like birds!  How cool is that?!"  Which, if you'd asked me two days ago, I'd have replied, "I guess maybe mildly cool?" but now that I've seen the Gatchaman OVA would have to admit is so cool that everything else henceforward is going to seem just a bit less cool for the fact that this exists.

Because, in director Nishiyama's hands, these kids really are awesome.  One of the major changes, perhaps inevitably, is an upping of the violence levels, and while that's generally an obvious and tacky route to take a reboot down, here it means that the Gatchaman team get to really ninja it up, taking out endless goons in ludicrously slick fashion.  Plus, though there's no actual sex and nary a sniff of romance, the sex appeal has been dialled up to eleven: unsurprisingly, that means token girl member Jun looking hot and getting stuck with a flash of nudity, but actually it's team leader Ken who gets sexualised the most.  (Indeed, Jun is treated with more dignity than this type of show normally allows, being both a genuinely useful team member and as deft at kicking ass as anyone.)  More generally, though, the attention to detail in ensuring that everything relating to the team - every pose, every gesture, every neat vehicle transformation and dramatic cape flap - is as hypnotically stylish as can be suggests a passion for this material that went far beyond the usual cash-grubbing.

The same is true for the animation, which, taking into account the fact that this is an OVA of two and a bit hours, is awfully close to "no expenses spared" territory.  Obviously, some expenses were spared, and that even includes a spot of reused animation, but since that consists of the sort of sequences you'd expect to be reused - the one I first spotted was Joe's plane docking with the team's supersonic jet God Phoenix - it's almost more a virtue than a flaw.  The same goes for the score, which is often very cheesy indeed, down to an absurd hair-rock anthem for the closing credits, and yet feels like a perfect fit for a title that manages to have its cake and eat it by simultaneously going down the seemingly incompatible superhero routes of dark brooding and gleeful retro camp and somehow landing them both.

Arguably, the only point where that categorically doesn't work is the plot, or at any rate the parts of the plot that relate to its villain's motives, which are the most incompressible, self-contradictory nonsense you could hope for.  Yet even there, it's hard to grumble; probably that (and other issues, for that matter) would stand out more to someone who'd never encountered Gatchaman before in either its Japanese or US iterations, but with the TV-footage-recycling movie and dim childhood memories of the show behind me, nonsensical villain motives felt very much par for the course.  I suppose in a sense that's giving Gatchaman bonus points for being Gatchaman, but so be it: if there's one lesson I've learned lately, it's that Gatchaman is the coolest thing imaginable and deserves all the bonus points it can get.*

New Hurricane Polymar, 1996, dir: Akiyuki Shinbo

On the face of it, New Hurricane Polymar is something we've seen plenty of around these parts, and indeed something we were looking at just a paragraph ago, a gritty reboot of a much older series that attempts to drag its source material into the present without losing too much of what was appealing in the first place.  Though within anime and Japanese culture in general, we could go further than that, since shows about youthful heroes battling crime with the aid of super-suits of one sort or another are part of the bread and butter of the nation's media.  And - again, on the face of it - there really isn't a lot to differentiate New Hurricane Polymar.  Teenager Takeshi Yoroi finds himself the recipient of a curious red helmet in the mail, sent by a schoolfriend he hasn't seen in ages, a genius scientist who we already know and he quickly discovers has been murdered by a vicious terrorist organisation hellbent on hastening the human race's extinction from climate disaster.  Fortunately, or maybe not so fortunately, Takeshi is the sole employee of hapless detective Joe Kuruma, who's just competent enough to track the terrorists but not at all competent enough to do anything about their shenanigans, at least not without the aid of a besuited hero by the name of Hurricane Polymar.

One obvious element that sets this apart from similar titles is the talent at the helm.  Here we have another work from someone we've seen a lot of in these reviews, director Akiyuki Shinbo, who'd only really come to widespread fame on the back of the superb Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but who'd been quietly banging out work that ranged from respectable to great for nearly two decades by that point.  Back in 1996, Shinbo was the better kind of hack, in that I don't imagine this was a passion project and there's not a great deal of directorial presence, but at the same time, everything is delivered with an unobtrusive sense of style that suggests a creator with talent and ideas to spare.  However, if you're up on your anime, it's not Shinbo who leaves the most noticeable mark but character designer Yasuomi Umetsu, who a couple of years on from this would make his own directorial feature debut with the notorious Kite, where he'd blatantly rip off one of his own designs to such an extent that it's really damn noticeable.  I mean, I had to keep doing double takes to be sure that Takeshi and Joe's landlady wasn't actually teen assassin Sawa and about to kill everyone in the room.**  Honestly, it's a little distracting, but hey, at least we get some unusually imaginative character designs, so there's that.

Neither Shinbo nor Umetsu's presence, however, is what ultimately makes New Hurricane Polymar feel different from its many counterparts.  What does the trick is more a matter of tone, and how the show opts to push hard into being about comedy as much as it's about action.  And even that isn't really it, since anime is frequently willing to throw daft comedy antics into something that, judging by the bloody violence and gratuitous nudity, might not be the most obvious fit.  But New Hurricane Polymar takes that to a whole 'nother level in a way I can't say I've seen before: it feels, essentially, like two different shows smushed together.  The action stuff is very much what you'd expect of the genre and is taken completely seriously; I'd go so far as to say that there isn't a hint of humour at any point when Takeshi's suited up.  Whereas outside of those scenes, the comedy balance is way higher than you'd expect, to the extent that we get regular insights from Joe Kuruma's dog and there's a running joke about how his office is dangerously uninhabitable that runs so hard that it starts to overtake the A plot.

It's all very weird, and while it's maddening that only two half-hour episodes of New Hurricane Polymar were ever made, I can kind of see why this might not have found its market.  Were the action scenes not so deadly serious, and indeed so well done, I'd be inclined to suggest that it feels like the work of people who simply didn't want to make the product they'd been handed and decided to sabotage it from within.  But that's not at all the vibe: the stuff with Hurricane Polymar is plenty good in its own right, it just keeps on taking a back seat to the comic side of things, which has the benefit of feeling that bit fresher.  Slam them together and you definitely have an odd mix that never quite gels, but at the same time one that's surprising and entertaining in a way a synopsis would barely hint at.  If New Hurricane Polymar had been finished - and hey, it's only missing one episode! - I'd be pushing it enthusiastically, but even at only an hour, it's still a bit special.

Tekkaman Blade II, 1994, dir: Hideki Tonokatsu

Just what is it you come to a sci-fi show about people in cool suits fighting aliens for?  Is it the people in cool suits fighting aliens?  Or is it more the rambling character drama?  Do you really like to watch your heroes bickering about nothing much?  And then making up?  And then bickering some more?  Do you want them to obsess incessantly over who has a crush on who, and would absolutely everyone have a crush on somebody else - somebody who's guaranteed not to like them in return - as though they're really in high school and not defending the Earth from imminent annihilation?  Well, if all of that's the case, then boy are you going to love Tekkaman Blade II.

An OVA follow-up to a lengthy series that sounds as though it didn't need much following up, Tekkaman Blade II is effectively Tekkaman The Next Generation, which would be a reasonable enough approach to take if it weren't for the fact that the new character it fixes its attentions on is Yumi Francois, a young mechanic who's recruited to the team for absolutely no imaginable reason.  Granted, the "apparently incompetent new recruit turns out to be the one team member who can save the world" trope is about as old as sci-fi anime itself, but it pretty much has to go one of two ways: either they have some hitherto-unknown power that makes them especially capable or they're so uniquely personable that they become the heart and soul that nobody realised the team was missing.  So that Yumi Francois starts out as an annoying cretin and ends up as an annoying cretin and only accomplishes anything whatsoever because she's inadvertently given access to a devastating superweapon that she just barely figures out how to control is ... well, it's a fresh take, I'll give Tekkaman Blade II that much.

Fortunate for those fans of teenaged soap opera, then, that the show is much more interested in Yumi's love life - though even there, it's even more interested in showing her and any other female characters naked at every opportunity.  And somewhere amid the lingering shots of bare breasts and bums and the endless scenes of Yumi pining over the hilariously nicknamed D-Boy, there's that aforementioned sci-fi show about people in cool suits fighting aliens, which for the first three episodes feels so pushed into the background that you wonder why they bothered.  When an actual plot of sorts starts up after the midway point, it's quite the shock, but an improvement nonetheless, since those back three episodes contain the seeds of an interesting story.  Unfortunately, it's one that relies heavily on knowledge of the original series that the OVA has shown zero interest in sharing, and even at its best, the delivery's decidedly clunky.  Most noticeably, it seems the writers heard about foreshadowing once but didn't get how it was supposed to work; a crucial character relationship is dropped in three episodes before it will matter by having one of the female pilots take a phone call from her father - while topless, of course! - and another pilot's tragic backstory is hinted at by having him randomly quoting the bible, again a good hour before the reasons why will become apparent.  It's so clumsy that it's kind of endearing.

The only element of Tekkaman Blade II that's unequivocally a success is the animation, which is thoroughly decent all the way through, if never eye-popping.  And the bulk of the design work is relatively appealing, too, though when things go wrong they go really wrong.  In particular, I struggle to think of an instance where that hideous trope of making the female characters' suits look super-girly so we don't for an instant forget they're girls has felt more stupid and inappropriate; Yumi's suit looks as though someone had a last-minute panic and decided to stick giant cherry blossom petals all over it.  Like Yumi herself, it's a bizarre attempt to bring something kitschy and cutesy to a show that otherwise seems determined to be quite grim and serious, and as with most everything about Tekkaman Blade II, it leaves you with the distinct sense that the creators had no idea what they were trying to accomplish.

New Kimagure Orange Road: Summer's Beginning, 1996, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

It's hard to know just what we're meant to make of Summer's Beginning.  It came relatively close on the heels of the Kimagure Orange Road TV series and the prior film that brought it to an ostensible close, with a gap of a mere eight years, and certainly positions itself more as a continuation than any sort of spin-off or reboot.  And yet it does insist on calling itself New Kimagure Orange Road and in general on having the feel of a revamp even when it picks up so directly from I Want to Return to That Day that it repeats a handful of crucial scenes by way of a recap.

Then again, you can see the makers might have felt that a bit of ambiguity was in their favour.  Continuing a plot that was functionally complete while also insisting on taking things in a new direction has the unfortunate effect of making Summer's Beginning feel distinctly like fan fiction, and it has to jump through quite a string of hoops even to get itself started.  This second movie picks up three years after the first left off - with Kyosuke and Madoka finally a couple and Hikaru heartbroken but already bouncing back via a burgeoning career as a dancer in musicals - and thus far, their lives have continued to follow roughly the same tangents.  Kyosuke and Madoka are still together, though his job as a photojournalist has kept them separate for a while, and Hikaru has been Stateside with her work.  However, that all gets shaken up when the present-day Kyosuke and the Kyosuke of three years earlier both have near-fatal accidents, leaving younger Kyosuke in the body of his older self and older Kyosuke stuck in some sort of limbo.

This is a breathtakingly contrived way of getting Summer's Beginning to the point it apparently needs to be at, which is to tempt Kyosuke with the what-might-have-been of seeing a more grown-up Hikaru, one who's come out the other side of the pain of their breakup as a stronger, tougher, more likeable person, but also isn't so past it that she doesn't have a yearning for the guy who dumped her all those years ago.  And as riddled with problems as that setup is, it's not devoid of appeal.  Like I said, this has the feel of something fans eager for more might cook up, yet it also seems like the work of people who genuinely cared about these characters and knew their history and hidden depths and wanted to do them justice.  On that level, it's often a success: as much as I loved I Want to Return to That Day, I wouldn't class myself as a Kimagure Orange Road devotee, yet there was many a moment that I got a kick out of.  The best of those, for me, revolved around Madoka and Hikaru, and if there was a loose thread left hanging, it was that their friendship seemed irreparably broken, so I appreciated the less cavalier approach Summer's Beginning took to the matter of their relationship.

Not everything succeeds so well.  My biggest bugbear was how obsessed Summer's Beginning was with the prospect of Kyosuke and Madoka first sleeping together, to the extent that it becomes a crucial ongoing plot point; it's handled tolerably enough, in fairness, but it definitely undermines the maturity shown elsewhere and veers terribly close to being the wrong sort of fan service.  And there are some technical issues along the way, too, in the shape of a slight but noticeable lack of polish in places where the film would greatly have benefited from it.  For example, a crucial scene in which Hikaru gets to show off her dancing falls flat because, if the animation is to be believed, she isn't really all that good.  On the other hand, the film does an excellent job of updating the classic character designs and of using its visuals to convey the crucial shift into adulthood that's so essential to its themes.

There isn't really a good reason for New Kimagure Orange Road: Summer's Beginning to exist, following on as it does from an ending that was to all intents perfect and setting itself the task of answering questions that didn't need asking.  However, perhaps as much through luck as judgement, it hits on some genuinely emotive topics - the idea that this version of Hikaru that Kyosuke is so enticed by only exists because their breakup forced her to grow up and find her inner strength is quite fascinating - and there are plenty of individual scenes that land with real force.  The problem is that Summer's Beginning has to wrap itself in such knots to get to that material, and all the body-swapping and time-jumping stuff is much less interesting than the simple character beats that, after all, are what Kimagure Orange Road was fundamentally about.  Still, there's pleasure to be had here, even if its not consistent, making for an addition to the franchise that just about earns its seat at the table.

-oOo-

Despite what I said in the introduction, there's only one real triumph here, though what a triumph it is!  The Gatchaman OVA is a masterclass in how to get a revamp right, so much so that it's hardly fair to weigh anything else against it.  On the other hand, Tekkaman Blade II is the only major failure, and I don't know whether that has much to do with it being a reboot, though it would surely have been better if it had settled on either telling its own story or developing what had come before rather than uneasily shuttling between the two.  As for the rest, New Hurricane Polymar is perhaps the most interesting title in terms of how it goes about reimaging its source material, whereas New Kimagure Orange Road is the most strange and baffling, and probably deserves credit for being as good as it is when it's so inherent misconceived.

And with that, we're exceedingly close to the big one hundred post, which I'm mostly through writing ... I'd have got there a lot quicker if I didn't keep getting dizzy from all the excitement!  In the meantime, however, we've one more batch of random nonsense to look forward to, so expect that in the not-too-distant future...

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

* If there were two, the other one would be that when I grow up I want to be a science ninja.

** Though what I was really reminded of, and what New Hurricane Polymar is reminiscent of in quite a number of ways, is Umetsu's much-underrated 2004 TV series Mezzo DSA.

Announcing The Outfit

 So, that bit of news I've been dropping hints on for quite some time now?  Well, today's the day I finally get to stop hinting!

Toward the back end of 2019, Rebellion editor David Thomas Moore got in touch to ask how I felt about the possibility of writing a fictionalisation of the Tiflis bank robbery.  Clearly, my first step was to learn what the heck a Tiflis bank robbery was, for which, being only human, I went straight to Wikipedia.  Roughly five seconds later, having discovered that the Tiflis bank robbery was one of the most wildly insane events ever to occur in human history, positively gawking at the fact that nobody had yet written about it and that I might conceivably get to be the one who did, I was already trying to think of ways to reword "Seriously though, when I can I start?" into something a business-savvy professional writer sort might say.

For those who didn't follow that Wikipedia link: the Tiflis bank robbery is the occasion when, on the instructions of Lenin and other high-ups in the Bolshevik command, a young Joseph Stalin led the gang of career revolutionaries he was at the time in charge of in one of the most outrageous, profitable, and bloody crimes in history.  And yes, I do mean that Joseph Stalin.  This a real thing that really happened in actual history, and when you dig beneath the surface, it only gets weirder and less plausible.  One example off the top of my head: there's a scene in the book in which Stalin recruits someone to his cause using their passion for his, Stalin's, youthful poetry.  Oh, and it takes place over a glass of milk, because milk bars were a thing in early twentieth-century Georgia.  Did I mention that this all really happened?!

The Outfit is still quite a way from release, having been put back a couple of times for the same reason that every damn thing's been put back over this last year and change, but at least, as of today, it's public knowledge and has a definite landing date.  It also has a press release, which you can read here - if you're not sold at "The Russian Revolution meets Reservoir Dogs" then I'm not sure I can help you! - and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an unveiling of the cover in the not terribly distant future.  And meanwhile, I, obviously, will be rattling on about it at every possible opportunity!

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 97

How on earth did these eighties posts become a regular feature of a blog that has its chronological parameters baked right into the title?  Obviously it has a lot to do with me being awful at following the rules I set myself to keep this whole exercise within a remotely manageable scope; but equally as often, it's just that I pick stuff up because it looks interesting or I've heard good things about it and only realise once I get round to writing my review that it came out in the wrong decade.  That was the case with a couple of the titles here, and inevitably I then end up reviewing some other stuff that I might have settled for just watching for my own amusement so as not to be left with half a post - which is how I'm talking about a kid's movie that's a whole nine years too early for our purposes!

And why I'm bothering to explain any of this is beyond me!  After all, we've got some terrific anime this time around, in the shape of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, Twilight of the Cockroaches, Outlanders, and Macross: Do You Remember Love?

The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, 1981, dir's: Toshio Hirata, Osamu Tezuka

You have to respect the willingness - nay, the eagerness! - of eighties Japanese children's films to go to thoroughly dark places.  The Fantastic Adventures of Unico doesn't so much toy with questions of mortality, grief, isolation, and the depredations of age as it does fling itself at them headfirst.  What we have here is a cutesy kids adventure that opens with its protagonist being sentenced to death by the gods for the crime of bringing too much unearned happiness to humanity, and though that sentence is quickly commuted to banishment to the ends of creation, it's a fair taste of what's to come.  In short order, the chosen agent of the gods, the West Wind, takes pity on our magical infant unicorn hero and drops him off, instead, at the most isolated spot she can find, reasoning that if there's no-one around for him to bring joy to, he can't very well incur the wrath of his creators any more than he already has.  But it's not long before the briefly traumatised but ever-optimistic Unico is trying to befriend a demon, a project that goes about as well as you'd expect, in that - spoiler alert, I suppose - he winds up dead within minutes.  It doesn't stick, of course, or we wouldn't have much of a film, but you sure feel like it might when you're watching an adorable, pink-haired unicorn child drowning in a seething ocean.

I can't overstress how weird this is; bar a brief interlude in which we're introduced to one of the most delightful cats in all of animation history, there's nary a scene of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico's ninety minute run time in which something emotionally challenging isn't happening.  But I also can't overstress how charming and engaging the film is and how much that grows out of its aggressively bleak themes rather than acting as a counterpoint to them.  Unico is a kindly innocent in a world where even the gods are seriously screwed up, and though he has magical powers that basically let him do whatever the plot requires, they only work when he loves and is loved in return.  Unico's is a world in which even small cruelties can be debilitating, and that lends the moments of kindness and decency that crop up vastly more weight than they have in the average kiddie flick, where the stakes are nonexistent and the forces of evil are more obstacles to be overcome than genuine threats.

It helps, mind you, that the film is lovely to look at, with gorgeously detailed backdrops and simple characters animated with an emphasis on nuance and personality, all gathered together in an aesthetic that somehow squares the circle between its seventies Osamu Tezuka source material and its eighties movie present: the lush colour scheme favours supersaturated shades and burning neon far more than you'd think could possibly work, but somehow it does.  Fortunately, perhaps, the soundtrack doesn't try the same trick, and the many songs, mostly delivered by singer / songwriter Iruka, are gentle, folksy things that are so legitimately sweet and sad that they stay on the right side of kitsch.

Which, I think, sums up The Fantastic Adventures of Unico in its entirety.  It ought to be unbearable to adult eyes, but, like its hero, it's so genuine and good-hearted, and so willing to confront and try and overcome the darkness of its world, that it somehow turns a tale of a magical unicorn into something complex and powerful, without forgetting that it also needs to be cute and lively and full of colour.  I can't begin to imagine how actual children would respond to this, and though I didn't sample the English dub, it's all but impossible to imagine how that wouldn't push the thing off the tenuous tightrope it's walking; it would take almost nothing to make this too cutesy, and less to make it so existentially terrifying that the average child would need therapy on the back of the experience.  At the same time, I suspect that emotionally sturdy kids are exactly the right audience, and if I had any to hand, I'd be eager to sit them down and let them experience the bittersweet joys of The Fantastic Adventures of Unico.

Twilight of the Cockroaches, 1987, dir: Hiroaki Yoshida

It's curious, really, that there isn't more anime that combines animation with live-action footage.  Oh, I can think of a few titles that feature both in the same place - Otaku No Video springs to mind as an obvious example - but ones that combine the two, in the manner of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  Off hand, I'm not certain I've encountered a single one beside Twilight of the Cockroaches.

Granted, the technique would hardly be an ideal fit for every project, and it's definitely hard to conceive of a more perfect usage than what it's put to here.  Twilight of the Cockroaches tells the tale of a tribe of 'roaches who've been living for long enough in a state of nonconfrontational equilibrium with the human whose apartment they occupy that they've come to regard that as just how things are - and the film's central gimmick is to render the bugs in hand-drawn animation while using live-action footage for everything else.  (There are two exceptions: a talking dog turd done up in some rather splendid stop-motion animation and one tiny spot of cheating that bothered me more than it probably should have, especially since it's in service of an especially fine bit of visual storytelling.)  Anyway, clearly things can't go on as they are, and cracks start to show when our 'roaches encounter a refugee from another tribe that live across the field behind their building; a victim of cockroach / human warfare, he's held up as an example of how great their ceasefire is, but it's obvious to us, if not them, that war is bound to reach their shores before too long.  Because it so happens that the woman who lives in the apartment across the field has caught the eye of the sad-sack layabout who's our protagonists' inadvertent landlord, and suddenly he has every reason to clean his act up.

All told, it's rather a strange narrative, one that very much has the feel of an allegory but at the same time is so specific that it's hard to see how it would map onto anything in our reality.  Apparently director Yoshida maintained that the cockroaches represented Japan, with the humans as the rest of the world, which does neither side any favours but also does the movie itself a disservice: it does such a good a job of giving its pest stars their own inner life, anthropomorphizing them but never to the extent that we can forget they're insects of a sort that tend to inspire revulsion more than affection.  In fact, the register Twilight of the Cockroaches often drifts into is a sort of cosmic horror, since we have a far greater understanding of what's going on and what it means than they do, leaving us full of dread on their behalf as they blithely blunder closer to oblivion.

Nevertheless, plot-wise, I don't know that Twilight of the Cockroaches is wholly a success, and at an hour and forty-five minutes, probably some of its odder digressions could have stood a dash of trimming.  But what absolutely does work is the look of the thing: even in the dire print Eastern Star put out, presumably because it's all that survives, the film is a delight to experience.  The animation isn't technically outstanding and the designs are relatively simple, albeit brimming with charm, but the integration with the live-action footage is outstanding, ingenious and adventurous in a way I've rarely encountered prior to this.  Once you get used to it, which takes all of a couple of minutes, it works and works beautifully, adding a special magic to the storytelling that makes even its odd flat moment feel special.  Frankly, if this is what Japan could pull off by mixing live action and animation, it's a hell of a shame the experiment didn't inspire more imitators, but I'm glad we at least got something so deeply weird and individual as Twilight of the Cockroaches.

Outlanders, 1986, dir: Katsuhisa Yamada

You can tell a lot about Outlanders from its opening couple of minutes and the way it handles its meet-cute between alien princess Kahm and bumbling human Tetsuya.  We're introduced to Kahm as she's single-handedly assaulting the Earth, and, having seen off the air force with her gigantic spaceship, she gets down to slaughtering a bunch of soldiers with her sword in rather bloody fashion.  One of their decapitated heads happens to land in the hole where poor Tetsuya is hiding, which is enough to scare him into the open, but not enough to convince him that standing gawping at Kahm - not to mention trying to take her photo! - is a seriously bad idea.  Still, his camera somehow deflects her sword, the two end up wrestling, and Tetsuya can't help noticing that Kahm isn't wearing much of anything, by which point Kahm's also finding the whole business a bit of a turn-on, and wouldn't you know it but five minutes later she's decided that it's high time the two of them were wed - and the sooner the wedding night arrives, the better.

Aside from being a bonkers way to get your central couple together, that opening teaches us quite a bit about where Outlanders' priorities lie.  Despite the relatively brief fifty minute running time, we'll have a couple more sword fights and the odd space battle, but far more than either, we'll have Kahm and Tetsuya really wanting to jump each other's bones at every available opportunity.  Outlanders is delightfully frank about sex in a way most popular culture and definitely most vintage anime almost never is: we're not really expected to believe this is some grand love story, just that these two kids are insanely hot for each other, sufficiently that Kahm's willing to defy her tyrannical father and let Earth off from its destruction and Tetsuya's willing to almost get himself killed and generally to put up with all manner of space weirdness.  But they're not the only couple here, we also have Kahm's best friend Battia and rebellious ship's captain Geobaldi, and their relationship is even more openly sexual, to a quite startling degree - not to say that we see a lot, though Outlanders does get surprisingly explicit at points, but in the way the film doesn't remotely dance around the fact that they're two adults who really, really enjoy getting it on with each other.*

I suppose that all this doesn't necessarily make Outlanders good, but since the topic of sex is generally treated with such immaturity, it does make for an awfully refreshing and distinctive watch.  Mind you, strip out the hanky-panky and you'd still have a decidedly odd title, one that very much feels as though there's a great deal of plot happening beyond the edges of the frame but still manages to barrel through a satisfying chunk of story in less than an hour.  In this, the wonderful design work is a major help, not so much for filling in the missing details but more for selling us on an entire galactic civilisation just by how visually thought through every aspect is.  The animation is nothing to write home about, though it's perfectly good and laced with nice character work, but the designs are enough to make for something that's always a pleasure to watch.

However, even putting aside the fact that a space opera rom-com that's obsessed with sex isn't everyone's cup of tea, Outlanders is less than it could be.  Perhaps it has something to do with being all the way from back in 1986 - a fact I admittedly wouldn't have guessed from the visuals - but Yamada's direction has a certain stiltedness, a certain uncertainty of tone, and it's not helped by Kei Wakakusa's score, which plays as though this were straight sci-fi and thus does more to undermine the tone than back it up.  Neither of those problems are calamitous, but they're enough to leave me imaging a version of Outlanders that works just slightly better than this.  Still, I'm plenty happy with what we got; anything this committed to its own weirdness is almost bound to find itself on my good side.

Macross: Do You Remember Love?, 1994, dir's: Noboru Ishiguro, Shôji Kawamori

Macross: Do You Remember Love? is a compilation movie retelling the first three quarters or so of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series that wrapped in the previous year, and based on experience, you'd think there's a definite cap to how good a compilation movie can be, for at least a couple of reasons.  For a start, that generally means recycled TV footage, which obviously is unlikely to look too hot on a cinema screen, and then there's how basically flawed the whole principle is: a story that's suited to multiple television episodes isn't generally one that can be crammed into a couple of hours without losing any of its depth or nuance.

Having not seen the TV series, I can't comment on that second point, except to say that Macross: Do You Remember Love? certainly doesn't feel like a work that's been stripped of anything at all, or indeed one that's been squashed into a shape that isn't the perfect fit for its material.  There is, in retrospect, a certain lumpiness to its story that you could see as representing chunks of multiple episodes, but there was never a second where that bothered me, and indeed there are frequent structural triumphs, such as the way crucial elements mirror each other, that make it hard to imagine how this could have functioned as twenty-some episodes.  Its story is a fine bit of space opera, one that pulls off the oft-attempted and even more oft screwed-up trick of marrying personal conflicts to grand cosmic drama, in this case a love triangle between pop idol Lynn Minmay, pilot Hikaru Ichijyo, and his commanding officer Misa Hayase and the tale of how the titular space fortress finds itself entangled in a war between alien species whose history is deeply connected with the Earth's.  Honestly, outside of Star Wars at its best, I don't know that I've ever seen a better pairing of small-scale human drama with galaxy-shaking mythologising: there are charming personal moments and there are moments of epic scale, and not only do the two never pull focus from each other, some of the best scenes web them inextricably.  It helps that the pace, while not slow, is willing to linger on the character stuff, so that, for example, when Hikaru and Lynn are trapped in a damaged portion of the Macross during a battle, we spend enough time with them that their relationship gains some proper weight.  As the title suggests, Do You Remember Love? is very much a love story front and centre, but somehow it manages to make that the core around which a great deal of other stuff spins.

Oh, and that other persistent flaw with compilation movies, the reuse of TV footage?  Well, there's none of that here.  The movie was reanimated in its entirety, and I suppose that really means we have to view it as something different, more a reimaging, but at any rate it looks astoundingly good, not just in the sense of being exceptionally well animated but for the sheer imagination and ingenuity that co-directors Noboru Ishiguro and Shôji Kawamori bring to their material.  There are no end of show-stopping scenes, with perhaps the most memorable being the one that literally stops the show: without going into spoilery details, there's a fairly astounding sequence near the end of a space battle with one character foregrounded that makes the film's marrying of the personal and the epic satisfyingly blatant.  But then, I could spend this whole review picking favourite scenes and shots from Do You Remember Love? and while you're watching, the breadth of its ideas and attention to detail seems practically endless.

Granted, there are odd points I could quibble on if I really wanted to; for a film that's so much about music and that features a pop idol as one of its central characters, the music is often disappointingly on the bland side, and I suppose that if you weren't willing to meet it halfway, the plot is much too ludicrous to be taken half as seriously as it is; view it with a cynical eye and there's plenty that would make for easy laughs.  But Do You Remember Love?, with its marrying of enormous, bombastic sci-fi thrills and genuinely engaging character drama, is the sort of film that sweeps you up and carries you along, and it would take a hard heart indeed not to surrender to its wiles.  It's no wonder this was an enormous hit at the time, and nearly four decades on, it's lost none of its charm.

-oOo-

With that behind us, I feel a lot less apologetic about these random eighties posts, because if ever a selection justified the odd departure further back in time, this was it.  Purely by accident, I seem to have come up with a really fine overview of some of the decade's best trends, so well done me for that!  Still, it's back to business as usual next time, and I know I keep saying this, but I really need to get to work on that big centenary post...

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

* Of course, one of them is an anthropomorphised dog.  Hey, this is still anime!

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 96

Once again I seem to have lucked my way into a theme of sorts, though it's not one I'd have deliberately opted for.  Skimming over them, I can't help noticing that all four titles here are very much about guys doing manly guy stuff, and not one of them has much time for their female characters, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to argue that all four have at least the odd moment where those female characters are basically there so they can be victims for the hero(es) to save.

So that sucks!  But hopefully there'll be a few virtues to balance it out somewhere among Fatal Fury 2: The New Battle, Shuten Doji, Lupin the Third: Napoleon's Dictionary, and Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers: Message...

Fatal Fury 2: The New Battle, 1993, dir: Kazuhiro Furuhashi

Had you told me a week ago that the Fatal Fury franchise was capable of turning out a truly good movie then ... well, I like to think I'd have had better manners than to laugh in your face, but there's certainly a chance I'd have scoffed a little.  The first OVA was fairly dire, rising to functional in its better moments, and the feature film, which would arrive a year after this second OVA, was decent enough if you could get around character designs that looked as though they'd been concocted by aliens with nothing but the Pioneer plaque to work off.  And both shared the problem that there's nothing whatsoever interesting about the Fatal Fury   franchise, which I dare say is remembered mostly these days because main character Terry Bogard wears a really stupid-looking cap.

Yet, despite its uninspired title, The New Battle is a genuinely good film.  It even profits somewhat from the inherent shortcomings of these things, by framing its plot around fighting to a puritanical degree: in so much as there's a story, it follows Terry suffering a nasty beatdown at the hands of new villain Krauser and then sliding into depression and alcoholism - because, if he can't be the best fighter in the world, what can he be? - until his brother Andy and their friend Joe Higashi learn what's been going on and take it upon themselves to intervene.  Granted, there's a bit more going on than that, including Terry getting saddled with an hilariously wardrobed teen protégé who should be more annoying than he is, and the introduction of Mai Shiranui, whose main and perhaps only purpose here is to have extremely large breasts.

Because, yes, The New Battle absolutely isn't perfect, and it's still a Fatal Fury movie, so you do have to be sensible with your expectations.  Nevertheless, writer Takashi Yamada and particularly director Kazuhiro Furuhashi manage to turn almost all its potential failings into at least vaguely positive features.  Take Mai as an example: enormously sexist as just about everything to do with the character is, here as she very much wasn't in The Motion Picture she's a positive presence, largely by way of being the only person who cares about anything besides fighting.  I don't know that I'd accuse The New Battle of having anything as grandiose as themes, but it does nod toward acknowledging that there's something problematic about devoting your life to violence and that possibly it's not for everyone.

Mostly, though, this works because The New Battle understands what it needs to do to and follows through rigorously.  It helps that the animation is frequently very good, and helps more that Furuhashi - by far the best director to make anything Fatal Fury-related - conjures up some great atmosphere and routinely captivating imagery.  Mostly, though, the film gets that there's one element it can't afford to screw up, as Legend of the Hungry Wolf screwed up so badly, and that means exciting, well-conceived fight scenes, of which there are an enormous number - though somehow the makers just about manage to do the whole "this is a fighting game adaptation so everyone has to fight in every possible combination" thing in a way that feels organic and satisfying.  No matter who's scrapping at any given moment, every confrontation points toward Krauser and Terry's final reckoning, and that's just enough direction to keep the show on the road, especially given that Krauser is a thoroughly satisfying bad guy, a self-satisfied Teutonic sociopath with an almighty daddy complex, a weird sense of humour, and, er, a love for playing his gigantic organ.

There are, I guess, limits to the heights to which a fighting game adaptation can climb, assuming that adaptation isn't the fantastic Darkstalkers and doesn't cheat by running off and having an actual narrative and proper world-building.  But within the generally accepted limits, I'm happy to place The New Battle in the top tier of what this routinely shonky subgenre has to offer.  It may not be terribly sophisticated, but as seventy-five minutes of story about people punching each other goes, it does what it does in a shockingly engaging and well-crafted fashion.

Shuten Doji, 1989 - 1991, dir's: Junji Nishimura, Jun Kawagoe, Yoshio Ishiwatari

The difficulty in reviewing the early nineties OVA miniseries Shuten Doji is that it does one thing that's quite interesting and relatively original and many things that aren't very interesting or original at all.  Moreover, that one thing, though it ticks away in the background right from the beginning - a bizarre opening in which two demonic oni battle through space and time - really only becomes a central feature in the last of the four forty-five minute episodes, leaving more than two hours in which the show isn't up to much that's the least bit exciting.

This is most the case in the first couple of parts, and it doesn't help going in with the knowledge that this is a Go Nagai adaptation, because the basic setup is so similar to Devilman, by far the best Nagai work I've come across, and Shuten Doji never operates on remotely the same sort of level.  Then again, even were Nagai's name not on the box, it wouldn't take much guessing that he was behind this, given the emphasis on gross-out bloodshed and particularly given the awe-inspiring levels of misogyny and sexualised violence.  That's most prevalent, and most obnoxious, in the first part, in which our teenaged hero Jiro wakes up to his magical powers, while Miyuki, the girl who has a crush on him, mainly spends her time being kidnapped, stripped, and nearly raped, before being licked all over by a demon, setting a pattern for her character that Shuten Doji will have scant interest in shaking off.

Mind you, while I claimed Shuten Doji only has one legitimately interesting feature, it's mildly intriguing how much each of the parts feels distinct from the others: I'd struggle to class this as entirely a virtue, but it's certainly something.  The jump between one and two is most dramatic, in that, though it's possible to follow the logical course of events, it seems strange to suddenly find that Jiro's gathered a group of protectors, especially since he could have done with their help throughout the first part.  And though the leap in part three, whereby we're suddenly watching a sci-fi movie with spaceships and a killer android, ought to be more jarring, it isn't, perhaps because the similar hop in the opening sequence suggested those spaceships had to pop up somewhere.  And then there's the fourth part, which I really don't want to spoil, so let's just say that again it's joltingly different from what's gone before.

I liked that ending on the whole, and while its ambitions aren't altogether new and possibly didn't add up to anything that made an enormous amount of sense, they're enough to set the show apart from the mass of its contemporaries.  Which is nice, but maybe not the biggest help when the previous three episodes have failed so thoroughly to distinguish themselves, with the possible exception of a score that borrows heavily and obviously from all sorts of places but does an excellent job in the process.  The animation, though, is nothing special, the writing definitely isn't, and while it's sort of gratifying that each episode is doing its own self-contained thing, those are all things we've seen frequently elsewhere.

Then again, hugely unpleasant attitude toward its female characters not withstanding, there was nothing in Shuten Doji that I found actively off-putting, either.  I'd even go so far as to place it in the upper tier of Go Nagai adaptations I've seen - though that's barely a compliment! - and I've watched many a worse slice of fantasy-horror with a supernaturally powered teenage protagonist, too.  It's definitely not great in any way whatsoever, but by merit of being slightly above average until an ingenious, bonkers, and memorable ending, I'm slightly surprised that Shuten Doji isn't better remembered or regarded.

Lupin the Third: Napoleon's Dictionary, 1991, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Lupin the 3rd: Napoleon's Dictionary is what happens when undeniably talented people make something without any visible enthusiasm or inspiration.  The team of screenwriter Hiroshi Kashiwabara and director Osamu Dezaki was capable of excellent work together on the Lupin franchise, so much so that it's hard to imagine they could have collaborated on a film with no merit whatsoever.  Yet, for whatever reason, both of them seem to have been mostly checked out while they were making this one.

Kashiwabara gets most actively wrong, as a brief summary of the plot neatly illustrates: in this episode, master thief Lupin steals a vintage car so that he can participate in a vintage car rally so that he can win the titular dictionary so that he can find a clue to the actual treasure.  Moreover, two of those steps are utterly unnecessary, as the film itself inadvertently admits: Lupin swears that he can't simply steal the dictionary from its current owner, then ultimately does so with zero apparent effort.  And speaking of zero effort, that's effectively what Dezaki is providing at the helm ... bar one brief flashback scene, there are none of his signature stylistic flourishes here, which isn't necessarily a bad thing given how annoying they can be, but the trouble is that there's not much of anything else either.  His direction is bland and functional and could be the work of most any mid-tier director working in anime at the beginning of the nineties, to the point where I almost wonder whether he farmed this one off onto the office junior while he concentrated his efforts elsewhere.  Given that he was extremely busy at the time and also banging out some of the worst work of his career, it's easy to believe.

However, let's assume for the moment that Napoleon's Dictionary was indeed another Kashiwabara / Dezaki joint, if only for the reason that, on a scene-by-scene basis, it's just charming enough to feel like it is.  Kashiwabara's script may be all over the place and shockingly devoid of momentum, but he's more than capable of flinging out a few great lines and solid scenes; Dezaki may have been mostly asleep at the wheel, but on the occasions when he wakes up, it's a reminder that few people have ever got Lupin the way he did.  The best material here is built around the Lupin / Zenigata relationship, and I think this may be the first film to point out the extent to which the characters are sides of the same coin, so that's nice to see.  Though Fujiko is barely present, Jigen's literally along for the ride, and Goemon's mostly occupied with imagining himself as the hero of a Yakuza flick, so it's fair to say that Kashiwabara still managed to drop the ball hard with every other character.  Oh, and the animation is pretty rough, so it's not as though that's much of a distraction - though here as he failed to do in From Siberia with Love, Dezaki marshals his resources sufficiently that there are moments of relative quality.  Which sort of sums up Napoleon's Dictionary: there's just enough flair and imagination and classic Lupin goodness to not make for a total washout, but nowhere near enough to add up to a legitimately good film.

Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers: Message, 1991, dir: Masashi Ikeda

You don't have to look far to see what Samurai Troopers: Message could have been, because it's right there on the screen.  The new footage here is nice indeed and the story it tells, a deep dive into series lore via a character seeking revenge for a tragic incident in the distant past, is a perfectly serviceable one with plenty of potential.  But notice what I said there, "new footage"?  Well, there's the problem, or at any rate the one absolutely inexcusable problem.  Of the five episodes, amounting to just short of two and a half hours, I'd be surprised if more than thirty minutes wasn't cobbled together either from the TV series that this is supposedly a grand finale to or from the preceding OVA, Legend of the Inferno Armor.

Obviously that's an enormous shortcoming, there's no two ways about it.  Yet it's still just about possible to see how something worthwhile could have been constructed from the available resources.  Samurai Troopers the series was, after all, hardly cheap or ugly, the previous OVA looked rather splendid on occasions, and so it's not like that footage is bad as such.  Granted, for any viewer who'd watched both, there'd be a measure of frustration in paying afresh to watch something they'd already seen, sliced up and taken out of context, but if the goal was both a nostalgic look back at and a challenging re-examination of the series up until this point, you can conceive of this working well enough to distract from the absurdly obvious cost-cutting.

And again I know that to be the case, because Samurai Troopers: Message gets things right just enough that its better self is right there to see.  Indeed, for the first couple of episodes, I was cautiously hopeful.  Since I haven't seen the series, most of what was on offer was new to me, but more than that, there was something legitimately weird and exciting about the format, the bulk of which involves one character narrating over a montage of clips.  Whatever the motivation, that's a little radical as far as mainstream animation goes, the more so because Masashi Ikeda's awesomely self-indulgent script leans heavily on poetic introspection, to the extent that it's easy to forget this isn't some European art movie done up in the guise of a show about teens fighting bad guys using magical suits of armour.

All of that remains true to the end, more or less, but it's not a sustainable formula.  By the third episode, my patience was waning, as it became apparent that this wasn't an introduction to get us to the point where the plot kicked in and the new footage overrode the old, this was it: the makers really did only have the budget for a single episode and enough story for maybe two or three and yet decided, for whatever reason, to drag that out to two and a half excruciating hours.  And yes, once it becomes clear that there's no reward coming, this does get pretty excruciating.  The nadir is a sequence in which one character sits listening to their voicemail messages, and I swear, the only actual animation is the blinking light on the answerphone.  This goes on for so long that, though I only watched it last night, I'm struggling to believe I didn't hallucinate it in some mad Samurai Troopers-fuelled delirium, because who has the nerve to do that?  Who wouldn't throw in the odd close-up or cutaway to distract us from how we're literally watching two frames of animation looping over and over for five whole minutes?

It's rare that we get a title I can't recommend to anyone for any reason, and it's rarer still when said title isn't even that bad.  I mean, I've been positive about things that, taken as the sum of their parts, were probably much worse.  Samurai Troopers: Message has some intermittently fine animation and a strong concept that it occasionally carries off, not to mention a terrific score - though for all I know, much of that was also pillaged from the series.  At any rate, it undoubtedly has virtues, and as a sort of bizarre anime tone poem deconstructing shounen anime and super sentai shows, there are moments when it exerts a hypnotic fascination.  But if you're new to Samurai Troopers, that's hardly going to keep you amused through such an unearned running time, and if you're a fan looking for the thrill of a true and satisfying climax, I can only imagine what a kick in the teeth this would be.

-oOo-

Oh dear, I don't know what happened there!  Or for that matter what strange parallel universe I've stumbled into where a Fatal Fury OVA is the only title I'd be legitimately recommending.  Though, I don't know, there's a part of me that wants to be more positive about Shuten Doji, which at least has the decency to go delightfully mad after three episodes of being not especially interesting.  But, however I dress it up, there's no getting around the fact that this was a pretty weak selection.  Thankfully, given what I've been watching recently, it's a safe bet to say the next one should be a fair bit stronger...

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