Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 65

I suppose that if I planned these better, I'd make an effort to balance weaker titles with better ones, and thus never end up with posts like this one where ... well, you'll see, but this ain't the greatest ever selection.  As much as I tend to like them, this may have something to do with the fact that we're back on the shorter titles, with four OVAs that come in at less than an hour apiece.  Sometimes that can mean you're in for a masterpiece of concise storytelling of a sort that anime seems uniquely attuned to delivering, and sometimes it means there wasn't the material for anything longer, or that a dodgy distributor is chucking out titles that got canned before they could go anywhere.

And now that your expectations are suitably lowered, let's take a look at Legend of the Last Labyrinth, Time Bokan: Royal Revival, Sword for Truth, and Spirit Warrior: A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms...

Legend of the Last Labyrinth, 1997, dir: Ko Suzuki

It's always best to have a spot of originality, of course, but if we have to be given recycled ideas, it's far better that the creators play straight with us.  So it goes with Legend of the Last Labyrinth, also known by the more logical title of Princess Rouge: the creators know their tropes, they know we know those tropes, and they have the  decency to lay them out with a minimum of fuss.  So when an amnesiac young woman drops on our teenage hero Yūsuke literally out of the sky, it's a safe bet that the two of them are going to fall for each other, perhaps after a spot of initial bickering, and sure enough, five minutes and a cute montage later, that's what's happened.  And since she fell out of a magical portal, along with an important-looking trinket, it's fair to assume she'll have powers of her own and some sort of meaningful destiny, facts that have been confirmed before the first episode is done.  And when her two sisters arrive, what are the odds that they'll insist on moving in with Yūsuke and making his life hell?  We've all seen Oh! My Goddess, right?  Or Tenchi Muyo?  Or one of the million or so anime that follow the model they helped establish?

The plus side, then, is that Legend of the Last Labyrinth burns through all its necessary setup in the course of barely an episode, which is a handy thing to do when you're a two episode OVA - though you assume the creators didn't realise they were going to get cancelled, because yes, this is yet another of those titles that was released incomplete by the good folks at AnimeWorks.  Anyway, it's for the best that they don't squander an hour of everyone's time by setting out ingredients we've seen on plenty of occasions before.  However, the negative is that, with everything happening at such a breakneck pace, it's hard to feel particularly engaged.  The characters are pleasant, with enough glimmers of characterisation to suggest they might have grown to be genuinely appealing, but how are we supposed to invest in the fates of Yūsuke and Rouge, let alone in the romance between them, when all the scene-setting has been whisked over in the blink of an eye?

There are indications that, had Legend of the Last Labyrinth survived, it would have started to carve its own path.  One fun wrinkle, for example, is that the magical kingdom Rouge has arrived from is actually the underworld of mythology; another is a genuinely vindictive baddie who seems to be hated by his own subordinates as much as by anyone.  Put that together with some attractive animation - the backgrounds are genuinely lovely, though the frequent reuse of footage so early on feels pretty cheap - and a bouncy end theme, along with the lack of any significant missteps, and it's enough that by the end of the second episode, it's annoying to know there won't ever be more.  Annoying, yes, but not exactly heartbreaking; Legend of the Last Labyrinth is a nice show, enough so that it's apparent why AnimeWorks felt justified in chucking it out unfinished, but its eagerness to rush through its familiar aspects to get to the good stuff feels a little tragic when that good stuff would never materialise.

Time Bokan: Royal Revival, 1993, dir: Akira Shigino

Here's the thing: there's no way I can write a fair review of Time Bokan: Royal Revival, a comedy knock-off sequel to a long-running seventies show that I haven't seen, which also references a whole bunch of other shows I haven't seen, and in fact pretty much totally relies on a knowledge of seventies Japanese TV that it would be damn near impossible for me to acquire.  So I guess that with the best will in the world (plus the ten minutes I spent researching on Wikipedia) this is still going to be my first openly and unapologetically unfair review.

With that said, the gimmick is this: a remake of the classic anime series Time Bokan is in the works, and since the original had a superfluity of near-identical villains, it's been decided that the only reasonable way to settle on one trio for this relaunch is with a race in their signature vehicles.  Or, to put it another way, it's Wacky Races.  And I feel like I ought to caveat that somehow, but no, I really can't: it's Wacky Races, but with the bad guys and gals from Time Bokan.  Or the first episode is, anyway; the second sees the winners attempting to get up to no good and inadvertently tangling with not only the heroes of Time Bokan itself but those of Gatchaman, Casshern, Speed Racer, and more from legendary production house Tatsunoku.

If all of that was gibberish to you, I can say with absolute certainty that Time Bokan: Royal Revival will be too.  And if only some of it was gibberish - I at least could recognise those characters, though I'm not overly familiar with them - then you're still likely to miss out on some sixty or seventy percent of the jokes.  With that in mind, I feel a bit guilty for suggesting that, even with the appropriate cultural baggage, they still wouldn't be that funny, and also that, a few extremely specific gags aside, they all boil down to the one brand of humour: everything the villains try is doomed to backfire spectacularly, hurting them more than it does anyone else.  There are definitely some laughs here - and it helps that the characters are pretty adorable, like all the best cartoon baddies - but for the average Western viewer, a lot of this will be inscrutable and a lot of what's left will raise a smile more than a guffaw.

With that said, the show looks good, kind of, except that it's devoting an awful lot of energy to emulating the scrappy artistry of anime from two decades earlier, resulting in some above average animation doing a respectable impression of animation that kind of sucks.  And the opening and end songs are damn fine villain anthems, with the caveat that the closer goes on for way too long, a complaint I don't recall ever having about an anime theme before.  Then again, like I said at the top, Time Bokan: Royal Revival is the point in this grand venture where I have to admit I'm out of my depth, so who knows, maybe that was another joke I didn't get?  I'm willing to believe that, if you were in on every last reference, this would be a treat.  For everyone else?  There's fun to be had, but perhaps no more than two back-to-back episodes of Wacky Races would provide, all told.

Sword for Truth, 1990, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Recently someone tried to convince me that I was underestimating director Osamu Dezaki, and they made such a compelling argument that I was determined to come at my least favourite anime director with fresh eyes.  So it's unfortunate that the first new work of his I should encounter is Sword for Truth, a fifty-minute OVA that has all his worst tendencies on display and then some.  Certainly, all of Dezaki's weird visual gimmicks are to be found here, among them a gross overuse of speed lines, the stuttering repetition of a brief burst of action three, four, or five times in a row, and - in practically the opening shot! - his bizarre habit of cutting to an internal view of a body, in this case the skeleton of a horse.

That one actually works, in context; it's a creepy note to start on, if nothing else.  Indeed, the opening five minutes, in which samurai battle a gigantic white tiger, were decent enough that I almost wondered why Sword for Truth had such a toxic reputation, even among the mostly risible releases that made up Manga's budget Collection range.  But by the ten minute mark, I was wondering no more, as Dezaki trotted out the remainder of his recurring bad habits.  In particular, he seems to have purposefully sucked the energy out of the endless action sequences, so badly are they handled, and the film treats its women with striking contempt, not so much because of the staggering amounts of nudity and sex as because none of them approach becoming actual characters.  Not that the male cast are nuanced, but the way in which both the women we spend any time with fall head over heels in lust with our protagonist for no apparent reason is galling, and that any shred of motivation they might have vanishes the moment they do so actively hurts the material.  By far the worst is the swindler that our antihero Sakaki humiliates early on, who then tracks him down to sleep with him, tries to kill him, decides she's in love with him, and vanishes from the plot altogether.

Or maybe she died and I wasn't paying attention.  Honestly, it's possible.  It's startling how dull a fifty-minute film that consists of almost nothing but sex and violence manages to be.  Conceivably, too, she was slated to return in a later episode; the ending leaves enough unresolved that it's obvious there was intended to be one.  And this is extra irritating in that the film concludes on the closest it has to a good scene, a moody dialogue exchange that does more to establish a theme than the entirety of what's gone before.  Perhaps this is why Dezaki bothers me so: as often as he seems to have turned out hackwork, he evidently wasn't a hack, and the effect is of someone with interesting ideas throwing stuff at the screen because they can't be bothered to think out what might actually work.  Never has that been truer than in Sword for Truth, a feature that was never going to be more than a tacky bit of sexed-up, horror-laced exploitation, but in Dezaki's hands, manages to flub even that.  I could have forgiven its other sins if it was only fun, but for this kind of material to be boring?  That takes real doing.

Spirit Warrior: A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms, 1991, dir: Katsuhito Akiyama

Having now seen all five of the Spirit Warrior short films released between 1988 and 1994, I feel confident in saying that the series adds up to more than the sum of its parts.  Not one of them is exceptional, and of this first wave, only the profoundly weird Castle of Illusion stands out in its own right.  And I realise that, yes, I've just damned this particular release without saying a word about it, but let's backpedal to my original point, which was that even when these things aren't altogether successful, they're at least intriguing.  And one of the reasons for that is that they each approach their source material in such a distinctive manner.

When we last saw Katsuhito Akiyama, it was as the director of the lacklustre opening instalment Revival of Evil, and not only is A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms better, it's a very different beast.  Its meandering story of a cursed actress and her role in reviving a centuries-old curse turns out not to be especially complex once all the pieces come together, but it feels more involved than other entries, and relies significantly less on action, in favour of - I was going to say scares, but I guess they're not really that.  What we get instead is a handful of atmospheric, gory set pieces, a couple of which are genuinely shocking.  On the one hand, that's due to a reliance on the sort of sexualised violence that crops up in so many titles from the period, but on the other, here it feels earned, or at any rate more than window dressing.  Indeed, the focus on two abused women left without any reasonable outlets by which to channel their grief and rage is a striking change of direction from a series that has tended to concentrate on its simplistic male heroes and their manly shenanigans.  It's exploitation, for sure, but better the kind that grapples with its subject matter, if only because here it provides a resonance that's been missing in other entries.

Where A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms falls down, its because the end point of all this is its most familiar aspect: another of those supernatural battles where people stand around reciting incantations and throwing magical thingummies at each other, and these have never been a strength of the series.  This one's particularly unengaging on a visceral level, but makes up for it somewhat with an added layer of emotive character drama; for once we have a baddie worth caring about, and who's even legitimately tragic if you're prepared to fill in some of the gaps that the fifty-minute running time leaves as narrative hints.  And though none of this adds up to anything extraordinary, like Spirit Warrior in general, it leaves a better impression than its individual parts entirely earn.

-oOo-

Blimey, that was a washout, wasn't it?  I can't even honestly recommend A Harvest of Cherry Blossoms, not unless you have the opportunity to watch it in the company of its four sibling entries in the Spirit Warrior series.  (As much as I'd rather not promote international piracy giant Youtube, all five have found their way there and are easy to locate.)  In fairness to Time Bokan: Royal Revival, I'm sure that if you'd grown up on the shows it pastiches, there'd be pleasure to be had, and thanks to Sentai Filmworks you can even buy it new for sensible money, which is a rarity for these articles.  Actually, and incredibly bizarrely, this is also true of Sword for Truth, but for goodness' sake, don't be tempted!  And Legend of the Last Labyrinth has all but vanished from the Earth, a sad but probably not altogether undeserved fate.

Next time around: some better stuff, I promise!



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

Working From Home Lock-down Special

I've been buried pretty deeply in struggling to get books done in time to hit a couple of looming deadlines, and sticking my head out the door was a luxury before it officially became one, but even I haven't failed to notice that there's some serious craziness going on out there.  One obvious effect of that is that an awful lot of people have found themselves attempting something I've been wrestling with for around seven years now: working from home and trying to stay vaguely sane while doing so.  As much as I generally prefer it, it's not always the easiest lifestyle, especially if you also happen to live alone.  So here, for whatever good they may do, are a few snippets of advice I've learned the hard way...

Set Your Own Schedule and Keep to It

It's a good idea to keep to an approximation of whatever hours you're used to, but why not use them as a guideline instead of a rule?  One of the joys of home working is that you're less obliged to do things just because that's how they're done.  So set your own hours, but don't make them silly; it may seem you're at your most productive towards midnight or at five in the morning, but it's awfully easy to wreck your body clock and keeping to something like a traditional routine is likelier to stave that off.  If you've no reason to keep weekends free, consider taking a day off in the week instead, you may find that only working two or three days in a row does wonders for your concentration.  Stick to regular mealtimes.  Take breaks, and use them to move around.  If you're sitting at a computer, make damn sure to get away from it every few minutes and go and stare out a window or something, your brain will be clearer by the time you get back.  Most crucially, set yourself a realistic stopping time that leaves you space to chill out and eat and all that basic human stuff.

Have a Dedicated Work Space

This one's really important for two reasons.  First, it's handy to have a physical reminder that you're supposed to be in work mode, and having a space - be it a dedicated room or just a specific seat at the kitchen table that you wouldn't otherwise sit at - is the best way of establishing that.  It might seem like a treat to grab your laptop and climb back into bed, but treats are better not done all the time and, given that you're potentially going to be at this for a long time, you really need to be thinking about all that health and safety stuff your employer used to do all the worrying about.  Then, on the other hand, and maybe even more vitally, you need a way of knowing that the working day is over, and that's ten times harder when your work space and your relaxing space are one and the same.

Slob a Bit, but Not Too Much

For years of self-employment, I forced myself to get dressed in something that wasn't pyjamas and a T-shirt because I'd read that was a thing you ought to do to be productive.  But you know what?  It doesn't make an ounce of a difference.  In those early days, though?  I think it probably did.  At any rate, the point is that the balance is a personal thing, but there definitely is a balance.  Needless to say, whatever you're wearing, make sure it's clean, and don't allow days to go by without a shower.  Even if you're not liable to see anyone, letting your personal hygiene slip even a little will just make you feel crummy.  That aside, it's worth testing the balance between comfort and discipline.  It may be that your brain needs the ritual of putting on smart clothes to remind itself that you're supposed to doing something productive, or maybe the more chilled you are, the more you get done.  But whatever your assumptions, it's worth trying the opposite approach to make certain you've got it right.

Light and Fresh Air Are Your Friends

If, like me, you like your working environment to be somewhat dark and as quiet as possible, and if like me you can easily go a week without stepping outside when you're really in full-on work mode, this one can be a lifesaver, because it turns out that the human brain doesn't respond well to constant gloom and stale air.  Crack a window; keep the curtains open, if not in your work space then in adjacent rooms that you can amble into when you need a break.  But working in direct sunlight often isn't terribly practical, and relying on daylight sucks on those gloomy, overcast days, so I heartily recommend investing in a daylight bulb or two.  These little beauties do pretty much what they say on the tin, and though they take some getting used to, they make an enormous difference.

Gamify Everything

This one's a good general rule for life: most things are more fun if you make them, well, more fun.  This is difficult to do in the average work environment, where people expect you to behave at least something like an adult, but at home?  Why the heck not?  If there's a way to make a task that tiny bit more enjoyable then, hey, go for it.  Even if that means it takes slightly longer, the payoff is that you'll spend less time hating what your doing.  Not everyone can work to music, but if you can, that'll certainly help.  In general, what you're looking for are minor distractions of a sort that let you quickly reset your brain, unlike rubbish distractions such as Facebook or Youtube that eat up half an hour before you realise what you've clicked on.

Be the Tough But Fair Boss You've Never Had

Most bosses are jerks, right?  But now that you have a lot more control over your minute-to-minute routine, you're essentially your own line manager, and you don't have to be.  However, that's not to say you aren't going to need a ton of discipline; even if you're a workaholic, there'll be days when you've had enough.  As much as it sounds like a sure route to madness, it helps to separate out the boss you and the employee you and to give them both a fair hearing - which really just adds up to taking the time to honestly imagine what those perspectives would be.  Objectively, have you been slacking all day?  Then admit it to yourself and do better tomorrow.  Have you worked until you can't see straight?  Then be more careful to stick to the hours you've set down and take sensible breaks.

-oOo-

Hopefully that's some help to someone!  The short version mostly amounts to taking the time to think through how you do things and consciously experimenting rather than letting yourself sink into bad habits.  And the even shorter version amounts to, take good care of yourself and do whatever is necessary to keep from going crazy.  Working from home can be brilliant, but it can just as easily be a nightmare, and as with most things, getting it right takes both thought and effort.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 64

These eighties posts are getting distressingly regular, aren't they?  The truth is that, as far as my tastes go, there's a sweet spot that stretches from somewhere in the mid eighties to somewhere in the mid nineties: that window in which the industry perfected its craft and set aside some of the wonkier traditions of the seventies, through the massive explosion of anime in both Japan and the West, to the point at which the mainstream application of computers temporarily buggered things up, while everyone figured out how to make use of their potential in ways that didn't look horribly cheap.

And enough with the excuses, because we have a couple of real gems this time, along with a pair of titles that are at least well worth a look, in the shape of Toward the Terra, Birth: A War of Two Worlds, Area 88, and Devilman: The Birth...

Toward the Terra, 1980, dir: Hideo Onchi

When I say that Toward the Terra is old-fashioned sci-fi, I mean more than the fact that it's nearly forty years old - though, unless you watch a lot of pre-twentieth century anime, that's certainly going to be what jumps out at you most, because it belongs overwhelmingly to another era in a manner that work from even eight or nine years later wouldn't.  But even if you could strip away those simplified, androgynous character designs and the slight but ever-present stiltedness in the animation, this would still feel like it belonged to a different age: one in which a two hour science-fiction film could get away with being more about ideas and principles than plot or characters, let alone feel the need to busy itself with messy action sequences when we could be watching scene after scene of people talking.

Now, personally I love me some old-school, ideas-driven science fiction, and Toward the Terra is awfully close to that.  In fact, back in 1980, I imagine it was precisely that, and it's no-one's fault that four decades have made most of those ideas more familiar than they once were.  Then again, given how much it draws upon Brave New World, a novel that was already half a century old, I guess it wasn't precisely cutting edge even when it came out.  At any rate, as our tale kicks off, it's the far-flung future and mankind, having wrecked Earth beyond habitation, has been forced to take extreme measures: the remainder of humanity lives on distant worlds, with their existence managed down to the last detail by omnipotent supercomputers.  Or so it would seem, but for the existence of the Mu, a despised branch of physically weak yet psychic humans who are thriving in exile despite all attempts to stamp them out.  So it is that, rather than have his memories wiped when he hits fourteen, like all the other good little test-tube-bred humans, Jomy Marcus Shin finds himself whisked away to become the Mu's new leader, inheriting the responsibilities - and the consciousness - of the role's previous incumbent.  Jomy has some radical ideas, like growing food in fields and growing people inside other people, and while he's content to experiment with them in peace, he's not going to get the chance when his very existence threatens the status quo.

So like I said, I love me a bit of ideas-driven sci-fi, but it does help if those ideas have been thought through.  As much as Jomy is our protagonist and as much as we're encouraged to sympathise with the Mu, based on all the information we're given, they're objectively in the wrong.  Since it's there in the title, it's not a huge spoiler to reveal that, as the plot develops, their main goal basically becomes "Let's go back to Earth and live precisely the way people used to, only hopefully it'll work out better this time."  We're never led to believe that the ordered society of the non-Mu humans wasn't a necessary measure, or that the threat of environmental destruction was exaggerated, and not once does Jomy engage with those questions, though the film kind of does, in a fitful, half-hearted fashion.  Basically, Jomy is right because the narrative wants him to be right, and because nature is good and science is bad, even when that science is trying to save nature, or some damn thing.

The end result is a film I wanted badly to like, but only enjoyed in brief spurts.  Even putting aside the fact that Jomy's plan doesn't extend far beyond "Let's try doing that thing that went terribly the last time!" he's not a terribly appealing protagonist; the sort-of villain, Keith Anyan, is a lot more fun to be around, and also the audience surrogate when it comes to actually asking a few vital questions.  But even he can't keep the proceedings from feeling dry and academic, which would be fine if they were a touch smarter and more original, or even if we had some really eye-popping visuals to hold the attention.  Toward the Terra is quality work, there's no doubt about that, and the passage of forty years has been pretty kind to it; but there's not quite enough here to warrant hunting it out for anyone who doesn't find the notion of early eighties anime exciting in and of itself.

Birth: A War of Two Worlds, 1984, dir: Shin'ya Sadamitsu

Do you love animation?  Are you fascinated by watching intricate shots of characters and objects spiralling through three-dimensional spaces, with the camera swirling and zooming and swooping in giddy circles?  Are you obsessive enough in your love of animation that you don't really mind if everything else - plot, characterisation, even design work - is a bit on the simplistic side?  Then it's fair to say you'll get something out of Birth.

I do love animation a whole lot, enough that I'll turn a blind eye to some fairly substantial failings, and I certainly did like it - though even then I had to take a break halfway through, because you can like something and still find it damn exhausting.  Birth is almost too animated, and it was a revelation to realise that, economics aside, perhaps a part of why most anime includes the occasional still frame or pan of an inanimate scene is to give the viewer's eyes and brain a rest.  Everything in Birth moves, all the time: even things like conversations, which would normally be exploited for a bit of discreet corner-cutting, are in perpetual motion.  But then, the film has little time for conversations, or for anything that isn't action: its plot boils down to "there are people and there are robots and they're fighting" and, without a word of a lie, a good three quarters of what's on offer falls into that category, be it an elaborate bike chase through a mountainous desert or a game of hide and seek with a giant mechanical horror in the ruins of a decimated city.

Mind you, it occurs to me that I'm making it sound violent, and it's not really that, because another crucial point is how decidedly goofy Birth is.  Sometimes that's in ways traditional to anime, such as a running joke about an elderly couple that seems to exist purely so that the viewer can get increasingly puzzled by when, if ever, it might tie into the main plot.  But more often it's the goofiness of, say, a Road Runner cartoon, which makes perfect sense for a movie as obsessed with physical movement for its own sake as this one is.  Oh, and there's a rather demented, rather marvellous early Joe Hisaishi score, notable for how much more experimental it is than his more familiar work for Studio Ghibli and how much fun he's obviously having.  Yet again, it's goofy and playful, those being the two words that sum up Birth by far the best.

I don't know if anyone could possibly call the film an uncompromised success, not when it's so focused on a handful of elements at the expense of all else.  And it's not even like it's trying to do those elements well in a traditional sense: the animation is delirious and joyful, but none of it's exceptionally good by the usual metrics, and the trade-off for so much movement is that most of the running time takes place in the same barren desert and the characters look like something from a kids' cartoon.  And like I said, the plot is so simple as to be basically nonexistent, and the glimpses of a wider universe that we get don't add up to much - certainly not to a satisfying ending, though at least it concludes in a way that feels true to its wacky vision.  There were moments when I adored Birth, a few where I watched in baffled amusement, and, yes, the odd one where I wished it would settle down and let me catch my breath.  And with all that said, it's frequently astonishing and not quite like anything else in the world of anime, which means that, though it's nigh impossible to track down these days*, if you're a true lover of animation, you owe it to yourself to try.

Area 88, 1985, dir: Hisayuki Toriumi

One of the great tragedies in anime is the mission drift of the straight-to-video OVA format, arguably a victim of its own success.  Many a great title would be released that way over the years, but by the nineties they'd often be indistinguishable from costlier TV shows both in their animation quality and their subject matter.  Not so a show like Area 88, which simply couldn't function as anything other than what it is, not only because it clearly cost a fortune but because its subject matter is so resolutely downbeat and harrowing that it basically demands an adult viewer.

Let's cover the second of those points first: Area 88 is the tale of Shin Kazama, a promising civilian pilot who finds himself tricked by his supposedly closest friend Satoru Kanzaki into signing a contract that allows him to be shanghaied into the foreign legion air force of the civil-war-torn nation of Arslan - a thinly veiled Iran - where he's informed that he has three options if he ever intends to return home: carry out three years of military service, buy his contract out for the sum of $1.5 million, or desert and risk the consequences.  Reasoning that the middle option poses the best balance of risk and reward, Shin sets to earning the gigantic ransom fee; but in the meantime, Kanzaki is not only courting Shin's fiance Ryoko, he's manoeuvring to take over the airline company she's heir to, and all the while Shin is learning that not only is earning $1.5 million a slow process but that killing is something he has a gift, and perhaps even a taste, for.

So not exactly a barrel of laughs then, and it's to Area 88's considerable credit that it stays on the right side of watchable without mitigating the overall grimness.  It helps immensely that the animation is barnstorming stuff: on the one hand because it's hard not to be entranced by the sheer complexity and level of detail and on the other because watching a fighter plane or a human body being shredded by machine gun fire is that bit more affecting when every impact has been drawn meticulously.  Meticulous, in fact, is the word that sums up most of what's on offer, and it's present from the very opening, a battle between Shin's fighter jet and a pack of tanks that doesn't seem to care that both planes and tanks are bloody difficult objects to draw when they're moving in three dimensions.  It's the sort of sequence you'd expect to be an eye-grabbing one off, but Area 88 will be just as show-offy time and time again across the course of its three and a bit hours.  Indeed, the two best sequences, a massive dogfight and a night approach through a tight canyon, are both crammed into the last segment.

One more thing that's remarkable about the show: you'd think that compiling the manga's vast source material into three episodes (or two in the theatrical cut that lumps the first two parts together) would be doomed to failure, and for a while it seems that might be the case.  The opening half, though never less than great, is noticeably episodic.  However, by the end, it's astonishing just how much director Toriumi and writer Akiyoshi Sakai have managed to carve a coherent arc out of such a wealth of material, and the last hour in particularly is extraordinarily satisfying, emotive stuff.  In general, its flaws are trivial indeed - some overly juvenile character designs that date the material and a score that leans too heavily into gee-whiz excitement and doomed romance - but its virtues place it firmly in the top tier of OVAs, and of anime in general.  Area 88 is stunning, bruising, adult storytelling, and very much a must see.

Devilman: The Birth, 1987, dir: Umanosuke Iida

Devilman: The Birth opens on beautifully painted vistas, accompanied by a lilting orchestral score.  The scene drifts over primordial jungle to a vast lake, above which angelic-looking humanoid creatures are playing.  Then, before we've remotely had time to get to grips with what's happening, a grotesque worm monster with eyes on sprouting tendrils has snatched one of them from the air and wolfed them down; other monsters do likewise, until one of the angel-creatures decides they've had enough, at which point they fire a beam from their hands that effectively nukes the site from orbit, presumably by the logic that it's the only way to be sure.

It's a genuinely stunning sequence, aesthetically so because it really is lovely, even when it's being incredibly grotesque, to the point where I couldn't stop being reminded of Disney's Fantasia even as blood was spattering and monsters were being reduced to their constituent atoms.  But it's stunning on a storytelling level as well, ambushing the viewer not once but twice, first with the drastic shift into horror - there's a fantastic moment where the score clings onto the mood from the earlier sequence, as though it hasn't quite caught up with what's happening - and then again with the revelation that the creatures we'd taken to be victims were every bit as deadly as the ones attacking them and more so.  And last but not least, it's a stunningly audacious opening, because it really doesn't have a lot to do with the specific tale that Devilman: The Birth is telling.

That tale is much more familiar than the bravura opening minutes might suggest, especially if you've watched much horror anime from the period, revolving around teen hero Akira Fudou's discovery that the only way to combat an ancient race of demonic beings is to combine with one and bend their powers to his will.  But the actual storytelling still has tricks up its sleeve, and as brilliantly as it begins, there's better to come; another, similar sequence around the midway point uses the groundwork set up by that prologue to go to even weirder, grosser heights.  And there's plenty of weird grossness elsewhere.  I wouldn't always count that as a virtue, but Devilman: The Birth has two major advantages: first, enough imagination for the horror to feel genuinely freakish and transgressive, and second some truly excellent animation.  I mentioned Fantasia before, and while we're not quite at that level, this would certainly rival many a mid-tier Disney movie.  So imagine a Disney film that includes a scene of a demon car trying to devour its passengers and you'll probably be thinking along the right lines, and also have a fairly good idea of whether this is for you.

-oOo-

It may just be my bad memory, but this feels like one of the strongest sets of titles I've talked about in quite some time.  Area 88 is a classic that I can't recommend highly enough; Devilman: The Birth is too if you're into your gross-out horror or enough of an animation fan to bask in its terrific craftsmanship.  And while Birth: A War of Two Worlds is perhaps no work of art or masterpiece of coherent storytelling, it's a treat in its right, doing thrilling things with the medium that are more than enough to justify its existence.  That just leaves the solid but unspectacular Toward the Terra, and any post where the weakest entry is solid but unspectacular counts as a definite win.



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


* You can find it on Youtube, under one of its alternate titles of World of the Talisman, but only in Russian so far as I could tell.  Fortunately, if ever there was a title where not knowing what anyone's saying is unlikely to spoil your enjoyment much, it's Birth.

You Don't Have to be a Superhero to Watch This...

I spend way too much time talking about my own projects here on the blog, and definitely way too much time talking about vintage anime, so it's nice to have a topic that's neither of those things.  Okay, it is a little bit about me, but we'll come back to that.  In the meantime, take a minute to watch the following short trailer.  Don't worry, I'll wait.

That was a bit more than a minute, wasn't it?  But hey, it's fine, it's not like I've anything better to be doing.  Anyway, great trailer, right?  Awesome concept, right?  You want to watch more, right?  Well, you can, right now, for free, because the entire show, in eleven mini-episodes, is available at this link.  But hey, this time maybe wait until I've finished the post, huh?

Right.  Good.  So, that's You Don't Have to be a Superhero to Work Here but It Helps..., and it's the brainchild of my oldest and dearest friend Lawrence Axe, and an endeavour more years in the making than either of us would entirely care to think about: Lawrence because it's always frustrating when you have a fantastic idea that refuses to quite get to the point where you can show it to other people and me because I've been radiating around this project ever since the beginning.

Indeed, for a while I was doing more than that: there's a version of a feature film-length script in existence that I had a hand in, and for a while it looked as though that would be the form that saw the light of day.  I love that script with all my heart, but in hindsight, it's right that the version that eventually made it to screens was principally Lawrence's creation: he co-directed the web series that its become along with fellow filmmaker Robbie Gibbon, wrote the bulk of the script, did the editing, and was responsible for a whole bunch of other behind-the-scenes stuff too.  And the upshot of that is that its current incarnation is about as unfiltered as any version got; people like me tended to get itchy about his mixing up of heroes and villains and comic book characters with cartoon characters, and to not realise that doing that is just plain funny.  I mean, it is; watch the show!  It's the perfect combination of affection and disrespect, and if its off-kilter skewering of our childhood nostalgia was a neat idea when Lawrence first had it, it's a downright perfect one now, when we're being fed all the childhood nostalgia we can stomach on a minutely basis.

And let me stress again, it really is funny.  The show, I mean, not the endless parade of nostalgia.  The funniest bits in the trailer are by no means the funniest bits full stop, I know for a fact that Lawrence picked them largely at random, and could get away with doing so because every minute is crammed to the rafters with great gags and generally amusing weirdness.  There were some lines in the treatment I worked on that still crack me up to remember, and obviously it would have been nice for both of us to go to Hollywood and drink margaritas with George Clooney and whatever it is Hollywood people do, but, again, these glorious bite-sized chunks of silliness are the ideal form for You Don't Have to be a Superhero to Work Here but It Helps..., in all its wry dementedness.

And here I am talking it up when you could just as easily be watching it yourself.  Go on, now's your chance!  Unlike, say, Avengers: Infinity War, you can binge watch all of You Don't Have to be a Superhero to Work Here but It Helps... in a long lunch break, which of course makes it much better.  And to save you wasting precious seconds by scrolling all the way back up to the top, here's that link again...

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 63

The posts where I randomly talk about whatever happens to come off the to-watch shelf have been getting increasingly uncommon of late, but to make up for it, this is about as random as it could get: a couple of very different flavours of sci-fi, a bit of raunchy comedy, and is this the first straight-up romance anime that I've covered?  I think it might be.

Put all  that together and we have: Golden Boy, Megazone 23 Part 2: Please Give Me Your Secret, Marriage, and Harlock Saga...

Golden Boy, 1995, dir: Hiroyuki Kitakubo

Here's what happens in the first episode of the six part OVA Golden Boy: twenty-five-year-old Kintaro begs his way into a job at a software development firm staffed entirely by women, then proceeds to screw up repeatedly while behaving like a massive sex pest.  (He has a particular fondness for rubbing himself on toilets.)  He somehow manages to get away with this behaviour for a few weeks, until a particularly catastrophic mistake sees the studio's latest project deleted and him unceremoniously fired.  But there's a twist!  While Kintaro was giving every impression of being useless, he was actually learning everything the women around him knew, and he single-handedly rewrites the software, only in a fraction of the time and better!  Needless to say, his former boss deeply regrets firing the young genius, but too late, he's already moved on - because, as will become apparent from the subsequent episodes, Kintaro's basically the Littlest Hobo if the Littlest Hobo was a colossal pervert instead of, you know, a dog.

What's galling - I mean, other than the entire concept! - is that when Golden Boy isn't embracing this formula, it's much, much better and often legitimately funny.  I mean, I guess there are people who find watching a guy rubbing himself on a toilet funny, what with humour being subjective and everything, so perhaps what I mean is that it's legitimately clever and novel in its humour: when the stentorian announcer who closes off each episode first reveals the secret behind Kintaro's weird lifestyle, for instance, it's a truly excellent gag.  And the better episodes stray far enough from the core idea of "Kintaro behaves like a letch, then is better than women at everything" to become genuinely entertaining stories in their own right.  For the most part, also, Golden Boy gets better as it goes along, and the last two episodes are comfortably the best.  For that matter, when Kintaro isn't being a jerk who literally can't see women as human beings, he's kind of a decent guy, one with a sound work ethic and a fascinating outlook: he roams the land taking job after job because he sees life as an opportunity to learn as much as possible.

Ultimately, though, what made it tough for me to dislike Golden Boy the way I felt I was going to based on the first episode is that it looks terrific.  I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the best-looking OVAs I've encountered, and there are scenes that wouldn't embarrass themselves in a feature from the time; a bike versus motorbike race in the penultimate episode is a tremendous sequence, not to mention a comic high point, and the opening credits are a sterling piece of animation in their own right.  Indeed, there's a real sense of love for the medium, as evidenced by the final episode, which is set in an anime studio and manages to wrap up proceedings on a far less sour note than the one they began on.  The result is a show that I flat-out hated at points, but also one that I can see why there's so much affection for out there.  I found too much of it obnoxious to go that far, but if ecchi humour is your thing, there are reasons why Golden Boy is considered a paragon of that subgenre.

Megazone 23 Part 2: Please Give Me Your Secret, 1986, dir: Ichirô Itano

If you haven't seen the original Megazone 23 in roughly the last ten minutes, this second part is assuredly not for you.  It couldn't make less effort to fill in vital back story or to avoid chucking the viewer in at the deep end and then not much caring whether they swim.  However, if you have seen Megazone 23 recently, you might find yourself equally as confused; months have elapsed since its ambiguous finale with little explanation, and perhaps more crucially, all of the character designs have changed, as indeed has the entire aesthetic, replacing its softer, curvier, cartoonier look with something a good deal busier and grittier.

And that's Megazone 23: Part 2 all over, really.  I genuinely get the impression it considers itself a faithful sequel: the actual part 2 that it claims to be, and so effectively the second half of a single entity.  Plot-wise that makes a considerable amount of sense; we're watching the same characters in broadly the same scenario, and all the dangling threads left over by Megazone 23's very open ending are picked up and dealt with to at least some degree.  So it's surprising how tonally at odds it manages to feel.  It's hard to fault the creators for that decision: our protagonist, Shogo Yahagi, is a very different person in very different circumstances to the cheerful, naive hero of the first part, and he can't unlearn that movie's twists.  But it doesn't altogether explain how much darker everything has suddenly got, let alone how violent.  I'm not easily shocked, but, in part because the first movie was so relatively tame, I was taken aback by how gory this second entry got in places: one sequence in particular is downright nasty.  And for that matter, there's a sex scene that makes the one in Megazone 23, and indeed those in ninety-nine percent of anime that isn't actual hentai, look awfully timid.

Then there's the animation - and I hardly know what to say about the animation.  I don't doubt for a second that it cost a lot of money, because it's littered with the sorts of ambitious shots that don't come cheap, and the level of detail is overwhelming in places, to an extent that I've seen almost nowhere else in anime.  It's tremendously busy work, and tremendously show-offy, and at the same time, it's frequently a little bit terrible.  Countless shots are subtly but distinctively off in a manner that you wouldn't expect from experienced animators, as though everyone was so caught up in the ambition of what they were doing that they never entirely got around to finishing anything.

Taken all together, it really is befuddling: it feels like a sequel made by people who were given all the resources they could need on the back of a successful first entry, and were determined to do it justice and to make its fans happy and to draw its narrative to a satisfactory conclusion, and at the same time didn't really like it very much and secretly wanted to chuck the lot out the window and do their own thing.  Really, Megazone 23: Part 2 is closer to what would have happened if Akira had continued in the vein of its opening twenty minutes for its entire length, only with the plot of Megazone 23 intruding every so often.  And as much as I've probably made this sound terrible, the truth is that I found it exhilarating, and in many ways exactly the sequel I'd have hoped would follow the fun, imaginative, but ever-so-slightly lacklustre first entry.  Megazone 23: Part 2 is nuts, and a mess, and for every moment of brilliance, there's a shot that's totally wonky or an element that doesn't work, but by damn its not short of energy or risk-taking or moments of visual brilliance.

Marriage, 1995, dir: Kazuhiro Ozawa

It's hard to know what to make of the 1995 OVA Marriage.  Even pinning down precisely what it is hasn't been as easy as I'd have hoped, and though the most plausible suggestion I've come across is that it's an adaptation of one of those dating simulator games that are such an untranslatable feature of the Japanese cultural landscape, I'm not altogether sure that's the case.  It certainly has to be the epitome of AnimeWorks' fetish for releasing anything they could lay their hands on, though who they were imagining the target audience to be is anyone's guess.  Oh, I totally see an argument for bringing romance anime over, and that's kind of what I was expecting this to be.  But, based largely on this release and its reviews, it seems fair to say that, at least in 1995, what counted as romantic in Japan was very much not what counted as romantic in the US or Europe.  Because Marriage is hella unromantic.  It's actually kind of forcibly anti-romantic for the most part, in its headlong focus on a single goal at the exclusion of all else.  And you can guess what that goal is, right?  It's there in the title.

What we have amounts to two short stories.  At the time, I thought that many of the cast of twenty-something career women and their male friends and co-workers carried over from one to the other, but having read the back of the box, they're apparently different people who just look the same.  Anyway, in the first, the group try and find a match for the shy Shizuka, by any and all means necessary, and the result is a moderately charming insight into the life of Japanese career women in the mid-nineties, along with the arcane mysteries of the dating scene they put themselves though.  The characters are shallow, but they're deftly portrayed, and though she's subjected to a tooth-grittingly ghastly date at one point, there's the sense that things are going to work out okay for Shizuka.  But then comes along episode two - with a different writer, notably - and boy does everything just explode into a horrible mess.  In this one, the clones of the cast from part one are four sisters trying to fix up their fifth sibling, Kiyomi, the only one not yet to tie the knot.  And wouldn't you know it, even as the topic gets raised, a suitor arrives, in the shape of Mikimaro, who's been hankering after Kiyomi in secret for goodness knows how long.  Well, what can the sisters do except school him on how best to propose?

The correct answer is anything, because Mikimaro is a creepy little sod without a single redeeming feature, and the closest he comes to displaying an actual personality is when he loses his temper at Kiyomi for not taking him seriously, a genuinely shocking moment that couldn't ring many more alarm bells if it tried.  Add to that the fact that Kiyomi is clearly hung up on her philandering ex, and her seemingly overwhelming indifference to Mikimaro, and the strong implication that she has no real interest in getting married full stop, and the result is excruciating, not to mention impossible to parse as entertainment.  Surely we're not supposed to be on man-child Mikimaro's side?  Surely our role as audience members isn't to will Kiyomi into this miserable union?  Who the hell knows?  But it's an agonising experience, all right.

What that means is one episode that's vaguely interesting on the level of cultural insight, though certainly not as romance, and one episode that's actively uncomfortable on any level whatsoever.  And neither of them has anything remotely exciting happening on the level of animation or design, though they look fine as these things go, and certainly neither impresses with their achingly bland music.  So unless you're researching dating practices in nineties Japan, or obsessively picking up AnimeWorks' bewildering catalogue so that you can be snarky about it on your blog, it's tough to say why anyone might consider tracking this one down.  I won't pretend it wasn't a little fascinating, but then so are car crashes, and you probably oughtn't to spend money to watch one of those.

Harlock Saga, 1999, dir: Yoshio Takeuchi

It makes me a touch sad that, with the occasional exception, I can't quite fall in love with the works of Leiji Matsumoto, because I feel like I should.  And that's truer of Harlock Saga than most of what I've come across, which has all the virtues of the better entries - the grand scope, the dizzy romanticism, the treatment of absolutely preposterous notions with such straight-faced solemnity that you can't but buy into them - and adds a whole extra layer of ludicrous ambition.  For Harlock Saga, you see, is not just any Matsumoto story, but an adaptation of Wagner's Das Rheingold, the first part of his vast musical drama Der Ring des Nibelungen.

That right: it's Wagner dressed up as space opera.  And if you're anything like me, and even if you don't like Wagner - do people like Wagner these days? - it's awfully hard not to get excited about the sheer, crazy aspiration of that prospect.  Not only that, but if anyone in the world of manga and anime was likely to be a solid fit for a science-fictional Wagner adaptation, it would surely be Matsumoto, whose Harlock universe operates in precisely that sort of mythic register, where everything and everyone is larger than life and the fates of entire galaxies rest on the shoulders of a stoic few.  Indeed, there's an argument to be made that the Harlock-verse actually works better with an injection of Wagner, since it means that the material is firing on all the same cylinders as the general atmosphere.

And that's not mentioning the production standards.  Aside from the odd bit of misjudged CG work, this is as good looking as any Matsumoto adaptation, and he's a writer who invariably seems to get the deluxe treatment.  That CG aside, there's nothing that would place it at the back end of the 1990's; indeed, a faithful adherence to Matsumoto's distinctive aesthetic gives it such an air of timelessness that it could easily have been made ten or even twenty years earlier.  Probably the animation was computer-assisted to a greater or lesser degree, but it certainly looks hand drawn, and wonderfully so.  There are no end of elaborate shots, all pulled off with considerable flourish, and the animators rise to the challenge of conjuring the scale and majesty that's integral to such a story.  Though arguably even better is Kaoru Wada's score, which draws extensively on Wagner's influence without lifting directly - the exception, perhaps inevitably, being an appearance of that most famous of pieces, Ride of the Valkyries.  At any rate, pair that music and those images together and the results are frequently magical.

So what's the problem?  The problem is exactly the same one I've had with every Harlock story I've come across: Matsumoto has no time for those aspects of storytelling that everyone else considers to be more or less essential.  Want even a hint of character development?  Not a chance!  Heck, for the most part, the cast of Harlock Saga don't even do anything, and that's truest of Harlock himself, who effectively stands around being inscrutable until he's required to act, for all of about thirty seconds, in the last of the show's six episodes.  As outrageously epic as the proceedings may be, on a minute by minute basis, they're hollow, a tale of puppets that could never be mistaken for living, breathing people.  Truth be told, that's less bothersome here than elsewhere - it's Wagner, for crying out loud, it's not like we really need relatable, dynamic characters - and for that reason, I'd rate this that bit higher than other Matsumoto adaptations I've come across.  Still, it's a shame, because as special as Harlock Saga undoubtedly is, it wouldn't have taken a lot to nudge it into genuine masterpiece territory.

-oOo-

Unsurprisingly, the results were just as random as the choice of titles: Harlock Saga and Megazone Part 2 are both pretty splendid, though with obvious flaws, Golden Boy bounces between good and dreadful, and Marriage ... well, the first episode was okay, I guess?  Then again, the second episode is among the most painful things I've ever sat through, so overall it's pretty damn wretched.

Next time around: we're heading back to the eighties again without a hint of shame, because I'm not really pretending anymore that I'm keeping this Sisyphean lunacy to a single decade!



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

Announcing To End All Wars

It felt like I spent the back end of last year sitting on more news than I was sharing, but finally I get to announce one of those big secrets that it's been driving me crazy to keep quiet about, and that's that my novel To End All Wars will be coming out this year from publisher Aethon Books.  Indeed, it's actually quite far on in the process, as I'll come to in a minute, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's out sooner rather than later.

To End All Wars was one of three novels that materialised out of the reckless burst of creativity that was my first year of writing full time - the other two being The Bad Neighbour and what ended up as A Savage Generation, both of which have since come out via Flame Tree Press.  But of those projects, To End All Wars was by far the most personal, the most ambitious, and probably in many ways the most difficult, both from the point of view of writing it and the point of view of subsequently convincing anyone that it was a valid commercial prospect.  For To End All Wars belongs to what, so far as I can tell, is an extremely small sub-genre, maybe even a sub-genre of one: it's a serious science-fiction story set during the First World War.  Or, thinking about it, maybe it's a novel about the First World War that happens to contain some elements of science-fiction, but either way, there are surprisingly few books out there that bring the two together.

But Aethon, thank goodness, were willing to look past that hard-to-categorise awkwardness to the equally hard to categorise book underneath.  They're a new publisher for me, and their approach is excitingly different to what I'm used to: To End All Wars will be out in all the usual formats, but there's an added focus on the audio edition, which they're putting a good deal more care into than usual.  And for that reason and others, while I've been unusually lucky on that front, I  suspect this one's going to be in a whole 'nother league.  The book's currently in the hands of actor Macleod Andrews and, based on the brief sample I've heard, I've got absolute confidence that he'll bring infinitely more to it than a mere reading, because that sample was as faithful to the tone of To End All Wars as I could have hoped for.  Oh, and the same, by the way, goes for the cover art; isn't that stunning?  I'm still amazed every time I see it, it's so precisely what I had in mind and so full of the sort of period-specific detail that only a seriously dedicated artist would bother to get right.

The upshot is, the book of mine that I'm perhaps proudest of, and certainly poured most of myself into, is finally close to seeing the light of the day, Aethon are knocking it out of the park on the presentation front, and I can't wait to have it out there and in people's hands - and, perhaps even more so, their ears.  As ever, I'm bound to be talking a lot more about this one now that the cat's out of the bag, and hopefully that'll include a release date in the not-too-distant future.  But for the moment, I guess I'll just go back to gaping at that cover art in slack-jawed delight and listening to Macleod's sample recording over and over again.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 62

It says a lot about the breadth and depth of nineties anime - and of how grossly I underestimated that when I began this! - that here, some sixty and a bit posts in, we're finally getting to one of its most seminal and enduring franchises.  But there's no more putting it off: it's time to grapple with Sailor Moon, which until this post I'd only seen a few episodes of from the original TV series.  However, there were movies too, and three of them fell in our decade of choice, so there's really no excuse not to take a look, is there?

This time around: Sailor Moon R: The Movie: The Promise of the Rose, Sailor Moon S: The Movie: Hearts in Ice, Sailor Moon Super S The Movie: Black Dream Hole, and, er, Sailor Victory...

Sailor Moon R: The Movie: The Promise of the Rose, 1993, dir: Kunihiko Ikuhara

Sailor Moon is a heck of an interesting series in and of itself, one that countless essays could and no doubt have been written about; even a straightforward-seeming question like "Is it feminist" is rife with complications when viewed through the lens of three decades.  But while all of that's hard to ignore if you happen to be coming back to the franchise after many years away, it ended up not being what intrigued me most with this first film.  Because Sailor Moon R: The Movie happens to have been directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, and Ikuhara would go on to direct Revolutionary Girl Utena, and I happen to consider Revolutionary Girl Utena one of the finest anime shows ever created, not to mention one of the finest cultural works of the twentieth century full stop.

Given the extent to which Utena would revolve around confronting traditional notions of gender and sexuality, and how explicitly queer its narrative would become by the time it got around to Adolescence of Utena, it's no surprise to find similar subject matter being explored here, albeit less directly.  The main antagonist's motivation is born of what amounts to a misplaced gay crush, though importantly there's never any suggestion that the gayness is the part of that equation that's misplaced.  It's easy to imagine a very different take on the narrative, and to suppose that the reason we got a version that refuses to remotely judge its nominal villain for his sexuality is down to the fact that Ikuhara was at the helm.

Still, not judging is a far cry from Utena's eager embracing, and in truth, on that and other levels, the most unsatisfying aspect of the Sailor Moon R movie is that it doesn't push further into being a Kunihiko Ikuhara film.  Though it would be another three years before he stepped away due to a lack of creative control, you can feel him champing at the bit, teasing the limits of what something like this could be.  There's a deep streak of surrealism that bubbles through frequently, a visual boldness that hints at the sort of off-kilter imagery that would dominate in Utena, and more generally, a wealth of details that are simply weird or interesting for no apparent reason other than that Ikuhara takes pleasure in interesting weirdness.  Take, for example, the first time we see Tuxedo Mask, where he steps from a billboard poster showing similarly dressed figures, or the faintly distressing sequence in which child character Chibi-Usa conjures a very real-looking gun from thin air and shoots Sailor Moon at point blank range with what turns out to be a motivational message.

As such, the worst that can be said about the film is that it feels as though it could be more than it is.  That's aggravated by the slender running time: though many an anime movie has done wonders in making an hour feel like feature length, here the result is more like an extended episode (albeit with considerably classier animation) and we're never really encouraged to take the end-of-the-world conflict seriously.  For better or worse, the focus is always on personal, individual stakes.  No, let's be fair, it mostly is for the better, and aside from Ikuhara's attempts to do legitimately creative things with what might easily have been a bit of insubstantial fluff, it's where Sailor Moon R: The Movie most succeeds: for all that it's surprisingly violent in places, the end result is tremendously kind-hearted and positive.  I guess that makes it a very good Sailor Moon movie, and one only kept from full-on greatness by a lack of ambition and the unfair knowledge that its creator would go on to something that allowed him a far broader canvas on which to experiment.

Sailor Moon S: The Movie: Hearts in Ice, 1994, dir: Hiroki Shibata

Compared with the first film, Sailor Moon S: Hearts in Ice is a trivial bit of business, and it's not as if Sailor Moon R: The Movie was exactly weighty drama.  Still, by comparison with the fluffy non-crisis on offer here, it feels as though it was.  Our nominal antagonist is some sort of extraterrestrial ice witch by the name of Princess Snow Kaguya, but the film doesn't foreground her much or take her very seriously, and in fact it's much more concerned with what you'd normally expect to be its B plot, in which Luna - Luna, importantly, is a talking cat - falls in love with a young astronomer who is himself in love with his astronaut girlfriend Himeko, but unwilling to fully admit it because she won't take his theories about a strange princess living on the moon seriously.  (A side point: how could anyone exist in the Sailor Moon universe and think that lunar royalty was a remotely outlandish notion?)  The point being, what the Sailor Moon S movie primarily wants to concern itself with is a tale of unrequited love in which one of the parties is a cat.

This probably all sounds like I'm criticising, and I suppose to an extent I am: Sailor Moon S: Hearts in Ice is the sort of frivolity you find yourself forgetting practically as you're watching it.  But Sailor Moon isn't about epic, detailed storylines, it's about goofy humour, friendship, and swooning romance, and by those criteria it gets the job done fine.  Between the efforts of the animators and Keiko Han's heartfelt vocal performance, there's actually something rather sweet and sad about the central relationship, and it helps that both the film and Sailor Moon herself treat it with proper seriousness.  It's flimsy stuff, to be sure, but it's cute enough to work in this kind of context.

Elsewhere, everything is largely business as usual.  You've got the bouncy theme tune, the lengthy transformation sequences, the special-move-heavy fights that lack even the vaguest sense of danger, and visuals that are just sufficiently beyond what you'd expect of a long-running show with a respectable budget to warrant a cinematic release - though fair play to the special effects team, there's some noticeably nice work on that front.  For that matter, while Hiroki Shibata may be no Kunihiko Ikuhara, he's a perfectly capable director, if somewhat workmanlike.  Which I guess is Sailor Moon S: Hearts in Ice all over, really, with the proviso that with a franchise this basically solid, even a run-of-the-mill tale with no ambitions beyond "Let's tell a gentle little story about a talking cat falling in love, with maybe some stuff about an evil space witch ticking away in the background" is a charming experience for as long as it lasts.

Sailor Moon Super S The Movie: Black Dream Hole, 1995, dir: Hiroki Shibata

There's no getting around the fact that the third Sailor Moon movie is the most minor and trivial-feeling, in a series that's never strayed far from being either.  Indeed, for the first half of its running time, it's almost impossible not to mistake it for a regular episode of the show, so unhurried and inconsequential is every single thing that happens.  I mean, there's a scene that seems to go on for about five hours wherein the sailor scouts bake cookies and discuss the baking of cookies and generally get very into all things cookie-baking related, and while it sort of informs the subsequent plot, it could easily have been trimmed to half its length without consequence.  Which isn't to say it's not pleasurable on its own terms - if there's one thing Sailor Moon is good for, it's being basically entertaining to be around - only that it doesn't feel like it belongs in anything so grandiose as a feature film.  And for that matter, the first half is lodged firmly in the realms of TV animation too, though if you squint, it's actually a little better than all that.  The point, I suppose, is that's it's as happy to look like a TV episode as it is to behave like one.

There's a plot to all this, though you'd barely know it for a good long while, and as with the first two, it's not what you'd call a priority.  What starts out as a riff on the Pied Piper story, as presented in a rather fantastic cold open that's one of the more interesting sequences anywhere in the movie, drifts eventually into a story of interstellar child theft, before shifting into a more science-fictional gear in the closing third.  Not by coincidence, this is also where stuff actually begins to happen in earnest, and the frivolous tone turns deadly serious with such shocking speed that you can practically hear the tires screeching.  As is already obvious by then, the film doesn't give much of a damn for its plot, nor its disposable villain, but it's heartily invested in the relationship between Usagi / Sailor Moon and Chibiusa / Sailor Chibi Moon, her [consults Wikipedia] ... um, time travelling future daughter?  Wait, that can't be right, can it?  At any rate, whatever the hell's going on, the real core of the narrative is Usagi being kind of a jerk to Chibiusa and then having to rescue her from certain death and in doing so dealing with the realisation that she probably shouldn't be jealous of a little kid that she'll eventually give birth to in a few thousand years' time.

Damn but Sailor Moon is weird!

Anyway, the point I'm aiming for is that, while you can certainly see what Sailor Moon Super S The Movie is trying to accomplish and how the focus on one particular relationship might justify an hour-long story, it's not altogether successful, in part because the last third is so drastically different in tone that it feels like a whole 'nother film has been stapled on - indeed, one with distinctly better animation of a sort that might actually have deserved to grace a cinema in 1995.  Neither section is what you'd call bad, at least if you have any affection for what Sailor Moon is up to, but nor are they sturdy enough to survive the drastic shift of the third act.  That's odd in a sense, since the first two movies functioned in precisely the same way - structurally they're all but identical - but then those two had sturdier foundations than this one, and also didn't rely on their protagonist being obnoxious to a little kid for a significant chunk of their running time.  The result is hardly horrible, but it's unmistakably the weakest entry in a series that peaked with its first attempt.

Sailor Victory, 1995, dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima

I'll come clean: Sailor Victory has nothing to do with Sailor Moon.  Or perhaps not quite nothing; we're firmly in the realms of parody anime here, and it's safe to say that a certain bunch of sailor scouts are among the many victims.  But Sailor Victory is too scattershot to pin itself down to lampooning any one show, and I won't pretend I got a fraction of the gags, though Patlabor is an obvious and repeated target.  After all, what need would there be for our five sailor-suit-wearing heroines if the local police and their goofy mechanical armours were up to dealing with the recent rash of giant-robot-related crime that's been inflicted on their fair city?

Mind you, this doesn't quite explain why anyone thought that three colour-coded, ninja-themed robots were the ideal solution, or how we ended up with these particular pilots, none of whom seem especially qualified.  Kiyomi is holding down a dogs-body job with the cops under the pretence of spying on them, Mika delivers noodles, and Mami is such a dope that she can't get halfway through the first episode without being replaced by her own less useless robot double.  Their wealthy sponsor Reiko and her tech genius Shizuka round out the team, and offer limited support via a helicopter that launches out of a swimming pool, because why shouldn't Thunderbirds get a nod too?

Sailor Victory consists of two episodes and runs to just under an hour, and that's perfect for what it is.  There's no meat on these bones whatsoever, it's silly, wacky, frivolous stuff, and yet for sixty minutes, it's a bit of a delight.  There's absolutely nothing exemplary here: it's easy on the eyes, the opening and closing themes are fun, there are enough genuinely funny jokes to keep things moving, and in so much as the plot is basically "giant robots fight!" there's enough imagination on display to keep the material feeling fresh.  The characters are absolutely one-note, but as is often the case with anime, the designs and performance add an extra layer that makes them distinctive company for a brief while.  I could happily have kept watching, but it was also nice to get a satisfactory ending out of one of these short AnimeWorks releases, something that's by no means guaranteed.

Sailor Victory is nothing special in the grand scheme of things.  Yet, for me, these shorter releases that manage to provide an hour's worth of self-contained fun are kind of special.  Sailor Victory is by no means the best, but it was a compact pleasure, briefly entertaining and nice to be around with a few good gags.  I suppose that lumps it into the vast collection of titles that would be worth tracking down if they hadn't been out of print for a couple of decades, but personally, I'm glad I made the effort.

-oOo-

So that was Sailor Moon (well, mostly.)  And my main take is that, much as I'm fond of the franchise, I'm not sure that any of these three films, except perhaps the first, do it justice.  Then again, perhaps the perfect Sailor Moon movie would be an oxymoron, since even dragging something this breezy out to feature length starts to impinge on what it is.  For that matter, while the first movie is the only one I'd be inclined to wholeheartedly recommend, the three work quite nicely together, teasing similar material in different directions and finding subtly different areas to concentrate on, even if that only means feline / human romance or watching our hero bully her time-displaced future daughter.

Hey, did I mention how weird Sailor Moon is?



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