Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 126

I may have the odd grumble about distributor Eastern Star / Discotek, if only because I'm never quite sure what to call them, but still, thank goodness they're out there and keeping up a steady flow of rereleases and remasters of classic anime, not to mention the occasional new release, which is ridiculously exciting if you're anything like me and have long ago exhausted most of the era's classics.  And while the Project A-ko blu-rays aren't quite that, it's still a thrill to get them when, in the UK at least, the only alternative until now was shoddy dub-only versions.

And for the purposes of this here post, Discotek and A-ko are all that's saving us from the deepest depths of obscurity, as we dig into some truly bizarre and long-buried corners.  Up this time: Roots Search, Project A-Ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody, Wild 7: Biker Knights, and Mystery of the Necronomicon...

Roots Search, 1986, dir: Hisashi Sugai

I'm not about to suggest that seminal nineties sci-fi horror movie Event Horizon ripped off a mediocre anime OVA, but if I was, Roots Search is the mediocre anime OVA I'd point to.  It did, at least, land on some of the same ideas and imagery a decade earlier, and if it deserves credit for anything, it's that: there's the seed of something here, and ten years later, a similar seed would grow into a minor classic rather than a stunted weed of a tale that barely has time to wave its saggy leaves at the sun before it's starting to wilt.

But I was trying to praise Roots Search for what little it does right, rather than condemn it for all the stuff it gets wrong!  Because the core is decent, and could have worked, and intermittently does, especially in the first half.  Our setting is the Tolmeckius Research Institute and our lead is said institute's apparently sole test subject, Moira, whose psychic powers are enough to get everyone terribly excited.  But that convenient plot thread gets quickly sidelined until it becomes useful again much later, as the scientific fun and games are interrupted by the arrival and near-impact of a much larger vessel, one that happens to look like something H R Giger might have dreamed about after scoffing too much brie before bed.  And wouldn't you know it but all the crew bar one are mysteriously dead, and also there's an apparently comatose alien aboard, which the Tolmeckius gang almost immediately decide to dump into space, having come to the sensible conclusion that dead crew plus unidentified alien is unlikely to bode well.

It's a good call, but not quite good enough, for it turns out the alien is... Well, I'm not certain the makers of Roots Search quite knew what was going on with their alien, and if they did, they weren't prepared to let us in on all their secrets, but we can comfortably say that it somehow survives being jettisoned and promptly sets about tormenting the crew with visions of their guiltiest secrets before disposing of them in exceedingly gory ways - this being the part that feels awfully like Event Horizon, even down to a particular death scene involving an airlock and the manner in which human bodies don't cope terribly well with the vacuum of space.

Had this been the sum of Roots Search, I think I'd feel more kindly towards it, since the horror is mildly ingenious and the "death by dark secrets" stuff quite entertaining.  So it's a disappointment when, past the midpoint, the psychological aspect gets largely binned in favour of more traditional tentacle monster shenanigans.  But even that isn't really what hobbles Roots Search.  While I hate to criticise something for having too many ideas, that's part of the problem, though even then I'd be more forgiving if any of those ideas went somewhere, say to a satisfying climax that made a shred of sense.  In particular, the fact that the alien declares itself to be acting in the name of God definitely seems like the sort of notion you might want to develop rather than trotting out only to leave hanging, and while I kind of liked the conclusion for its brazen "What the hell?" gambit, I'd still have preferred a bit of clarity.

Perhaps needless to say of a totally forgotten OVA from three and a half decades ago that its less-than-choosy US distributor never felt the need to give a DVD release, none of this is salvaged by its technical aspects.  The end theme is quite nice in a dopily inappropriate fashion, and the animation has its moments, most of them in the intermittently effective horror sequences, but it goes wrong as often as it goes right and the character designs are particularly disastrous: there's the strong impression that a different artist was responsible for every one, none of whom did a good job or spoke to each other.  More effort went into the mechanical designs and the alien, which is actually quite interesting to look at, until it turns into a bunch of writhing genitals made of spam, anyway.  Oh, but that cover art is nice, isn't it?  And it appears beneath the end credits, which feels like a thank you for putting up with Roots Search's bad choices for three quarters of an hour.

Project A-Ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody, 1988, dir: Yuji Moriyama

I was beginning to worry that reviewing these Project A-ko sequel OVAs separately was a wasted effort, having responded to the first entry, Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, much as I did back in the day when I covered them under their original release as one collection.  So I was pleased to discover that my main objection to Cinderella Rhapsody, on a rewatch, barely bothered me at all.

I know I wasn't alone - if only because Discotek's excellent liner notes touch upon the subject - in being put off by a story that relied on two characters who thus far had been strongly implied to be gay suddenly lusting after a guy rather than delightfully awful moppet C-Ko, and it seemed to me another example of the dearth of ideas that happens when creators sequel something that really ought to have been left alone.  What I perhaps failed to notice is that Cinderella Rhapsody takes its straight romance even less seriously than it did its gay romance, and indeed seems to be actively mocking the conventions of the genre - particularly as they're relayed through anime and manga - and possibly even the distressing tendency in Japanese culture of the time toward presenting intimate female relationships as a fad to be grown out of.  The object of A-Ko's affections, who inevitably becomes the object of her rival B-Ko's affections, would fail the sexy lamp test and then some, barely says two words throughout the forty-some minute running time, and is ultimately shown to be even less of a catch than C-Ko, who somehow winds up both more humanised and precisely as dreadful as ever.

You might still argue that a romance pastiche was hardly the way to take a property so anarchic as Project A-ko, and I wouldn't suggest there weren't better alternatives out there, but it certainly feels fresher than Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group's attempt to extend a narrative that had nowhere useful to go.  Indeed, if there had ever been a model by which Project A-ko might have kept going longer than it did, this feels like a step in that direction, larking about with a genre that's a fairly rubbish fit until it becomes funnier to hurl all that out the window for a ridiculous action climax that sees half the city dragged into the fight.

One thing's for sure, director Moriyama seems considerably more enthused than he did last time around, bringing some genuine ingenuity to the table and an eye for imaginative shots that I noticed barely anywhere in Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group.  Then again, it may simply be that there was more time and money floating about, for this is a much more polished effort, not so far off the level of the original Project A-Ko and on occasions - as in the baffling dream-sequence opening that adopts an entirely different art style - maybe a little bolder and better.  Hiromoto Tobisawa's note-perfect parody score is a step up, too, from Mariya Takeuchi's perfectly adequate efforts, and feels like a worthwhile stand-in for the irreplaceable work Carbone and Zito did to give A-Ko its singular vibe.

All in all, then, I liked Cinderella Rhapsody quite a bit, and if that's partly a case of coming to the material with a more forgiving attitude, I think this one also gained from Discotek's slightly mercenary approach of putting out these short OVA sequels one by one: as a standalone sequel, it fares better than it did crammed in the middle of a trilogy, and the superior animation gains considerably from the move to HD and Blu-ray.  Having previously only seen the dub, I wonder, too, if that somehow managed to miss the joke with the mock-romance, because it's hard to imagine coming away from the original Japanese version with the impression that it was meant to be taken remotely seriously.  Whatever the case, Cinderella Rhapsody's enough of a success that I'm now a little sad that there's only one more "proper" A-Ko sequel left to go.

Wild 7: Biker Knights, 1995, dir: Kiyoshi Egami

It was obviously a lot to hope that this second Wild 7 OVA would be as good as the first when the first largely felt as if it fluked its way to success.  Still, the specific ways in which Biker Knights fails to reach the same modest heights are irritating in their own right, since it really only needed to be more of the same to get itself a modest pass.

Granted, somebody in the production possibly came to a similar conclusion, given that, in one crucial fashion, Biker Knights is absolutely that, picking up as it does almost directly from the end of the original.  Unfortunately, that ending left little in the way of interesting loose threads, and so this turns out to be merely the first of a bunch of bad decisions, though it's one that could have easily been recovered from, since Biker Knights almost immediately resets itself anyway, introducing new villains with a new dastardly plot.  At least, I think it was meant to be dastardly; it's so convoluted and self-evidently dumb that it was hard to be certain.  And by then we're into the realm of bad decisions that weren't recoverable, because if you're telling a tale in which your bad guys are trying to take over Japan via the medium of a TV show that makes popular idols battle each other, you'd better be damned sure to keep tongue firmly in cheek.  Yet somehow, despite an obviously more absurd plot, Biker Knights takes itself very seriously indeed and thus manages to make the most bonkers of criminal conspiracies seem dull and workmanlike.

Speaking of taking things seriously, the one thing that categorically couldn't survive that treatment, as I pointed out at probably too much length in my review of the original Wild 7, is the core concept of our heroes being criminals made cops who can get the job done where the regular police can't because they're not bound by all those dumb rules about proving people guilty with actual evidence and are free to shoot and explode and generally molest whoever they please.  Wild 7 got away with it by largely ignoring it; Biker Knights has its characters sit down for a scene that kills any momentum the show has gathered to lengthily debate the relative merits of summary execution versus due process.

That scene's symptomatic of a title that's generally come to the conclusion that what Wild 7 needed was more talking and less action.  There is, indeed, barely any of the latter until the third act, and none of what we get until that point is any good at all.  Really, neither is the main setpiece, which suffers partly from not being the climax of the film that it seems like it ought to be, but more so for how the animation is markedly worse this time around, with all the flaws of the first OVA and none of the virtues.  And that's the one failure that's truly unsurvivable, since some imaginative action brought to live with ambitious animation would have stood a chance of making the other flaws fade from memory, whereas wading through scene after scene of tedious plotting only to be rewarded with sequences that should be awesome and aren't is quite the slap in the face.

It's not as if Biker Knights is terrible; if I was never especially absorbed, I was never bored either.  But in a way, that was actually worse, since I'd much rather have had a Wild 7 sequel that self-destructed in outrageous fashion than one that flopped about limply the way this does, imagining we'd prefer to watch ridiculous villains setting out incoherent schemes than crooks-turned-cops firing missiles from their souped-up motorbikes.  As it is, if it has any value at all, it's to make the original seem better than it was by illustrating just how badly wrong a setup like this can go if everyone involved fails to realise how essentially dumb and trashy it is.

Mystery of the Necronomicon, 1999, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Yoshitaka Makino

I'll spare us the usual excuses for when I review hentai here: the truth is, I went into Mystery of the Necronomicon with my eyes open and a measure of genuine curiosity.  The influence of weird fiction writer H P Lovecraft is all over nineties anime, yet I can't think of a single other title off the top of my head that actually adapts his work or does more than obliquely acknowledge the connection with the odd sly reference.  So when I discovered that there was an actual Lovecraft-adapting nineties anime out there, my interest was sparked, hentai or no.

As it turns out, however, Mystery of the Necronomicon isn't precisely that.  There are enough familiar names and figures that it's certainly a lot more open about the connection than is usually the case, and there's one work in particular that it draws from heavily in its latter portion, though saying which would constitute a massive spoiler.  The plot, though, is its own thing, and given that the majority of Lovecraft's boil down to variations of "man encounters something horrible and inexplicable, goes mad," that's probably for the best.  Which isn't to say that isn't what Mystery of the Necronomicon is up to, just that there are a lot more wheels spinning along the way to keep its two-and-a-bit hour running time occupied.

Our hero, for want of a more suitable word, is private detective Satoshi Suzuhara, who's differentiated from your usual cynical private detective in a supernatural mystery who comes to realise the case he's investigating is connected with his own shadowy past mainly by how he has way more sex - this being hentai, let's not forget! - and by how his attractive assistant is also his adopted daughter, a detail that will end up feeling awfully gross before the credits roll for reasons I probably don't need to spell out - hint, still hentai!  The first two of four episodes find Suzuhara at a remote ski lodge hotel in which the tiny handful of guests are being bumped off at a rate of knots in ritualist fashion, a thread that largely plays out by the midpoint, though oddly the third episode then opts for more or less the same setup but in a hotel in the north-eastern US.  It's the sort of narrative that feels quite complicated until you learn where it was heading, at which point it seems awfully straightforward in retrospect, but there are enough bumps in the road, along with a couple of neat twists, that it manages to stay largely satisfying.

Certainly there's a whole lot more story here than I would have expected from a hentai title, and if, like me, you're cool on that particular subgenre, it definitely helps that the various sex scenes feel of a piece with that story rather than being crowbarred in wherever they can possibly fit.  That's not to say they're not both frequently nasty and surprisingly graphic - there's stuff here I was confident you couldn't show, in animation or elsewhere, in Japan at the time - but while it's often unpleasant, it's at least unpleasant in a way that fits with the wider horrors.  Then again, when Mystery of the Necronomicon is actually doing horror, it trips over itself as often as not, and proves an excellent exemplar of the rule that simply showing gross stuff is rarely scary and even stops being alarming quite quickly: in particular, you can only see so many skinned faces before the shock wears off.

Or rather, maybe the issue is more that you can only see so many skinned faces that look quite rubbish - for Mystery of the Necronomicon has the grave misfortune of hailing from 1999, the year where anime went to die, and thus is ugly and shoddy in all manner of ways it can't afford to be.  Objectively, the animation is probably relatively competent, and Takayama does enough to instil a bit of much-needed mood and tension into the proceedings, but nothing can do away with that painful impression of computer-aided animation made by people who are far from figuring out how the "aided" part works.  It's a shame, really, because on the whole I quite liked Mystery of the Necronomicon, which sets itself some unenviable challenges and manages, on the whole, to make the results work, by the very specific definition of working that Lovecraftian hentai could hope to accomplish.

-oOo-

That... could have gone worse?  Perhaps not a lot worse, granted, but there was nothing here I didn't snatch at least a dash of enjoyment from, though Wild 7: Biker Knights came perilously close.  It has to be said that only Cinderella Rhapsody could be called a nice surprise rather than a disappointment, but realistically that's on me for having any expectations whatsoever for Lovecraft hentai, a Wild 7 sequel, and a long-since-vanished, VHS-only OVA that I bought entirely because I thought the cover art was cool.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 125

125 posts! That's totally something to celebrate, or possibly to commiserate if you consider reviewing extravagant amounts of mostly impossible-to-find media from decades ago a life-wasting exercise in futility.  But surely nobody anywhere would think that, so let's go with the celebrating!  And what better way to mark a major Drowning in Nineties Anime landmark than with some eighties anime?  OK, I know, but this way we get to cover some pretty good titles, including a couple that you can even buy on those shiny, new-fangled Blu-ray thingamajigs the kids won't shut up about, and I don't have to ramble on about VHS titles that probably about three people on the planet would be interested in watching.  So here for the big 125 - and review number 500! - are Tomorrow's Joe 2, Fair Then Partly Piggy, Prefectural Earth Defense Force, and Final Yamato...

Tomorrow's Joe 2, 1981, dir: Osamu Dezaki

On the one hand, to expect the second Tomorrow's Joe movie to go as miraculously right as the first did feels optimistic.  After all, the original seemed as though it could easily have been not half so good as it was, and only by some fluke of editing genius was a coherent two-and-a-half hour-long movie dragged together from the dozens of hours of footage that comprised the original TV series.  Yet if you were the optimistic sort, you might equally ask, why shouldn't it happen again?  After all, the elements and process were essentially identical, and Tomorrow's Joe 2 has a few obvious advantages: a mere 47 episodes to compile rather than the 79 of the first series and so a less intimidating run time of under two hours, some noticeably more polished animation, and perhaps most importantly, all the groundwork already in place, so we don't need half a movie just to get us into the boxing stuff.

Maybe, then, it's my personal preferences that made Tomorrow's Joe 2 a relative disappointment.  I wouldn't choose to sit down and watch a boxing movie, but the original Tomorrow's Joe largely tricked me into it, in that by the time its protagonist Joe Yabuki finally stepped inside a ring, I was already totally absorbed by the character drama.  More than that, though, I'd argue Tomorrow's Joe had one virtue Tomorrow's Joe 2 couldn't hope to replicate, and that was belonging to the perfect genre for something so vast and shaggy.  Because far more than it was about boxing, it was a coming-of-age story, and who expects those to be structurally neat and tidy?  The only necessities for such a narrative to work are that it leaves its protagonist somewhere close to being an adult and that it gives a sense of that progress in an interesting, arresting fashion, and this Tomorrow's Joe pulled off as well as any example I can name.

Tomorrow's Joe 2 actually has more of a definite shape to it, but it's one that's barely apparent through an episodic first half that has to reset itself a couple of times and only really becomes absolutely clear in the last minutes.  To go into details would be spoiler-y, and while I didn't wholly get on with the film, I certainly wouldn't want to do that: it's absolutely up to some intriguing things, and though I'm comfortable calling it a boxing movie, that's not to suggest its ambitions and themes are limited to the action within the ring.  Far more so than the first feature, it's interested in what it means to be a career fighter, what it says of a society that it would allow such a profession, and where, for a man like Joe Yabuki who knows nothing else and perhaps is good for nothing else, that all leads.

I respect that, but respect isn't the same as enjoyment, and Tomorrow's Joe 2 is tough to enjoy.  Partly that's because its answers are grim and fatalistic, with not a lot of light amid the darkness, and partly it's because, while the animation is better, it's still not so good that it's actively pleasurable to look at - though Discotek's inclusion of an option to watch in what I take to be the correct aspect ratio this time around is a huge boon.  Perhaps hypocritically, having grumbled that the film is too much about boxing for my tastes, one of the more frustrating issues is that the fight scenes aren't especially good; even the lengthy climatic bout doesn't get near to the heights of the first film's yet lengthier climatic bout.  But for all that, I don't regret my time with Tomorrow's Joe 2.  I have a feeling, too, that it's one that will stick with me, since the parts that work best get to some undeniably powerful places.  I'd only say that if you enjoyed Tomorrow's Joe, this is a very different experience: a tougher, harsher, more frustrating, and somewhat lesser one that nevertheless flirts with greatness on a reasonably regular basis.

Fair, Then Partly Piggy, 1988, dir: Toshio Hirata

Fair, Then Partly Piggy is an adaptation of the first two volumes of a series of beloved children's books written and illustrated by author Shiro Yadama*, and I think it's fair to say that everything about it that works and everything that doesn't revolves around these facts.  For, judging by the limited available evidence, which is to say a brief extract from the book provided on Discotek's otherwise spartan Blu-ray release, Toshio Hirata's directorial take is less an interpretation and more a slavish recreation.  And while the word "slavish" doesn't exactly have the best connotations, it's not as though it's automatically the wrong route by which to transfer a book into a movie, especially when said book is so abundantly, obviously charming as this one.

The story, as I'm sure I'm not the first to observe, is Death Note for preadolescents. Young Noriyasu happens upon his mother reading the journal he's been keeping religiously ever since he began it for a class project and, in a bid to mess with her head, decides to write the next day's events in advance and to make them as absurd as his eight year old's imagination will allow, which extends as far as a snake appearing in the family's bathroom.  When, the next day, there actually is a snake in the bathroom, he assumes it's just his parents pranking him in return, and even a further experiment that could easily have proved fatal for all involved doesn't convince him otherwise, leading inevitably to ever-more-absurd abuses of his reality-bending powers - though, this being a Japanese children's movie and not an American one, not much in the way of lesson-learning or character development.  Then, having run out of book at around the midway mark, Fair, Then Partly Piggy reboots itself as a tale of journalistic integrity, or the lack thereof, and finds a whole new bunch of weird places to go to.

There's problem number one: this is two films jammed together without any effort to hide the seams, which shows most noticeably in the fact that you'd kind of expect Noriyasu to be quicker on the uptake when his fake newspaper articles start coming true after the exact same thing just happened with a demonically possessed journal, or whatever was going on.  Indeed, generally, Fair, Then Partly Piggy relies heavily on Noriyasu being dumb as bricks even by the standards of his age demographic, which, combined with a grating laugh that gets trotted out awfully often, makes him a touch difficult to stay on side with.  (That he never tries to use his unearned deific powers for anything besides wacky, slightly cruel mischief and has no real personality beyond "rubbish at sports" doesn't help either.)

Problem number two is probably more personal and maybe - no, definitely - not a problem in a fair number of ways.  Hirata makes the choice to stay faithful to the books' illustrations, which are typically picture-bookish at the level of Noriyasu's reality and reduced to childish doodles for things like when Noriyasu's own illustrations come to life.  The reason I don't want to criticise too hard is that it's wonderful to see a kids' movie that does something, anything, interesting with its animation, and there's no question that it gives the film a unique flavour, with the closest comparison I can come up with being Takahata's My Neighbours the Yamadas.  Only, what's interesting for a few minutes is less so for an hour and a quarter, and it's a one-note approach for a film that would have benefited enormously from having more thought put into why we should be watching instead of reading.  It flattens the mundane and the bizarre to a single uniform level and so doesn't leave anywhere to go in terms of visuals: no matter how crazy things get, they're always presented in basically the same fashion.

If that sounds like nit-picking, particularly when aimed at something with no pretensions beyond being a wacky little movie for younger children that their parents can also find moderately amusing, then, yes, it absolutely is, and Fair, Then Partly Piggy nails the modest goals it sets itself with aplomb.  On a scene-by-scene basis, it's often pretty wonderful, and much of the humour is surprisingly surreal and deadpan rather than being loud and silly as you might expect; more than once I found myself thinking that if David Lynch had ever tried his hand at making an animated feature for the young'uns, it might have turned out rather like this.  The problem is merely that it's good enough that I wished it were better: a dash more imagination, more advantage taken of the change in mediums, and the slightest effort made in figuring out how to combine multiple books, and this could have been awfully special.

Prefectural Earth Defense Force, 1986, dir's: Tsukasa Abe, Keiji Hayakawa, Takaya Mizutani

Prefectural Earth Defense Force came out in the same year as the hugely influential Project A-ko and is up to some remarkably similar things, while being, for my money, better in nearly every way.  And I realise I'm almost certainly alone in thinking this, though I'd argue part of the reason for that is that nobody's seen Prefectural Earth Defense Force, and part of the reason for that is surely that, not for the first nor the last time, ADV did a bewilderingly bad job of selling it.  I mean, what's with those slogans on the cover?  I think the goal is to make it look like a Star Wars pastiche, but I couldn't guess why, and in the meantime we're left with not one but two pieces of text that have no relation to the title on offer or anything else.  And the back is worse, with some aggressively dreadful design choices, too-small text, and the only marginally less strange claim that "Before there was Excel Saga... There was Prefectural Earth Defense Force!"

I mean, chronologically that would be hard to argue, but presumably the implication is that Prefectural Earth Defense Force was in some way influential on or meaningfully similar to Excel Saga, and barring a few essentials - they're both science-fictional comedies that feature one or more female characters working in service of a male character bent on world domination - they're not much alike at all.  And okay, writing it out like that, I do see where they were going, but Prefectural Earth Defense Force offers a very different experience, and it was definitely A-ko I found myself thinking of frequently and Excel Saga not at all.  It's the difference, I think, between fond satire in the former case and satire that's a little vicious about and derisive of its targets in the latter: Prefectural Earth Defense Force, like A-ko, finds the clichés of eighties Japanese genre fiction hilariously silly, but it wants to revel in that silliness and ramp it up to the nth degree, not critique it in any meaningful fashion.

The central concept is more a jumping-off point, but since it's pretty neat, it's worth getting out there. Somewhere in the boondocks of Japan, the nefarious Telephone Pole Group have set their sights on world domination in an unusually pragmatic fashion: accepting that conquering Tokyo would probably go as badly for them as it has for all the other potential world dominators, they've settled on taking over one prefecture instead and working out from there.  This of course means there are no proper heroes around to stop them, so the job falls to three random teenagers with no powers or qualifications, which would be more of a big deal if - and here you'll see why a full plot synopsis would be a waste of everyone's time! - it weren't for the fact that Santin, a tourist from India, has recently been transformed into a missile-spewing cyborg and is hellbent on revenging himself upon those responsible, which he believes to be the villains of the Telephone Pole Group.

All of this, anyway, is mostly just a centre around which Prefectural Earth Defense Force, over the course of three episodes and some fifty minutes, rushes off down whatever screwy comic rabbit holes take its fancy.  And if I had to point to a reason this received a cool reception in the US and couldn't fall back on "ADV sucked at marketing comedy OVAs," I'd have to confess that much of the humour, from the central gag on upwards, requires a degree of knowledge of Japanese culture and so doesn't have the universality of something like Project A-ko. On the other hand, that humour is also much more dense, meaning that if you're on its wavelength, the laughs are crammed in awfully tight.  Plus, while there's never a moment where it could be accused of taking itself seriously, there's just enough of a grounding in reality that the characters register as characters rather than comic props, and - something I didn't remotely expect by the midway point - it even wraps up in kind of a proper conclusion.

Ultimately, I think what reminded me most of A-ko, though, was that elusive labour-of-love quality that comes along so rarely, and here's the point where, for me, Prefectural Earth Defense Force nudges into the lead.  You likely haven't heard of Studio Gallop, and I certainly hadn't, but in 1986 they had effectively no work to their names, and by heck does this feel like the product of fresh young animators desperate to show off what they can do.  Because those fifty minutes consist of almost nothing but showing off, starting with an eye-popping and wholly unnecessary red herring of an opening and carrying on from there.  It's marvellous stuff, but more than that, it's infectiously fun: you can almost feel the creative team encouraging each other to greater and greater excesses, and the visual over-the-topness is almost always in the service of pushing jokes to ever more ridiculous heights.  Prefectural Earth Defense Force is funny enough that it's hard to imagine a bad version of the material, but what Gallop delivered all those many years ago was closer to the best possible take, and it's a crying shame the results should have been so forgotten to anime history.

Final Yamato, 1983, dir's: Takeshi Shirato, Tomoharu Katsumata, Yoshinobu Nishizaki, Takeshi Shirato

Final Yamato is a masterpiece of animation, and it's a good thing too, because it's profoundly useless when it comes to practically everything else.  Narrative had never been a strong point of the film series - initially because it was obliged to compile an enormous amount of TV into something that could pass as a feature film and then later because that TV series hadn't really left anywhere to go besides "more of the same but bigger" - and yet Final Yamato manages, somehow, to have at once the least story and the longest running time.  Upon release, indeed, it was the longest animated film ever, and it still more or less is, depending on how much you're willing to count director's cuts and additional footage, since Final Yamato originally aired with a post-credits epilogue that added another ten minutes to its already far from breezy two and a half hours.  Yet if I were to tell you that the plot amounts to "The Yamato and its crew try to stop evil aliens from drowning the Earth using a passing water planet" I'd be exaggerating only slightly, and then by purposefully leaving out some of the dumber details.

Final Yamato has lots of dumb details, and some of them are pretty fundamental, such as bringing back a long-dead character with some absurdly hand-wavy logic in a scene that manages to strike the perfect worst balance between briskly jumping the shark and piling on enough of an explanation to actually make some sense, or telling us another character who hasn't appeared in the film at any point is dead only to have them pop up a couple of hours later to save the day.  And I could go on and on, and probably fill the rest of the review without much trouble, because there's practically nothing in the screenplay - muddled together by too many writers to list - that could definitely be said to work.  Even the character drama, which ought to be easy enough this many films in, is fluffed at every turn, despite setting itself such low goals as "character who messes up in the first act slowly regains his confidence" and "couple who we know will end up together do in fact end up together."  And given that the characters are dull and one-note at their best, this doesn't leave the cast much to work with, so it's hardly surprising that nobody makes much of an impression.

This, then, leaves a staggering amount of heavy lifting to be done by the animation, and to a somewhat lesser degree the designs, and to a slightly lesser degree still Hiroshi Miyagawa and Kentarō Haneda's score, and it's saying an awful lot that everything's up to the task.  As I said at the start, that's truest of the animation, which is routinely so wildly impressive that it almost doesn't matter what nonsense it's portraying, the more so since the one thing the script does manage not to fluff is chucking out plenty of action that's bound to look cool when presented in the best manner money could buy and skilled craftsmen could draw in the year 1983.  I wasn't exactly keeping count, but it's likely that more than half of Final Yamato consists of spectacle, and all of that spectacle is terrific, enough that, if you're willing, it's not terribly hard to ignore the whys and wherefores.

In all of this, I suspect Final Yamato is precisely what its makers intended and probably in large part what its rabid contemporary fanbase wanted, and as with many an enormous blockbuster, it's arguably better to view the result less as a film and more as some cultural artefact that defies the usual rules of criticism.  Final Yamato had to be epic and huge and crazily expensive, and it didn't really have to tell a good story or even to tell a bad story well, and while it would obviously be nice if it had done those things, there's perhaps no point in worrying too much over what might have been when the result is as thrillingly lavish and outrageously over-the-top as this.

-oOo-

So admittedly not the finest selection we've had, but it's always nice when everything's pretty good, and Prefectural Earth Defense Force is a modest treasure.  But let's move on from all that so that I can make some vague predictions about the future of this series!  I mean, very vague, but here goes: I almost certainly won't be going past post number 150, if only because it's deeply unlikely there'll be anything left to cover, and by the opposite measure, I would quite like to reach that next big landmark.  I suspect the wells will run dry long before that point - we'd be talking another hundred reviews, and I'm deeply unconvinced there are that many titles left that come anywhere near fitting the rules of what I cover - but what's life without stupid, meaningless targets that you'll almost certainly miss?  Bring it on, world!  Magic number 150 here we come!

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

* I think.  Getting accurate information out of Google on a series of Japanese picture books turns out to be surprisingly difficult!

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 124

One great thing about this blog having a readership of basically nobody is that if you are reading it, and there's something you'd like me to cover, and I can get my hands on it, the odds are it will end up here sooner or later - and so it is with Wild 7, another one of those titles that never made it beyond VHS and which was suggested in the comments a few months back.  Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have a classic of sorts (or maybe half a classic?) that got put off until I could rewatch it on Blu-ray, along with a couple of the usual random finds, which leaves us with Wild 7, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², K. O. Beast, and Catnapped...

Wild 7, 1994, dir: Kiyoshi Egami

The best summary I can come up with for Wild 7 is "Dirty Harry remade as a Saturday morning cartoon," which won't be much use to anyone who doesn't remember either Dirty Harry or Saturday morning cartoons, but it's hardly my fault I was born in a different century.  From the former we have the whole "when the criminals are so despicable and everything's awful and corrupt and beyond saving, wouldn't it be better if the cops just shot all the bad guys on sight" right-wing fantasy that holds up to no scrutiny whatsoever but admittedly makes for cool action scenes.  And from the latter we have an air of extreme goofiness that manifests most obviously in how our protagonists - they're a bunch of former crooks handed police badges and turned into effectively a law-enforcement biker gang - have motorcycles that can fly and fire missiles and generally look as if they've wandered in from M.A.S.K or the sillier episodes of G.I. Joe.

This is, of course, a stupid combination that has no right to work.  And by any reasonable rules of storytelling, Wild 7 is a fiery train wreck, unable to settle on a tone for more than two adjacent scenes and constantly undermining its feeble attempts to be political or satirical or whatever the heck it imagines it's up to.  This is most evident in the third-act climax, when the bulk of the team - who've been largely sidelined until now in favour of a focus on a single character, making even the title somewhat absurd - have to choose between rescuing one of their own and carrying out their assigned mission.  So far, so hackneyed, except we've been led to believe that the whole justification for this nonsense is that the Wild 7 can protect innocents where the regular, non-murdering police can't, and said mission is all about stopping a bunch of innocents being slaughtered, whereas it's been established that no one else is in harm's way in the other scenario.  Guess which they go with?  And if we were to take Wild 7 seriously, this would all be quite shocking and unpleasant and whatnot - but if we were to take Wild 7 seriously, we'd also have to turn a blind eye to flying motorbikes.

Technically the OVA has the feel of work by talented but inexperienced animators who are regularly running into their own limitations.  I have no idea whether that was the case or not - the inexperienced bit, I mean - but the ambition is unmistakeable: Wild 7 is constantly throwing up daring, elaborate shots without any sign of a guiding ethos beyond, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?"  And often it is cool, if you're down with the whole air of hyperviolent silliness, but sometimes it's quite shonky, and that manifests most with the character work, which is so all over the place that I'd have struggled to describe most of the cast right after the closing credits.  Still, I'd always rather have ambitious animation that routinely gets a bit screwy than bland animation that's reliably OK, and at least Kazushi Umezo's high-energy score is there to level out the uneven tone and remind us that all Wild 7 really wants is for us to have dumb fun.

Now, where most things that claim to offer dumb fun fall down is in failing to deliver the second part, something Wild 7 is careful not to do, with its puppyish determination to ensure boredom never sets in for the barest fraction of a second.  Thankfully, this also makes it easier to not take the violence and general nastiness seriously, compared with something as grimy as, say, Angel Cop, and also to feel OK about not taking it seriously, since Wild 7 is quite capable of undermining its own ridiculous central thesis: give the police heavy weapons, it merrily informs us, and they'd likely cause utter havoc while failing to protect much of anything or anyone.  As such, I have no qualms about recommending it and being faintly annoyed about its failure to ever get a DVD release: this very much feels like the sort of thing that ought to have more of a cult following.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², 1997, dir's: Hideaki Anno, Masayuki 

I can claim no lack of bias when it comes to Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show I'd count among the seminal works of the twentieth century and consider to be essentially perfect.  Even knowing its reputation, it hit me like a juggernaut and dug deep into my head in a way that may not have been altogether pleasant at the time but certainly stayed with me.  Is it actually perfect? Heck no!  But as with all great art, its imperfections are so inextricably a part of what makes it work that fixing them would jeopardise everything else.

That brings us to our actual topic, which isn't exactly Neon Genesis Evangelion the series and was the beginning of an attempt to grapple with the most troublesome aspect of the show, to whit the fact that most viewers had been left with barely a clue as to what had gone on and a significant percentage were deeply, even angrily frustrated by its ending.  For that was the point - if received wisdom is to be believed - at which the budget issues that had been a growing concern throughout the production became so unignorable that director Hideaki Anno's ambitious plans had to be scaled back and replaced with...  Well, look, I personally like that ending plenty, but it absolutely isn't what anyone would have expected from the culmination of what they'd been naively imagining was essentially a giant robot show, that's for sure.

How much of what did and didn't go into the final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion was down to budgetary constraints is apparently up for debate, and we can say the same for what happened the following year: was Anno really trying to set things right with the fans or just grateful for the opportunity to return to a property he'd poured his heart and soul into, but with a guaranteed audience and some serious cash at his disposal?  Whatever the precise reasons, a new feature film was conceived to replace the original ending, and by way of reminding everyone why they'd loved Evangelion (or most of it, anyway) as much as they had, it was ushered into cinemas with a retelling of the first 24 episodes, the chunk that remained canon, followed by the first half hour of the new ending, all under the title Death and Rebirth.  That version, however, would be superseded not once but twice, as Anno continued to tinker and as the notion of previewing a film that was separately available started to look increasingly silly, and thus, finally, we arrive at Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², that being the current widely available incarnation.

If that's a lot of setting up, it's because it's both difficult and pointless to talk about Death (True)² without that context.  It was, after all, created for a singular purpose, more so than even the usual compilation movie: it seems extremely unlikely that anyone intended it to supplant the series, and the aim was rather for a refresher with just enough new footage and extra information that hardcore fans would feel rewarded for laying down their yen.  Granted, that new footage is nice, as is the structuring device that's used to provide some sort of shape to a film edited by what feels more like dream logic than cause and effect, whereby we see core cast members gathering one by one to perform the classical piece that plays over the closing credits, Johann Pachelbel's exceedingly lovely Canon in D.  But even with all that, what's the most you can hope for from a seventy minute retelling of 24 episodes of TV?

The thing of it is, though, for all its supposedly modest ambitions, Death (True)² works.  It comes damnedly close to pulling off something it has no right to even be attempting, namely functioning as a self-contained movie, and all that really stymies that is how the ending was destined to take place, four months later, in an actual movie.  It even mostly looks the part, with obvious care taken to make sure the animation was polished enough to be acceptable on a big screen, and it has a head start given that Evangelion was nearly always a gorgeous, stunningly designed show, budgetary issues be damned.  It may be a mere retelling, but it's a fine retelling of one of the seminal stories of recent decades, using its nonlinearity and some exceedingly sharp editing to clarify relationships and plot points and treating the impossibility of cramming in everything as an opportunity rather than a constraint.  It's a sturdy enough recap that watching it together with The End of Evangelion would be a worthwhile experience even for someone unfamiliar with the series - particularly if they had the new Rebuild of Evangelion films under their belt - and for existing fans, it's a satisfying reminder of what makes Evangelion so profoundly wonderful that oughtn't to be skipped just because they've been there before.

K. O. Beast, 1992 - 1993, dir: Hiroshi Negishi

I don't know that greatness was ever on the cards for K. O. Beast: it tries to do too much and none of it's terribly original or necessarily all that compatible.  Its sci-fi tale of a divided Earth being warred over by hostile humans and shape-shifting beast people is a variation on themes that were all over anime at this point, the more so once you roll in giant robots and a race to possess ancient technologies from a bygone era that are the key to things that will be awfully vague for most of the running time, though thank goodness K. O. Beast has the decency not to throw out mysteries it isn't willing to eventually answer.  Still, it's much of a much, and while a heavy emphasis on goofy comedy isn't the usual approach, that goofy comedy is, in itself, nothing fresh; plus, in the early going, it's not so much incorporated into the sci-fi plot and mecha action as plonked awkwardly alongside it.

But what pushes K. O. Beast up to the level of at least comfortably good is that it was clearly made with a ton of enthusiasm.  In ways big and small, it feels cared about, and if that can't quite edge it past those intrinsic flaws, it certainly makes the virtues a lot more noticeable.  That's truest of the animation and design work: the former shows its budget but constantly pushes against it, especially when it comes to delivering action scenes that go well past what was strictly necessary for so light-hearted a title, while the latter provides a depth of setting and intricacy of world-building that isn't remotely there in the script.  The mecha designs and locations are particularly special, even if that still doesn't add up to much originality - though only now do I realise that the title it most reminded me of, Magic Knight Rayearth, came out a couple of years afterwards, so perhaps I'm not being altogether fair.  At any rate, it's not the bad kind of familiarity, more the "this cool design looks a bit like that cool design" sort that's practically a bonus when it comes to anime.

None of this extends to the characters, who really are types more than individuals and fairly one-note types at that: I genuinely couldn't tell you what bird person Bud's personality is beyond "American, likes girls," and the American part makes no sense at all, while another of the core cast members, Tuttle, gets so little definition that I kept forgetting he was there.  Still, once again, appealing designs and obvious enthusiasm make a difference, and I was surprised when I returned to the second half of the story - this was actually two OVAs, one of three episodes and another of four - that I was glad to be reunited with the gang.  Actually, the back end is better in every way, using its extra breathing space to let the comedy play more and bleed into the action and sci-fi elements, so that the show largely stops feeling as though it's jolting awkwardly from one to another.  And if the plot never fully gets around to being innovative, it does play out satisfyingly, so that everything ends on a positive note.

And I appreciate that "better than the sum of its parts" isn't the most glowing praise, but here it does mean quite a bit, the more so when none of those parts are bad unless some mild derivativeness makes you especially angry.  Really, the only thing that actively counts against K. O. Beast for the person who quite likes the sound of a goofy sci-fi show with unexpectedly good production values and not quite enough to distinguish it is The Right Stuf International's mercenary decision to spread it across three DVDs, making it that bit harder and more expensive to track down than it ought to be.  The good news is that you can still find copies kicking about: I got the lot new from Robert's Anime Corner, who I'm happy to use this opportunity to plug, since finding pristine copies of a long-out-of-print title and getting them delivered just in time for my birthday was one of the year's nicer surprises.

Catnapped!, 1995, dir: Takashi Nakamura

I'd never suggest that Studio Ghibli's outsized influence on the medium of Japanese animated family films is a bad thing, but I do strongly suspect it's the case that it's led to the favouring of certain types of stories and subgenres over others.  And one such casualty has been - well, I don't even quite know how to define it, really, but it seems to me that there's a proud history in Japan of animated kids' movies that are first and foremost about chucking as much barely connected stuff at the screen as they possibly can, with preferably those wild flights of fancy extending to the level of the animation itself, so that worries like realism and consistency are infinitely less important than doing neat stuff that simply wouldn't be possible in live action.

I could offer up specific examples, but I think that anyone who's seen more than a couple of children's anime films from prior to the nineties will have an idea of what I'm on about; indeed, go back far enough and it was probably more the rule than the exception.  But even by 1995, they were a dying breed, and I've struggled to think of any examples at all beyond that year: ironically, the only one I can come up with is Ghibli's own delightful and underrated The Cat Returns from 2002, which might almost be seen as a homage to our present subject and even shares the precise same running time of 75 minutes.

That's an important detail when it comes to Catnapped! - yes, we got there eventually! - because any more of what it has to offer would run the risk of leaving the average viewer with their brains dribbling out of their ears.  The Cat Returns is random and frenetic, and so are classic works in this same mode such as Animal Treasure Island, but they have nothing whatsoever on Catnapped!, which spends all of about five minutes pretending to be relatively normal before it leaps onto the highest diving board and hurls itself into a deep, deep swimming pool full of crazy.

As such, any attempt to sum up the plot beyond "two kids get whisked into a world of humanoid cats" would start to sound like nonsense.  Catnapped! actually has a bunch of plot - really, quite a staggering amount for that slim running time, including at least a couple of lengthy flashbacks to fill us in on major details and to flesh out important characters - but it's never really about that plot, which is perhaps why it defies summary so thoroughly.  The story is mostly just a medium for whatever ideas and imagery the filmmakers felt the need to throw in at any given moment, and most of it seems to have been geared toward the end goal of delivering the most delirious climax they could concoct.  And if you're at all like me, this is kind of a lot at first, and even slightly off-putting, until the moment a few minutes in when you realise you really are best off just enjoying the ride.

What's perhaps strangest about a film in which more or less everything is strange is that, somehow, it does carve out for itself quite a satisfying narrative, or at least an emotional core and enough character development that it's not just a nonstop stream of outlandish imagery.  Still, there's rarely an instance when that's not what Catnapped! is primarily up to, and how much you'll get on with it definitely depends on how appealing that sounds.  This is all the truer because the character designs seem to be purposefully skewed toward the odd and faintly discomforting, and the animation, while consistently good, is rarely quite up to the level of what it's striving to convey, so that the joy comes more from what's being shown than how.  Catnapped! is absolutely the sort of film you have to meet halfway and on its own terms, even the sort that feels like its creators didn't care all that much whether everyone liked it so long as a handful of people were on its peculiar wavelength, but for that select audience, it's sure to be quite the delight.

-oOo-

It's a big ask this late in the game that everything I cover in a post should turn out to be any good, so I for one am cherishing this batch and four titles I genuinely enjoyed, with both Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)² and Catnapped brushing up against greatness and Wild 7 and K. O. Beast both being enjoyable in spite of some hard-to-miss flaws.  And only now does it occur to me that I should have saved this one for next time, what with post number 125 being something of an anniversary and all. Oh well!  I'm sure I'll come up with something...

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 123

Wait, there's more Gundam?  I mean, I know there's more Gundam, if there's one thing you can say with certainly about possibly the most expansive science-fiction franchise in existence, it's that there'll always be more, but until not so long ago I was labouring under the misapprehension that I'd covered all of what fell under this series' purview, that being the films and OVAs released prior to 2000.

Admittedly, I wasn't that far wrong, except for Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, which I'd had my eye on for a while.  But then along came Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, or more specifically the film adaptations that were released in 2005 and 2006.  Now, obviously both of those years are a good bit later than 2000, but the original Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam TV series they were drawing upon wasn't, and that leaves us with a definite grey area - one I've gone and ignored by reviewing them anyway.  Which means that up this time we have Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Love is the Pulse of the Stars, and Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory...

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, 2005, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino

I can barely imagine the thinking that went into Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation.  Oh, not the notion of producing a trilogy of compilation movies of what, by the start of the twenty-first century, was already established as being among the highlights of the vast edifice that is Gundam; given that we've already covered the compilation movies of the original series and rated them pretty highly, that bit's perfectly understandable.  And reanimating them, well, that's not quite so easy to get your head around, since you'd suppose part of the point would be that you didn't have to make three new movies from scratch, but Zeta Gundam was heading rapidly toward the big 2-0, and as good as it may have looked by eighties TV standards, there was a gulf between that and what you could chuck into a cinema.  No, the unfathomable part is how the solution settled on was to reanimate only some of the films, with percentages ranging from a third to four fifths.

Compilation movies have become standard practice in the years since: it's almost rarer for a popular anime show not to get cut down, retouched, and thrust into theatres.  But what Tomino and co attempted was very much not retouching or anything close.  A heck of a lot had changed since Zeta Gundam first aired and apparently it never occurred to anyone to disguise the fact, because it would be hard indeed to mistake the old footage for the new.  The TV stuff looks decidedly ropey, the more so for being blown up to fit a cinematic aspect ratio, and the 2000s stuff is nicer but also very of its time, meaning plenty of shots with that awkward glossiness of animation made by people still fighting the contributions of computers as much as they were aided by them.  But what really sucks is the transitions between the two, or rather, the lack thereof: while things settle down somewhat toward the end, where the bulk of the new material is, lengthy stretches chop from one to the other with no rhyme or reason or logic as to why, say, two people having a fairly uneventful conversation needed reanimating at all.

On that last count, the answer is surely that A New Translation, as its name tells us up front, isn't quite the Zeta Gundam of old.  Having never encountered the show before, I'm not well placed to comment, but the internet tells me that there were changes made both big and small, and that's presumably why we get shiny 2000s animation for scenes that don't obviously warrant it.  Then again, keeping track of what matters on a minute-by-minute basis is such a task that it's possible I was just underestimating the significance of certain conversations: this is, after all, a conflation of one third of 50 episodes of TV, and it's not even an especially long film.

To say the results are confusing is an understatement: Heirs to the Stars does most of its storytelling at the most breakneck pace.  Nobody relays details they wouldn't have good reason to, which often means vital information arrives long after you'd expect, and rare are the moments when you entirely feel you grasp anyone's motivations, the more so since we have good reason to suspect numerous cast members.  There is a pattern that emerges whereby every few minutes events slow down enough for your brain to catch up on the essentials, and that combines with a sort of osmosis that lets the bigger picture gradually soak in, as the repetition of names and faces and concepts counteracts the general chaos.  It's mostly frustrating but sometimes exciting, since the effect - and from my experience of Tomino's work, I doubt this was accidental - is less like watching an anime show about a space war and more like learning the essentials of said space war by skipping news channels.

To some extent, that's all well and good for the tale being told.  However, while we can make excuses for Heirs to the Stars and even propose that its flaws are more like features, that doesn't do a lot to improve the experience of actually watching the thing.  It's draining and bewildering, and who wants to be drained and bewildered by their entertainment, especially when there isn't enough to compensate?  Much of the action borders on incoherence, and the better sequences are backloaded, meaning a lot of damage has been done by the time they arrive.  The politicking is more interesting in theory, except that, while it's fairly simple once you get your head around it, it's delivered in the most headache-inducing manner possible.  As with all of Heirs to the Stars, the good stuff is definitely good and the spine is pretty great, but that delivery turns it into work, and I'd be hard pressed to suggest it's worth the bother.

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers, 2005, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino

What struck me most about Lovers is how consistently it manages to fix some aspects of Heirs to the Stars while breaking others in a fashion that does barely a thing to nudge the overall quality in one direction or another.  So, for example, there's considerably more new animation this time around, and the integration is generally better, and for that matter even the original TV footage seems to have improved somewhat or perhaps was chosen with more care.  But then the new footage is generally less impressive, to the point where I occasionally found myself struggling to tell which was which.  There's also some prominent use of CG, something that was hardly guaranteed to go well back in 2005 and doesn't particularly here, aggravating the general tendency of the "modern day" footage to be too glassily smooth and polished.  On balance, the shift towards visual consistency probably has to be regarded as an improvement, and if nothing else it means we get some action sequences that are legible and thus reasonably exciting, but it's less than I was hoping for when I noted the ratios of old to new footage.

On the plot front, meanwhile, some effort has gone into addressing the aimlessness that afflicted Heirs to the Stars.  The answer Lovers brings - look, it's right there in the title! - is to focus on the relationship side of things, which Heirs to the Stars largely neglected.  Sometimes this pays off, in that there are lengthy sequences where Lovers behaves like a proper film, focusing on the interpersonal conflicts of a manageable bunch of characters in a handful of locations rather than batting madly around the solar system while flinging names and faces at us seemingly at random.  The trouble is, judging by what I've seen of his work and certainly by what's on offer here, Tomino is awful at writing relationships, and the central one, between reliably dull protagonist Camille and enemy pilot Four Murasame, is no hook to hang a movie on.  Possibly it would have worked better with the breathing room of multiple episodes, but it's hard to wish for more scenes of incoherent teenage romance.  Four reminded me strongly of Quess from Char's Counterattack, one of my least favourite characters anywhere in anime, and if she's not quite that bad, her actions are just as unmotivated by anything that could be considered reasonable or believable human behaviour.

Then again, perhaps Camille secretly found her as irritating as I did, since within minutes of their earth-shaking romance reaching its inevitably tragic ending, he's making out with someone else - again, presumably a consequence of cramming hours of footage into ninety-some minutes, but it doesn't make things less absurd in the moment.  And what's worse, the price we pay for this slightly more lucid change in direction on one front is that the wider conflict hardly makes a shred of sense: I could offer no better summary of the plot than "The good people try and stop the bad people from doing bad things while running away a lot."  A degree of that probably comes down to my fuzzy memories of part one, but contemporary audiences had waited five months between entries and it was twenty years since the TV show had aired, so I reckon I can be forgiven for a gap of a couple of weeks, and I don't feel bad about suggesting that the fault lies in some thoroughly inarticulate storytelling.*

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, Love is the Pulse of the Stars, 2006, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino

I'd naively hoped that this last entry might be the point at which the series really began to pick up, perhaps became the original Gundam movie trilogy managed to end on a high note that made it feel retrospectively more like a trio of proper movies than a massive quantity of TV footage chopped, often clunkily, together.  No such luck: despite containing the largest percentage of shiny new twenty-first-century footage, Love is the Pulse of the Stars is comfortably the worst of three films that only ever succeeded in clawing their way up to fairly good.

Love is the Pulse of the Stars doesn't manage that much.  Oh, maybe there's the odd scene, but if there was, I refuse to be blamed for missing it, since the hundred-minute run time is an almighty slog: with two movies of back story, countless characters major and minor, and not one iota of an attempt made to re-establish anyone or anything, keeping the barest grasp of what was going on was such an ordeal that I had no energy left for discerning okay-ness from mediocrity.

By the end, it's tough to imagine that there could ever have been a worthwhile three movie adaptation of  Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, at least with this particular approach.  There are elements to this one I personally found wholly off-putting, like a drift into vague spiritualism in a series that's always struck me as avoiding that sort of thing hard, and I could definitely have done without the bizarre "The Zeta Gundam is powered by love or maybe ghosts or some damn thing" twist we get in the back half.  But there is certainly good stuff in here; the problem is that it's so rarely foregrounded.  With the running time hobbled by the determination to re-animate so much of the footage, there isn't room to balance the wider conflict, which is on a particularly enormous scale this time around, and once again that means a focus on interpersonal dramas that simply aren't that interesting.  It really does reach ludicrous heights here, as giant robot fight after giant robot fight is reduced to clashes of personality between people who were once friends, lovers, enemies, or a combination of the three, and always seem to somehow know who they're up against.  Meanwhile, the whole interplanetary war that you might naively imagine would be the point is sidelined so hard that I truly don't think it's followable without having seen the series.

So are there any compensations?  Not really, no.  For all that there's theoretically 80% new footage here (which, yes, makes this vastly more a film from 2006 than a TV series from the eighties, but it's too late to worry about that!) the animation is, on a whole, that bit weaker.  This possibly has something to do with just how much Love is the Pulse of the Stars is mobile suit battles, something Tomino is bafflingly bad at directing given how much experience he'd clocked up by this point.  He routinely acts as though space is a flat plane, the older footage continues to suffer from being awkwardly zoomed in to suit the cinematic aspect ratio, and the balance of CG and traditional animation is never quite right, as it rarely would be for another half decade or so.  So for all that the visuals are the strongest aspect - after, perhaps, a noticeably more novel and interesting score - they're not the sort of strength that could hope to make up for some disastrous narrative weaknesses.  I'm sort of glad I sat through Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation to fill in a gap or two in my Gundam knowledge, but I can't think of any other reason to devote five hours of your life to these movies.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, 1991 - 1992, dir: Mitsuko Kase, Takashi Imanishi

Throughout most of my watching of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, I was confident I'd be starting this review by declaring that I'd gone from some of the weakest Gundam entries I've encountered to one of the finest, if not the very best.  And now, coming out of its thirteenth and final episode, I still think that's the case, I'm just disappointed that I'm having to hedge that statement a little.  So let's be clear up front: Stardust Memory is superb, both top-tier Gundam and top-tier science fiction in general, not to mention an extremely high water mark for animation and one of the better OVA series ever produced.  It's excellent stuff and I recommend it, I'm merely sad to not be recommending it unreservedly is all.

But that start - oh my!  The first episode, in which the first of two experimental Gundam units is stolen from a base on Earth and rash greenhorn test pilot Kou Uraki borrows the other in an attempt to retrieve it, is as near to flawless as you could dare to hope.  And what's more astonishing is that the level of quality barely slips for its immediate successors, building out the cast and context with slick economy while never losing track of the core conflict and mixing compelling character drama with absolutely thrilling action.  Really, I'd struggle to point to anywhere in the first two thirds where a foot is inarguably put wrong; my heart sank slightly when the conflict left Earth for outer space, since, for me, Gundam is always at its best when it's not just mobile suits whizzing around against a black backdrop, but the actual dip in quality is negligible, in large part because the storytelling is so good that the shift feels both natural and necessary.

Stardust Memory will eventually take that dip, and I could point to the exact moment at which it happens, but I won't because it would be both an enormous spoiler and somewhat unfair: the scene in question is superb in its own right and the partial reboot of the narrative that follows is, again, both earned and dramatically satisfying.  The problem is merely that it pushes Stardust Memory from a track that felt genuinely fresh onto one that's more familiar Gundam fare. Familiar Gundam fare delivered superlatively, no doubt about it, and yet there's an awful lot of Gundam in existence, and there are beats that had been hit many a time by 1991 and would go on to be hit many times more, and so the early freshness is all the more exhilarating, just as its lack is that bit more frustrating - though even then, Stardust Memory is canny enough to use the experienced viewer's assumptions against them to pull off some real shocks.

It helps, obviously, that Stardust Memory both looks and sounds extraordinarily good.  Indeed, if Gundam's ever reliably looked better than this, it's outside of my experience.  Obviously, that means that the giant-robots-fighting stuff is magnificently animated, but so is everything else, from the most mundane conversations through to the most trivial of character details.  Neither Kase nor Imanishi ever get particularly show-offy in their direction, but it's purely because they don't need to when every shot feels like showing off.  Chuck in some left-field soundtrack choices that feel like they ought not to work at all and end up as a triumph of constructing a unique mood and you have the sort of show that you genuinely could enjoy without following the plot purely for its overwhelming quality.

So, yes, it's great, and I'd feel terrible if I left anyone thinking overwise.  It's only that a Stardust Memory that had stuck to its early guns and been largely insulated from the wider Gundam-verse in the manner of other highlights like War in the Pocket and The 08th MS Team would have been both a new favourite and an easy recommendation to more or less everyone, whereas the one we have, which starts out as that and ends up getting awfully busy with filling plot gaps from other shows, isn't quite there.  If you're a Gundam fan, then obviously this is indispensable, and likewise if you're a Gundam casual like me, and if you don't even know what a Gundam is but love sci-fi and outstanding animation, then this should be high on the list of franchise entries you really need to sit down with regardless one of these days.

-oOo-

It gives me no pleasure to be mean about Gundam, the rare series that has absolutely earned its out-sized cultural impact by being far more often excellent than not.  But then, it gave me no pleasure to watch Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation, so what can you do, eh?  Still, I'm very glad we got to say our last goodbye** to the Gundam-verse with an entry that shows off so much of what makes it so special.

Next up: hopefully some stuff that's actually definitely from the nineties!

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

* If more evidence were needed, I'd point to the crucial scene that relies on two children hidden in a spacesuit failing to hear or even notice a heated conversation taking place roughly a metre from their heads.

** OK, so there might be a Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 compilation movie to get to at some point...

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 122

 Normally, I'd be feeling bad about rambling on about another thoroughly obscure bunch of titles, but a) it's not as if there isn't worse to come if I don't give up on this madness soon and b) this is the rare post that throws up something I'd never heard of and ended up slightly loving and c) the one title here that's remotely well known is a return to a franchise we'd have been better off forgetting all about.  Yes, it's  the end of Urotsukidôji - at least for our purposes - and of a journey that began with Legend of the Overfiend practically at the beginning of this series.  Can the finale redeem everything that's come before it?  Well, let's just say I'm not sure it's the worst of the batch from amongst Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, Magical Twilight, Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road...

Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, 1990, dir: Satoshi Dezaki

I remember musing last time as to why no "proper" distributor* ever picked up the two Riki-Oh OVAs that were released in 1989 and 1990 respectively.  Well, here, no doubt, we have part of our answer: Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction is abysmal.  And normally I hate to pre-empt a conclusion this far into a review, but there's no use dancing around the facts on this occasion, since I'm not going to have anything nice to say.  No, wait, the closing song is OK.  But that really is it.

It shouldn't need pointing out that Riki-Oh 2 is the sequel to Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, yet it's easy to imagine the viewer who could get all the way through the latter without realising it had anything to do with the former.  That sort of thing isn't altogether uncommon in the world of manga adaptations, where it makes sense to focus on discreet arcs that are a fit for your running time whether or not they necessarily link together, yet it feels as though there ought to be some connective tissue - heck, the protagonist being recognisably the same in all but a handful of shots would be a start.  And this is especially weird given that both share director Dezaki, a creator of modest but definite talents who apparently forgot everything he knew in the span of a year.  The Wall of Hell was no masterpiece, but it had style, and that style carried it a long way, injecting energy and tension into some basically schlocky material.

Here he does the opposite, and while I don't think we should be throwing too much shade in Dezaki's direction, it's certainly the case that more could have been done with this setup.  It's overly busy and definitely too reliant on coincidence and storytelling shortcuts, but it's not hard to see from what we get here how the material might have played out better, as it no doubt did in the manga.  Following his escape from the hellish prison of the first OVA (I presume), our hero Riki is intent on tracking down his long-lost brother (I think, maybe) who he abandoned when they were children.  This quest takes him to the southernmost cape of Japan (I'm completely guessing) where, in a distressing bit of fiction foreshadowing reality, a malfunctioning nuclear plant has left a chunk of the country supposedly uninhabitable - though in the world of Riki-Oh, that just means it's been taken over by evil sorts as a base for their vague but no doubt nefarious plans.

Let's cover one example of how spectacularly shabby Child of Destruction's narrative delivery is and move on.  It's self-evident that Riki's abandonment of his brother is the beating heart of this material, yet here's how that vital moment plays out on screen: the two are playing hide and seek and it's Riki's turn to hide; as he's running off, a limousine pulls up and the old man inside says, "Wouldn't you like to come and live with me, though?" which Riki agrees to without a second thought; as the car drives off, he sees his brother sitting waiting in the snow and looks mildly troubled; and that's our lot.  So far as it's possible to judge by what we're shown, Riki left his little brother to die because he kind of forgot about him, and wouldn't it be rude to ask the kindly stranger who's just effectively kidnapped you if there might not be room in his mansion for another random kid?

With no one willing to find space in a 45-minute OVA to explain the lynchpin of the whole plot, this never had much hope of succeeding on a story level.  However, I've had kind words to say about many a narratively disastrous piece of anime before now, and so we return to why I don't know that this shambles was altogether Dezaki's fault, for all that he did nothing to right it: Child of Destruction evidently had no budget, and its animation is horrible, and that horrible animation kills every scene stone dead.  There's stuff that could be fun - the action and gore were clearly intended to be - but apparently there wasn't even cash to splash on what ought to have been highlights, since they're as visually malnourished as the rest, constantly relying on the most obvious shortcuts.  And that pushes Child of Destruction down from being merely bad to the realms of face-slappingly bad, because what sort of early nineties OVA can't find a few yen to make its outrageous gore and over-the-top fights look cool?  Fail that and you've failed everything, which, as I've hopefully established, is precisely what Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction does.

Magical Twilight, 1994, dir: Yoshiaki Kobayashi

In spite of appearances, the reason I swore blind I wouldn't review hentai here and then went on to review quite a lot of hentai is not, in fact, that I secretly just wanted to watch a load of hentai and talk about it in public.  No, it's more that, compared with most of what we might categorise as pornography, the boundary between hentai and regular anime is an awfully vague and blurry one, and there's sometimes no sure way to separate one from the other.  But on this occasion I'm pushing that argument about as far as it will go, because, yes, Magical Twilight is most definitely hentai, and yes, I knew that going in, and the only real excuse I have is that numerous reviews suggested it was good enough that, if you squinted a bit, you could watch it as plain old anime.

That's sort of true but mostly not: there's a ton of explicit sex in Magical Twilight and, compared with some of the titles we've covered here, it's hard to imagine how you could snip it out and cobble anything remotely coherent from the remainder.  Though for the first episode, anyway, this seems like it might not altogether be the case: the basic setup, with white witch Chippie and her promiscuous frenemy Irene sent down to the human world to accomplish the practical part of their witching exams by ingratiating themselves with a randomly chosen human, could easily be the setup for your standard comic nineties OVA were events played out a little differently.  This is less true of the two-part follow up, which relies heavily on Chippie's now-love-interest Tsukasa getting jiggy with every remotely appropriate female he lays eyes on, yet its heart remains in the world of romantic comedy and so does the bulk of the material.

Marking on the exceedingly slidey scale of vintage hentai, the sexy stuff is relatively innocuous, which means there's a bad witch who gets sexually assaulted into giving up on her quest to kill Tsukasa and a teenaged girl who wants to sleep with him because she watched her mum sleeping with him and got awfully horny as a result, and actually, now that I think about it, probably more of the sex is non-consensual than not, though that generally means Irene using her magic to have her way with Tsukasa, and there's no indication that he's particularly traumatised by the experience.  Again judging entirely by the standards of nineties hentai, I guess that leaves us somewhere around "only a bit gross"?  At any rate, the animation is respectable enough that these look like real people conducting recognisable acts that horny naked people might get up to, which is by no means a given, so I'm willing to suppose that as hentai it's fairly successful, if perhaps a bit on the unimaginative side.

Which leaves us with everything else, and as often seems to be the case, the everything else fares a good deal better.  Magical Twilight is fairly half-hearted as pornography, whereas as a comedic fantasy it's entirely solid and occasionally much better than that.  The animation is respectable, the character designs are appealing, and there are a handful of properly good gags, most memorably a magically assisted game of ping-pong that gets wildly out of hand.  Sad to say, though, it's still too committed to being hentai to make the most of its fun setup and characters and as hentai it devotes a lot of time to scenes that are staged largely identically, and so, at the end of ninety minutes, it finds itself sat uncomfortably between two rather nondescript stools.  If a fantasy comedy with lots of generic but competently handled sex scenes is the one thing in the world you're craving, it's hard to see how this would majorly disappoint, but for the rest of us, there isn't enough here that's at all special.

Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, 1999, dir: Shin'ichi Watanabe

One of the nice things about this whole reviewing-abolutely-all-of-the-'90s-anime deal is that I've been obliged to give attention to a lot of titles that, for one reason or another, I'd otherwise have skipped.  And OK, that hasn't always been a positive since some of that stuff was eminently skippable, but it's nice to sometimes have your preconceptions proved wrong and be entertained by something you wouldn't normally have given the time of day.  Such is the case with Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and a cover that does practically nothing to sell what lies within to the viewer seeking anything besides romance between a couple of unusually pretty (well, unusually by non-anime standards) guys.

Now, it's not that Lyrics of Love - a subtitle nearly as off-putting as the cover art! - doesn't offer that.  Our hero Shuichi Shindo, lead singer of the band Bad Luck, is certainly head over heels for author Yuki, and though it's not altogether evident for much of the running time, there are clues enough that Yuki feels the same way, albeit in a more stand-offish and cynical fashion.  For Shuichi's love is very much of the puppyish, unfiltered kind, and so it is that, as we join the story, a period of coolness on Yuki's part has sent him into such a spiral of misery that he's incapable of writing lyrics for the band's upcoming new album.  While that mightn't normally be an issue, since everyone else would be happy to bring in a songwriter from outside, Shuichi is just as outspoken when it comes to his musical career, and he's already bragged to the media that nobody but him can do Bad Luck's music justice.

So we have hot guys being in love, not to mention a fair bit of lust - which is quite refreshing given how much anime of the period tends to veer towards prudishness when it's not being out-and-out hentai - and we have music as a central story element, and all of that you could certainly work out from the DVD art and accompanying blurb.  But that Lyrics of Love happens to also, maybe even primarily, be a comedy?  That you'd never guess, which sucks when what we have here is among the funnier comedies to come out of anime in the nineties.  Indeed, it's all the funnier for being ostensibly not much of a comedy at all, since much of the best humour rises out of situations that aren't, on the face of it, especially humorous.  The benefit is that it gets to be wildly goofy at points without ever just being goofy; somehow, the push and pull of extreme silliness and high emotions works in harmony rather than opposition.  Were this not a comedy, Shuichi would be a bit obnoxious and Yuki even more so, but seeing a lighter side to them actually makes their tumultuous romance more engaging and sympathetic, such that when, towards the end of the second of its two episodes, Lyrics of Love is obliged to take its plot seriously enough to bring things to a conclusion, it's drummed up ample good will for a theoretically contrived conclusion to be warm and satisfying.

Had this arrived a few years earlier, then, we might be looking at something of a minor classic - but as I'll never tire of pointing out, 1999 was a bad year indeed for anime as an art form and long after the point when OVA meant the sort of budget that got you near the realms of feature-film animation.  Frankly, Lyrics of Love barely holds up compared with the TV of the time, and that's quite the damning criticism.  I get that not all anime fans are obsessed with the niceties of animation, I do, but there's no avoiding how it hurts the material here, with the musical numbers suffering the most: judging by what we see, there are Punch and Judy shows with more stage presence than Bad Luck.  Thankfully, their songs hold up better, enough to be toe-tapping even if not quite enough to convince you they'd be much of a big deal in real life.  Still, that leaves us with a musical romantic comedy where all three core elements are good to great and only one significant weakness, which is mostly more of an annoyance, so I think we can comfortably call this a recommendation.

Urotsukidôji IV: Infernal Road, 1993 - 1995, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Shigenori Kageyama

I've frequently been disgusted by the Urotsukidôji franchise, and sometimes angered by it, and often bored, and just occasionally amused, but until now, I can't say I ever felt sorry for it.  Yet that was my main reaction to Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road (or Inferno Road, as it appears to be known to everyone but UK distributor Kiseki.)  I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I dislike this series, and yet I don't know that even I would have wished upon it such a paltry nothing of a finale.  For all that this has been mostly nasty, silly, juvenile stuff, in its best moments, as far as the first two entries go at any rate, there was a certain apocalyptic grandeur to be found, not to mention some really determined cynicism and wallowing in the deepest depths of human ugliness and suffering, and the one thing you'd have a right to hope for from a franchise that sets itself those sorts of goals and intermittently hits them is that it go out with a bang and not the most strangled of whimpers.

But that's not what fans were given in the mid-nineties, and it's certainly not what eventually arrived on the shores of the UK, since the first two episodes of the three-episode OVA were banned outright and appeared merely as scripts on Kiseki's otherwise bafflingly thorough DVD edition.**  That leaves us with some 40 minutes or so of actual footage including credits, presumably cut down from the more standard 45-minute run time: a whopping 40 minutes to send off multiple hours of narrative spread over three not-entirely-reconcilable timelines, and boy is Infernal Road not remotely up to that task.  Nor is the problem the missing episodes, which appear to have been a self-contained tale that didn't move the main story forward one iota, which is in itself a weird move and probably a clear pointer to what went wrong here: everything was in such a mess by this point that it's almost impossible to imagine what a satisfying conclusion would look like, all the more so since we've already had a couple of conclusions that were about as satisfying as it was reasonable to hope for from a property where apocalypses are practically an everyday occurrence.

I admit that I couldn't remember much of the events of previous entry The Return of the Overfiend, since it was bad and I haven't wasted any thought on it since I watched it, so I guess it's my fault that I couldn't recall who most of the characters were that we meet racing in a tank through the ruined remnants of Japan on a mission to defeat the probably-bad messiah the Chōjin with the aid of the possibly-good messiah the Kyō-Ō.  Nevertheless, Infernal Road couldn't possibly do less to reintroduce them or to re-establish their goals or to ease us back into the wider context or to explain who their antagonists are or what their beef is.  Indeed, Infernal Road has no time at all for the viewer who isn't 100% steeped in Urotsukidôji lore, which is ironic given that they, presumably, would be the selfsame viewer who'd be most frustrated by its manifest failings both as a final send-off and a story in its own right.  For that mission to get the Kyō-Ō to the Chōjin and the various attempts to impede it is really all there is here, meaning a fair amount of violent action and the odd dash of demon rape - but much less of both that in any previous entry, even accounting for the reduction in length - and then an ending that I won't spoil except by saying that I couldn't even if I tried.

Nothing could have saved this material, and given the track record it had to work with and the fact that even the best Urotsukidôji entries were deeply flawed, and taking into account that the taste for this sort of stuff was already dwindling fast by 1993, saving was likely never on the cards; but the one thing that frequently pushed past instalments up to the level of intermittently entertaining is the odd bit of quality animation, so it's a further blow to Infernal Road that it contains no quality animation whatsoever and not much that would pass as basically competent.  It's ugly, small scale, and achingly cheap, with a palpable sense of creators who just wanted to get something out the door so they could move onto doing anything else with their lives.  So I suppose the only real plus is that, even for the most devoted fan, there's no reason to track this down: on its own merits it's effectively worthless, and as a conclusion to Urotsukidôji's grand, gross, baffling saga, it's truly bad enough that anything you care to make up will likely be better.  No, seriously, try it: in my version, the Kyō-Ō and Chōjin hugged it out and ended up living together in post-apocalyptic Tennessee raising demon llamas, and that's still an improvement.

-oOo-

So probably not a great post for anyone else, but a definite win for me in that Gravitation: Lyrics of Love was a nice and out-of-the-blue surprise and I'm at last completely done with Urotsukidôji, although knowing me I'll probably feel the need to pick it up on Blu-ray at some point in the future to make absolutely sure it's as unpleasant and basically shabby as I remember it being, the way I did with Violence Jack (which was and wasn't but mostly was.)

Next up: probably the Gundam special in which I bend the definition of nineties anime far past its breaking point...

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

* Both were put out by a company that I think is called AVP, unless that's just a random bit of text on the box.  They did a relatively acceptable job with Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, for all that nothing about it looked what you'd call professional.  Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, however, which needed all the help it could get, is lumbered with some of the most incoherent subtitling you're ever likely to see.

** Seriously, if you want a great summary of Urotsukidôji's by this point exceedingly dense and tangled mythology and enormous cast, this is the place to find it.