Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 130

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor!  It's a classic and much-loved nineties anime show, and up until now it hasn't seen any real mention on this blog because I don't cover TV shows, except for the one or two times when I have because I got confused or someone asked me nicely.  At any rate, that's not an excuse for not getting to the subsequent OVA series, and if I have one at all, it's that its reputation isn't especially great and the box set has been sitting unattended on my shelf for rather a long time.  But what kind of review series would Drowning in Nineties Anime be if we cared about reputations?  So it's finally time to work through the four volumes of the DVD release, those being An Exceptional Episode, The Rules of Being 16 / The Samurai's Narrow Escape / The High-Tech Opposition / White Christmas, If Only The Skies Would Clear, and From Here to Eternity...

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: An Exceptional Episode, 1994, dir: Kōichi Mashimo

It wasn't my original plan to review the ten OVA episodes of The Irresponsible Captain Tylor in chunks, but having watched the first two, it's already obvious that treating them as a single entity would be a useless exercise.  For those first two episodes, jointly known as either An Exceptional Episode (which is what we're going with) or Tylor's War are, to all intents and purposes - and especially when presented the way Nozomi did on the release I have, with the intermediate credits snipped out - a follow-up movie to the Irresponsible Captain Tylor TV series, and I'd be very surprised if the remaining eight continue on from it in any direct way.

Now, this is as good a place as any to admit that I've never been the world's biggest Irresponsible Captain Tylor fan.  It's one of those shows that I have a ton of respect for, that I'd unhesitatingly recommend, but that I never quite clicked with.  So it was quite the shock to settle down with An Exceptional Episode and almost immediately be hit by a flood of nostalgia and warm affection for its sizeable cast.  That cast was always the heart of the show, of course, but in retrospect I wonder if part of my issue was that having so many people to keep track of and care about left it feeling a touch unfocused, just as the likeable hanging out that was its baseline made the shifts into actual drama sometimes seem more annoying than rewarding.

So it's to An Exceptional Episode's credit that it sidesteps both those failings, setting up a crisis that's suitably major but broad enough in its particulars that we can still spend most of the running time watching the cast bounce off each other, which is all the more fun here since characters who never got to interact before are thrust together in new and interesting combinations.  The film - and I know it's not quite that, but it seems dumb to consider it anything else - also pulls off the neat trick of both capitalising on the growth that occurred over the course of the show and sneakily resetting crucial aspects, since we can hardly have ninety minutes of story about an irresponsible captain who doesn't behave irresponsibly and is unreservedly trusted by his crew of loveable eccentrics.  Really, the heart of the tale is a mystery, one kept both from us and the cast and focused on why Tylor is back to being a shady goofball who seemingly puts everyone's lives in danger, and though the outlines are obvious from early on, the details are intriguing and significant enough to provide a solid narrative spine.

What's not on offer is much in the way of action, which is fine because that's hardly The Irresponsible Captain Tylor's forte, but it does mean the animation never really gets to impress.  If there was extra money here, as you'd expect from an OVA from 1994, it seems mostly to have gone into making the character animation sing, which is arguably just as it should be.  But the caveat is that there's nothing to distract the viewer who wasn't coming directly from the show, not when so little effort is made to reintroduce the cast and setting or to recap recent events, which from the perspective of someone who tends to blunder into OVAs without the requisite foreknowledge would normally be a turn-off.  However, since I did the groundwork for once, I can confidently say that if you are familiar with the show, this is up there with the very best episodes, and perhaps even a touch better than any of them.

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: The Rules of Being 16 / The Samurai's Narrow Escape / The High-Tech Opposition / White Christmas, 1995, dir: Naoyuki Yoshinaga

I said in regards to the last episodes that they were a pleasant reminder of how enjoyable the group dynamics in The Irresponsible Captain Tylor could be.  The four standalone episodes that followed, produced by a different studio and a different creative team, were a reminder of the curious flipside of that, which is that I don't have much time for most of the characters when they're on their own.  The thing is, and bear with me as I try and expand upon a really obvious point, but the core of the show is Justy Tylor, the man whose irresponsible attitude to nearly everything throws the overwise standard sci-fi milieu he resides in into chaos.  So it follows that the purpose of everyone around him, to a greater or lesser extent, is either to react to Tylor or to create situations for him to resolve in his inimical fashion.  That's truer of some of them than others, for sure, and the series got some good mileage from digging below the surfaces of its cast, but still, is separating them off for solo adventures really the way to go?  I'd argue not, and lo and behold, director Yoshinaga and the team at Studio Deen gave me ample evidence.

The Rules of Being 16 is the most substantial of these four episodes, with a bit of dramatic weight to it and a bearing on the wider Tylor narrative.  But for all that, the story of how teenaged emperor Azalyn finds herself meeting up with an old friend who's been left traumatised by events that her father and the Raalgon empire in general were directly responsible for strays a bit too close to rehashing ideas and incidents we've already seen quite often by this point, and as recently as the previous OVA episodes.  I can't imagine the viewer who, having got this far, won't be able to predict exactly how Azalyn behaves - like a sixteen-year-old girl who couldn't really care less about emperoring, basically - and the true mystery is how she keeps pulling this stuff and not getting violently deposed.

On the plus side, it's the second-nicest-looking of the four, with some detailed, sensitive character animation across gorgeous backgrounds, both of which take something of a dip as we move into The Samurai's Narrow Escape and The High-Tech Opposition, which get up to more ambitious stuff and so end up showing the cracks in the budget more.  It seems reasonable to treat these two as a pair because they both do exactly the same thing: take minor characters that have had minimal development until now and chuck them into a thirty minute action movie.  The first focuses on fighter pilot Kojiro, and tries to cook up a Top Gun-style conflict which doesn't succeed since Kojiro's only remotely interesting trait, his phobic aversion to women, is wholly absent, and without that he's just your stereotypical hot-headed pilot type.  Whereas The High-Tech Opposition has even thinner characters, in the shape of the Soyokaze's marines, but gets to have more fun with them, humour being something that's been extremely lacking up until this point.  It also has a stronger concept - albeit one Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex would go on to do vastly better - and better action, and generally feels more in tune with what makes The Irresponsible Captain Tylor tick.

But ultimately, what made The Irresponsible Captain Tylor tick was the irresponsible Captain Tylor, and it's no surprise that his return makes for the best episode.  White Christmas feels like the sort of thing the TV show did on a regular basis, with Tylor being thrust into a situation and making everything much weirder by responding in ways no-one would expect: in this case, it's an attempted Christmas Eve date with Yuriko, which has the added benefit that we get some nice development for her and the long-suffering Yamamoto.  Essentially, though, it's our titular protagonist who's the star, and in a low-key, uneventful fashion that's perhaps a better fit for the character than the more extreme scenarios the TV series tended to traffic in.  It also helps that White Christmas is a pleasure to look at, with some terrific backgrounds conjuring up a night-time city that's at once tangible and dreamy, familiar and alien, and a perfect setting for the woozy, bittersweet tale being spun.

One genuinely satisfying episode out of four isn't much of a success rate, especially when that one isn't up to anything especially fresh, and all in all this feels like a distinct step back from the superb start that was An Exceptional Episode.  I respect the intent of splitting up the cast and then using them to glimpse at what the strained peace between humanity and the Raalgon Empire looks like from a variety of angles much more than I enjoyed the actual results, in part because none of these four stories are very illuminating on that front and three of them aren't that strong on their own merits.  It's a decent idea not delivered as well as it might have been, and yet the results are perfectly fine and end on their strongest notes, so this middle stretch is at least worth sticking with, and I'm curious to see whether all its setting up pays off as we hit the final stretch.

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: If Only The Skies Would Clear, 1996, dir: Naoyuki Yoshinaga 

I'd got my hopes up for another two-parter, given how excellent the last one we had was - and also how much the one-and-done episodes weren't working for me - and so it was quite the disappointment to discover that the two episodes of If Only The Skies Would Clear are practically as standalone as the preceding four had been.  By this point, in fairness,  there's finally a proper shape starting to form that implies all of these apparently separate incidents are building towards something, and this time around there are some definite links and continuity, and yet we're still essentially looking at two more independent tales, each with a different focus, and if the wider narrative's gaining momentum, that's not to say it's doing so with any haste.

All of this is truest of part one, which focuses on Yuriko, who finds herself the target of enemy agents whose motives are kept purposefully unclear - though given that the introductory text has been hinting heavy-handedly that there are factions on both sides eager to restart the war and they basically admit that's what they're up to, perhaps the intrigue isn't so intriguing as all that.  Nevertheless, it's a better-than-average episode and another visual winner: someone on the animation team evidently knew a thing or two about drawing gorgeous cityscapes!  And it's another step forward in developing Yamamoto as more than comic relief, which is handy for the even stronger second part, which sees him gaining and losing his first command in rapid succession.  Logically, I'm not convinced it holds together - even in a world as unreasonable as The Irresponsible Captain Tylor's, what happens is transparently not his fault - but it still packs an emotional punch on behalf of poor Yamamoto and conjures some modest thrills, and in general the character work finally pays off on some of what the preceding episodes have been striving to set up.

So arguably If Only The Skies Would Clear is more of the same of what these OVAs have been delivering post An Exceptional Episode, except more effective, in part since the emphasis on character over action or comedy is coming to seem more natural and in part because, if the wider plot direction is still nebulous, at least it feels as though there is a direction.  Problems remain though, and it was with these two episodes that I realised what had been bothering me on the animation front, which I've felt I was reacting harshly to given that in many ways they look more than respectable.  The issue, though, is the low frame rate, and specifically its combination with designs that lean so heavily into realism.  It's not that the slightly jerky animation is egregious by the standards of mid-90s anime, and with less detailed designs it would pass mostly unnoticed; but these latter episodes are trying to look classy, as befits the more serious and grown-up storytelling, and it's hard to do that when your characters are jolting awkwardly around the screen.

As we get near the end, I continue to find that I like what these Yoshinaga-directed OVAs are gunning for in theory more than I'm enjoying the execution, though the gap has definitely narrowed with this so-called two-parter.  And arguably the bits that do work prove that we only need a little of Tylor for that to be enough; we're three for three now on episodes where he's appeared without being the main focus and all have worked better than the preceding three that sidelined him altogether.  If the goal was to prove that The Irresponsible Captain Tylor can function without its irresponsible captain, I'm afraid that didn't succeed at all, but at this point I'm ready to accept that the supporting cast and wider universe have enough depth to carry some solid storytelling.

The Irresponsible Captain Tylor: From Here to Eternity, 1996, dir: Naoyuki Yoshinaga

If you're going to spend six episodes sloooowly building up to your epic conclusion, you'd better make damn certain that your epic conclusion is actually epic, and not, say, tedious, repetitive, and inconclusive.  I've certainly had my issues with the preceding parts of Naoyuki Yoshinaga's set of OVAs, but I was willing to forgive all if that setting up had paid off, even as I'd come to suspect it probably wouldn't.  There's no satisfaction in being right on that front: From Here to Eternity is a truly dispiriting affair, acting as though things we've already figured out for ourselves are fascinating and mysterious, laboriously retreading ground to make sure we get how the preceding parts fit together, and substituting scenes of people talking at each other for practically everything that's fun and appealing about the Irresponsible Captain Tylor franchise.

The reason for all this, so far as I can tell, is that there was content to be bridged in the novel series and somebody somewhere was both determined that it must be bridged and, presumably, convinced this would all pay off in more Irresponsible Captain Tylor stuff down the line, which is why we have eight - eight! - episodes establishing a new threat we learn barely anything about.  That's the really disastrous part, and there really is no getting around it, the more so since it's basically all that was going on in the previous two episodes, which worked in large part because they felt as though they were raising questions that were about to be paid off.  And the rest, which is the reignition of the conflict between the United Planets Space Force and the Raalgon Empire, is better more or less by default, but that's not to say it's much good.  We've been told at length said conflict was inevitable, then spent far too long watching pieces being nudged into place and conspirators conspiring and everyone wearily acknowledging that there was never much future in this peace business, and by this point it feels more like characters being pushed into doing what they have to for the plot to advance.

I won't say that this material couldn't have worked, though I will say that it couldn't possibly have sustained this sort of running time - trim the lot down to a couple of hours and you'd immediately solve half its problems - but at any rate, Yoshinaga wasn't the right director to do it justice.  It takes a special talent to make scenes of people plotting, or talking about other people plotting, or just plain old expositioning, interesting, and Yoshinaga hasn't the knack at all.  I found myself thinking often about Mamoru Oshii, a director who followed up a lively, comedic, action-packed show with a slow-burn political drama that ditched most of what seemed essential about the franchise in question (that would be Patlabor) and ended up with a stone-cold masterpiece.  Yoshinaga isn't Oshii, or anywhere close, and he frequently has no idea how to keep talky scenes visually interesting or to differentiate them from each other, so that large stretches of From Here to Eternity become a sludge of indistinguishable material delivered in indistinguishable fashion.

At least the animation and designs remain pretty nice, even if you could count the scenes in which they're used to their best advantage on two hands.  There are moments when From Here to Eternity jolts into life, and they're a pretty clear indication of one of the things that went most wrong here, in that whenever Tylor and crew are the focus, these episodes improve considerably and even nudge up against being pretty good.  Strip out everything else and you'd have maybe ten minutes of footage - it's truly astonishing how little this second set of OVAs care about Tylor and often seem actively embarrassed to have him around - but you'd have a decent little mini-movie that pays off on some of what the TV series left hanging.  Ultimately, though, it seems that the goal here was to set up a bright future for the Tylor franchise regardless of whether that meant sacrificing much of what had drawn viewers in the first place, and while I respect the willingness to take risks on something different, I dearly wish someone had figured out how to make the alternative interesting or satisfying.

-oOo-

So it turns out the reputation was deserved, or even a little overgenerous, since while I'd heard that these OVAs were too serious and plot-heavy, nobody bothered to mention that they squander any good will they might have otherwise accumulated on a non-ending that makes all the build-up seem downright absurd.  Ah well, at least An Exceptional Episode lived up to its title, though that does mean that I have to recommend the set as a whole despite not having much good to say about quite a lot of it.  

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 129

It's been a while since we looked at a stone-cold classic around these parts, but with the last of the rebuild films, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0, finally about to get a UK release and so bring the whole saga to its long-delayed conclusion for those of us on this benighted isle - well, until Anno decides to start over again, anyway! - it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at the last film that promised to wrap up Evangelion, a mere two and a half decades ago.

And now that I think, that's not even the only exciting ending to a classic series that would go on to be heavily rebooted we have this time around, and there was probably a great themed post to be had here, but the other two titles have completely blown it, so I guess we're stuck with the hotchpotch that is Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, Hermes: Winds of Love, NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX, and Birdy the Mighty: Final Force...

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, 1997, dir's: Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki

It's hard to think of anything more pointless to review that The End of Evangelion.  Not only are there the usual caveats that come with a film adapting a hugely popular series - if you like the show you'll probably like the movie, if you haven't seen it you'll have no idea what's going on, and all that - but End of Evangelion goes a step further, in that, true to its title, this is literally the culmination of 26 episodes of television.  Or rather, of 24, for, as we discussed back when we looked at Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², there were those who objected to the original ending so vociferously that Hideaki Anno would eventually opt for a do-over that effectively supplants what came before.  Except, this time around, there'd be no question of muddling through with a limited budget: this would be a true cinematic release, and just in case anyone doubted it, studio Gainax consolidated their own considerable expertise with support from the mighty Production I.G.

As is well known, The End of Evangelion would not turn out to be the fix that many of the fanbase were craving, and really, what would that even have meant?  In all its incarnations, Evangelion is a work born of many, varied, and fundamentally contradictory influences.  Probably what audiences of the time essentially wanted was an ending that would do justice to the giant robot show they'd had every reason to believe they were watching for at least the first half of the series, and though it was abundantly apparent by 1997 that Anno had been more interested in interrogating and deconstructing the genre, that remains the sort of project that could be brought to some sort of coherent ending.  Indeed, there's quite a large chunk of running time where it looks as though this is precisely what The End of Evangelion is offering, and there are good reasons that its climatic action sequence is legendary both for its thrillingly visceral action and its exemplary animation.

Only, that action climax comes not even halfway through the film, and once it's done, so are any pretensions of being a story about giant robots, deconstructionist or otherwise.  Well, OK, that was probably too much to ask for, but at least we might get some explanation of the series' vast and bewildering cosmology, right?  And sure, that's another thing The End of Evangelion does, sometimes with startling bluntness, as though Anno was a little annoyed with fans for having failed to follow along, or perhaps for having failed to realise that the precise details were never terribly important.  At any rate, there are answers to be found, but they're not of the satisfying kind, and again, how could they be?

But you know what stood absolutely no hope of wrapping up in a satisfying manner?  That would be Anno's study of mental illness, and specifically of depression, and more specifically of that particular brand of depression so crushing and numbing that it makes you want to erase yourself from existence just so you don't have to endure another moment.  This is where we meet young Shinji Ikari, and this is where he spends pretty much the whole of the film, so terrified of being hurt or of hurting others that he's almost entirely immobilised.  And any illusions that Anno was somehow trying to make amends with the fanbase evaporate entirely in the final third, which is very much the last episode of the TV show, a deep dive into Shinji's fractured mind and tormented heart, but more so and pushed to the limits of what late nineties anime was capable of being.  Which brings us, I think, to why it's inconceivable that a version of The End of Evangelion should wrap up neatly: how do you tie a bow on soul-killing depression?  Yet it's here, paradoxically, that Anno comes closest to being candid with us the viewer, and here that there are answers to be found, however rough, painful, and ultimately inconclusive.

There are, I'm sure, many who'd consider The End of Evangelion's contradictory aims and arguable inability to offer a satisfying take on any of them as a fault and even a fundamental failing.  I'm not one of those people.  I find its wild swinging for the fences, its inscrutability, its seeming hostility towards the audience and itself, its mix of the grand and the grubby, the sublime and the pathetic, to be utterly hypnotic.  As I said when we covered Death (True)², I can't pretend to be at all objective about Neon Genesis Evangelion, a work that affected me profoundly and that I love more or less unconditionally, despite fully recognising its flaws, and so there was never any likelihood of my not loving The End of Evangelion.  Yet, with all that bias acknowledged, I'd still argue, as impartially I can, that it's a masterpiece anyone with the faintest interest in anime owes it to themselves to experience.

Hermes: Winds of Love, 1997, dir: Tetsuo Imazawa

Generally, I find that anything that's described as "So bad it's good" is just plain old bad, and yet every so often you hear about something that, at the very least, sounds as though it might be bad in such thoroughly weird and unlikely ways that it's hard to look away from.  And it was with that in mind that I got a bit disproportionately excited when I discovered the existence of Hermes: Winds of Love.  I mean, it's rare enough at this stage that I stumble upon a vintage anime title that I've never so much as heard of, but one that was made by an honest-to-goodness cult to promote their religion by inserting their deity of choice into a tale of Greek mythology and, presumably, hoping everyone would fail to notice?  That's not something you happen upon every day.

Said cult is, according to my half-hearted Wikipedia research, named Happy Science, and has quite the track record of inserting their god into places where he / she / it doesn't belong, so from their point of view, mythical ancient Greece was perhaps as good a fit as any.  But for the viewer who has to watch this nonsense?  Not so much so.  Because, while there was never going to be a great or even an especially good version of Hermes: Winds of Love, it's the necessity to serve as a medium for a set of beliefs that, however much they're explained to us in ponderous detail, don't make a lick of sense, that really shoves it down into the depths of wretchedness.  When it's merely called upon to be a somewhat over-earnest tale of Greek heroes contextualised with a surprising amount of realpolitik, it trundles along quite happily, with the odd sequence - as, for example, Theseus's confrontation with the minotaur - rising to the level of genuinely exciting.

And throughout its first half, this is all Hermes: Winds of Love is up to, with only occasional clues - such as the opening shot of a golden feather composed with shockingly poorly integrated CGI - to hint at what awaits.  But here we get to the other enormous problem, which is the animation.  Find stills of it and you might imagine that said animation is rather decent and even above par for the time, but you'd be deceived.  It's evident there were talented people working here, presumably among the key animators since solitary images often impress, but the inbetweening is dreadful and sometimes barely there and gestures as simple as people waving are routinely mucked up, with anything more complex - horses, say, of which there are a predictably large number - going wildly off the rails.*  And even that's not really the heart of the problem; anime, after all, has been finding ways around such issues since it began.  No, the problem is that rather than adopt the usual shortcuts where we'll barely notice them, in dialogue, crowd scenes, and the like, the makers throw their limited resources uniformly at everything, meaning that the badness is evenly spread and consistently ruinous.

The goal, I think, based on the character designs and the historical action adventure / musical format (yes, it's also a musical, and precisely one song is some good) was to ape what Western animation was up to at the time, except with a fraction of the budget, and thus we get a film that manages to be actively painful to watch rather than one that mostly looks okay and shines when it needs to.  That gets us back to the core of the thing, which is that it was presumably intended to appeal to as many potential converts as possible, drawing in both Western and Japanese audiences with a tale and approach to animated film-making drawn from the former culture while still being essentially Japanese enough to play in the home market.  And you know what?  A version of Hermes: Winds of Love that didn't need to be religious propaganda - that didn't stop dead to sermonise dully at us, that didn't devote what feels like roughly three hours to developing its cosmology at precisely the point when it was already running low on steam - might have pulled that off in a modest fashion.**  But of course such a version could never have existed, and what we actually got is pretty much rubbish and way less trashy fun than it ought to be.

NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX, 1991, dir: Koji Masunari

It's not for me to tell Discotek their business, but if it was, I might wonder why, having decided to release the TV series NG Knight Lamune & 40 and its follow-up VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire, they would make NG Knight Lamune & 40 one release and lump its two OVA sequels in with VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire.  Then again, I'd probably also want to ask why they'd consider releasing either in the first place, given that, as far as I know, only the OVA to VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire ever saw the light of day in the West, existing as a rather disreputable oddity under the title of Knights of Ramune.

The answer to the second question is beyond my guessing, but the answer to the first, I imagine, was that NG Knight Lamune & 40 was the much longer show, meaning that bunching all the OVAs in with VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire leaves two releases of identical episode count.  Great for lovers of symmetry, not so great for people who were after the entirety of the first show without buying two Blu-ray sets, and mildly annoying for those of us who might want to review NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX with some context and aren't remotely wealthy enough to splash out on both disks.  Although, let's be honest, it's not as if I've ever been shy about reviewing OVAs without much knowledge of their accompanying series, and only occasionally has it caused problems, what with nineties anime having a tendency to be pretty formulaic and all that.

And wouldn't you know it but NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX is formulaic as all get-out.  Indeed, its main failing as an OVA sequel is a thoroughly familiar one, in that it spends far too long re-establishing a status quo for characters whose arcs have all ended and who, in this case, have no real reason to be interacting with each other.  Our hero, Baba Lamune, was whisked off to the magical land of Hara-Hara World to save it from the evil Don Harumage, and presumably he got the job done, since when we eventually join him, after the emergence of a new crisis in Hara-Hara World, he's back to being a normal high-school kid; so normal, in fact, that he's apparently forgotten all about his adventures, much to the chagrin of his former flame Princess Milk.

The pair's subsequent bickering will go on to take up about ninety percent of NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX, or so it felt, but the exact ratio hardly matters given that my tolerance for the whole business had been exhausted by the end of the first scene.  It's not as if everything surrounding Lamune and Milk and their I-guess-we-have-to-call-it-a-romance is especially wonderful, but everything else is certainly better: they're the dullest members of the cast, Milk especially since she does effectively nothing, and when her sister Cocoa can build giant monster truck tank things out of scrap and brainwashed antagonist Da Cider has a talking snake living in his shoulder pad, you do have to wonder if the focus is really in the right place.  All told, the Lamune and Milk stuff feels a lot like filler in a plot that already consists almost entirely of filler.

The main compensation for the thin story and the annoying central pairing - not to mention some cheap animation and the odd rather ugly design, especially when it comes to the various robots that occupy a big chunk of the third and final episode - is a measure of goofy charm and a healthy dose of random weirdness, like whatever the heck was going on with that snake.  It's not a lot, nor enough to make NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX worth recommending, but it keeps most of the running time on the side of mildly amusing, so that's something.

Birdy the Mighty: Final Force, 1996 - 1997, dir: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Back when I covered the first half of U.S. Manga Corp's two volume set of the Birdy the Mighty OVA, I proposed that all this second half had to do was stick the landing and maintain the high quality level that had been established.  And it does both of those things, so it's probably unfair that it left me feeling a tiny bit dissatisfied.  But let's come back to that and focus on the positives, because they're considerable.  Everything that worked in volume one, Double Trouble, works equally well here: the animation remains terrific, especially during the imaginative, well-staged action sequences, and the concept - regular human Tsutomu is stuck sharing a body with badass space cop Birdy Cephon Altirra and together they have comic mishaps and try and foil an alien plot - is obviously just as good as it ever was.  What dragged down Double Trouble a touch, the annoying end theme and generally lacklustre score, along with some weak comedy that did little but put the brakes on the show's momentum, is no worse here, and in the latter case probably better, since there's less room for distractions as we move into the climax.

But it's there, insomuch as there's a problem, that the problem lies.  Birdy the Mighty sets a lot of plates spinning and by the start of the fourth and final episode, I was already getting concerned that it wasn't going to wrap up even slightly.  That turned out not to be the case, thank goodness, and the ending is probably the best compromise that could have been come to under the circumstances, satisfactorily resolving the central crisis and dealing with a major villain while leaving some hefty loose threads flapping as to the who, what, and why of the bigger conspiracy we kept getting glimpses of.  What we're given is a self-contained story, it's just that there's no attempt made at hiding that there are plenty more adventures in store for our protagonists.

Well, there were and there weren't, but as far as nineties anime went, this was all we'd ever get, and it's hellaciously frustrating, even as it's clear things could have been an awful lot worse.  But for once the blame doesn't lie with poor sales, creative differences, behind-the-scenes crises, or anything like that, and director Kawajiri and writers Chiaki J. Konaka and Yoshiaki Kawajiri were arguably making the most of the hand they'd been dealt.  Because Masami Yuki's manga, upon which the OVA was based, had come to a close nearly a decade earlier, having lasted a mere three years.  I don't know how far it got plot-wise, but given that it ran to all of a single volume, I doubt there was much more material to adapt had anyone wanted to.  So while you might argue that it wasn't terribly fair to incorporate so much that would lead nowhere, it was at least true to the source.

But here's the kicker, and what leaves me with distinctly muddled feelings when it comes to Birdy the Mighty: fifteen or so years later, Yuki would decide to take another crack at his irresistible concept, and he got an awful lot further that time, which presumably is why the year that second run concluded saw the release of the series Birdy the Mighty: Decode.  And Birdy the Mighty: Decode is not only a fine bit of TV anime in its own right, it would recover much of the ground of the OVA with largely the same cast of characters, meaning that all those outstanding questions do sort of wrap up, just not where they ought to.  For while I like Decode plenty, I do slightly prefer Kawajiri's take, which is more fun and upbeat and content to imply a lot of what Decode would expand to slightly unnecessary lengths.  And that leaves us with a largely top-tier OVA that ends on a somewhat frustrating note that's almost more unsatisfying for the knowledge that any answers you might want are out there in a great but not quite as great TV series.  The obvious answer, of course, is to watch both and appreciate each on its own merits, and yet it sure would have been lovely to have a few more episodes of something this delightful.

-oOo-

I suspect that most people who read these posts don't even know that I keep scores for the titles I review, since those scores are hidden away on the summary pages, so I may as well point out here that Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion is only the fourth ten out of ten rating I've given in 130 posts and somewhere around 520 reviews.  I don't know if that's a controversial conclusion; I guess it will be with quite a few people, given how often I've seen Neon Genesis Evangelion declared to be hugely overrated.  But hey, they're wrong, it's a masterpiece if ever there was one, so there!

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

* Granted, a little of the blame ought to go to the reliably awful Image Entertainment and a ghastly non-anamorphic print that's so ugly I hardly know how to describe it, though "very green" gets us some of the way there.

** But probably not, given what a rough ride the superficially similar and infinitely better Arion received.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 128

As I've noted before, the flipside of reviewing stuff that's as thoroughly out of print as, say, a title that was only ever released on VHS entire decades ago is that it barely feels immoral to suggest that perhaps hunting down a maybe-not-strictly-legal copy on YouTube would be a bad idea.  So it sucks that I've managed to find something that's not even available there and that's it's actually pretty decent.  Yup, probably ought to have put some more thought into this whole availability issue before we got quite this far down the rabbit hole!  Still, it's much too late now, so why not have a guess at what you'll potentially never be able to watch out of Samurai Spirits 2: Asura Zanmaden, God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, The Girl From Phantasia, and Akai Hayate...

Samurai Spirits 2: Asura Zanmaden, 1999, dir: Kazuhiro Sasaki

The OVA Samurai Spirits 2 is the follow-up to what was unleashed in the US as Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture, one of the most irredeemably awful releases we've covered here, and is thus the second anime adaptation of the beat-em-up video game series known alternately as Samurai Shodown and Samurai Spirits.  Unlike the film - or, if we're being more honest than ADV were, the TV special - Samurai Spirits 2 has no pretensions to telling a standalone story, and instead slots in between a couple of the games: Wikipedia suggests that it serves primarily as setup for Samurai Shodown 64: Warriors Rage, which is puzzling given that Samurai Shodown 64 came out a year earlier than the date provided by IMDB for the OVA. Frankly, it's hard to be terribly sure on the details given that this second title was never picked up outside of Japan, and the DVD that did eventually turn up in the US appears to hail from Hong Kong judging by the subtitles' alternately loose and over-literal approach to the English language.

With all of that, there's no reason to suppose Samurai Spirits 2 would be anything other than dreadful, and it's frankly ridiculous how much that isn't the case.  Really, its obligation to both sequelling a story that it feels almost no need to fill us in on and prologueing a second story that, presumably, was regarded as much more important to series continuity than this one should be quite enough to sink it.  And yes, Samurai Spirits 2 is confusing in its broader details, but its script - written by who I don't know because there really isn't a lot of information out there about this one - does an admirable job of filling in the necessary broad strokes and giving each of its cast members sufficient introduction that we understand their essential personality, skills, and motivations.  And all of this is greatly assisted by designs that immediately fill in most of the remaining gaps: I may never have understood what precisely the main antagonist was up to, for instance, but I was never in any doubt about how evil, dangerous, and yet flat-out cool he was.

Still, any fighting game should be capable of having instantly readable character designs and building a simple narrative around them: especially by the end of the nineties, that sort of thing was the bread and butter of the genre.  That Samurai Spirits 2 has actual themes, though, ones that are emotionally absorbing and resonant, that's a more unlikely bar for it to somehow dive over.  Yet as much as it was obvious there was plenty I was missing out on, at its core was a clear and heartfelt fable about one young woman trying to live with kindness in a violent, pitiless world.  Nakoruru, the closest we have to a protagonist among a busy cast, finds the former-and-possibly-still villain Shiki and insists on giving her the benefit of the doubt, despite everyone's protestations that death is both the best she deserves and the only way to keep her from further horribleness - and that, really, is our plot for just under an hour.

Arguably, it's not much, but it's enough, and it's delivered with admirable seriousness and restraint, though not so much so that there isn't space for some surprisingly satisfying moments of light-heartedness along the way.  And it's also delivered with some genuinely excellent animation, not exactly lavish but full of the sort of thoughtful details that suggest a team who were fully invested in their work, and set against backgrounds that do a marvellous job of portraying an historical Japan that feels distant and threatening and indefinably other.   Even the opening and closing themes are a delight, and I really have no complaints beyond the inscrutable references to series lore, which makes it all the more frustrating that I'm singing the praises of something that's all but unavailable to an English-speaking audience.  Uh, sorry, I guess, but the alternative would be to not heap praise on of one of the finest video game adaptations I've encountered, one so good that it barely matters that it's based on a video game at all, and that would be a crying shame.

God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, 1988, dir: Masakatsu Iijima

My heart sank as I watched God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, and not because it wasn't good - no, quite the opposite!  What got to me was that Masakatsu Iijima was knocking it out of the park through scene after scene, and yet his name didn't ring any bells.  Was this yet another anime director who got to prove himself a master of the form precisely once before vanishing into the long grass of TV work or simply disappearing from the industry altogether?

Yes and no, as it turned out: Iijima did get one other stab at directing a feature-length work, and lo and behold, it was Yu Yu Hakusho: Poltergeist Report, which I also praised for being strikingly well-directed.  There, what leaped out at me was Iijima's unusual grasp of using 2D animation to represent three-dimensional spaces, and that's certainly a virtue of Untold Legend of Seventeen, though this time around it was far from being all that impressed me.  Indeed, Iijima kept coming up with new ways to do that: here a wildly original way of introducing a giant robot, there a sequence of silhouetted figures against firelight establishing a moment of human connection that we know is about to be violently torn apart, and on and on throughout the just-under-an-hour's running time.  Moreover, never does the direction veer into style for style's sake.  Rather, it genuinely feels as though Iijima has agonised over every shot, figuring out how best to let the visuals support the story and how to stretch the animation accordingly.

Without that, I don't know that there'd be half so much here.  Certainly, it's easy to imagine a take on this basic content that didn't distinguish itself at all.  Released six years on from the TV series, God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen is a curious creature, part reboot, part retelling, and part prologue.  Throughout the first half, I assumed it was simply that last, since the focus here is on protagonist Takeru's brother Marg, who was so ill-served by God Mars: The Movie, and particularly on his life as part of the local resistance that's battling, with obvious futility, against the evil Emperor Zul.  Perhaps simply by virtue of being new material, or as new as that old chestnut a resistance drama can be, this first half proves to be Untold Legend at its best, leaving the last twenty minutes with nothing to do besides retell crucial moments we've already seen before.

Even there, though, Iijima proves triumphant, since his take on what should be overly familiar scenes is so much better than what we've previously had.  And while that's partly due to the visuals and partly to the somewhat modernised designs and greatly to do with the grittier, harsher atmosphere, it's the character psychology that benefits most.  I'd struggle to explain how that's the case, since all the cast are still essentially cyphers on paper, yet everyone benefits - bar Zul, I guess, since there's less place here for him and his cackling lunacy.  But Marg, unsurprisingly, feels a thousand times more fleshed out, Roze gets more of a satisfying arc despite appearing for maybe a total of five minutes and hardly speaking, and Mars / Takeru, with even less screen time, benefits perhaps the most, getting to be believably heroic and confused and grief-stricken in what's little more than a cameo.

There's simply nothing here that's not an improvement: Reijirō Koroku's lush orchestral score takes on much of the emotional heavy lifting while being gorgeous in its own right, and Keisuke Fujikawa's script is admirably light-handed given the material, rarely spelling out what we can be left to figure out and feel our way into ourselves.  The closest I have to a grumble is a strikingly abrupt ending, and even that turns out to be purposeful, as the film briefly, tragically, flicks back to an earlier moment, adding in one last layer of grief and humanity to Marg's short, cruel life.  So the only real problem is that to get the most from Untold Legend you'll have to at least watch God Mars: The Movie, and while much inferior, that's still pretty decent, so things could be worse.

The Girl From Phantasia, 1993, dir: Jun Kamiya

I'll say this in the favour of The Girl From Phantasia, the ever-inconsistent ADV put in some genuinely impressive efforts.  That's most noticeable in the picture quality, which is positively mind-blowing for what was only ever a VHS release - and yeah, I know the image there says DVD, and no, I don't know why, but if you'd sat me in front of this and told me it was a DVD, I wouldn't have questioned you.  Then there are the subtitles, which are actually applied with some ingenuity in a fashion I can't say I've come across elsewhere, and while the translation was too loose for my tastes, it was readily apparent that some thought had gone into figuring out how to make jokes work in a different language.  Heck, even the box design is quite nice, and that was something ADV got wrong as often as not.  And perhaps most astonishingly, there are extras at the end, and they include the entire storyboard, a bonus that must have been practically unique at the time and yet goes oddly unmentioned on the back of the box.

And if all of this seems like a weird angle to focus on, then it's because I have nothing much to say about The Girl From Phantasia and suspect that no one else would either, because it's all of a standard TV episode in length and as boilerplate as boilerplate can be.  If there's one aspect that distinguishes it from a hundred similar titles, it's some nice animation from the company that would go on to become Production IG and not long after this would produce some of the finest work in that field the world has ever seen, and while we're roughly a million miles from that point here, their fingerprints are evident in the unusual care and relative realism that went into the character animation, the standout feature of an OVA that generally looks that bit better than you might expect.

But a show about a dorky guy whose life is invaded by a cute but annoyingly supernatural girl that's he alternately bickers with and lusts after is, let's face it, something that's going to need rather more than good animation and nice presentation to make it stand out from the crowd, and The Girl From Phantasia has more or less nothing.  There are hints of interesting world-building, but inevitably they never get to be more than hints, because how much can you really set out in 25 minutes?  And in fairness, Kamiya and his team cram in a fair old bit, enough that there's actually a story here with a beginning, middle, and end, some mildly engaging conflict, a dash of characterisation and even a character arc of sorts, and a brief but action-packed climax: this surely must have been intended as the setup for further adventures, but it's not obnoxiously obvious about the fact.  Other than the extreme familiarity, and the brief length - and, care of ADV, an added dash of misogyny that was the main thing that put me off the subtitles -  there's nothing here that's actively bad, and while it's happening, it's all quite charming.  It's just that there isn't a single reason to seek out The Girl From Phantasia thirty later when there are so many titles that did the same but more so and better.

Akai Hayate, 1992, dir: Osamu Tsuruyama

Akai Hayate starts with a pretty neat setup, and I only wish I'd known going in that it would dump that setup after one episode to chase off in other directions for two of its four episodes, because perhaps then I wouldn't have found those two episodes quite so frustrating.  Still, for the first thirty minutes, things run smoothly and intriguingly enough, as we're introduced to the titular Hayate and his sister Shiori, who are on the run due to Hayate having just murdered their father for reasons we won't learn until much later.  And while patricide is generally frowned on, it's an even bigger deal when you happen to be the scion of Shinogara, a secret organisation of ninjas who've been running Japan from behind the scenes for hundreds of years.  As we join Hayate and Shiori, they and the two companions who've decided to go on the lam with them have just been caught up with by those assassins in creepy masks that seem to crop up in most anime that features ninjas, and in the subsequent ruckus, Hayate is mortally injured saving his sister's life.  Possibly figuring she owes him one, he decides that the only solution is to use his powers to transfer his soul into her body, so that he can possess her if she's ever in trouble, which inevitably she is before the first episode's done.

Needless to say, all of this seems like it's going to be important, or heck, even the actual story Akai Hayate intends to tell.  It's as jarring as you might expect, then, when the second episode drops Hayate and Shiori more or less entirely, to focus on another of the Shinogara escapees and what we'll soon discover is a much wider conflict for control of the nation, which by episode three will have drawn in yet another secret organisation and moved on to a third protagonist.  All the while, Hayate and Shiori drift around, barely in the background, lost amid a too-large cast and a plot that imagines that watching characters we've barely been introduced to, let alone grown attached to, backstab and manipulate each other is somehow intrinsically interesting.

Perhaps it even might be if you went in expecting that rather than a tale of body-sharing ninja siblings; "secret organisations vie for power in the shadows" is less of a fresh setup, but it's hardly been done to death.  But while I suspect a rewatch will be more satisfying, the execution is still lacking, even putting aside how muddled the storytelling frequently gets.  Tsuruyama, who has a fascinating CV but apparently no other directorial experience, brings little to the material, with his most distinguishing characteristic being a tendency to overuse close-ups and mid shots, making everything feel cramped, even the frequent action scenes.  And even when the action isn't let down by poor choices or the never much more than decent animation, it still has a tendency to devolve into what I've dubbed special move tennis.  For reasons that are never explained and probably don't stretch much past "What does our target audience expect to see?", all of the main cast have a super-powered shadow form they can adopt, seemingly whenever they like, and of course those shadow forms come with flashy powers that they can blast at each other and so end fights without any of that messy business of actually fighting. 

In that sense and others, Akai Hayate reminded me of another largely forgotten OVA, Hades Project Zeorymer*, in that it feels caught between two stools, on the one hand looking back to a goofier and more carefree era of anime when characters in cool suits or giant robots firing off special moves at each other was enough and on the other pre-empting the relatively greater complexity, the darker tone, and the increasing brutality and cynicism that came to dominate a lot of genre anime throughout the late eighties and nineties.  Like Hades Project Zeorymer, it routinely gets the wrong end of both sticks, while working just well enough to feel like an intriguing failure; at any rate, it definitely lands amid that handful of titles whose absence from DVD feels really puzzling, and the parts that succeeded were strong enough that its lack is mildly annoying.

-oOo-

That one threw up a couple of the nicest surprises I've had here in a while, in that there was basically no reason to be hopeful for either Samurai Spirits 2 or God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, let alone to imagine they'd be such a pair of mostly-forgotten gems.  Whereas The Girl From Phantasia I did have some vague expectations of - I can't remember why! - and falls into that most frustrating category of things that aren't even interestingly bad.  And that only leaves Akai Hayate, which happens to be the title that doesn't appear to be anywhere on YouTube with English subtitles, and which was certainly novel and decent enough to deserve at least that slender cultural legacy.

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

* Reviewed on this site as Zeoraima, because nobody seems to agree what the thing is called.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 127

We definitely seem to be settling into a pattern here, with one or two somewhat mainstream titles - inevitably care of the good folks at Discotek - accompanied by whatever long-lost oddities I happen to have stumbled upon lately.  But this time around, the thing you might have actually heard of is of a particularly interesting nature, since it's at once from a major franchise and being released for the first time in the US.  Many eons ago, I noted wistfully that I'd run out of City Hunter to cover unless the day should come when Discotek released the one OVA that for whatever reason never made it across back in the day, and lo and behold, here we are, with City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba - accompanied by Capricorn, Samurai Gold, and God Mars: The Movie...

City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba, 1999, dir: Masaharu Okuwaki

It would take a lot for this, the last of the City Hunter movies to be released in the twentieth century, to live up to its marvellous title.  And to be clear, it's not the "death" part I'm referring to, which by itself would feel like cheap misdirection given that we know Ryo Saeba is unlikely indeed to be killed off here or anywhere.  No, it's "vicious criminal" that makes it sing, since for all his manifest failings as a human being, Ryo isn't that, (though arguably only because the franchise exists in a world where neither sexual harassment nor mass murder are criminal offences,) meaning that right off the bat we have us an enticing mystery hook.

Here's a pleasant surprise, then: for the first half of its running time, Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba does about justify its flamboyant nomenclature, and in so doing gets awfully near to knocking Goodbye My Sweetheart - aka City Hunter: The Movie - from its well-deserved top spot.  Indeed, it arguably has something neither Goodbye My Sweetheart nor either of the other meaningful contenders for the position possesses, in the shape of what's, to the best of my knowledge, an original premise, one that's not Speed but on a train or Die Hard but in a hotel.  Moreover, it's a strikingly current-feeling setup that finds Ryo on the run with a news anchor (female and attractive, naturally) who's come to him in a bid to get free of the evil media empire she works for.  The point where this all gets rather special and modern is in how said media empire have the ability to modify video footage in real time, meaning that setting Ryo up as a kidnapper rather than a rescuer is as easy as slapping a knife in his hand and a mean expression on his face.

A fanciful notion for 1999, and kudos to writers Tsukasa Hôjô and Nobuaki Kishima for coming up with it and then milking it in fun and satisfying ways.  Though perhaps I oughtn't to be crediting both of them, for Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba is as much a work of two halves as anything I've come across, and those halves are so unequal that I could readily believe that each writer contributed 45 minutes of script without speaking to the other.  Somewhere around the midpoint, there's a major twist, and it's a stupid twist that the film never quite recovers from, though it does regain some ground once it's had time to figure out the new direction.  Actually, part two might have been a decent enough movie in its own right, for all that its ideas are much less fresh; what it can't get away with is being crudely grafted onto something that's inherently more interesting.

That's the only really big problem with Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba but not the only problem, and the other one is arguably more annoying, since a City Hunter movie can comfortably stand to have a messy narrative, whereas boring action sequences tend to be more disastrous.  They're not here, mainly because the animation is good enough to make even dull action moderately engaging, but it definitely sucks the wind from the film's sails at multiple points when it could dearly do with some excitement to keep us distracted.  If only Kazuo Yamazaki had stuck around to provide the odd set-piece on a par with those in Goodbye My Sweetheart: that, I think, would have pushed Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba into the realms of greatness, rather than it being a pretty good City Hunter entry that constantly gets beaten out by its own title.

Capricorn, 1991, dir: Takashi Imanishi

ADV's box cover proudly declares this to be "Johji Manabe's Capricorn", which, with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, seems rather an odd choice.  I don't know about Manabe's popularity within Japan, but in the West his influence was limited indeed: there was this, there was the adaptation of Outlanders,  covered here a couple of years back - my conclusion seems to essentially have been, "boy is Outlanders horny" - and his manga Caravan Kidd appears to have made it over to the US in full.  In America, at least, Manabe's was hardly a name to conjure with.

I'm not convinced that was altogether his fault, though, in the same way that I'm not sure it was his fault he never got a really outstanding anime adaptation that made it as far as the West.  Judging solely by Outlanders and Capricorn, Manabe's schtick was pretty neat: fairly straightforward genre tales gussied up with a racy edge, elaborate settings, and, for some reason, lots and lots of animal people.  That was definitely a thing in Outlanders, and it's more so here, not to mention how our heroine Mona is a sexy dragon lady, a detail that unfortunately meant I spent most of the running time being reminded of Dragon Half and struggling to take anything remotely seriously.

Mind you, perhaps taking itself less seriously would have done Capricorn some favours, though that's part and parcel of its one big problem, which is that it's determined to barrel through far more plot than it remotely has the space to deal with.  That's true of many of these shorter OVA movies, of course, but I can't off the top of my head think of a more egregious example: Capricorn wants to be an epic tale, and epic, by and large, demands more than 45 minutes.  It gets there, but the cost is any characterisation whatsoever, and even more damagingly, the worldbuilding that I can imagine being a big part of the manga's appeal, since it very much feels as though there's an interesting world to be seen here if we weren't being flung through it almost too fast for the details to register.

This sparsity of detail is most an issue, though, with our protagonist Taku, who we meet at the exact moment he materialises in the fantastical, delightfully named alternate world of Slaphrase.  In short order, Taku will perv on Mona taking a bath - presumably because there was literally no other way to introduce female characters in nineties anime - and then find himself drawn into the resistance against the villainous Zolba, who's plotting to invade the mysterious orb hanging in Slaphrase's sky, which somehow seems to be connected with Taku. Oh, look, it's Earth, all right? It's obvious and even the box blurb gives it away.  Anyway, Taku too will turn out to be more than he appears, and that leads us to a plot twist that ought to have at least some impact, but the thing is that we never got to know Taku before he was thrust into this particular story, and he might be the mayor of Denver or a dozen unusually smart ferrets hiding in a cunningly crafted flesh suit for all we know.  His character, essentially, is, "guy who's in another world that he can't make much sense of," until the plot calls on him to be something more.

That may be Capricorn's biggest weakness, but it's not actually a disastrous one; nor, surprisingly, is some noticeably cheap animation, which is salvaged largely by the fact that Manabe's designs are so pleasant to be around.  Indeed, that goes for all of Capricorn: the source material is just about strong enough that all the adaptation needs to do is not get in its way too much, and Imanishi was absolutely a good enough director to pull that off, even with such obviously limited resources.  Those 45 minutes fly by quite satisfyingly, and it's simply a shame that there wasn't the room to let the material breath even slightly: add another quarter of an hour in which to contextualise Taku and in general to give the characters some actual character and so the plot some meaningful stakes, polish up the animation a touch, and you'd have something that would stick in the memory once the credits were done in the way the Capricorn we actually got unfortunately fails to manage.

Samurai Gold, 1988, dir: Atsutoshi Umezawa

If you have to set your expectations extra low for anime titles that were never reissued from their VHS releases, that goes doubly for distributor Western Connection, who are known these days, where they're remembered at all, for being especially shonky and lacking in any measure of quality control and killing off more or less every license they touched.

So it comes as all the more surprise that Samurai Gold should turn out to be good.  No more than good, mind you: no real flashes of excellence here, and not much in the way of distinctiveness either, though you might expect some on learning that its one-hour story is a take on the life of semi-legendary historical hero Tōyama no Kin-san, immortalised in kabuki theatre and subsequently in no end of films and TV shows, and here thrust into a sci-fi future that at the same time bears a striking resemblance to the Edo period in which he lived.  All of which is undoubtedly to Samurai Gold's benefit, except that the science-fiction never gets much past, "But what if Gundam?" and if you new nothing of Tōyama no Kin-san, as I didn't, you could easily make your way through the story without guessing its roots, though some of its later developments would feel that bit stranger.

The conceit of combining Edo architecture and motifs with the stock sci-fi designs of the time, though, does turn up some fairly fresh and appealing imagery - take, for instance, a highway overarched by torii gates - and while I'm far from an expert, I'm pretty sure I detected nods to period art in the character designs as well.  Those designs benefit, too, from some above-average animation, even if director Umezawa isn't always the best at hiding his cost-cutting measures, as with shots of immobile crowds that stretch on long enough to be noticeable.  For the most part, however, Samurai Gold offers some respectable visuals, and that and the 16:9 aspect ratio almost left me wondering if the thing might have had a cinematic release, for all that most everything else about it screams typical late-eighties OVA.

Not that that would be such a bad thing, either, mind; the late eighties was a fine time for OVAs, after all, a brief window in which they got to be more experimental and risk-taking than would be allowed even a few years later.  And so we have a tale that not only gets to reimagine historical events through a futuristic lens but drags in a whole bunch of other genres while it's at it, functioning at any one time as an action comedy, a romance, a political thriller, and a courtroom drama, and most often as some combination of the lot.  If this makes Samurai Gold feel rather haphazard, it also makes it impossible to predict or grow too bored with - unless, presumably, you're already familiar with the material from other tellings - and engagingly busy, with a startling amount of twists and turns and even some meaningful character development and high drama all squeezed into an hour.

And here I am feeling like, having insisted that Samurai Gold never pushes past being good, I've made it sound quite great, possibly because it's already beginning to look that way when I think back to it.  So let me try and remember that, for all its minor eccentricities, on a scene-by-scene basis it was a lot like a lot of other titles from the late eighties and early nineties, with the overriding instinct being to imitate rather than playing up the uniqueness of the material.  Whether or not that's a bad thing is debatable; there's certainly an argument that, with so many balls already in the air and so little time to barrel through so much narrative, more ambition would have been a distraction rather than a plus.  Given its inherent limitations, I suspect the Samurai Gold we got might be close to the best possible version, and sometimes consistently good is perfectly fine.

God Mars: The Movie, 1982, dir: Tetsuo Imazawa

The first time through, I fell asleep watching God Mars: The Movie, and while I'm not about to claim that's the film's fault - I was really tired! - I'm also not, having watched it through again properly, willing to take the whole of the blame, because there were a couple of points where I found my eyes growing heavy on that second go round too.

Granted, I don't quite have the affinity for early eighties anime that I do for nineties anime, and especially not for the seemingly endless string of giant robot shows that seem to have been aimed squarely at older kids and younger teens, with not much thought given to the possibility that an adult viewer might want to get something from them as well.  That's firmly where we're at here, and as such, God Mars: The Movie - a retelling of the 64-episode show Six God Combination God Mars - is full of remarkably dumb details and nonsense plotting, all of it more or less precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to run across in a giant robot anime from the front end of the eighties.  Humanity has become a space-faring civilisation on the brink of breaking out of our solar system by the far-flung year of 1999; Earth's elite combat squad are all too young to get their driving licenses; and the villainous Emperor Zul, who's decided that the people of Earth have already seen quite enough of the galaxy, is such an idiot that you have to assume everyone else took one glance at the job of Galactic Emperor and decided it looked too much like work.  His plans go off the rails almost immediately, when the alien being he planted on Earth - now known as Takeru and the old man of the aforementioned Crusher Squad at the crusty age of 17 - decides he'd rather defend the planet he's lived his entire life on than turn against it because some creepy space guy tells him he should.

Zul was pretty much my favourite part of God Mars: The Movie, partly because his design is rather awesome but mostly because he's such a force of absurdism and chaos, concocting ever-more-nonsensical schemes, contradicting himself constantly, and apparently being evil more for the fun of it than through any hope of gain, given that all the problems he encounters are of his own making and could have been resolved with minimal effort at almost any point in the film's 90-minute running time.  And God Mars: The Movie surely needs a good villain, or at any rate a bad but entertaining villain, because its heroes are thoroughly dull, with almost everyone but the achingly tedious Takeru and his brother Marg getting pushed firmly to the sidelines.

Thankfully, and acknowledging that early-eighties giant robot anime is rarely the place to look for intricate characterisation or rich plotting, it's a good job that, as a work of animation, God Mars: The Movie fares better.  It's precisely as dated as you'd expect, but it does look somewhat like a cinematic feature, and a lot of that's down to director Imazawa.  The animation is reliably fine without doing much to impress, but Imazawa has a definite gift for the sort of epic sci-fi that the film's aiming to deliver - perhaps honed during his time helming the TV show - and his greatest virtue is a sense for how to use scale to really wow.  It's not something he calls on much, but there are a handful of shots that are a little breathtaking, in the way a film containing massive spaceships and robots ought to be and so few are.

The odd awesome sequence that makes impressive use of scale and a delightfully daft villain aren't enough to push God Mars: The Movie anywhere near greatness, but they save it from being merely serviceable, and the whole business gets steadily better the more it goes on, meaning that most of its best moments are backloaded.  Given those virtues, it's no surprise that the ultimate showdown against Zul is a highpoint, and it occupies an unreasonably large portion of the running time, which goes a long way toward making up for the slightly dull opening and convoluted, momentum-less middle.  That obviously still leaves this firmly in the "worth a look if you like this sort of thing" camp, though given my basic lack of enthusiasm, I guess my mild enjoyment is sort of a recommendation in itself.

-oOo-

Since I tend to review individual titles rather than releases, let me take this opportunity to plug Discotek's fantastic City Hunter collection, which includes all six of the vintage OVAs and TV specials.  Granted, two of them are fairly dreadful, but that leaves four that are somewhere between good and great, with Goodbye My Sweetheart - aka City Hunter: The Movie - standing out as one of the finest franchise films to come out of the nineties.  And since I've grumbled a bit about how overly costly the Project A-ko sequel blu-rays have been, let me say for the sake of balance that Discotek have gone completely the other way here, bundling what easily could have been split into two sets together at a thoroughly reasonable price.

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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.

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