Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 134

What was that I said last time about trying to avoid exclusively covering obscure VHS-only releases?  But while I've failed miserably, we do have a title of note this time around, one of those that frequently comes up in "How the heck did this never get a DVD release?" conversations, so at least we're likely to get one hit from among Explorer Woman Ray, Grey: Digital Target, DNA Sights 999.9, and The Adventures of Kotetsu...

Explorer Woman Ray, 1989, dir: Hiroki Hayashi

Everything that works in Explorer Woman Ray, and everything that doesn't - which is considerably more - is present from its opening prologue.  Before we're introduced to our titular explorer woman, we meet two teenaged girls, Mai and Mami Tachibana, out on what looks to be a pleasant train journey through some vaguely South American country.  But, shock!  Barely have we had time to get our bearings before the seeming peasants in a passing truck are whipping out automatic weapons, leaving the twins to fight for their lives in an action sequence that's fun and ingenious, but so much less so than it ought to be because the animation is horribly wonky, and which makes little sense in retrospect given that there'll be endless scenes later where the baddies are careful not to shoot at the pair because their goal is to steal the artefact they're carrying.

So lots of action, then, and most of it perfectly fine on paper, and almost all of it undermined by animation so frequently bad that it feels genuinely unfinished, along with a plot that's full of nagging inconsistencies and gaping plot holes.  Where do we go with all that?  I could outline a bit more of the story, but Explorer Woman Ray doesn't care about it, so there's no reason we should.  It's connective tissue for the action scenes, which isn't a problem in itself, except that we really do need something to hang onto, and the only cast members with anything close to a clear motivation are Mai and Mami, who want to get rich and then grudgingly decide to side with nominal hero Ray.

I say "nominal" because the twins get more screen time and because I'm honestly unsure what Ray is out to accomplish or whether she's in the right.  The show gets a couple of relatively sympathetic bad guys, who aren't above killing people to meet their goals but would rather avoid doing so if they can, and all we see of what drives Ray is that she wants to stop them, but it's difficult to tell from the onscreen evidence whether the villainous Rig Veda's villainous plan is actually all that villainous.  He wants to reawaken the technologies of an ancient race, but who knows, maybe that's a good thing?  The first temple that gets destroyed (like all fictional archaeologists, Ray is dire at keeping ancient structures from being destroyed) makes it rain, and, annoying as it can sometimes be, rain isn't inherently evil.

All of which is to say that the plot is dumb and broken; but I could spend half a day reeling off good vintage anime titles with dumb, broken plots, and the thing that unifies almost all of them is how they aren't actively annoying to look at.  There are moments in Explorer Woman Ray that work visually - someone clearly put their heart into some of the water shots - but they never last for more than a few frames, then things fall apart again.  Sometimes that means an absence of shading, and routinely it means a lack of inbetweening, but most often it's that the characters drift so off-model that you start wondering if there were models or if the animators were getting instructions like, "Remember the woman with the dark hair?  Draw her."  Weirdly, the villains fare slightly better, whereas Ray hardly looks the same in two consecutive scenes and the twins are nearly as bad.  And of course none of those problems are mutually exclusive, so we get a ton of scenes where everything goes wrong all at once.

I don't know that all this makes Explorer Woman Ray bad, exactly.  Or, no, I do know that, but it's relatively easy to discern a version of this material that could have worked better, and we get enough glimpses that it's hard to hate what we ended up with.  Whatever its failings, it's bursting with energy and its intentions are noble enough: an hour's worth of over-the-top, Indiana Jones-aping action is a fine idea in theory and one that's hard to botch entirely.  Explorer Woman Ray isn't the worst conceivable version of itself, and it's evident it was made by people who cared for the material and had some sound ideas: director Hiroki Hayashi would go on to make the wonderful Sol Bianca straight after this, so the man wasn't without talent.  But something clearly went very wrong here, and while it's certainly appropriate that watching Explorer Woman Ray feels like digging through the wreckage of an ancient disaster hunting for a little treasure, there's nowhere near enough there to warrant the effort.

Grey: Digital Target, 1986, dir: Satoshi Dezaki

All credit to Grey: Digital Target, it has a story to tell and has put considerable thought into how to tell it, and it's a story worthy of the investment, one that feels, especially in the early going, as though it might be something really special.  Grey doesn't quite get there, mainly because the more answers we get, the more familiar its sci-fi tropes start to become, but it does enough that even once we can see the proper shape of where everything's heading, it's hard to feel too disappointed.

That's mostly because the world-building is terrific all the way through, achieving the thing that science fiction rarely pulls off or even seems to realise it ought to be aiming for of presenting us with a reality that feels fundamentally not our own and so keeping us always a little off-kilter, as though we're tourists in a foreign country frantically trying to catch up enough to not embarrass ourselves.  Grey gets to this in a couple of ways, and one of them is admittedly terrible in theory.  There are a lot of unfamiliar nouns flung about, for places, things, and concepts, and while most of them can be figured out with a bit of thought, we're never really specifically told their meaning, or anyway not until we really ought to have got there by ourselves.  It's perhaps the laziest route to getting that sense of alienation, but here it's used as well as can be, in so much as it never feels as though the writers are bombarding us with all of this terminology; rather, it's coming from the characters themselves, for whom mutual understanding is generally a low priority.  And that gets us to the second, much better way in which Grey keeps us at arm's length from its setting, the one that's genuinely impressive: from the beginning, we're thrown in with these characters and given only what information they share among themselves, which isn't much.

The reason all of this matters enough that I've devoted a full paragraph to it is partly that Grey: Digital Target is, more than anything, a mystery, in that the principle goal of its narrative is to keep us guessing as to what's really going on for most of the running time, but partly - and more excitingly - because all of this stuff is essential to how and why it works.  As we're introduced to our antihero, Grey, he's walking away from a skirmish that's cost the rest of his squad their lives, and we soon learn that this is a regular enough occurrence that Grey has earned himself a reputation as a grim reaper.  He's a consummate killer but a lousy team player, as becomes extremely evident once he's sent back into action with a new squad.  But by then, we're already coming up against some bigger questions, like who is he actually fighting, and why does nobody seem terribly concerned about objectives beyond how much killing gets done and how many vehicles get destroyed, and what's all this talk of classes and citizenship, and why does no one appear to care about anything besides that last one when surely the others are way more important?

It's unfortunate that, three and a half decades after its release, the average viewer with more than passing experience of science-fiction will get out in front of Grey well before its end, because the story, the mystery, the steady unravelling of this strange and exceedingly dystopian future, is nearly all the film has going for it.  The animation is entirely so-so, the designs are pretty goofy and all over the place (though I suspect that was at least partly intentional, and it does kind of pay off from a narrative perspective) and the action, of which there's a lot, is rarely very exciting, though its extremely blunt approach to violence still packs a punch.  Grey: Digital Target is a title I'd love to be able to declare a lost classic, because its goals are admirably lofty, and it's a heck of a shame both that time hasn't been kind to it and that the budget wasn't there to give us the best take on this material.  Still, science-fiction films that make a real stab both at telling a fresh tale and doing so in an unfamiliar fashion are rare enough that, if you've any fondness for the genre, it comes awfully close.

DNA Sights 999.9, 1998, dir: Masayuki Kojima

DNA Sights 999.9 feels very much as though it starts and ends in the midst of a much bigger story, with major events that might well have been as or more interesting than what we've watched off there to either side.  And the tale it does manage to tell is one that our protagonist Tetsuro stumbles through without much agency or thought, being batted around by allies and enemies and his own unearned and unasked for abilities, until everything wraps up with an outrageous deux ex machina and some vague promises of how much excitement lies ahead.

But you know what?  I've had a similar reaction to just about every Leiji Matsumoto adaptation I've seen, to the point where I've come to view it as almost more of a feature than a bug.  Well, the whole "bigger story" thing anyway; that's definitely a chief characteristic of much of Matsumoto's genre work, and surely a part of why it's so loved, given how excited folks have been known to get about shared universes and suchlike.  I'm absolutely not one of those people and I'd much rather my 45-minute OVAs have the decency to provide a beginning, middle, and end, and yet - perhaps because I've got so conditioned to Matsumoto - I couldn't really hold it against DNA Sights 999.9.

In part that's because, whatever's happening from moment to moment, for all that it frequently feels random and unmotivated and needs to be hurriedly followed by a burst of explanation for us to follow along at all, it's generally entertaining and frequently outlandish, as for instance when a bunch of amorphous beings from beneath the Earth's crust abruptly because a major plot element despite us having been given not the slightest indication until then that they existed.  But they're a cool concept and - this being the other crucial point - they look pretty great, since the animation is mostly very good indeed, and director Kojima, who'd go on to get some tremendous work on his CV, understands how to make Matsumoto's shtick work in motion.  Along with ensuring the spectacle is properly spectacular, he makes the wise choice of letting Matsumoto's goofier character designs hang around in the background while keeping Tetsuro and most of the other core cast members that bit more realistic, enough to anchor the show in some sort of concrete reality without losing any of the innate charm.

Normally, then, this would be an easy recommendation, barring the usual caveats about the difficulties of hunting down a lost, forgotten title that never got as far as a DVD release.  And yet I do think - and I'm a little sad to say it about something I thoroughly enjoyed - that DNA Sights 999.9 is for existing Matsumoto fans only, if only because the ending relies so utterly on tangential knowledge of his wider works, and probably even then solely for Matsumoto completists.  And if that's you, you've probably, by definition, already seen it; but if you haven't, hey, here's a likeable little slice of Matsumoto fiction wrapped up in cracking production values to round out your not-quite-complete collection.

The Adventures of Kotetsu, 1996, dir: Yûji Moriyama

When you've watched absurd quantities of vintage anime, it's easy to get a bit overly cynical and to come to a title like The Adventures of Kotetsu feeling you've seen it all before, when, in truth, it's not doing anything drastically wrong.  Well, it is doing one thing drastically wrong, and that's incessantly showing its 14-year-old female protagonist in various states of undress, and for that matter it's true that there's nothing here that the average viewer well versed in nineties anime won't have come across somewhere else, so maybe I was being just the right amount of cynical, but... Look, let's start over, shall we?

The point I think I was trying to make is that The Adventures of Kotetsu is fine for what it is, accepting that what it is is pretty sleazy and inconsequential and quite obviously a taster of a longer manga.  We get, within its two episodes, a sort-of-complete story, in that all of the major conflicts have been resolved and its cast are in meaningfully different places from where they started.  Predictably, this is most true of Kotetsu herself, whose actual name is Linn Suzuki and whose nickname comes from the brother, Tetsu, that she arrives in Tokyo from Kyoto in search of and then forgets about for the remainder of the running time.  She's also on the run from the ancient witch who's been teaching her the proper use of the demonic sword she's somehow in possession of, and rapidly finds herself roped into the affairs of Tetsu's former employer, detective Miho Kuon, who's got herself into some supernatural bother thanks to the case she's working on, and my goodness does The Adventures of Kotetsu have a lot of flailing plot threads once you stop to think about it.

The Kuon plotline gets wrapped up somewhat, though largely off-screen, and the business with Linn's master / mentor is a major element of the second episode and allows for the semblance of a proper ending, and I guess we can write the whole Tetsu thing off as a way in to the actual narrative, though it feels as if it must have been considerably more important in the manga.  But whichever way you shake it, The Adventures of Kotetsu has a lot of plates spinning for what's essentially an excuse for a bunch of fights and bare boobs - the two of which, by the way, are in no way mutually exclusive.

Most of the nudity, as I mentioned, is exceedingly creepy given that Linn is portrayed as a particularly immature 14-year-old.  That portrayal fits with the logic of the character, since we're led to believe she's grown up in isolation from the modern world - the show seems to think Kyoto is some sort of time tunnel to ancient Japan - and provides for some laughs, many of which arrive in the dub via Kay Hest's decision to play Linn with a posh English accent that's somehow funny in and of itself; but none of that makes up for how uncomfortable it makes the incessant gawking.  Thankfully, the action side of things fares better: Yûji Moriyama, who handled all the first run of Project A-Ko sequels and peaked with Macross Plus, knows his way around this kind of material and injects plenty of energy into what could easily have felt inconsequential and too familiar.

And those, really, are the two poles of The Adventures of Kotetsu: on the one hand, Moriyama has the sense to keep the pace fast and those energy levels high, and the animation, while never actually impressive, is good enough not to hamstring his efforts.  But on the other, while it's easy to imagine this developing its own personality with a couple more episodes, especially given how the second makes small strides in that direction, what we actually got brings nothing new to the table and distinguishes itself only by how exceedingly eager it is to show off a mostly naked 14-year-old girl at every opportunity.  And ending on a statement like that doesn't leave much room for a recommendation, so I won't try, except to note that if you're in the mood for 45 minutes of hectic, pervy supernatural action comedy, The Adventures of Kotetsu does a satisfactory job of ticking all those boxes.

-oOo-

As you've probably realised by now, or else new all along, Grey: Digital Target was our ringer here, and I can definitely see why there's still a lot of fondness out there for what in many ways would have been a fairly minor science-fiction title at the time: it may not stick its landing or fully nail its execution, but there are some splendid, resonant ideas in there, along with a distinctive vibe that really lodges itself in the memory.  And as predicted, it was the only proper recommendation this time around, though I did at least enjoy everything, which is always a win.

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 133

 I'm still trying hard to keep these posts from degenerating into nothing except deeply obscure VHS-only releases, but that's obviously proving a bit difficult given that deeply obscure VHS-only releases are about all I have left to cover.  Nevertheless, we do have one exception this time around, in the shape of the OVA of the 80's sci-fi adventure series Zillion, and it's a bit of a corker, too.  But does the fact that it's been deemed worthy of a shiny Blu-ray release mean it's better than three other titles that will probably never get anywhere near such a prestigious treatment?  Let's take a look at Zillion: Burning Night, Rail of the Star, Dragon Slayer, and Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past...

Zillion: Burning Night, 1988, dir: Mizuho Nishikubo

There's an essay to be written about the outsided influence of director Walter Hill's bewildering '50's-styled, cyberpunk-presaging, neo-noir action movie Streets of Fire on the anime scene.  Heck, it probably has been written, but I can't be bothered to find out and I'm not about to dig too deep and reveal my ignorance.  For our purposes, though, suffice to say that Bubblegum Crisis, which in itself would go on to be enormously influential, homaged its opening scene and much of its style about as enthusiastically as it's possible to homage anything.  Or so you'd think had you never seen Zillion: Burning Night, which came out a year later and goes even further in riffing on that wonderful opening sequence, then continues to lift the entire rest of the plot as well, albeit dropped into a setting that's just as weird a mishmash in its way as anything Streets of Fire managed.

All of which might come as quite the surprise to the viewer who'd made their way through Zillion the TV show's 31 episodes and came to this 45-minute OVA expecting more of the same.  For Zillion was a fairly standard teen-oriented sci-fi action affair whose main distinction would have been its close association with laser tag guns and Sega video games had it not had the good fortune of being made by the team that was just about to become the mighty Production I.G.  Though, actually, that's a little unfair: Zillion certainly looks far better than a late eighties anime TV show has any right to, but it's actually pretty delightful on all fronts and an unusually great example of something that could easily have been not remotely great, with some ingenious plotting, exciting action, and charming character dynamics.

Zillion: Burning Night sort of has all of the above.  The animation is perhaps a slight step down, which seems counterintuitive for an OVA from a time when that really meant something, but then, you could step down pretty far from Zillion and still look plenty good, and Burning Night certainly does nothing to embarrass itself.  On every other front, however, it feels very much like an attempt to carry over something of the vibe of the show but as little as possible of the actual content, which is why the heroic White Nuts who we last saw saving their home planet from aliens are now band members trapped in a bizarre steampunk Streets of Fire pastiche.  And even beyond that obvious strangeness, there's something awfully tongue in cheek and subversive going on, as though everyone's secret goal was to see how far they could bend the format and still keep it just about recognisable, up to and including taking five minutes to stop the action dead and sit two characters down to delve into the show's gender politics.

This was always going to work for me, since one of my very favourite things about anime is that willingness to mess around with existing properties in silly and probably hopelessly uncommercial ways, and Zillion: Burning Night is one of the more outrageous examples of that tendency I've come across.  Obviously, if you're the sort of viewer that would prefer to be offered more of what you've enjoyed, its likelier to be hugely annoying, both in how fundamentally different it is from Zillion the TV series and how amused it seems with itself over that fact.  So thank goodness Burning Night is fun and goofy and thrilling enough that you can, if you want, simply watch it as just another late-eighties OVA that stands pretty much on its own two feet.  And if you're yet to come across either the show or the OVA - which, surely, most people haven't, since they're hardly well-known in the West - then Funimation's complete and sensibly priced Blu-ray set is absolutely worth taking a chance on.

Rail of the Star, 1993, dir: Toshio Hirata

Pretty much everything that works in Rail of the Star is down to the narrative, and that's going to be all the truer for the viewer who's at least reasonably interested in the historical events it narrates and in the slant it takes to those events.  Based upon an autobiographical novel of the same name by Chitose Kobayashi, it covers her childhood as the daughter of well-off parents living in Japanese-occupied Korea, from a little before the opening of World War II to the aftermath of the war's end, by which point the Kobayashi family are impoverished, grieving, and desperate to escape from a country that has good reason to hate them and no interest in making their lives anything but horribly difficult.

This places Rail of the Star both squarely in that subgenre practically unique to Japan, the tale of civilians suffering through the losing of a war told through the eyes of children, and somewhat off to one side, in that Chitose sees little of the actual military conflict and is touched by it only indirectly until after its end, as, for example, by her father going off to serve.  Mostly, though, Chitose's story runs in parallel to the war, as her life gets increasingly bent out of shape by the global events happening just out of her, and so our, view.  And arguably even that isn't the core of the thing; though some reviews would have you believe otherwise, the thread uniting most of Rail of the Star's scattered and episodic narrative is Chitose's slow awakening to the fact of Japan's oppression of the Korean people and her own culpability in that simply by being part of a family that's done pretty well out of the arrangement until recently.

Admittedly, this is sometimes frustrating.  Since we're mostly bound to Chitose's perspective, the Kobayashis are nearly always front and centre and the Koreans who enter their lives hover on the periphery, helping or hindering and rarely coming into focus.  And though Chitose lived through some incredibly dramatic and heartrending events, there's nothing particularly unique about her or her family, and as protagonists they're not the most inherently interesting of people.  We'd like to learn more about those around her, and that's truest of the maidservant who, in one particularly gut-wrenching scene involving a misplaced clothes pin, she indirectly brings harm to.  That's surely part of the point, though, and I don't know that being blunter in its themes or more overt in introducing information that Chitose couldn't have known or comprehended would help things any - yet it leaves us with a narrative that's unsatisfying and shapeless in all the ways lived experiences are, albeit with a brief framing narrative that goes a good way to tying everything up in a manner the central story can't.

Still, a mixed bag for the average Western viewer, I'd think, and all the more so for the Western viewer uninterested in or actively hostile to the tale it's telling and its very particular context.  And as I said at the start, that's really the best that Rail of the Star has going for it: the animation is awfully barebones for a feature film, reminding me of nothing more than the Animated Classics of Japanese Literature series, and though Koichi Sakata's score has its strong moments, it also has a tendency to be cloying and manipulative.  Likewise, the cast are fine without anyone leaving too much of an impression and Harata, as a director, seems quite happy making sure that everything gets from A to B without necessarily trying to play scenes for all they're worth.  Whichever way you shake it, then, Rail of the Star isn't on a par with classics like Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen, or even the similar but more recent Giovanni's Island; but come to it with realistic expectations and there's an often moving, often fascinating account to be found of events that I, for one, knew almost nothing about going in.

Dragon Slayer, 1992, dir: Noriyuki Nakamura

In a way, what I found most frustrating about Dragon Slayer isn't that it wasn't better, but that it was as good as it is.  Because, after all, there's a definite quality ceiling on something like this - that being a prequel to a JRPG video game that couldn't possibly be drawing upon more hackneyed elements if it tried, and, moreover, a prequel that's doomed to drag itself toward a non-conclusion that is, in fact, the beginning of the proper story everyone felt was worth telling.  You could gin that up with the most glorious animation ever drawn by human hands, you could hire the finest of voice casts, you could bring in the most skilled writer and director, and what you ended up with could almost certainly never rise above "not too bad, considering."

The Dragon Slayer we got does not contain the most glorious animation, nor the finest voice cast, nor the most skilled writer or director, but you can tell, at least, that everyone was making a proper go of it.  Certainly the thing looks pretty respectable, especially around the character work, and Urban Vision's dub is that rarity of the form that's something of an asset, with generally commendable actors finding just the right blend of tones for the material, which veers between leadenly serious fantasy cliché and mildly silly light-heartedness that's invariably more entertaining.  Indeed, we could have done with more of that: the balance as it stands is fine for the tale everyone was stuck with telling, but nudging that in a goofier direction could have paid dividends.  Alternatively, a shift further towards horror might have paid off: Dragon Slayer flirts with the genre, with the stock monster enemies being closer to demons than to, well, stock monsters, and one gloriously creepy moment near the start leaves you with hopes the remainder has no intention of meeting.

What's worse is that there's one element amid the rote "young hero sets out to avenge his dad and rescue his mum from the all-conquering big bad with the aid of his plucky chums" tripe that verges upon being novel and interesting, and wouldn't you know it but it's introduced bare minutes from the end and not remotely explored?  I won't give it away - Dragon Slayer does deserve better than that - but suffice to say that there are the makings of a properly unusual romantic entanglement here, and I'd much rather have watched that story play out.

Ultimately, I feel bad for a creative team who were handed something of a poisoned chalice and had the decency to make what they could of it, and likely the drifts into humour and horror and relationship weirdness were their way of acknowledging that they had to do something to enliven what would otherwise be stunningly over-familiar.  And yet I can't help wondering why they didn't go further.  Maybe the answer is merely the limitations of a 40-minute run time, since even the most unoriginal of stories still needs to be kept on track, and that doesn't leave much room for doodling in the margins.  But if there's a moral to be had here, it's that when your margin-doodling is the only memorable ingredient of your otherwise utterly cookie-cutter product, you might as well go for broke, because the alternatively is making reviewers three decades later grumpy, and nobody wants that.

Dog Soldier: Shadows of the Past, 1989, dir: Hiroyuki Ebata

My hope for Dog Soldier wasn't that it would be good, since that seemed an awfully long stretch based on the cover art and back-of-box description, but that an anime Rambo knock-off from the tail end of the eighties couldn't fail to be kind of fun-bad.  And in this I was to be badly frustrated, since Dog Soldier isn't really that committed to ripping off First Blood and its sequel at all - though it does so enough to make clear that the similarities aren't accidental - and isn't very much fun, bad or otherwise.  Like so many OVAs from the period, it's just kind of there, though it manages to shoot itself in the foot harder than most.

The story takes a while to coalesce, and this is actually a plus point, since the chaotic opening is as good as Dog Soldier will ever get.  A frenzy of middlingly well animated action eventually gets around to introducing us to our hero, Japanese-American former Green Beret John Kyosuke Hiba, now a construction worker, who finds himself dragged by ludicrous coincidence into the attempted kidnapping of a beautiful female scientist carrying an experimental cure for the HIV virus.  Events rapidly grow more convoluted, as said scientist apparently assists in her own capture, and who can the American authorities recruit to bring her back - along with the cure, which they want more because an enemy power could use the immunity it would grant to weaponise AIDS than through any humanitarian instinct - other than our hero?  I mean, anyone else, obviously, but Hiba hates and distrusts the authorities and from their point of view is thoroughly disposable, regardless of his impeccable service record, and wouldn't you know it but he has a personal connection both with the scientist and the head of the organisation that's abducted her, so he's the one who gets dropped onto an island of unfriendlies to get the job done.

That's already a lot of setup for what really feels like it ought to be an action title, but we're not done yet: we still need to have the central love triangle explained to us in copious detail, or at least by copious flashbacks to the same snatch of footage, and we've already learned why Hiba lost faith with the US military, along with some muddled stuff about his general backstory that strongly suggests the filmmakers viewed America in the same way the average American of the time would have viewed, say, Libya.   And that's the big problem: there's too much story and none of it's particularly fresh or special, and even if it was, it's never developed enough to be interesting in and of itself or to complement the present-day narrative.  Or to put that another way, it wastes a lot of time that could be devoted to what surely any viewer would be here for, that being the action that, once we get out of that enjoyable opening, is barely a feature.

It helps not at all that we never get a sense that Hiba is especially good at soldiering, since the plot needs him to fail so we can have our full 45 minutes of running time.  We're told he's exceptionally competent, but we barely see it, and Ebata further muddies the waters by turning him and his buddy (who serves no purpose beyond an early spot of exposition) into out-and-out cartoons at certain points, amid an otherwise fairly realistic cast, so that he spends probably more time being a buffoon than he does being the badass we're assured we're meant to be watching.  Humour's a weird thing to even try for in such a title, and its brief presence is the clearest sign that nobody thought to sit down and figure out what this was meant to be, leaving us with an action title with barely any action, far too much narrative busywork, and a routine lack of anything for a viewer to latch onto, let alone enjoy.

-oOo-

I'd say that Rail of the Star's been done a little dirty, first by not getting much of a positive reception back in the day - and falling foul of the "How dare the Japanese talk about their own wartime experiences in a way that doesn't make them look like total monsters" crowd, who've even managed to get their hands on its shockingly off-topic Wikipedia entry - and then, subsequently, by being denied a more modern release that it warrants at the very least for the uniqueness of its material.  Although, since it's awfully easy to imagine a better take on that material, I guess the injustice isn't all that, especially when there are a handful of similar movies that are flat-out masterpieces.  At any rate, Zillion: Burning Night is terrific fun, and well-deserving of its rather baffling presence on Blu-ray, so there's that.

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 132

Having a couple of posts with stuff that's readily available was obviously too good to be true, and so here we are, breaking with that trend about as hard as we can with another bunch of VHS-only titles, most of which are pretty obscure even by that already pretty high bar.  But wait!  There's a twist!  My perhaps-unfair criteria for judging these releases that never made it past the humble medium of video tape has been whether or not they actually deserved to do so, or whether languishing on an extinct medium was an appropriate fate.  But that's all out of the window this time, because I'm happy - or, I guess, sad - to declare that everything here comfortably clears that requirement.  This is all good anime, and the question is more of how good and why the fates chose to bury these treasures in the mists of time and defunct media.

So, with thumbs pointed firmly upward, let's have a look at Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, Kabuto, Blue Sonnet, and Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals...

Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, 1985, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko is at once as unoriginal as a piece of fantasy could hope to be and a complete delight, and I think the explanation for that apparent contradiction comes down to one thing.  It's possible to imagine a live-action version of this same material that might just about work, if only because the designs for the cast, locations, and particularly for the technology are one of the few elements that bring something distinctive to the table; but being animated, and being mostly very well-animated, is what makes The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko shine.

Kunihiko Yuyama went on to have a weird old career that involves a quite horrifying number of Pokémon movies, but there's the odd bit of great work on his CV prior to that, and one of the common elements to his best efforts is a real understanding of how to play to the strengths of his medium.  Here, Yuyama constantly switches up techniques to pull out what's best for a given scene, or even a given handful of frames, and is happy to sacrifice a bit of visual consistency if that means an action beat is more exciting or the introduction of a new setting is more giddily fantastical.  This is perhaps most noticeable in the opening sequence, possibly the most visually lovely The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko will be throughout its perfectly paced seventy minute runtime, and during which you might easily jump to the conclusion that you were in for an artsy romance rather than a sci-fantasy adventure full of transforming giant robots and boob armour and talking dogs.

Because, oh yes, one of the relatively tiny number of main characters is a talking dog, and that proves yet another illustration of what Yuyama is up to on the animation front, because said verbose canine, Lingam, gets an altogether different art style from our teenage heroine Yohko, who in turns looks not much like the villainous Zell.  That approach can easily go wrong, and I've grumbled before now about works where it very much looked like all the designers were in different rooms and never spoke to each other, but in The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko it simply feels right in a way that trying to hammer a single aesthetic onto those three very different characters couldn't.

Still, there's no getting around the fact that chucking a talking dog into your sci-fi swords and sorcery movie is kind of goofy - which is probably all for the good.  As I started off saying way back when, The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, stripped to its bare bones, couldn't be much more cliched if it tried, with Yohko getting transported to another world whose head villain has designs on conquering her own and quickly discovering her chosen one status while buddying up with a team of allies to set things right.  And even within that, it's not like there are many twists on the formula, though there are individual details - like how the central McGuffin isn't a sword or somesuch but a piece of music Yohko's written to woo the guy she's crushing on - that add a nice bit of texture.

Don't come to The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko for strikingly original fantasy storytelling, then, but also don't let that lack of originality be a reason not to seek it out.  And the same, surprisingly, goes for the aforementioned boob armour, which turns out to be about as sexualised as Yohko ever gets in a story that actually winds up feeling slightly progressive by the standards of 1985.  Even if a big part of her motivation is the attentions of a boy who possibly doesn't know she exists, she still gets to be tough and brave and decisive, and there's a terrific scene towards the end where all those elements come together and we get to see how much she's grown across the relatively brief running time.  It's characteristic of a film that's wonderfully well thought out in its every detail, and even if that's in service of a plot you can predict every beat of, that still adds up to something utterly charming.

Kabuto, 1992, dir: Buichi Terasawa

Not for the first time, I find myself baffled as to why UK distributor Manga put out some absolute dross in their budget Collection range and yet failed to relicense some of their better VHS titles for DVD.  Because Kabuto - or Raven Tengu Kabuto in the US, or Raven Tengu Kabuto: The Golden-Eyed Beast in its original title - feels like the very epitome of what The Collection was about, except for the part where it's pretty good.

And, OK, "pretty good" is hardly gushing praise, but it's a hell of a lot further than I'd go for the likes of Vampire Wars, and Kabuto, to its credit, gets there by exceeding its inherent limitations in a few unexpected and satisfying ways.  We could grumble about the animation, for example, but I never feel good about doing that when a title is obviously pushing its budget to the limits in the hands of a director who's going out of their way to make interesting visual decisions.  Kabuto has its fair share of style, and roughly half the time it looks great thanks to some detailed, realistic designs; so long as nobody moves too much, it's actually quite splendid in places.  The flipside is that the action suffers the most, and the action could have done with some flashy animation since it's the aspect Terasawa has the least grasp on, with every sequence boiling down to variations of one character swinging their sword or otherwise doing something violent and another character dying unpleasantly, with not much in the actual way of fighting.

This is frustrating, since good action would have really elevated a title that has quite a lot of the stuff.  Fortunately, Kabuto is such a busy genre hybrid that it's allowed to let a few aspects slide, even ones that theoretically ought to make or break it.  It's nominally a samurai drama, but very much at the end of that spectrum that wouldn't be at all upset if you mistook if for a Spaghetti Western, though that's not as easy as it might be when it also chucks in a fair bit of science-fiction and tops the whole weird confection off with a heavy dose of horror.  Those last two are where Kabuto really threatens to excel, though the brief running time never quite allows it to get there.  Still, there's some absolutely terrific imagery scattered around, getting great mileage from the incongruity of muddling genre material into what, for most of its running time, would function quite happily as historical drama.

That's all for the good, because strip out the genre shenanigans and you have the most basic of tales left behind, one enormously familiar to any viewer who's seen more than the slightest bit of classic Japanese cinema: our hero, Kabuto, returns to the village of his youth to find it taken over by bad folks and sets out to rescue his childhood sweetheart from her captors.  But the familiarity is easy to ignore when the head villain is actually a perpetually naked villainess of the most cackling and self-amused sort and her hench-weirdos are a guy who seems to have wandered in from a samurai-themed version of The Terminator and a genius inventor smart enough to have harnessed advanced robotics while everyone around him thinks horses are pretty high-tech.  Oh, and Kabuto himself can sprout wings and fly, because apparently there's a martial arts school that lets you do that, and heck, even Manga's dub is quite respectable for a change, and all in all, trivial and flawed though it is, Kabuto is about as thoroughly and delightfully nineties anime as you could hope to get.

Blue Sonnet, 1989 - 1990, dir: Takeyuki Kanda

It's not like I need to be reminded of why I love vintage anime, but still, every so often it's nice to be, and usually what does it isn't the really mind-blowingly terrific stuff but a title that absolutely nails the nuts and bolts.  So it was with Blue Sonnet, a five-part OVA that, from its plot synopsis, couldn't sound more generic if it tried and probably wasn't a good deal fresher back in 1989.  The 16-year-old Sonnet Barge is both a psychic and a cyborg, and she's in the employ of an organisation called Talon, working under the transparently evil Dr. Josef Merekes, but poor Sonnet, who's never known anything except misery and abuse, isn't well equipped on the moral compass front.  So when she finds herself sent to Japan to stalk innocent-seeming high school girl Lan Komatsuzaki, who may or may not be another powerful psychic, she finds nothing about the situation especially suspicious, except for how posing as a normal teenager means that people are suddenly showing her the sort of kindness and decency she's been so deprived of until now.

Actually, I seem to have unintentionally made that summary a bit less cliched than I intended, and in doing so touched upon one of the things that makes Blue Sonnet special in the face of so many apparently commonplace ingredients.  Though it has all the graphic violence and nudity you'd expect from a 1989 OVA about battling psychic warriors, the source material in this case was actually a Shōjo manga, and perhaps that's why it goes down the unusual route of treating its twin heroines like actual human beings and letting in some genuine notes of emotion and tragedy.  By the mid point, I was quite shocked to realise how caught up I was in the fates of Sonnet and Lan, and by the end I was fairly stunned to look back and see how much ground had been covered in the space of two and a half hours.  Blue Sonnet uses its running time exceedingly well, and does as good a job as any title I can recall of making each episode self-contained and meaningful whilst also gradually building the wider conflicts and setting up what's to come.  Though it's hard to notice in the early running, when the show is largely aping a typical high-school drama, there's no real flab anywhere, and though there are a couple of hefty diversions - part three is a neat retelling of some of the best bits of Ringu, except for how it got there first by a couple of years - everything ends up pointing in the same direction, even if it's only to make some of the later character choices feel believable and impactful.

All of this is wrapped up in animation that's never a great deal better than it needs to be, and Kanda is hardly show-offy in his direction, but he does a fine job of ensuring that the budget goes where it needs to and that the art is always working in service of the storytelling.  It's hard to say whether the same is true of character designs that look as if they've wandered in from a good decade prior, and no doubt there'll be viewers who feel they overly date the material.  For me, they worked just fine, sometimes by injecting an air of innocence to the proceedings and sometimes by seeming thoroughly incongruous as limbs are torn off and heads explode.  Blue Sonnet, incidentally, has some exceptionally well-used gore, especially by the none-too-subtle standards of 1989, doling it out just enough that it feels shocking and consequential and selling us on how powerful its protagonists are rather than conjuring up a world where stubbing your toe is enough to make you explode in a shower of blood.

It's fair to say that Blue Sonnet caught me in precisely the right mood, which is to say, when I was absolutely ready for something pulpy but not dumb, and it's also fair to say that nothing here is what I'd call objectively great, barring a shockingly catchy opening theme and a generally splendid and well-used score.  There are aspects, such as the sequence that runs under that terrific opener, wordlessly depicting some of Sonnet's overwise barely touched upon childhood traumas, that might be bold and heartfelt or tacky and exploitative depending upon the eye of the beholder, and perhaps, there and elsewhere, the truth lies somewhere between those two poles.  Or maybe it's truer to suggest that Blue Sonnet is quite capable of being bold, heartfelt, tacky, and exploitative by turns, and sometimes all those things at once, and that's probably even a big part of why it works so damn well.

Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals, 1994, dir: Rintaro

We've covered any number of titles whose absence from any medium more modern than VHS tapes is strange and frustrating, but here at last we come to one where it's downright inexplicable.  The very fact that Legend of the Crystals is the first attempt to adapt the enormously long-running and popular Final Fantasy JRPG series to the screen would, you'd think, be enough in itself; but add in the fact that this was directed by Rintaro, of Galaxy Express 999 and The Dagger of Kamui and Metropolis fame, among much else, and cap that off with animation by the famed studio Madhouse, and you're into the realms of the truly baffling.

Or rather, there's one obvious explanation, and that would be that everybody involved was so embarrassed by what they'd come up with that they decided to disappear it from the world as well as they could.  I can't say for sure that wasn't what happened, but if it was, they were enormously bad at judging their own work, because Legend of the Crystals is a strong effort by everyone's standards.  Rintaro had and would go on to produce things that were more creatively interesting and visually spectacular, but there's not much on his CV so consistently good, especially when this bucks his usual trend of getting so caught up in the imagery that he lets the story get away from him.  By his and Madhouse's standards, there's not much here that's terribly showy, but the animation is reliably impressive, the framerate is high even for an early nineties OVA, and the integration of the marvellously designed characters with some simply coloured but especially detailed backgrounds is really standout stuff.  And as for the Final Fantasy series, well, the next time Square took a stab at this would be with uncanny-valley-fest The Spirits Within, and enough said about that.

Though, no, let's say one more thing.  Among the more obvious ways in which The Spirits Within missed the mark was by doing nothing with the Final Fantasy license besides throwing in a few arbitrary references and emulating its busy, over-cooked approach to narrative lore, something ill-suited to the limitations of a feature film, while later attempt Advent Children would learn from that mistake but arguably go too far in the other direction by hewing so closely to its source material as to be incomprehensible to anyone but the existing fanbase.  And that's all the more embarrassing when Legend of the Crystals got it right first time, acting as a sequel to Final Fantasy 5 but with a mostly new cast, allowing it to tell its tale without getting too bogged down in worldbuilding or exposition.

It helps, in fairness, that it's as boilerplate a tale as can be, but it helps considerably more that the cast are pretty wonderful, with the definite highlights being Rouge the kinkily underdressed sky pirate with a passion for stealing anything not nailed down and her opposite number, the brash and bulky Valkus, whose better judgement quickly falls foul of his developing a massive crush on her.  The leads are slightly less fun, though they do better than their counterparts in many an actual Final Fantasy game, and speaking of which, I'm baffled at how any series fan could fail to love this when the female lead is a summoner who can only summon Chocobos!  Admittedly, that's a sure sign that Legend of the Crystals isn't taking its Final Fantasy-ing as seriously as it might, and if you prefer the games at their more angsty, this probably isn't for you.  For everyone else, though, it's a delightfully light-hearted gem brought to life with splendid animation by a director with talent and vision to spare, and I'm genuinely bewildered as to why it's been allowed to muster away in the VHS dungeons the way it has.

-oOo-

Man, what happened there, huh?  Did nineties anime companies not want to make money?  Did they really prefer to put out junk and leave splendid titles to gather dust?  Or is it just that I don't have the faintest idea how anime licensing works and there were actually vast and complicated factors that consigned these gems to the trashcan of history?  Who knows?  Given that I'm not willing to go the extra mile and do some actual research, not me!

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 131

Unlikely as it seems, we have another post of stuff that's readily available - nay, readily available on blu-ray, no less! - and I'll be amazed if that ever happens again, but for now, let's wallow in the joyous fact that lots of great (and, OK, some not so great) anime is still being put out on shiny disks and take a look at Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Afterglow of Zeon, Project A-Ko 4: Final, NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX, and All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH!...

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Afterglow of Zeon, 1992, dir: Takashi Imanishi

I'm not convinced there was ever a possibility of cutting a two hour movie from the thirteen episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory that was remotely as successful as that seminal OVA series.  Stardust Memory wasn't always the paciest or the most concise show, but then, that willingness to slow down and build its world and characters, or just pause for a stunner of an action sequence, was the source of many of its virtues, and I've never been a fan of the breakneck storytelling that characterises much of the Gundam franchise, especially when it comes to these compilation films.  However, there are definitely ways in that could have worked, and it's evident that the creators of The Afterglow of Zeon put some thought into the question rather than simply stripping out everything remotely unessential and lashing whatever was left together as best they could.

I mean, that is a thing they did, it's just not the only thing.  And therein lies the problem: any one approach might have succeeded, but The Afterglow of Zeon tries its hand at three that I counted, if we include the aforementioned path of least resistance.  Which, actually, isn't quite what's happening anyway, given that the film does do away with quite a bit that was, if not crucial to the plot, then at least pretty useful in regards to making it followable: it's fair to say that Imanishi's take heavily favours the material he himself directed, which means an emphasis on the second (and, for me, the slightly weaker) half and an opening that hits the ground running way too hard.

So that's one angle.  But initially it looks as though Afterglow of Zeon might be up to something considerably more interesting, as we're greeted with narration from Nina Purpleton and by far the clearest explanation of the one-year war and the Gundam-verse I've encountered.  And that got my hopes up for a version of Gundam 0083 told through Nina's eyes, since the ill-use of her character was perhaps my biggest bugbear with the OVA's telling.  Saddled with the thankless dual role of love interest and exposition-deliver, Nina was probably doomed from the off, but the directions she's taken in the last few episodes are frustratingly nonsensical and ripe for a revision that clues us in to what the heck she was thinking beyond Stardust Memory's "Boy, women sure are emotional to the point of being downright crazy, huh?"  Which makes it all the more annoying that Nina's narration ends up as nothing more than a lazy way to plaster over some of the wider story gaps, leaving the sense that she was picked more because everyone agreed that Rei Sakuma had a nice voice.

That leaves us with one last approach, and perhaps the most potentially exciting, and this one Afterglow of Zeon does follow through on somewhat, though I came to suspect that again it was more from necessity than creative choice.  A take from the antagonists' perspective is sitting right there, and it's not as though Gundam hasn't dabbled plenty in that sort of thing, but here it could really have paid dividends since they do have some legitimately good points: given that the tale begins with the revelation that the Federation have been developing atomic superweapons in secret, their moral high ground is severely lacking.  But though Afterglow of Zeon feels more balanced than Stardust Memory did, that never particularly leads anywhere, presumably because to really delve into the motivations and morality of the Delaz Fleet would have required the production of new footage.

Which, in a review that so far has been a bit unduly harsh, leaves us with the one thing Afterglow of Zeon couldn't hope to screw up even slightly.  It may not be the best possible two-hour version of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, but it's still Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, and that's some pretty great bones to have.  The animation hasn't got any less glorious, the character and mecha designs remain some of my favourites anywhere in Gundam, and in general the visuals outshine almost everything else from the time, looking remarkably fresh and current even some three decades later.  The same goes for Mitsuo Hagita's thrilling score, the strong cast, and the largely excellent work of both directors: this could only ever have gone so far wrong, and while it takes a fairly good stab at times, that leaves a somewhat mangled, not always easily followed version of two hours of fundamentally excellent Gundam.

Project A-Ko 4: Final, 1989, dir: Yûji Moriyama

I can't be sure whether these Project A-Ko sequels have improved with each entry or whether they've just worn me down, but Project A-Ko 4 was comfortably the one I enjoyed the most.  And again, I don't know if that's the same as being the best; Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group had an infinitely clearer story and  Cinderella Rhapsody played around much harder with what it meant to be a follow-up to the original A-Ko.  Indeed, narratively Final is quite the mess, and it's difficult to judge how much of that is a deliberate harnessing of the first entry's chaotic energy and how much is simply that nobody was quite sure what story they were telling or how to keep it in line with the demands of wrapping up threads from the preceding two.  Which is something Final concerns itself with more than I'd have expected, meaning that borderline-mute love interest Kei is back from Cinderella Rhapsody and this time romancing A-Ko and B-Ko's teacher Miss Ayumi, much to their mutual chagrin, which in turn is enough to wind up the eternally annoying C-Ko, who had good reason to suppose she was back to being the centre of everyone's attentions.

Oh, and also there's a massive alien fleet approaching Earth for reasons unknown, though they'd be more obvious were it not for the various red herrings that writer Tomoko Kawasaki throws in to obfuscate things.  Really, the plot is far from a strength in and of itself, but since it's merely a vessel for delivering gags and amusing nods to other media, more so even than Project A-Ko's was, it proves to be just what's needed.  Really, it's that return to being anarchic for its own sake that makes this such a joy, and the sense of fun that was never 100% there in the last two is back in full force.  This feels like the work of people who at once have huge affection for the property they've created and no qualms whatsoever about blowing it all to pieces if the result is the tiniest bit funnier.  So we get perhaps the most random smorgasbord of references yet, from an hilarious mockery of Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day to classics of Japanese cinema to The Graduate, and on and on, with no end of cameos to be spotted if you're quick enough with the pause button.

Arguably, none of that makes Final a necessary watch, and for all the efforts to provide a true and definite conclusion, this takes us nowhere Project A-Ko hadn't already and indeed doesn't really do much to slam the door on further sequels.  If there's any real finality here besides the title, it's in the pervasive sense that the creative team knew they'd drained all the mileage from the franchise they could and were ready to bring the roof crashing down, which is admittedly just the right sort of note for the series to go out on.  That faint air of wheel-spinning is enough to make it that bit less satisfying than the original was, as is the inconsistent animation, and yet I struggle to imagine the viewer who enjoyed Project A-Ko and didn't also get a kick from this - which is weird given that, way back in March 2017, I was that selfsame viewer.  But here in 2023, and even with the somewhat weak start of Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, I definitely can't stand by my earlier dismissal of these sequels, the more so given how loving and lavish Discotek's Blu-ray releases have been, so I guess that leaves us with an across-the-board thumbs up for all things A-Ko-related.

NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX, 1993, dir: Naori Hiraki

NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX is at least better than NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX.  It has more of a story than "new villain appears, heroes defeat new villain", and thus rises above the laziest possible level of plotting.  It also has the decency to ignore basically everything that happened in the previous OVA, which has the advantage that the romantic developments between our protagonist Lamune and Princess Milk have been forgotten and we don't have to endure another ninety minutes of them angry-flirting with each other.  Not that the alternative, whereby Lamune and his pun-loving pal Da Cider's sole motivation is to cheat on their respective girlfriends with a pair of random women, is better in any meaningful sense, but it does have the advantage that this time everyone's bickering for a vaguely sensible reason.

Oh, but we're already deep into the realms of faint praise!  Well, faint praise is all that NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX is going to earn itself, I'm afraid, but I was genuinely glad that the plot was up to something, even when that something didn't work in much of a meaningful fashion.  The alluring ladies that Lamune and Da Cider have their sights set on are named Gold Mountain and Silver Mountain, because why wouldn't they be, and they're obviously up to no good, though not so obviously that the show doesn't hang onto that revelation as a half-hearted third act twist.  And because that setup wouldn't fill a single episode, let alone three, we also get some business involving a Wacky Races-off with some other prospective suitors, Milk and her sisters chasing their deceitful beaus disguised as Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts - well, Sacred Scouts if you believe the lawyer-proofed subtitles - and a bit of time jumping through past episodes that would probably have meant more if I'd seen the TV series, though it's not as if the writers do much with the concept besides raising questions about the ready availability of time-travel-inducing rocks that they haven't the faintest interest in addressing.

What they are interested in is providing a brief and bouncy slice of silly, slightly lecherous fun, and with a bar set that low, it's almost impressive that NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX can't flop over it a little higher.  The character designs don't help - Ramune and Da Cider, in particular, seem to look markedly worse than they did a mere two years ago - but the animation quality is the main culprit.  Mostly it's just doing the show no favours, but there are points where its cheapness and lack of ambition cause actual damage; once you notice that almost every shot with Gold Mountain and Silver Mountain is actually just one lot of character animation mirrored, it's annoyingly hard to ignore, and the last episode spends so long set against a featureless, abstract void that I forgot where the climatic battle was meant to be happening.

Nevertheless, there are laughs to be had, and since that's the bare minimum we can ask of what's primarily concerned with being funny, NG Knight Lamune & 40 DX manages to hobble its way past the finish line.  Then again, it's hard to say if anyone else would laugh at those gags, the more so since they're never developed beyond the point of being gags: the Sailor Moon stuff always made me chuckle, but objectively it's just there, without ever, say, delving into the differences between the NG Knight Lamune & 40 and Sailor Moon franchises for comedic effect - the exception being serpentine mascot character Heavy Meta-Ko's impersonation of feline mascot character Luna, because a snake dressed up as a cat is inarguably hilarious.  If you agree, you might find some enjoyment here, and it should at any rate provide a bit of fun for fans of the series, which is further than I'd have gone for NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX.

All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH!, 1998, dir: Yoshitaka Fujimoto

It's honestly kind of impressive how badly the makers of All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku DASH! screw up what you'd think would be a largely unscrewupable premise.  The original Nuku Nuku OVA isn't any kind of classic, but it's fun, likeable, and fairly ingenious, while having the decency not to lean too heavily on its central concept-stroke-gag, that our heroine is an android with the brain of a cat.  The TV series that would follow five years later and air a few months before DASH! doesn't get things quite so right, if only because it sands off a lot of the sharper edges, but it's a pleasant enough diversion, and if nothing else it feels as though everyone understood what an audience might want to get out of a show about an all-purpose cultural cat girl.

DASH!, which is strictly speaking some sort of alternate-universe retelling, since there's no way to square its particulars with either of the previous iterations, has its own ideas about what the property ought to be, and every last one of them is terrible.  I assume it began somewhere around, "But what if we made it darker and edgier," as so many entertainment industry meetings did in the late nineties, and went from there, digging ever deeper holes for the show to stumble into.  What if Ryunosuke Natsume, previously the pre-teen son of Nuku Nuku's inventor Kyusaku Natsume, was aged up to the point where there could be some sort of love interest between him and Nuku Nuku?  And what if Nuku Nuku herself was, like, really hot, in the very specific sense of that phrase meaning "has whopping breasts"?  And what if, when she wasn't jiggling about doing superhero antics, she was quiet and subservient and mostly devoid of personality, acting as an unpaid maid for the Natsume family?  And, oh, yeah, what if the whole thing with Ryunosuke's parents being divorced went out the window, but mum Akiko still worked for the evil Mishima corporation, though not as their CEO, and what if that was no longer any source of contention and indeed was accepted by basically everyone, even though Mishima were still the villains of the piece?

If the downgrading of Akiko Natsume is the most galling change from the OVA, what with Akiko being the best thing about it, the changes to Ryunosuke are the most annoying.  That's because this new version of Ryunosuke is utterly dreadful, from his screamingly late-nineties design to, well, his entire personality.  In a win for realism and nothing else, Ryunosuke reacts to the arrival of an attractive girl in his household more or less exactly as you'd expect a teenage boy to, lusting after her, getting increasingly jealous and possessive on the basis of a relationship that exists almost entirely in his own head, and failing to pay any actual attention to Nuku Nuku as a person to such an extent that he never for a moment suspects that she might, in fact, be both a robot and a cat or that she's the same person who keeps saving him from various Mishima-related shenanigans, only minus the wraparound sunglasses and spray-on leotard.

That broken core relationship is what pushes DASH! towards unwatchability, but it's not as though any of the stuff around it is picking up the slack.  Kyusaku is as irrelevant to this telling as Akiko is declawed, the humour is largely absent and almost never funny, and the plot that we get in its place is generic sci-fi junk of the sort that didn't feel altogether fresh when Bubblegum Crisis did it so much better a decade earlier.  And it probably won't surprise anyone at this point that the music is unmemorable, the designs are ugly, and the animation is barely functional and only gets that far by reusing every drop of footage it can get away with.  I try to always find at least one positive, so I ought to mention that the manner in which everyone simply accepts how Mishima use the city as their personal weapons testing ground is kind of amusing, but that's how far I'm having to reach to find anything nice to say about a title that had the answers handed to it on a plate and chose instead to scribble rude pictures all over the test sheet.

-oOo-

Whew, not much of an argument for buying vintage anime blu-rays, huh?  Except that three out of the four releases here come packaged with other, better titles (I'm assuming in the case of VS Knight Lamune & 40 Fire, but surely something on there must be some good) and both Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 and the All Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku collection remain well worth your time, even if not for these particular entries.  And the one thing that gets a disk all to itself was pretty great, so I guess the survival of physical media is justified after all.  Phew!

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 130

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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