There's not much to say by way of an introduction this time around, except that this isn't the "sexy" vintage anime special I vaguely promised last time. But curb your disappointment! No doubt we'll get to that soon enough, and in the meantime, there's plenty of the usual randomness to go around: we've got comedy sci-fi, we've got gross-out horror, we've got giant robots, and to top things off, we've a spot of supernatural-tinged medical drama. Or to be more specific, we have Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, Urotsukidōji III: The Return of the Overfiend, Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, and Black Jack: Biohazard...
Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, 1996, dir: Yoshiaki Kawajiri
What the heck happened to the Birdy the Mighty OVA series? Of all the vintage anime lost to time, its vanishment is one of the hardest to comprehend. Here's a show that was put together by the ever-reliable studio Madhouse and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, perhaps the most consistently great director of the late eighties and early nineties whose name wasn't Hayao Miyazaki, capping off a spell of work that included the likes of Demon City, Cyber City Oedo 808, and Ninja Scroll, and found him both near the top of his game and pulling out some brand new tricks. And all of that skill and ambition was in the service of an irresistible premise, whereby bad-ass space cop Birdy Cephon Altera finds herself stuck sharing a body with aimless teenager Tsutomu Senkawa and now has to accomplish all her usual space cop business while existing on a time-share arrangement and trying not to trash Tsutomu's life too much. It's a strong enough idea, replete with obvious opportunities for humour, pathos, and buckets of action, that the Birdy the Mighty franchise would be revived a decade later and given the full-length TV show treatment under the title of Birdy the Mighty: Decode.
Yet here we are with Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, first volume of U.S. Manga Corp's two-volume release, and does anyone remember it at all? I'm guessing the answer is no. And it may be that we've already inadvertently touched on the reason why, in that U.S. Manga Corp were often not great at pushing their titles or releasing them in a fashion likely to get them into the hands of punters, and it looks as though, in this case, something went very wrong indeed. Volume one, Double Trouble, has been tough to find for years; volume two, Final Force, is one of the rarest vintage anime titles out there, and there was never a collected edition or reissue.
To be blunt, it very much seems like the Birdy the Mighty OVA got screwed over by its distributor. Because, assuming the second half doesn't mess things up horribly, it's a real gem. Not an especially deep or complex one, to be sure, and it makes the odd misstep - primarily some dumb comedy centred around Tsutomu's family that goes nowhere and a grating closing theme that's hardly a good note to end on - but, like its protagonist, when it hits, it hits hard. With Kawajiri at the helm, it should come as no surprise that the action is unusually imaginative and well-conceived, and since there's tons of action, that's justification for a watch in and of itself. However, while the concept may be relatively shallow, what's been built around it is unexpectedly satisfying; we barely learn the first thing about Birdy's job or about Birdy herself, but some excellent design choices and subtle world-building nevertheless give the sense of a whole universe ticking away just off the edges of the screen. And Birdy, too, is rather more nuanced than you might be led to expect by her spray-on costume, as is Tsutomu once he gets past his initial shock at being killed and resurrected as one half of a comedy buddy-cop pairing sharing the same body. Their interactions have a genuine charm, and it's a credit to the creators that they largely steer away from the sort of easy "he's a guy in a body that's got boobs!!!" nonsense that would have been such an obvious route to go down back in 1996.
I suppose none of this really makes for an all-time classic; aside from the great action and the mostly excellent animation, there's nothing truly standout or memorable to Birdy the Mighty: Double Trouble, and you could argue that the series would go on to do a better job of developing the idea all those years later, though personally I find the swift dashes of world-building here more compelling than the somewhat overly thought-out attempts there. But be that as it may, Double Trouble is a fine take on a fine concept, a funny, thrilling, gorgeous seventy minutes of awesome sci-fi action goodness. Add in the fact that it's not as though Decode is exactly readily available these days, and it's fair to say that, however you look at it, the world has much less Birdy the Mighty in it than it ought to.
Urotsukidōji III: The Return of the Overfiend, 1992, dir: Hideki Takayama
First, a disclaimer: the version of the third Urotsukidōji OVA I watched was the one released by Kiseki Films, which was heavily censored and, judging by the disparities in the episode running times, presumably heavily cut. And second, a confession: despite being open about how I found them to be largely devoid of value either as art or entertainment, I rewatched both the previous OVA series by way of prep work for diving into this one. Though, to be honest, that had as much to do with it being suggested to me a while back that I'd been unduly harsh on the original Urotsukidōji, Legend of the Overfiend. In retrospect, maybe I was a touch; returning to it with a ton more vintage anime under my belt, I definitely found it less shocking, if not much less unpleasant. But better? I dunno. What struck me on a rewatch was that it was at least trying to tell a grand and mythic tale of cosmic horror, even if it also felt the need to stop at regular intervals to show off a bit of demon rape or other ghastliness. One criticism I definitely stand by is that neither of the first two OVAs had anywhere near enough story to fill their running times and so were left with middles where scarcely anything happens, and one piece of praise I equally stand by is that both have unexpectedly decent third acts, where the otherwise often iffy animation pulls itself together and the narrative actually hits that grand, mythic cosmic horror note and for a brief few minutes I could see what some folks find to love here.
What's weird about Urotsukidōji III, then - I mean, aside from the run-of-the-mill Urotsukidōji weirdness - is that it has neither the greatest fault nor the greatest virtue of its predecessors and thus manages to be a bit ... well, I guess you can't fairly call something with this much rape and bloodshed and freaky scenes of people transforming into insect women and robotic spider monsters "boring", but nonetheless, that was the word I was heading toward. The animation is never anything truly special and frequently outright poor, sinking to downright laughable at points in a manner that feels like the result more of a lack of time than a lack of money, though I'm sure the latter was a factor. And as for the plot, well, that's absolutely stuffed to bursting, or even past the point of bursting, since it definitely feels like there's at least one two many storylines and maybe half a dozen too many significant characters in play.
This leaves me somewhat torn, the more so because, maybe simply by virtue of having a lot of plates spinning at any one time, Urotsukidōji III seems as though it has a lower quota of sexual violence than parts one and two, though it's possible there's just as much and it feels less soul-crushing for being spread over a gobsmacking three-hour running time. Don't get me wrong, this third entry still has a horrible attitude toward practically all its female cast, and there are a couple of scenes that are startlingly repellent, even if the shonky animation robs them of some impact. In particular, the character of Alector feels like if 4chan gained sentience and set out to write the most misogynistic character it could imagine, and even if everything else in Urotsukidōji III was a model of progressive attitudes toward women, I'd still hate it a little for her arc. All the same, and maybe this is just the weariness brought on by watching three of these things relatively back to back, but I couldn't summon a lot of anger this time around.
Partly that's because Urotsukidōji III never has the relationship with reality that its predecessors did, being set in the post-apocalyptic hellscape that's all that remains after the events of the first series. It's fair to say that, where until now the franchise was horror-fantasy, here that balance has flipped and what we have is primarily a work of fantasy larded up with some occasional, albeit extreme, horror. And while I sort of admired its determination to follow up on the narrative that had been handed to it - one of the most truly shocking elements of the Urotsukidōji series is the extent to which it does tell one vast, consistent tale, for all that surely nobody came to these things looking for that - the setup it was given simply isn't that interesting. Plus, it requires Urotsukidōji III to effectively reboot the entire affair, with only a couple of recurring characters getting much to do and lots of new ones to be introduced, which, yes, means that this time we do get more than enough plot but also means that everything feels enormously busy without offering much that could be called entertaining. There's no one to root for and certainly no one to like and none of the various conflicts have clear or meaningful stakes, devolving as they largely do into "who'll win in the battle between this horrible person and this horrible person?"
Look, I didn't hate this one, so there's that. However, aside from the odd cool moment of body horror, I also can't think of a reason to recommend that anyone might want to watch it, which, as much as I don't personally have a damn bit of time for either of them, was at least true of Legend of the Overfiend and Legend of the Demon Womb. If you're the person whose existence I'm highly doubtful of that got to the end of those two desperately eager to see where this convoluted but not really that complex or clever mythology was heading, you should absolutely give this entry a go, because boy does it want to give you all the answers it can possibly come up with. As for everyone else? Much as this is probably the entry I least disliked, that's far from being a recommendation.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, 1996 - 1999, dir's: Takeyuki Kanda, Umanosuke Iida
The 08th MS Team, the OVA series that ran across four years toward the tail end of the nineties, doesn't get off to the strongest of starts. Or, no, that's a fib; its first episode is a miniature space-opera masterpiece and as strong a start as you might hope for, it's only in the immediate aftermath of that superlative beginning that things tails off a little. And even here I wonder if I'm being unfair, because the truth is that the show sets itself up for certain preconceptions - essentially a Gundam take on the Vietnam conflict - that it's only sporadically interested in fulfilling. In the first half, that becomes a niggling frustration, because, come on, 'Dam in the 'Nam is one hell of pitch and who wouldn't want to watch that? Here's a franchise, after all, that's routinely at its best when it's hewing close to real-world issues while dressing them up with just enough sci-fi pizzazz to soften their harshest blows.
As it turns out, what The 08th MS Team is actually far more interested in being throughout its first half is Gundam's take on The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, the comedic TV show from three years earlier that pitched its titular lackadaisical hero against the horrors of war and the frustrations of military bureaucracy and on the face of it seems more like a parody of what Gundam's about than a model it remotely ought to be adapting. Yet our hero, Ensign Shiro Amada, has an awful lot of DNA in common with Tylor: he's an optimistic sort who's as likely to break rules on a whim as he is to follow orders, he has a pacifist streak a mile long that makes him an even weirder fit for the world of Gundam, and there's an inherent niceness to the character, bordering on goofiness, that doesn't exactly fill his newly assigned subordinates with faith. Not that they're any more on the ball, with the four-person team split evenly between grouchy professionals with severe personality disorders and idiots even less fitted to a warzone than their new commander, in the shape of wannabe music star Eledore Massis and whiny kid Michel Ninorich, who seems to spend at least ten minutes out of each of the first six episodes writing to his transparently disinterested girlfriend BB.
No doubt I'm not making this sound like a terribly strong foundation for what I'd better hastily point out may be my new favourite Gundam entry, but before I go into why none of these issues matter more than slightly, let's also pause to note that there's even the odd bit of dubious animation in that first half, which is all the more shocking because, with an OVA budget applied to Sunrise's flagship franchise, The 08th MS Team spends far more time being an extremely special work of animation indeed. And now I'm done with criticising, firstly because what feels like a somewhat aimless and meandering opening half is actually a fine grounding for what's to come and secondly because the back end of The 08th MS Team is so near to flawless that it could have got away with bigger missteps and still been comfortably a classic. That's in part because once the show has its ducks in a row, it utilises them marvellously, with an emotive central romance and the traditional Gundam stuff, here revolving around a Zeon superweapon that becomes a bête noire for enemies and allies alike, feeding off each other in satisfying ways and building toward a climax that - well, I haven't seen enough Gundam to say this is as good as the franchise can deliver, but if there's anything better out there than the two-parter that rounds out this particular tale, then please do tell me, because I'll be tripping over myself to seek it out.
Strong as the character stuff and the plot and the drama all become after that ever-so-slightly shaky beginning, however, they're not the core reason The 08th MS Team ends up being quite so splendid. No, that's because here we have a Gundam show that puts its giant robots to brilliant use and has the budget to back that up. I don't recall ever seeing giant robot battles done quite this well, and I certainly can't think of an example - okay, one that isn't Patlabor - where they felt so real and solid and believable. That, actually, is where the jungle setting pays off most, far more so than in evoking memories of real-world conflicts: jungles, it turns out, are the perfect location for making enormous machines look and act like enormous machines in a convincing manner, the sort that get dirty and damaged and rusty and stuck and need to be repaired under far-from-ideal circumstances. Sure, space battles may be easier to animate, but they rarely get close to this level of physicality*, and as one of the people who likes their real-robot shows to treat the realness as more than a veneer, that determination to present these enormous mechanical beasts as tangible, weighty, breakable objects would have been enough to win it some love. Put that together with basically everything else going right for a healthy span of episodes and dress it up with production values that, bar the briefest dip, are toward the upper limits of what the nineties had to offer, and you have something that's truly top-tier, enough so that an interest in or foreknowledge of Gundam should by no means be considered a prerequisite to watching.
, 2000, dir: Osamu Dezaki
I'd planned to skip over this last volume of the Black Jack OVA series, since it falls just out of our nineties purview, but also because I'd only seen it with some hilariously dodgy subtitles care of a Malaysian copy, and how can you possibly write a fair review on that basis? In truth, I'd given up much hope of finding the U.S. Manga Corps version, possibly the rarest in their never exactly easy to lay hands on set, so lucky me that one turned up at a sensible price and lucky Drowning in Nineties Anime too, because wrong decade or not, it would have been nuts to leave this best of all vintage OVA series incomplete.
There, I said it! Oh, there was certainly better anime produced during the nineties, but was anything quite so consistent as these Black Jack OVAs? The worst episodes were very good and the best were damn near masterpieces, but what's really striking is the across-the-board consistency, regardless of individual highs and lows; sure, the early animation is shakier than the superlative later work, and sure sometimes the plots get a little too bogged down in weird contrivances, and yet both animation and writing - and absolutely everything else, really - keeps to an unusually high baseline across all ten parts. Which is a long-winded way of saying that, yes, Biohazard - or The Sinking Woman, to give it its non-U.S. Manga Corps-imposed title - is splendid stuff. It's not my favourite episode, I don't think, but I could be easily persuaded that its the best. And though it's not an ending in any meaningful sense, it's a fine send-off, if you impose an arc onto these OVAs that was perhaps never fully intended and view them as an exploration of a genius surgeon who's tried very hard indeed to cut himself off from all human feeling and to see the body and its countless ailments in purely intellectual terms and finds himself constantly reminded that life isn't that simple, for better and for worse.
Biohazard, then, finds the titular character at his most human and vulnerable, and at his least mercenary, and perhaps it's no coincidence that - a slight spoiler, but if anything in the opening minutes leads you to expect a happy ending, that's more on you than me - here Black Jack is also at his most ineffectual. It's not so much that this episode succumbs to the failing we've seen elsewhere whereby the plot just kind of happens around him, but that the problem he encounters, which begins with a seaside community poisoned by pollution and steadily narrows to the case of a particular patient, is too vast to be solved by one person or perhaps to be solved at all. By the same measure, there's an argument to be made (and the show sure seems to be making it) that for once Black Jack simply lacks the necessary skills: sometimes, a genius surgeon isn't what you need, or anyway, not a genius surgeon who'd make for a lousy psychiatrist.
So it's downbeat stuff, but not horribly oppressive; Black Jack's pint-sized assistant Pinoko is solidly utilised and given a couple of well-outlined side characters to bounce her comedy shtick off, and there's just enough of that to keep the tone from drifting into suicide-fuel territory, though thankfully no more. Also, aside from the usual graphic scenes of operations, it's not really horror and barely even fantasy, though there's a bit of aptly chosen mythology laced through in a way you could choose to read in that direction if you wanted to. At its heart, though, this is a tale of very human evils, and human evils of that especially ugly, mundane sort where probably most of the participants were merely doing their jobs and covering their backs, one told with both furious indignation and a somewhat numbed pragmatism, since we already join the grim events well beyond the point where most of the damage is done and the only story that's left is of what can be salvaged. It's not exactly fun times, then, but it's wise and sad and thought-provoking and made with marvellous craft, and that seems a fair trade-off to me.
-oOo-
It's been a while since we had three absolute stunners on a par with Birdy the Mighty, The 08th MS Team, and Black Jack: Biohazard, and while Urotsukidōji III drags the average down something fierce, there's a small part of me that's glad to have finally seen it and generally glad to have given the Urotsukidōji franchise the second chance that it probably didn't really deserve. Mind you, we do have one more chapter to go, so that opinion may very well change...
* I say rarely because, for all that I haven't seen all that much Gundam, I have seen the excellent Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, which manages to figure out many of the inherent problems with robot space fights.
I actually have a bunch of problems with Villeneuve's take on Dune, and two of them are far from trivial. It's absolutely half of a movie, and as the running time dragged on, I found that harder and harder to ignore, because there's just no arc here: it's a story that runs and runs and runs and stops, and that stopping point could easily have been anywhere in the last third without leaving the result any more or less shapeless. And while there was a lot in the design work that I found thrilling, it bugged me deeply that, having found an aesthetic he liked the look of, Villeneuve seemed determined to plaster it over everything. Say what you like about the Lynch version (or don't, since I like it and you probably don't) but it did a hell of a job of creating a universe that felt full of wildly different and competing cultures and ideologies, whereas Villeneuve's Dune does a hell of a job of creating a universe where everything's drab and brutalist. Neither of those are small issues, so that the film gets this high on the list is a testament to how good every other element is, and more than anything to how it does the one thing genre fiction needs to do and rarely nails, which is to transport us somewhere totally other and make it feel real and true. I didn't always love Dune, but I believed it, and arguably that's nearly as valuable.2) The Suicide Squad
I don't much like James Gunn as a writer and I'm lukewarm to him as a director; there's nothing on his CV prior to The Suicide Squad that I'd rate as highly as other people generally do, not even the first Guardians of the Galaxy. But with the astonishingly free rein DC appear to have given him, Gunn got to lean hard into the black humour and wanton sadism that were an uncomfortable fit for his PG13 projects, and with Margot Robbie now the undeniable MVP of the DC comics universe and Daniela Melchior stealing the film from under almost everyone else, he finally managed to make a film that does right by its female characters, and with a project that plays to his strengths and irons out his weaknesses, the results are a thing of wonder. Incredibly dark and mean-spirited wonder, to be sure, but then, that's a big part of the fun and also wholly appropriate: The Suicide Squad ponder the notion of a US supervillain strike team mucking about in world affairs for all of about three seconds, recognises it for the grotesquery it is, and proceeds accordingly, crafting a delirious two hours of entertainment that skewers its concept with fanatical dedication. Though written like that, it sounds like a grind, and thanks to a splendid cast doing splendid work and some truly excellent gags and just the right amount of decency and kindness at the centre of its shrivelled tumour of a heart, it somehow never is.1) Zack Snyder's Justice League
I can't possibly justify this decision, except by saying that the existence of Zack Snyder's Justice League feels to me like a miracle and, let's face it, we don't see a lot of those these days. And yes, I get that you might choose instead to view it as a win for the tenacity of toxic fandoms, but consider the alternative: that Snyder, an inconsistent craftsman who nevertheless clearly believes deeply and wholeheartedly in what he's up to, set out to create something of epic grandeur as one part of something even more preposterously epically grand, and a bunch of studio execs who'd lost faith in his vision because it wasn't as shiny and quippy as what those other studio execs were doing used a horrifying family tragedy as the leverage to push him off the project so that he could be replaced by a philandering, abusive hack who everyone pretty much knew by that point ought not to be working in an industry where he might get any chance to abuse his power - and then, somehow, years later, the stars aligned in such a way that Snyder got not only to fix his film but to then break it in a whole bunch of other ways that are giddily fascinating if you're a certain kind of film nerd. A more than four hour running time! A 4:3 aspect ratio! A goddamn black and white version! Clearly this sort of auterishness is madness and not a remotely sustainable model for making films, but just once in a blue moon, to experience something so vast and singular and magnificently demented - well, it was a rare treat, and for me, one of 2021's much-needed highlights.
