Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 128

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Girl From Phantasia, 1993, dir: Jun Kamiya

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

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

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

Akai Hayate, 1992, dir: Osamu Tsuruyama

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 127

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capricorn, 1991, dir: Takashi Imanishi

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

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

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

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

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

Samurai Gold, 1988, dir: Atsutoshi Umezawa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 126

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

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

Roots Search, 1986, dir: Hisashi Sugai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 125

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 124

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

Wild 7, 1994, dir: Kiyoshi Egami

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catnapped!, 1995, dir: Takashi Nakamura

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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