Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 87

To the long list of things I promised myself I'd never do, because if I did, this whole exercise would go from downright silly to irredeemably ridiculous, then promptly went ahead and did anyway, we can now add picking up titles that were only ever released on VHS.  We've had one VHS review already, that being Debutante Detective Corps, but that was only because I couldn't snag the DVD and the tape was cheap.  Here, for the first time, we have something that never even made it onto recent media, and also the reason I slipped up in the first place: the 1984 film Lensman, which is both well regarded enough to be of interest and condemned to have never reached any technology more modern than a LaserDisc player.

But was it worth it?  You'll see when we get there!  Let's take a look at Night on the Galactic Railroad, Golgo 13: The Professional, Lensman, and Lupin the Third: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon...

Night on the Galactic Railroad, 1985, dir: Gisaburo Sugii

Beloved childhood classics don't always translate readily between cultures, nor should we expect them to.  After all, these are the sort of stories that get buried deep in a nation's psyche, often in ways that are difficult to comprehend from the outside.  And that certainly seems to be true for the works of Kenji Miyazawa, who somehow managed to tell enormously personal, abstract, difficult tales that probed at his brief and often tormented life in a manner that resonated deeply with those who came after him.

Thus, from half a century after his death, we have the film adaptation of his short and oft rewritten but never quite finished novel Night on the Galactic Railroad, which sort of looks like a kids film and sort of behaves like a kids film and yet has no qualms about delving into questions of faith, suffering, and how the heck we're meant to live in the sure knowledge that we're all going to die, perhaps without forewarning or apparent cosmic fairness.  This is approached via a series of sequential but not always very connected vignettes, and the story of lonely, hard-working boy (well, boy cat) Giovanni, who a quarter of the way into the film finds himself whisked from his home town by an interstellar train, where he runs into his friend Campanella.  From there, the two encounter various other characters, many of whom have stories of their own to tell, and go on a series of...

I was going to say adventures, but that's not really how Night on the Galactic Railroad works.  If it was a Western kids' story then sure, we might reasonably expect that.  If it were, to pick on a close parallel, something like the sort of children's literature C. S. Lewis wrote, another author trying to thrash out questions of faith and the meaning of existence through the medium of books ostensibly aimed at a young audience, we'd expect the two friends to be a driving force through the narrative, even if that narrative was primarily there to explore bigger issues.  But actually, the pair are more of an audience, and very little happens to them in the traditional sense; indeed, the one episode where they're particularly active was invented by screenwriter Minoru Betsuyaku.  Mostly we're in classic dream narrative territory: stuff happens, much of it makes no objective sense, but Giovanni and Campanella are content to go with the flow, no matter how odd these events seem to us, the wide-awake audience.

The way Night on the Galactic Railroad pulls this off is partly by successfully conjuring the precise mood of a dream and partly by embedding us in a story that rejects adult baggage and views the world through childish eyes, making intuitive much that would otherwise be strange.  And all of this depends primarily on a couple of elements.  First and foremost, unsurprisingly, there's the animation, which is soft and simple and quite lovely, and looks like a children's book come to life in the truest sense: not like a series of illustrations but as if we've plunged through those illustrations into the world within.  But good as the animation is, I doubt it would work without Haruomi Hosono's sublime score, which ties every element - the dreaminess, the childishness, the religiosity, the grand philosophising - together with alternating subtlety and grandeur.  Though thinking about it, even Hosono wouldn't be so effective were it not for some tremendous sound engineering: for example, its impossible to imagine this succeeding half so well without the measured, eerie clacking of wheels and gears that underlies the train journey.

Sadly, none of that's to say that I loved Night on the Galactic Railroad; I think it would be a tough film to truly love, though I'm sure there are many who do.  In some ways, it deals in universal themes, and in some ways it does so wonderfully, but it also has a tendency to phrase them in terms of religious faith, which, if you're not religious, can be off-putting.  Also, there's the fact that - at the risk of sounding like a philistine! - not a heck of a lot happens and much of what does happen is fairly baffling.  This is the kind of film you have to give yourself over to wholly, and if you can't succumb to its hallucinatory atmosphere and keep succumbing, it loses a lot of its effect.  But to be clear, you should absolutely put in the effort: I can't say on the back of a single viewing whether Night on the Galactic Railroad is a masterpiece, but it certainly begs the possibility.

Golgo 13: The Professional, 1983, dir: Osamu Dezaki

There's a lot about Golgo 13: The Professional that's plain awful.  Top of the list has to be Golgo 13 himself, a hitman so stoic that, whatever the male equivalent of the sexy lamp test is, he'd fail it.  In many a scene, you could replace him with, say, a brick or a fence post, and it would have negligible impact on the drama.  In fact, some sequences would make more sense, since there are moments when logic dictates that a flesh-and-blood human being would die horribly, rather than appearing intact a minute later as though a building hadn't just exploded around them.  And Golgo 13 the character is at his worst when Golgo 13 the film expects us to believe that he's irresistible to women, which is often.  In this universe, apparently nothing excites the ladies more than a total lack of personality, and the way to drive them to heights of ecstasy is to lie perfectly immobile and let them get on with whatever they feel like doing.  Mind you, this should probably more be regarded as part of a wider issue with the movie's horrible attitudes, which manifests most damningly in a rape scene - heck, more of a rape subplot - that exists primarily so that we grasp that the villains are such unpleasant people that we should be on Golgo 13's side, ignoring the extent to which he does nothing besides kill people for money and have inanimate sex.

Now, I'm inclined to argue that Osamu Dezaki salvages Golgo 13: The Professional, but I honestly don't know if that's the case: I can't be certain his bonkers approach here makes for a better film.  What he certainly does do, though, is offer one hell of a distraction.  I've commented often on how Dezaki was a fan of ostentatious style to an extent few directors can, or would want to, match, but now I reckon I hadn't seen the half of it.  Golgo 13 feels like the work of a man who was handed the script for a seedy hitman thriller and decided his brief was to make a delirious art installation.  I doubt there's a shot anywhere that could be described as normal; always there's some weird trick or angle or distortion.  And there's never a point where it feels like Dezaki is content with merely propelling the narrative from A to B.  There are plenty of scenes that don't work at the level of plot - most of the first third falls hard into that category - and there are plenty of scenes that don't work at the level of visual storytelling, but there's not an instant where it doesn't seem that Dezaki was wholly invested in whatever he was up to.

Then again, like I say, whether what he regarded himself to be doing had much in common with conveying a coherent version of the screenplay handed to him is an unanswerable question.  Still, I'm inclined to take his side, given how not terribly special that screenplay is.  It has superior moments, like an unlikely hit that takes up the middle portion and a basically sound reason for all the various goings-on that ends on a satisfying twist, but there's also lots of garbage, mostly stemming from the scumminess with which it handles its every female character.  Those aren't small failings, nor are they easy to look past; a couple of years back, in the days when I loathed Dezaki for his reliance on weird gimmickry, I doubt I'd have managed it.  And while the animation is respectable and sometimes great, even that's not always an asset.  In particular, some desperately primitive CG is fine in the weird Bond-style credits sequence but ruinous when it shows up later for a helicopter attack on a building.

All told, I couldn't honestly claim Golgo 13: The Professional is a good film.  It gets too much enormously, inexcusably, unnecessarily wrong for that to be the case, and even that weren't true, it would still be a story about a profoundly boring central character.  But in Dezaki's hands, subjected to his overdose of raw style, it's certainly something.  And now that I'm on-side with Dezaki, I personally enjoyed it far more than I didn't, even if the content often made that more challenging than it needed to be.  As eighties anime classics go, it's aged atrociously, and there's plenty better out there.  But if its director's mad excesses are now the sole reason to seek this out, they're nonetheless a decent excuse.

Lensman, 1984, dir: Shûichi Hirokawa, Yoshiaki Kawajiri

You can absolutely see the thinking behind Lensman.  By 1984, Star Wars continued to be enormous business, as was trying to imitate it with whatever pulpy sci-fi you could conjure up, and what pulpier sci-fi was there than the writings of E. E. "Doc" Smith?  Add to that the fact that A New Hope has some transparent similarities to the books and you had the perfect balance: all the benefits of imitating Star Wars and with the neat get-out of pointing out that actually, no, you were the rip-off merchant, Mr. Lucas, all we're doing is adapting these here novels.

Whether or not that was truly the logic behind their decision-making, what's evident is that Toho were willing to throw some serious money at the thing.  It's all there on the screen, and if it wasn't, the presence of some remarkably okay CG effects in 1984 - yeah, eleven years before Toy Story, that 1984 - are a sure testament.  All of which begs the question of why you've probably never heard of the movie Lensman and almost certainly never seen a copy.

The answer to that question isn't altogether easy.  Or rather, it's very easy indeed - as I mentioned in the introduction, the film never made it to any medium besides VHS and LaserDisc - but the whys and wherefores are trickier.  The most convincing theory I've found is that Smith's estate, unimpressed with the liberties taken with the beloved material and possibly also a lack of appropriate royalties, created enough of a fuss that nobody was willing to wade into the legal quagmire to try and salvage the release rights.  And that certainly seems plausible, given how much vastly worse eighties anime would find its way onto DVD.

Because, whether we choose to view it as a shonky E. E. Smith adaptation or an unusually solid Star Wars rip-off, Lensman is quite the treat.  Its plot is absolutely boilerplate, but boilerplate dressed up with lots of delightful stuff around the edges, as our young hero Kimball Kinnison finds himself orphaned and dragged into an intergalactic war with only a bison man, some sort of pterodactyl person, and a sexy nurse lady to back him up.  Oh, and the titular lens, a bit of nifty technology that serves so little point in the plot that they could have exchanged it with any easily carried technomagical doodad and saved themselves a lot of bother.  At any rate, the film has a merry time barrelling through various loosely connected incidents for the better part of two hours, from spaceship scraps to drugged-up alien murder slug attacks to disco riots, and looks terrific all the while: the character work has dated slightly badly, and is oddly careless in places, and obviously 1984 CG can't hold a candle to modern CG - though it's awfully charming in its own way - but the backgrounds and effects and the vast bulk of the animation are up there with anything the decade would provide.

Admittedly, Lensman is hardly perfect, and I wouldn't go so far as claiming it to be any kind of lost classic.  Appropriately for a Star Wars imitator, its signal weakness is a flat lead character, and Kimball also gets the least inspired design, along with, in the dub Manga put out, the worst vocal performance in an otherwise impressive cast.  Then there's the female lead, Clarissa MacDougall, who's introduced as a plucky Katherine Hepburn type before immediately descending into serial damsel-in-distress uselessness; and the back half does rather get lost in enormous action sequences that, while undeniably cool, are less fun than the more involved world-building of the opening scenes.  Nevertheless, there's plenty more that succeeds than doesn't, and taken together, the film is pretty much a joy, certainly enough so that its near-total erasure from anime history has be considered a crying shame.

Lupin the 3rd: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon, 1985, dir's: Seijun Suzuki, Shigetsugu Yoshida

The Legend of the Gold of Babylon does something I've never seen anime attempt before, which is to emulate the loose, slipshod style of the brand of American animation exemplified by the works of Ralph "Fritz the Cat" Bakshi.  Now, I for one don't like Bakshi's work much at all, and the last thing I want my anime doing is aping it, but hey, it's certainly different.  And for a Lupin story that spends a great deal of its running time in New York, it even makes a degree of sense.  Indeed, for the first five minutes, a scene in a monster-themed bar that pushes the franchise's tolerance for out-and-out surrealism about as far as it could go, it looks as though it might be precisely the right choice.  Then the film stops dead for an extended, repetitive, deeply dull action sequence with perpetually hopeless cop Zenigata, and decides that what it really ought to be foregrounding is how damn dubious the designs for its black characters are, and suddenly the Bakshi influence starts to feel like a very bad decision indeed.

Fortunately, things largely balance out from there; even the experimental animation style eventually settles into something more comfortably familiar, though certain characters, notably Fujiko, never come close to looking right.  At any rate, there are scenes that function brilliantly and scenes that fall flat - though none so much so as that interminable motorbike chase with Zenigata - and scenes that simply get the job done, and maybe the lousy beginning even works to the film's benefit, in that everything thereafter seems better than it might otherwise have.  Plus, it's to The Legend of the Gold of Babylon's advantage that it has quite a bit of plot to go around, or at any rate lots of incidents that hang together engagingly enough that it feels like there's a significant plot.  It's an enormously busy movie, with far more than its share of ideas and characters and threads to keep track of, and that it cobbles all its elements into something that seems vaguely unified is an achievement in itself.

On the flip side, you don't need the excellent liner notes of Eastern Star's re-release to inform you that this had a troubled gestation - though the revelation that one of its many contributors and potential directors was Mamoru Oshii, of Ghost in the Shell fame, and that he was shoved off the project when the studio deemed his ideas too radical and weird, is downright heart-breaking.  Then again, their first choice was for Hayao Miyazaki to return and work the sort of magic he brought to The Castle of Cagliostro, so Oshii would admittedly have made for quite the change of pace.

Plus, if his legacy amounted to contributing the screenplay's more outlandish elements, I fervently hope Oshii wasn't to blame for the ending, which doesn't so much jump the shark as line up a hundred sharks and attempt to break the world shark-jumping record.  It's so bewildering that it makes the entire film feel oddly non-canonical, since surely there's no squaring any other Lupin film with this one.  And while that's an annoying way to have to digest this, the more so given that some of those better scenes get the formula one hundred percent right, it's maybe the best perspective from which to view The Legend of the Gold of Babylon: it feels, and looks, like a Lupin movie beamed in from some bizarre parallel universe.  Given how generic and overstuffed the series would become for lengthy stretches, that's exciting in and of itself, but it would be that bit more so if the results were consistently successful.

-oOo-

Do I regret dragging my VHS player out of its retirement in the TV cabinet?  Of course I don't!  I mean, I should, but that would require a lot more self-judgement and common sense than I possess, so right now I'm just excited about the neat finds I've managed to snag at very reasonable prices ... it turns out pretty much no-one wants VHS tapes, who'd have thought it?  We'll certainly be seeing those popping up over the next few posts, so for anyone who comes to this blog for its near-total irrelevancy, that's sure to be a treat!

Whether that'll happen next time, though, I'm not certain, because - shock, horror! - I've exhausted my backlog of finished posts and now just have lots of half-finished ones.  So really, it's anyone's guess, but it's safe to say this might mark the end of the weekly schedule I've been keeping up for a while now.

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 86

 Let's talk about sex, shall we?  Or, well, not talk about it, more review some anime about it, but ... wait, what do you mean I already did a sex-themed review post way back in part 43?  That's ... woah, exactly 43 posts ago, isn't it?  That's kind of creepy.  And also means that henceforward, every 43rd post is going to have to be sex-related.

Boy, that went south fast, huh?  I guess we probably ought to just look at some sexy anime, in the shape of Demon Fighter Kocho, Very Private Lesson, Fake, and the Sorcerer Hunters OVA...

Demon Fighter Kocho, 1997, dir: Tôru Yoshida

What's a fair way to go about reviewing an OVA of less than half an hour in length?  It's tempting to say that Demon Fighter Kocho would have been a solid title if there was only more of it, but that doesn't get us far, because what we have is all there is or ever will be.  And to its credit, it crams about as much into its running time as you could possibly ask for, setting up its concept and introducing four characters sufficiently that we have a sense of who they are and what they're about and even finding time to tell a decent little story, with a beginning, middle, and twisty end.  Moreover, it's not as if that story would be improved by being twice as long; it's actually rather satisfying the way Demon Fighter Kocho barrels through its plot without pausing for breath.  It's just that it's tough to come away from what amounts to a single TV episode and feel you've had your money's worth.

Still, let's take that as said and move on, shall we?  What we have here belongs to a familiar subgenre, both in and out of anime: Kocho is a high school student who, as the title informs us, fights demons, as part of her role in an astrology class that clearly should have been shut down years ago, what with how the teacher, Professor Kamo, is a massive sex pest with no qualms about tricking his female students into disrobing.   Also, thinking about it, as far as this OVA is concerned, Kocho doesn't fight demons, she fights ghosts; and this she does with the dubious assistance of her sister Koran, along with fellow student Kosaku, who's also a bit of a perv.  Kocho seemingly lacks any powers, but what she's pretty great at is getting naked, and Kamo and Kosaku are both entirely fine with this, especially given that Koran's also quite willing to reveal all at the drop of a hat.

So you could consider it a much more perverted Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or a slightly more perverted Devil Hunter Yohko, but either way, it's evident the territory we're in and Demon Fighter Kocho does nothing to hide its influences.  Insomuch as it's interested in doing its own thing, that mostly extends to doubling down on the nudity and the general obsession with sex, along with a bit of self-aware fourth wall breaking that's perhaps its biggest saving grace; it's genuinely funny in places, and even when it's not, it has an endearing tone of not taking itself too seriously.  Being able to laugh along with Demon Fighter Kocho does it a lot of favours, because it's never quite good enough that it would get by otherwise.  The animation is resolutely mediocre, with dated computer assists and character designs that look almost half-finished, and only the jaunty score stands out on the artistic side of things.

To finish on a slight diversion, while putting out a less-than-thirty-minute OVA that just barely warrants the effort is very much the kind of thing AnimeWorks had a bad habit of doing, a dash of credit's due for the extras, which are the usual behind the scenes stuff with the US voice cast that tend to pad out these releases, but much longer and much less filtered.  Though I didn't check, I suspect the various bits of footage we get total more than Demon Fighter Kocho itself, and they're an entertaining insight, the more so because the dub cast are actually pretty good and pretty damn funny in their own right.  Obviously those extras don't push the title into must-have territory or anything, but they round out the package nicely, and meant that I came away from Demon Fighter Kocho with a somewhat greater appreciation of its goofy, low-rent charms.

Very Private Lesson, 1998, dir: Hideaki Ôba

It's tough to imagine how the setup for Very Private Lesson was ever going to work: youthful teacher Oraku, in the midst of trying to hit on his crush and fellow teacher Satsuki, runs into the sixteen-year-old Aya, who proceeds to have him drive her home and flirts with him mercilessly.  By the next day, Aya has somehow tracked down his address, and not only has she transferred to the class Oraku teaches, she's decided to move in with him, and Oraku hasn't much choice in the matter because her old man happens to be a Yakusa boss who, as the saying goes, makes him an offer he can't refuse: either get Aya to graduation in one piece or suffer the consequences.

Accepting that there's probably no good way to go about that wholly problematic setup, it's at least not hard to see a less disastrous approach than the one the makers opted for.  What we get is effectively three different takes, which the show bounces between largely at random: the smutty comedy that's the most obvious route, a more sweet-natured character drama that emphasises Oraku and Aya's developing friendship and mutual respect, and - here's the kicker - a violent, social-realist thriller in which Aya is repeatedly under threat of rape and Oraku under threat of horrible violence or even death.

Two of those could, maybe, have fitted together; certainly you could have got a fairly routine nineties anime sex comedy out of the first two in combination, and if it kept a tight rein on the fan service, it might even have been pretty okay.  And for that matter, the thriller stuff, though grim and tasteless, is far from unsalvageable; it's novel, at least, to see an anime of this sort that doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of school life and Japanese society.  But all three together makes for a tone that's often wildly, cringingly dysfunctional.  The show absolutely wants to have its cake and eat it, while never seeming entirely sure what the cake actually consists of: one minute it's leching over Aya in her underwear, the next it's freaking out over the prospect of her falling into the hands of one of the many male characters who openly express an interest in sexually assaulting her.  It shouldn't need saying that that's not a topic you treat lightly, and it's sure as hell not one you cram up against sleazy light comedy.

Really, the only reason I'm wasting this many words on something that's in many ways totally obnoxious is that it isn't wholly awful.  Technically it's pretty competent - the music's particularly solid, but the animation does just fine - and narratively it's not always a train wreck.  Oraku and Aya are both humanised enough that we like them and would like to see them helping each other out, and Aya in particularly strays far enough away from the twin poles of obnoxious male fantasy and obnoxious male nightmare that it feels like there's a personality there that could be more deeply delved into.  The comedy is even funny sometimes, and the thriller aspects are interesting, particularly in how they're willing to explore their ostensible villains and reveal them as more complex than we'd assume.  But seesawing between the two constantly over the course of an OVA that doesn't make it to ninety minutes is a hell of an ask of an audience, and one Very Private Lesson ultimately doesn't warrant.

Fake, 1996, dir: Iku Suzuki

It's fair to say that the anime market has never exactly been overstuffed with shows about gay American cops holidaying in the British countryside, so if there's one thing Fake has going for it, it's novelty.  Though, unlike in the West, it's not the gay part of that equation that really stands out; most anime fans will have at some point encountered the subgenre known as Yaoi, of homoerotic stories aimed at a primarily female audience.  Supplant that to the wilds of England, though, and the result is something decidedly interesting.  It's not really a criticism to say that anime tends to get the UK enormously wrong - I mean, it's not as if Western media hasn't been horribly misrepresenting Japan forever - but it genuinely feels like a bit of research went into Fake, and possibly even an actual visit.  I mean, Peter Rabbit shows up at one point, how's that for veracity!  Granted, so does a tanuki, and you don't see a lot of those gambolling around in English forests, but nobody's perfect.

In fairness, that care for detail is mostly true of the Yaoi aspects as well: you can sort of tell that this was aimed more at women than at gay men, but there's enough depth and complexity to the lead characters that the presentation of their relationship feels more sympathetic than prurient.  This is a good thing given how basically seedy the premise is: the confident and openly gay Dee Laytner has arranged this trip away with the explicit goal of bedding his more closeted partner (in the police sense!) Ryō 'Randy' Maclean, and he's certainly not above getting him drunk to do it.  Thankfully, Dee isn't quite as lecherous as the setup paints him to be, and where many a nineties anime character would have barged onward without restraint, he's generally inclined to rein himself in before anything happens to push the certificate up.  This lets Fake have it both ways, by being a raunchy sex comedy that nevertheless doesn't slip up as a character drama and lets us laugh comfortably at situations which could easily have gone the other way, especially given that we're never a hundred percent sure of where Ryō's proclivities tend.

So that's the first half of Fake: Dee hits on Ryō, Ryō demurs, while also playing up to it sufficiently that we can get a few scenes of two guys making out, and it's all pretty involving, mostly because the pace is relaxed enough that we feel we're hanging out with this pair of likeable characters who we'd be quite happy to see wind up together.  But there's a B-plot bubbling away, introduced by a brief flash of bloody murder early on, and inevitably the B-plot has to become the A-plot before all's said and done.  This isn't disastrous, since it's not like the stuff that was working just vanishes, but the murder mystery that dominates the latter half is hardly an asset: it's obvious who the culprit is, since there aren't any other suspects, their motives are nonsensical, and it's utterly implausible that the local police wouldn't have figured out whodunit.  There's some hand-waving about a cover-up perpetrated by the locals, which is downplayed enough that its stupidity isn't too glaring, but in general, all the shift into more traditional cop drama gets us is a relatively fun action sequence to cap things off with.  Oh, and the sight of Peter Rabbit being stabbed, which after those godawful recent movies is enough to earn an extra point.

Put the two halves together and you end up with something that's definitely unusual - "come for the gay romance, stay for the naff murder mystery!" is a tagline no-one used ever - but generally more successful than not.  Ryō and Dee are engaging company, as are most of the supporting cast, technically it's all more good that not, there are some solid laughs, and the thriller elements kick in just as we've had about enough of our two heroes awkwardly flirting.  If those thriller elements had been great, Fake would be an easy recommendation; given that they're only just about functional, it ends up much more in the category of "Take a look if it sounds like your thing."  Still, all credit to AnimeWorks for putting this out there, it's always a treat to come across a title that doesn't feel quite like anything else.

Sorcerer Hunters OVA, 1996, dir: Kōichi Mashimo

I'll say this for the Sorcerer Hunters OVA, it's nice to see an anime that commits so hard to being a sex comedy, instead of tentatively nosing around the concept.  So often anime has a tendency to be simultaneously prudish and exploitative, portraying sex as something basically naughty that men want to do to women - and that needs to be punished, perhaps via giant hammers or lightning attacks - and never going beyond the odd illicit flash of bare breasts or underpants, there to "service" the (implicitly male) fans and often so unrelated to what's going on elsewhere that the plot has to come to a crashing halt to fit the moment in.

Sorcerer Hunters is having none of that.  We've seen practically the entire cast naked by the end of the second scene, and the remainder of the first of these three episodes involves them all trying fiercely to hook up in various combinations.  It's that rare work that concedes that sex is basically a fun activity, one most people want to do, and even goes so far as to admit that sometimes women want to have sex with women and men want to have sex with men and some folks aren't especially picky and all of this is absolutely fine.  Once you get past the sheer busy lecherousness, it's actually kind of refreshing.  Sure, it's not particularly adult - the general theme here is still using sex as a way into a familiar brand of silly comedy, and there's no question that the targeted viewer remains predominantly male - but it's at least flirting with the notion of adultness.

Would that it could have found a way to do this and be a mite funnier!  Don't get me wrong, the Sorcerer Hunters OVA often is quite funny, and I certainly laughed out loud at various occasions over the course of its ninety minute running time.  But it's not hilarious, or consistent, and even that would be fine if there was a bit more plot to hang the gags and the raunchiness off.  Only the middle episode sees any actual sorcerer hunting going on, or has what you could generously call a story, and thinking about it, that probably makes it the weakest of the three; then again, it's not much of a story, so I'm not sure that disproves my argument.  The problem's not ruinous, but compare this with another Sorcerer Hunters spin-off, the two-part Sorcerer on the Rocks, that actually did manage to deliver a relatively involved narrative without sacrificing the humour, and it feels that bit shallower than even its inherently shallow nature calls for.

On the plus side, if we're making that comparison, Sorcerer Hunters does considerably better on the technical side of things, with animation that's in line with what you'd hope for from a mid-nineties OVA of a TV show: there's enough extra spark here to warrant the step up of an independent release, and Mashimo's energetic direction ensures that the plotlessness and inconsistent humour don't matter too much while you're watching, since there's rarely a slow moment in which to nitpick.  Even with all that, I doubt it's going to stick in my memory, but if you fancy a fantasy comedy anime that's not terribly interested in the fantasy side of things but is absolutely obsessed with sex, this might well be for you.

-oOo-

Sex may allegedly sell, but you certainly get the sense from this bunch that it doesn't often make for good anime.  I suppose that only Very Private Lesson was actively bad, though it was bad enough in its worst moments to cast quite the shadow over everything else, and it's not as though anything was good enough to make up for it.  Fake seems to be well-regarded, and I can certainly see why, but the thriller parts were enormously dumb and could have been fixed with annoying ease.  Looking back, I'm almost wondering whether my personal highlight wasn't Demon Fighter Kocho, and that certainly wasn't a sentence I ever dreamed I'd type when I was watching it.  Oh, and as for the Sorcerer Hunters OVA, while it wasn't anything terribly special, it does have the advantage of having been recently re-released along with the series, so at least you can buy the thing for money without too much bother, which makes quite the change for these reviews!

Next: probably another trip back to the eighties, unless I change my mind between now and next week...

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 85

In keeping with my efforts to ensure that these randomly assembled review posts are as randomly random as possible, this one's all sorts of random.  We've got a CG-enhanced sci-fi thriller, social satire posing as a show about wealthy teenage girls investigating their own attempted murder, weird horror featuring cat people fighting tentacle monsters, and a light-hearted, somewhat surreal college drama.  Which is to say, we have Blue Submarine No. 6, Debutante Detective Corps, Dark Cat, and Welcome to Green Wood...

Blue Submarine No. 6, 1998-2000, dir: Mahiro Maeda

I'm inclined to believe that, were it not for a couple of factors, I wouldn't need to be telling you how terrific Blue Submarine No. 6 is, because it would be among that handful of widely regarded classics from the era that most everyone with a passing interest in anime has heard of.  The first of those factors is its OVA format, a type of release that was never quite so acceptable in the West, and was surely made less so in this instance by distributor Bandai, who insisted on releasing four thirty-minute episodes on four separate disks.*  And the second reason, which ties into why Bandai presumably reckoned they'd get away with such naked exploitativeness, is that Blue Submarine No. 6 was brought to life with what at the time was a fairly radical approach, combining extensive, cutting edge CG with hand-drawn animation.

I say fairly radical; obviously, the notion of mixing CG with traditional animation was nothing new at this point.  But with Blue Submarine No. 6, studio Gonzo pushed the approach as far as the technologies available to them in 1998 would allow.  (Remember, this was the year Pixar put out their second release, A Bug's Life, a film precisely no-one remembers for its timeless aesthetic qualities.)  What Gonzo were after went beyond what 1995's Ghost in the Shell had done and what anime in general was steadily growing comfortable with, using computer technologies to bolster aspects that hand-drawn animation tended to struggle with but generally keeping it fairly discreet.  No, this was to be a true hybrid, such that you couldn't hope to miss the CG elements, be they water or vehicles or even certain creatures.

The problem here, and I'm sure you're well ahead of me, is that CG from over two decades ago, however astounding it might once have been, now looks horrifyingly dated.  And taking that into account, it's a wonder Blue Submarine No. 6 holds up as well as it does.  It helps that the traditional animation is superlative, and that the unusually realistic designs feel much more the product of the twenty-first century, but once you get past the fact that you're looking at CG from a whole other millennium, even that fares respectably for the most part, with the occasional shot that's still impressive today.  It's easy to suppose that if they'd just gone with the old-fashioned approach, this would have been a visual masterpiece, but then the CG is employed judiciously enough that probably nothing like this could have been accomplished on a rational budget.  It really was a bold attempt at marrying the best of what old and new animation technologies had to offer and accomplishing what neither could alone, and on its own terms, that hybridisation works well.  It's impossible to ignore, and it may be what robbed Blue Submarine No. 6 of a classic status it thoroughly deserves, but that's not to say it's not good - and in its day, it must have been downright mind-blowing.

And here we are, three paragraphs deep, and I haven't even told you what Blue Submarine No. 6 is.  Suffice to say that it begins as a novel kind of alien invasion picture - novel because the aliens are actually modified animals given human-like intelligence and the setting is an Earth that's mostly underwater, among numerous other reasons - and develops into something much smarter, an eco-fable that has the decency not to be patronising or preachy and that doesn't stint on the thrilling action which characterises the first episode.  Admittedly, there's nothing here we haven't seen elsewhere, though I'd wager most of its ideas felt fresher at the time, if we put aside how liberally it borrows from The Island of Doctor Moreau; but the particular combination of elements is enough to produce an unusually thoughtful slice of science fiction.  The writing's top notch, as is the direction, as is the perfect-in-its-incongruity jazz score, and really, everything else.  Get past the once great, still pretty okay CG and there's not much to find fault with here, and an enormous amount to admire.

Debutante Detective Corps, 1996, dir: Akiyuki Shinbo

It's a lot to ask of a thirty-minute OVA that it be both a breezy comedy and an incisive critique of capitalism, but Debutante Detective Corps certainly pulls that off, and hats off to it for doing so.  Its central joke is basically, "Isn't it funny how rich people automatically assume they're great at everything, and that that's why they're rich, and isn't it also funny how nobody dares tell them the truth and that, however badly they screw up, they can always buy themselves out of whatever trouble they've brewed?  But isn't that also kind of not funny at all, and actually quite appalling; but hey, what can you do except laugh, right?"  And to me anyway, this seems an altogether wholesome message in the year of our billionaire overlords 2020.

The ostensible form of this socialist screed is a show about five outrageously superwealthy high school girls.  How outrageously superwealthy?  Well, at one point it's suggested that their combined worth is equal to that of the rest of Japan combined, at which one of them points out that, no, it's rather the entire GDP of Japan.  So, you know, pretty damn superwealthy.  At any rate, after the five of them arrive at school in increasingly outlandish and disruptive ways, we learn that they've been marked for death, and they immediately find themselves placed under police protection.  But for what do they need police protection, when they're not only staggeringly rich and beautiful but geniuses in their particular hobbies as well?  And since one of those hobbies involves being a master of disguise, it's not long before they've tricked their way out of the police's misguided effort to protect their lives and into the sights of their would-be murderers.

Obviously, you don't need to be chuckling along at the social critique to have fun with this; many an anime title has wrung laughs out of protagonists who aren't half as able as they deludedly imagine themselves to be.  Still, I think it helps, and perhaps explains why Debutante Detective Corps has a fairly dreadful reputation in the West.  Take it on face value and it's silly and intermittently amusing but a lot like a lot of other titles: the animation is perfectly capable and the music is cheerfully upbeat and the voice cast do a good job of establishing their one-note characters in the bare minimum of time - and Akiyuki Shinbo is a terrific enough director to handle something this straightforward with the peppy energy it requires - but nevertheless, this is hardly reinventing the anime wheel.

All of which is to say that, though I thoroughly enjoyed it, half of that was down to how I enjoy watching supercilious rich people being mocked, even when that mocking is for the most part almost affectionately gentle.  If that's not up your alley - or, if you somehow manage to miss the satire altogether, as most critics appear to have rushed to do - then there's not enough left to warrant seeking this out.  I mean, it's a thirty-minute OVA that's all but impossible to find (except on VHS, oddly, that being how I watched it) and even the version on Youtube is missing English subtitles, so unless you understand Japanese or read French, that seeking is quite the job.  All the same, if this amounts to the lone voice in the wilderness saying "Hey, Debutante Detective Corps really isn't that bad!" then my work here is done.  And since I exchanged my labours for no material compensation, I reckon that both Marx and the makers of Debutante Detective Corps would approve.

Dark Cat, 1991, dir: Iku Suzuki

Insomuch as there's a consensus on Dark Cat, a title nobody much cared about when it first came out and that certainly no one remembers now, the conclusion is that it's irredeemable garbage.  And given that this was an attempt by ailing film studio Nikkatsu, known for making soft porn "pinku" movies and a couple of years away from going altogether bust, to break into the anime market by imitating the unpleasant likes of Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend, it's hard to imagine the consensus would be off base on this one.

And yet, based on the prelude that constitutes the first three or so minutes of its fifty-minute running time, I was all ready to fight Dark Cat's corner tooth and nail.  That opening is a perfect little horror vignette, alternately melancholy and creepy, and with one flat-out freaky image that's thoroughly skin-crawling.  Plus, the animation is more than respectable, and Suzuki's direction is tight and intuitive, getting maximum impact from what we have to assume wasn't a grand budget.

Of course things go downhill from there, how could they not?  But the funny thing is, everything that worked keeps on working, to a greater or lesser extent.  Suzuki can't save the material, an enormous mess that tries to mix moody, character-driven horror with gross-out body horror with wacky supernatural shenanigans and does so by alternating between them apparently at random; but his direction frequently bring out something of value.  The character stuff is terribly thin on paper, but quite a few scenes land thanks to his surehandedness, and even the stuff that fails isn't the disaster it might have been.  And the animation remains unexpectedly decent, with a surprising degree of detail and shading and some thoroughly lovely backgrounds - though you'd have to think the fact that no one on the staff had the faintest clue what cats look like might have come up in a meeting at some point.  The score, too, is better than you might hope, frequently backing up Suzuki's attempts to conjure a bit of genuine mood.  (Admittedly, the end credits track sounds like it was recorded three rooms away on a broken microphone.)

You might notice that I've got most of the way to the end of the review and said nothing about the plot, and ... look, I'm trying to find positives, okay?  Actually, there is the seed of a decent narrative here, and whenever Dark Cat remembers where its focus ought to lie - shape-changing feline brothers Hyoi and Ryoi are trying to get to the bottom of the evil force that's gripped a school, and particularly to protect student Aimi Koenji, whom Hyoi has already encountered in his cat form - it's reliably effective.  But as often, the script is off on a mad tangent, with the brothers battling their former mentor, who's supposedly a cat but looks more like Baron Greenback, or with Ryoi getting healed by a magic tree, or ... well, you get the idea.  I assume this is because the makers felt obliged to cram in as much as they could from the manga this was based on, but it's disastrous, because none of the wider narrative makes a shred of sense and all it does is suck energy from the aspects that are just about working.

And with all of that, I did quite like Dark Cat; certainly I've seen worse short horror OVAs, though admittedly the bar is perilously low on that front.  Still, it's not crap, which you'd have every right to suppose it would be given its heritage.  There's frequently the sense that nobody involved altogether knew what they were doing - at regular points, frames jolt slightly to one side, a mistake so basic that I can't say I've ever seen it happen before - and yet it's also apparent that the goal was never to make tossed-off garbage.  Like I say, Suzuki really does seem to have tried to do what he could with the material, and genuine love went into the animation and artwork, more so than I've seen in some more high profile titles.  So while the consensus is right, and there's certainly not much reason to waste your time with Dark Cat, there's also just enough here that I wish I could mount a proper defence.

Here is Green Wood, 1991, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki

A useful place to start would be telling you what Here Is Green Wood is, but even reaching that point isn't altogether straightforward.  A synopsis of the first episode gets us so far: Teenager Kazuya Hasekawa makes a late start enrolling at Ryokuto Academy, having spent time in hospital for reasons that may or may not relate to how the woman he's in love with married his brother before he could let her know his feelings, only to find himself assigned to the notorious Green Wood dormitory, a dumping ground for eccentrics.  In short order, he meets his neighbours-to-be Mitsuru and Shinobu, and they introduce him to the person he'll be lodging with, Shun, who we're originally led to believe is a girl passing as a boy and turns out to be a boy who looks and acts like a girl - a topic, by the way, that the show handles with a welcome gentleness and lightness of touch.  Anyway, Kazuya steadily gets past his obsession with his now-sister-in-law, and steadily warms up to Mitsuru, Shinobu, and Shun, and from there on, the four friends have various wacky adventures together.

Except when they don't.  The thing is, it's easy to make Here is Green Wood sound like a Japanese Animal House or similar US frat movie, and it's fair to say that's a part of what it's gunning for, yet for long stretches it's not that at all.  Heck, three of the six episodes really aren't that funny, and I don't think it's accidental.  The first is mostly character setup with a smattering of comedy, and the double-parter that wraps things up is full-on romance, and ultimately what Here is Green Wood feels most like is an anthology show, one that uses its setting and cast as a jumping-off point to tell a diverse set of stories that don't even feel the need to belong to the same genre.  So of the middle three episodes, one's a ghost story, one's a gangster movie, and the third - and best - finds the gang roped into making a short fantasy film, which we alternately watch being made and see in its finished form.  It's here, by the way, where director Mochizuki, who you'd be forgiven for not expecting too much of based on a mostly workmanlike CV, gets to cut loose, pulling out imaginative but silly shots of the sort you'd expect a student filmmaker to fling around, and generally getting up to enough interesting things that you wish he'd had more opportunities to show off than he did.**  And the same goes for the playful score, and especially so for the animation and artwork, which mostly pass as functional and of their time until you pay closer attention, at which point you might notice that they're actually pretty polished and special.

Which, I think, is as good a summing up of Here is Green Wood as any.  It's the kind of show that sneaks up on you, confident enough in its material and cast that it doesn't feel the need to set out its wares all at once.  It was toward the middle of the third episode that I began to grasp how good it was, and from there, I was enraptured; it's fair to say it gets better as it goes along, though perhaps that has as much to do with how we gradually get to know the characters, and how Kazuya grows up a bit, having been fairly obnoxious throughout the first episode.  It's also the sort of title that I'm sure passed most people by at the time, and which is all but forgotten now; but at the same time, it's an exemplar of so much of what I love about the anime of the nineties.  Many a film and show has claimed to be full of lovable eccentrics, but Here is Green Wood is the rare one that legitimately embraces its characters and lets them be who they are, while not forgetting to tell witty, ingenuous, well-crafted stories around them.

-oOo-

Damn, this was a good batch!  Or, wait, was it?  I'm literally the only person anywhere with a nice word to say about Dark Cat, so I guess that was probably terrible.  And the same maybe goes for Debutante Detective Corps, though there I feel I'm on stronger ground, given that not a single review even seems to have picked up on its social commentary, despite how it uses the first seconds of its short running time to have totally unrelated characters comment on how much it sucks to be poor!  At any rate, I definitely got something out of each of them, and Blue Submarine No. 6 is awfully close to being a stone-cold classic, and I don't know that Here is Green Wood is that far off either, albeit in a slightly less obvious fashion, so that's some pretty high highlights.  Yeah, I reckon we did okay this time around.

Next: excitingly, it's up for grabs, in that I've about run out of finished posts at last, but have lots of nearly finished ones.  So the possibilities are practically endless! ***

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* Thankfully, it's since been brought back on both DVD and blu-ray, though even those are a bit tricky to lay hands on these days.

** Mochizuki's CV is fascinatingly all over the place, from Ocean Waves, the Studio Ghibli movie everyone tends to forget about, to the superb My Dear Marie, to forgettable but competent titles like Dirty Pair Flash and Eight Clouds Rising.

*** "Practically endless", in this context, meaning "about five."

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 84

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 83

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, yes and no.  But mostly no.

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

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

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

Art of Fighting, 1993, dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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