David Tallerman's Blog, page 11

To End All Wars Out Today

Happy book birthday to me!  2020 may not have brought much to celebrate, but I'm thrilled that To End All Wars, the third of the three novels that I wrote way back when I first put my day job behind me, finally gets to see the light of day.
To End All Wars is the most personal book I've written.  That seems an absurd statement on the face of it, when The Bad Neighbour is set around where I live and even draws upon a few of my own experiences.  And perhaps what I really mean to say is, more of me went into To End All Wars than anything else I've written.  Nothing I've done better reflects my interests, my opinions, or the topics that fascinate me, and perhaps that's most apparent when I try and talk about what genre it belongs to.  Clearly it's a historical novel, because it's set during the First World War, with the opening chapters taking place in the trenches of the Western Front and in No Man's Land.  But then there's the question of the strange encounter my protagonist Lieutenant Rafael Forrester has when he's out there, and which leads him ultimately back to his homeland and a country house hospital in the north of England, where yet stranger experiences await; that's definitely the stuff of genre fiction, and that hospital, with its inexplicable rules and weird ambience, has more than a little of The Prisoner about it.  Only, from there, To End All Wars will go on to be a thriller and an adventure novel, will toy with horror, will even tell a love story or two...
I realise I run the risk of making it sound like a crazy mishmash of ideas and genres, and I'm not going to claim it isn't that.  But in many ways, To End All Wars may actually be the most focused of my novels.  Ultimately, it's the story of Rafael Forrester, who begins the book doubting himself and the war he's fighting in, and ends it ... well, let's just say, in a very different place.  And part of why I hope the sheer amount of ingredients that went into it didn't lead to an almighty mess is that I put an inordinate amount of work into getting the details right.  I'm sure I drove my editors at Aethon nuts with the degree to which I wouldn't let go until I was as sure as I could be that I was happy with every last word!  Nevertheless, I've no regrets; I love this book.  And I hope, perhaps more than with anything I've written, even including my debut Giant Thief, that others will love it too, or at least be challenged and haunted and affected by it.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  Obviously, it's early days yet, but there have been a couple of highly positive responses.  Ros Jackson reviewed To End All Wars on her site Warpcore SF here, and concluded both that it's "...a gritty story that balances action with moral questions, and mixes credible history with the fantastic" and that it's "...well researched and enjoyable" (though actually, Ros's observation that bits of the dialogue reminded her of how her grandfather used to talk was by far my favourite part.)  And a fellow author you might have heard of, the multi-award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, was kind enough to take a look and concluded that To End All Wars is "thoughtful and atmospheric" and "a haunting story about loss, empathy and the human soul."  So that's nice.
Should that suffice to whet your appetite, you can buy To End All Wars in e-book and paperback, as you'd expect.  But if you want to experience the story at its very best, I heartily recommend having a listen to the audiobook.  Audiobooks are something of a speciality for Aethon, and they went all out on this one; from the samples I've heard, actor MacLeod Andrews has done an exemplary job of bringing the text and its characters to life, and his remarkably good impression of an English accent will now and forever be the voice of Rafael Forrester in my head.  Also, I think I like that gorgeous cover art slightly more in its square incarnation!

And there we have it.  You can pick up To End All Wars online in all the usual sorts of places, including Amazon UK and Amazon US.  With Aethon being a somewhat smaller press and me being far from a big name author, those week-one sales really count, so if you'd like to support us along with reading / listening to a book that hopefully you'll thoroughly enjoy, now's the time to grab a copy.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 66

What's perhaps even more surprising than the fact that I've kept my promise to review some titles that are actually worth watching is that, here on post sixty-six, a substantial two hundred and sixty reviews into our nineties anime drown-a-thon, we're still coming up against some major titles that I've somehow failed to get to before now.  Of this batch, I'd say there's only one that's been forgotten by all and sundry; all the rest are fondly remembered by at least someone.
Care to guess which is the odd one out from among Yu Yu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, Video Girl Ai, Jungle Emperor Leo, and 10 Tokyo Warriors...?
Yu Yu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, 1994, dir: Masakatsu Iijima

I've grumbled on occasions about these series tie-in movies having not enough in the way of stakes, to the extent that they feel like not much more than extended episodes, and to its credit, Poltergeist Report makes damn certain that's not a concern within its first five minutes - a five minutes in which we basically watch hell freeze over.  Okay, it actually gets flooded, but that's still pretty dramatic, right?  That there is a movie nailing its colours to the mast and declaring that we're in for some serious action over the next ninety minutes.

And if there's one thing Poltergeist Report is serious about, it's action.  Really, that's about all it has going on, and apparently this is a source of contention for fans of the show, who consider this a shallow outcropping that stints on depth and character drama.  But hey, I haven't seen the show, so I was just glad I could follow along without the slightest notion of who everyone was.  In truth, it couldn't have been easier: the Yu Yu Hakusho film is all too eager to make itself accessible to a new audience.  It doesn't go so far as actually introducing anyone or explaining the hows and whys of its world - this is still an anime franchise movie! - but otherwise, it's as accessible as something like this could be.  And part of that's down to the fact that, at it's core, it's not much besides a series of imaginatively conceived fight scenes.

It also helps that there's nothing here we haven't encountered elsewhere, even down to quite specific details.  The front third sees our heroes trying to defend five elemental shrines that provide mystical protection for the city of Tokyo, and I kept getting distracted by trying to recall all the different places I'd come across that trope.  But you know what?  It doesn't matter.  Because, with a couple of exceptions, Poltergeist Report handles its familiar elements with a ton more flare than they've been presented before.  It's a thoroughly lovely looking movie, with great work at every level: the character animation, backgrounds, and effects work are all top notch.  But what struck me most was director Iijima's grasp of three dimensions.  I don't know that I've seen an anime that so clearly locates its characters in real-feeling spaces, and the use of movement on different axes to give the locations a sense of depth is a hell of trick, one aided by unusually deft editing.  Couple that with Yûsuke Honma's remarkable score, which never sticks to a genre for more than a couple of minutes and yet always seems precisely appropriate to what's happening on screen, and you have a film that could coast on its technical virtues alone.
That it doesn't need to is a testament to the strength of the source material.  Poltergeist Report could easily have been nothing but empty thrills - presumably, for fans of the show, that's precisely what it is - but if you're unfamiliar with Yu Yu Hakusho, the benefit is a cast and setting with enough specificity and enough of a lived-in feel to get around the lack of plot.  As such, though it may be treading familiar ground, with so much going right and so much energy to spare, it still manages to feel fresh, and the result is a treat that I wasn't remotely expecting.

Video Girl Ai, 1992, dir: Mizuho Nishikubo

Like many an anime title before it - and specifically like shows such as Oh My Goddess! and My Dear Marie, both of which it closely resembles - Video Girl Ai has the potential to be all sorts of icky.  Here's the setup: Yota Moteuchi, despondent over the fact that not only did he inadvertently get the girl he loves to confess her own feelings for someone else but wound up humiliating her in the process, comforts himself with a video tape of the beautiful Ai, who, in a striking opening scene addressed seemingly to the viewer, assures him that it's all going to be okay and she'll be there to make his dreams come true.  And this turns out to be meant more literally than you might expect if you'd seen no anime whatsoever, as by some sort of weird science, Ai is sucked Ringu-style from the TV screen and manifests in the real world.  The sole problem, if you don't count inherent creepiness as a problem, is that not only does Ai only have a month to make good on her promise before her tape runs out, she's been physically and mentally mucked up by Yota's broken video recorder, with symptoms ranging from a violent temper to unexpected flatchestedness to - wouldn't you know it? - the supposedly impossible ability to fall in love herself.

Perhaps there are countless shows that mine similar themes and end up being all sorts of gross and weird, but that simply don't make it out of Japan?  However, based on what I've seen, the country seems to have an almost preternatural ability to take this kind of premise and somehow make it sweet and funny and romantic.  It helps that Yota is a decidedly nice guy beneath a slight lack of social skills, and helps more that Ai is quite unlike the dream girl we're initially introduced to.  Their relationship is appealing from the off, and at least in the early episodes that lean more into humour, legitimately hilarious in places.  Even the supporting cast have unexpected layers, and as the love triangle drifts toward a convoluted love quadrangle, their side dramas are weighty enough to hold their own.

But if there's a reason to track down Video Girl Ai today, nearly three decades on from its original release, it's one of pedigree.  That's because it's an early work of a studio then named I.G Tatsunoko, but who'd soon re-brand themselves as Production I.G and go on to be one of the most important and innovative anime studios ever, with the likes of the Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell franchises.  More to the present point, they started strong: Video Girl Ai is gorgeous, not only in the sense that it's lushly animated, or that the backgrounds are lavishly painted, or that the character designs are engaging and distinctive, though all those things are true.  But in the hands of director Nishikubo, that artistic talent is put to work primarily in service of bringing nuance to the story.  There's the way the backgrounds have a certain faded, insubstantial quality, for example, which does a lovely job of capturing that sense of being a love-struck teenager to the point that nothing else in the world feels entirely real, or the unusually realistic designs of the female characters, helping to sell us on the notion that they're actual people with meaningful emotions.  In general, both I.G and Nishikubo knock it out of the park, creating not only one of the nicest-looking OVAs I've seen, but one of the best for applying its style in service of its storytelling.

If I had to criticise, my small grumble would be that, probably as a result of squashing a lengthy chunk of the manga into six episodes, the navigation between light-hearted sex comedy and serious romance doesn't go as smoothly as it might, and though both elements are excellent, the comedy is a heck of a lot more fun.  Video Girl Ai gets pretty damn dark by its ending, and though it does that as well as it does everything else, it's hard not to miss the earlier fun a little.  In general, it's less of a romantic comedy, more of a comedy that turns into a romance, and I guess that might put some people off.  For everyone else, a show that's a great comedy that turns into a great romantic drama, looking terrific all the while, should do perfectly well.
Jungle Emperor Leo, 1997, dir: Yoshio Takeuchi

I've never had much time for Disney's The Lion King, and I've certainly never considered it the masterpiece many seem to.  I'd be lying if I said that had much to do with the widely-held theory that elements of the film were lifted from Osamu Tezuka's manga Jungle Taitei and its subsequent anime adaptations under various titles, though perhaps most recognisably Kimba the White Lion, or the supremely crass way in which Disney responded to those perfectly reasonable allegations.  Nevertheless, that knowledge is enough to nix any impulse I might have to reappraise it.  At any rate, I offer all this so that, when I say I much preferred Jungle Emperor Leo to The Lion King, you know I'm biased as hell.

With that said, it's bizarre just how much Jungle Emperor Leo feels like a response to the controversy, to The Lion King in particular, and to Disney's canon in general.  Take the opening sequence, in which, via some gorgeously lush and kinetic animation, the titular Leo discovers that his mate Lyra has given birth to twin cubs and celebrates by bounding through the jungle, spreading the word to its many denizens.  In the light of hindsight, it couldn't feel much more like a shout of "Hey, you know how you ripped off our cultural heritage?  Well, here's how that scene would have looked if you'd stuck to the source material."  Basically, it's the opening of The Lion King except with more obviously hand-drawn animation and a certain degree of anime stylisation and Tezuka's designs, which are a bit goofy but also charming and vibrant.  Oh, and it's fantastic.

From there, Jungle Emperor Leo veers off in some directions that, if you're not familiar with the source material, are likely to come as a surprise.  In particular, an early jump to a city - I assumed it to be New York for some reason - introducing a down-on-his-luck swindler named Ham Egg, comes right out of left field.  Ham Egg soon finds himself kidnapped by a company that knows, as he doesn't, that the gemstone he's been trying to hock is part of a larger stone that could be a source of limitless energy, and the result is an expedition, with scientist Dr. Moustache and hanger-on Mr Lemonade*, to a certain stretch of jungle we're already familiar with.  Oh, and while all that's going on, Leo's son Lune is becoming obsessed with humans thanks to the discovery of a music box, a plot thread that will eventually find him travelling to our world and joining a circus.

You might think that thread would tie back into the main narrative, or indeed that the main narrative would follow a fairly logical course whereby the humans disrespectfully penetrate Leo's home and he's forced to come to terms with their rapacious ways, and yes, that's sort of what happens.  But really, there's more just a whole load of stuff going on, loosely connected by the theme of the relationship humankind chooses to have with the natural world and its inhabitants, but which also seems like it's cramming an inordinate amount of Tezuka's manga into a hundred minute run-time regardless of whether it necessarily wants to fit.  This might be regarded as a problem, especially if you're the sort who likes nice, tidy stories.  For me, it was a ton of fun, and though Lune's plot is dispensable, it's entertaining and gets some of the film's best animation, which is saying a lot given how generally wonderful the movie looks from start to finish.

Going back to my claim in the introduction, it's also the aspect that feels most indebted to Disney: Lune's arc is reminiscent of multiple of their works, including Dumbo, Pinocchio and, most unexpectedly, the engagingly surreal wartime package movies that they knocked out on the cheap.  And while all of this may have been my imagination, is it really such a stretch that the Japanese animators, stung by the casual manner in which the beloved company lifted from one of their greatest innovators and then flatly denied it, chose to do a little homaging in return?  Whatever the case, if you're an animation nerd, it's one more reason to enjoy Takeuchi's alternately strange, goofy, morbid, and baffling family movie, should you need one.  While objectively it might not be The Lion King's equal, it certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, and to be just as as well-loved.
10 Tokyo Warriors, 1999, dir's: Noboru Ishiguro, Hikaru Takanashi

First impressions aren't stacked in favour of 10 Tokyo Warriors.  Its opening narration introduces such a heap of cliches that you wonder if the writer lost a bet: Oda Nobunaga, who was actually a demon don't you know, is returning from the dead after four-hundred years and only the ten titular heroes, all of whom have distinctive supernatural powers, can defeat him and save Tokyo, but also in the meantime they have to fight a bunch of other demons for reasons that aren't altogether clear.  I swear, that's at least four hackneyed sub-genres of anime all rolled into one!  And though unoriginal stories aren't necessarily a problem around these parts, one thing definitely is, and that's subpar animation.  From the off, 10 Tokyo Warriors looks cheap, and there was perhaps no worse year for cheap animation than 1999, as the rise of computer assists seemed to temporarily make half the industry forget everything they'd learned in the preceding couple of decades.  The result is the sort of show where even fundamentals like walking are off, and the character and monster designs certainly don't do much to redress the balance.

With all of that said, the first three episodes of 10 Tokyo Warriors turned out a lot better than I was expecting.  If there's an advantage to such a wildly unoriginal setup, it's that the show can hit the ground running - literally no time is wasted on introducing the characters or their particular crises, all of which are flung at us in media res - and that it can dig a little deeper than some of its influences into the implications of its overly familiar setup.  Plus, while it rarely looks better than mediocre (and only ever does thanks to some surprisingly impressive CG and effects work) there's still some neat action on offer, due largely to a greater degree of imagination being applied than is normally the case.  Most of the warriors' powers are ones we've seen countless times before, but the uses they're put to and the combinations they're presented in are often ingenious.  Indeed, there's a lengthy battle in the third episode against what's effectively a mobile wormhole that's one of the most genuinely thrilling scraps I've seen in a long while.  In short, while the animation may not be up to much, the uses it's put to just about redeem it.

Oh, but there's one last problem.  10 Tokyo Warriors is not one but two OVAs, both adapting chunks of what I take to be a long-running manga, and the result is two halves that fail to fit together in all sorts of ways both big and small.  The plus side is that the second part looks distinctly better, as you'd expect, since it arrived a couple of years later, and the virtues largely carry over too: the ingenuity, the rapid-fire storytelling, and a rather terrific score, which borrows from a host of genres.  However, it's downright frustrating to be informed in voice-over that between episodes three and four, we've somehow missed numerous important events, including the death of one significant character and the introduction of another, and its equally annoying that the second part neither builds off the setup in the first nor gets round to addressing what we've been led to assume is the core conflict: not once does Nobunaga show up outside of the introduction at the very beginning.

I guess, put together, all of that makes 10 Tokyo Warriors somewhat hard to recommend.  And yet, I'm going to anyway, for the simple reason that I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its often considerable flaws.  Because ultimately, they don't matter a great deal; the imaginative writing and direction make up for the uninspiring animation and that both arcs are satisfying in their own right means the whole two-chunks-of-a-bigger-story thing is less frustrating than it ought to be.  Sure, it's no classic, and it's probably not worth hunting for, but should you happen on a cheap copy, it's a genuinely worthwhile find.

-oOo-

That was a pretty marvellous selection, and - to make another somewhat risky promise - I've got enough of those posts finished in draft to say that this is going to be more the standard that the exception for a good while to come.  While inevitably I've watched the odd bit of rubbish over the last few months, its been in the minority to an extent that hasn't been consistently true since the early days of these reviews.  Why that should be the case, I don't know; it's not like I've been any more discriminating, goodness knows!  But it means that there are plenty of reviews of titles that don't completely suck on the horizon...



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


* Because, yes, all the evidence suggests that Tezuka named his human characters after whatever he was looking at in that precise moment.

Film Ramble: Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 66

What's perhaps even more surprising than the fact that I've kept my promise to review some titles that are actually worth watching is that, here on post sixty-six, a substantial two hundred and sixty reviews into our nineties anime drown-a-thon, we're still coming up against some major titles that I've somehow failed to get to before now.  Of this batch, I'd say there's only one that's been forgotten by all and sundry; all the rest are fondly remembered by at least someone.
Care to guess which is the odd one out from among Yu Yu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, Video Girl Ai, Jungle Emperor Leo, and 10 Tokyo Warriors...?
Yu Yu Hakusho The Movie: Poltergeist Report, 1994, dir: Masakatsu Iijima

I've grumbled on occasions about these series tie-in movies having not enough in the way of stakes, to the extent that they feel like not much more than extended episodes, and to its credit, Poltergeist Report makes damn certain that's not a concern within its first five minutes - a five minutes in which we basically watch hell freeze over.  Okay, it actually gets flooded, but that's still pretty dramatic, right?  That there is a movie nailing its colours to the mast and declaring that we're in for some serious action over the next ninety minutes.

And if there's one thing Poltergeist Report is serious about, it's action.  Really, that's about all it has going on, and apparently this is a source of contention for fans of the show, who consider this a shallow outcropping that stints on depth and character drama.  But hey, I haven't seen the show, so I was just glad I could follow along without the slightest notion of who everyone was.  In truth, it couldn't have been easier: the Yu Yu Hakusho film is all too eager to make itself accessible to a new audience.  It doesn't go so far as actually introducing anyone or explaining the hows and whys of its world - this is still an anime franchise movie! - but otherwise, it's as accessible as something like this could be.  And part of that's down to the fact that, at it's core, it's not much besides a series of imaginatively conceived fight scenes.

It also helps that there's nothing here we haven't encountered elsewhere, even down to quite specific details.  The front third sees our heroes trying to defend five elemental shrines that provide mystical protection for the city of Tokyo, and I kept getting distracted by trying to recall all the different places I'd come across that trope.  But you know what?  It doesn't matter.  Because, with a couple of exceptions, Poltergeist Report handles its familiar elements with a ton more flare than they've been presented before.  It's a thoroughly lovely looking movie, with great work at every level: the character animation, backgrounds, and effects work are all top notch.  But what struck me most was director Iijima's grasp of three dimensions.  I don't know that I've seen an anime that so clearly locates its characters in real-feeling spaces, and the use of movement on different axes to give the locations a sense of depth is a hell of trick, one aided by unusually deft editing.  Couple that with Yûsuke Honma's remarkable score, which never sticks to a genre for more than a couple of minutes and yet always seems precisely appropriate to what's happening on screen, and you have a film that could coast on its technical virtues alone.
That it doesn't need to is a testament to the strength of the source material.  Poltergeist Report could easily have been nothing but empty thrills - presumably, for fans of the show, that's precisely what it is - but if you're unfamiliar with Yu Yu Hakusho, the benefit is a cast and setting with enough specificity and enough of a lived-in feel to get around the lack of plot.  As such, though it may be treading familiar ground, with so much going right and so much energy to spare, it still manages to feel fresh, and the result is a treat that I wasn't remotely expecting.

Video Girl Ai, 1992, dir: Mizuho Nishikubo

Like many an anime title before it - and specifically like shows such as Oh My Goddess! and My Dear Marie, both of which it closely resembles - Video Girl Ai has the potential to be all sorts of icky.  Here's the setup: Yota Moteuchi, despondent over the fact that not only did he inadvertently get the girl he loves to confess her own feelings for someone else but wound up humiliating her in the process, comforts himself with a video tape of the beautiful Ai, who, in a striking opening scene addressed seemingly to the viewer, assures him that it's all going to be okay and she'll be there to make his dreams come true.  And this turns out to be meant more literally than you might expect if you'd seen no anime whatsoever, as by some sort of weird science, Ai is sucked Ringu-style from the TV screen and manifests in the real world.  The sole problem, if you don't count inherent creepiness as a problem, is that not only does Ai only have a month to make good on her promise before her tape runs out, she's been physically and mentally mucked up by Yota's broken video recorder, with symptoms ranging from a violent temper to unexpected flatchestedness to - wouldn't you know it? - the supposedly impossible ability to fall in love herself.

Perhaps there are countless shows that mine similar themes and end up being all sorts of gross and weird, but that simply don't make it out of Japan?  However, based on what I've seen, the country seems to have an almost preternatural ability to take this kind of premise and somehow make it sweet and funny and romantic.  It helps that Yota is a decidedly nice guy beneath a slight lack of social skills, and helps more that Ai is quite unlike the dream girl we're initially introduced to.  Their relationship is appealing from the off, and at least in the early episodes that lean more into humour, legitimately hilarious in places.  Even the supporting cast have unexpected layers, and as the love triangle drifts toward a convoluted love quadrangle, their side dramas are weighty enough to hold their own.

But if there's a reason to track down Video Girl Ai today, nearly three decades on from its original release, it's one of pedigree.  That's because it's an early work of a studio then named I.G Tatsunoko, but who'd soon re-brand themselves as Production I.G and go on to be one of the most important and innovative anime studios ever, with the likes of the Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell franchises.  More to the present point, they started strong: Video Girl Ai is gorgeous, not only in the sense that it's lushly animated, or that the backgrounds are lavishly painted, or that the character designs are engaging and distinctive, though all those things are true.  But in the hands of director Nishikubo, that artistic talent is put to work primarily in service of bringing nuance to the story.  There's the way the backgrounds have a certain faded, insubstantial quality, for example, which does a lovely job of capturing that sense of being a love-struck teenager to the point that nothing else in the world feels entirely real, or the unusually realistic designs of the female characters, helping to sell us on the notion that they're actual people with meaningful emotions.  In general, both I.G and Nishikubo knock it out of the park, creating not only one of the nicest-looking OVAs I've seen, but one of the best for applying its style in service of its storytelling.

If I had to criticise, my small grumble would be that, probably as a result of squashing a lengthy chunk of the manga into six episodes, the navigation between light-hearted sex comedy and serious romance doesn't go as smoothly as it might, and though both elements are excellent, the comedy is a heck of a lot more fun.  Video Girl Ai gets pretty damn dark by its ending, and though it does that as well as it does everything else, it's hard not to miss the earlier fun a little.  In general, it's less of a romantic comedy, more of a comedy that turns into a romance, and I guess that might put some people off.  For everyone else, a show that's a great comedy that turns into a great romantic drama, looking terrific all the while, should do perfectly well.
Jungle Emperor Leo, 1997, dir: Yoshio Takeuchi

I've never had much time for Disney's The Lion King, and I've certainly never considered it the masterpiece many seem to.  I'd be lying if I said that had much to do with the widely-held theory that elements of the film were lifted from Osamu Tezuka's manga Jungle Taitei and its subsequent anime adaptations under various titles, though perhaps most recognisably Kimba the White Lion, or the supremely crass way in which Disney responded to those perfectly reasonable allegations.  Nevertheless, that knowledge is enough to nix any impulse I might have to reappraise it.  At any rate, I offer all this so that, when I say I much preferred Jungle Emperor Leo to The Lion King, you know I'm biased as hell.

With that said, it's bizarre just how much Jungle Emperor Leo feels like a response to the controversy, to The Lion King in particular, and to Disney's canon in general.  Take the opening sequence, in which, via some gorgeously lush and kinetic animation, the titular Leo discovers that his mate Lyra has given birth to twin cubs and celebrates by bounding through the jungle, spreading the word to its many denizens.  In the light of hindsight, it couldn't feel much more like a shout of "Hey, you know how you ripped off our cultural heritage?  Well, here's how that scene would have looked if you'd stuck to the source material."  Basically, it's the opening of The Lion King except with more obviously hand-drawn animation and a certain degree of anime stylisation and Tezuka's designs, which are a bit goofy but also charming and vibrant.  Oh, and it's fantastic.

From there, Jungle Emperor Leo veers off in some directions that, if you're not familiar with the source material, are likely to come as a surprise.  In particular, an early jump to a city - I assumed it to be New York for some reason - introducing a down-on-his-luck swindler named Ham Egg, comes right out of left field.  Ham Egg soon finds himself kidnapped by a company that knows, as he doesn't, that the gemstone he's been trying to hock is part of a larger stone that could be a source of limitless energy, and the result is an expedition, with scientist Dr. Moustache and hanger-on Mr Lemonade*, to a certain stretch of jungle we're already familiar with.  Oh, and while all that's going on, Leo's son Lune is becoming obsessed with humans thanks to the discovery of a music box, a plot thread that will eventually find him travelling to our world and joining a circus.

You might think that thread would tie back into the main narrative, or indeed that the main narrative would follow a fairly logical course whereby the humans disrespectfully penetrate Leo's home and he's forced to come to terms with their rapacious ways, and yes, that's sort of what happens.  But really, there's more just a whole load of stuff going on, loosely connected by the theme of the relationship humankind chooses to have with the natural world and its inhabitants, but which also seems like it's cramming an inordinate amount of Tezuka's manga into a hundred minute run-time regardless of whether it necessarily wants to fit.  This might be regarded as a problem, especially if you're the sort who likes nice, tidy stories.  For me, it was a ton of fun, and though Lune's plot is dispensable, it's entertaining and gets some of the film's best animation, which is saying a lot given how generally wonderful the movie looks from start to finish.

Going back to my claim in the introduction, it's also the aspect that feels most indebted to Disney: Lune's arc is reminiscent of multiple of their works, including Dumbo, Pinocchio and, most unexpectedly, the engagingly surreal wartime package movies that they knocked out on the cheap.  And while all of this may have been my imagination, is it really such a stretch that the Japanese animators, stung by the casual manner in which the beloved company lifted from one of their greatest innovators and then flatly denied it, chose to do a little homaging in return?  Whatever the case, if you're an animation nerd, it's one more reason to enjoy Takeuchi's alternately strange, goofy, morbid, and baffling family movie, should you need one.  While objectively it might not be The Lion King's equal, it certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, and to be just as as well-loved.
10 Tokyo Warriors, 1999, dir's: Noboru Ishiguro, Hikaru Takanashi

First impressions aren't stacked in favour of 10 Tokyo Warriors.  Its opening narration introduces such a heap of cliches that you wonder if the writer lost a bet: Oda Nobunaga, who was actually a demon don't you know, is returning from the dead after four-hundred years and only the ten titular heroes, all of whom have distinctive supernatural powers, can defeat him and save Tokyo, but also in the meantime they have to fight a bunch of other demons for reasons that aren't altogether clear.  I swear, that's at least four hackneyed sub-genres of anime all rolled into one!  And though unoriginal stories aren't necessarily a problem around these parts, one thing definitely is, and that's subpar animation.  From the off, 10 Tokyo Warriors looks cheap, and there was perhaps no worse year for cheap animation than 1999, as the rise of computer assists seemed to temporarily make half the industry forget everything they'd learned in the preceding couple of decades.  The result is the sort of show where even fundamentals like walking are off, and the character and monster designs certainly don't do much to redress the balance.

With all of that said, the first three episodes of 10 Tokyo Warriors turned out a lot better than I was expecting.  If there's an advantage to such a wildly unoriginal setup, it's that the show can hit the ground running - literally no time is wasted on introducing the characters or their particular crises, all of which are flung at us in media res - and that it can dig a little deeper than some of its influences into the implications of its overly familiar setup.  Plus, while it rarely looks better than mediocre (and only ever does thanks to some surprisingly impressive CG and effects work) there's still some neat action on offer, due largely to a greater degree of imagination being applied than is normally the case.  Most of the warriors' powers are ones we've seen countless times before, but the uses they're put to and the combinations they're presented in are often ingenious.  Indeed, there's a lengthy battle in the third episode against what's effectively a mobile wormhole that's one of the most genuinely thrilling scraps I've seen in a long while.  In short, while the animation may not be up to much, the uses it's put to just about redeem it.

Oh, but there's one last problem.  10 Tokyo Warriors is not one but two OVAs, both adapting chunks of what I take to be a long-running manga, and the result is two halves that fail to fit together in all sorts of ways both big and small.  The plus side is that the second part looks distinctly better, as you'd expect, since it arrived a couple of years later, and the virtues largely carry over too: the ingenuity, the rapid-fire storytelling, and a rather terrific score, which borrows from a host of genres.  However, it's downright frustrating to be informed in voice-over that between episodes three and four, we've somehow missed numerous important events, including the death of one significant character and the introduction of another, and its equally annoying that the second part neither builds off the setup in the first nor gets round to addressing what we've been led to assume is the core conflict: not once does Nobunaga show up outside of the introduction at the very beginning.

I guess, put together, all of that makes 10 Tokyo Warriors somewhat hard to recommend.  And yet, I'm going to anyway, for the simple reason that I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its often considerable flaws.  Because ultimately, they don't matter a great deal; the imaginative writing and direction make up for the uninspiring animation and that both arcs are satisfying in their own right means the whole two-chunks-of-a-bigger-story thing is less frustrating than it ought to be.  Sure, it's no classic, and it's probably not worth hunting for, but should you happen on a cheap copy, it's a genuinely worthwhile find.

-oOo-

That was a pretty marvellous selection, and - to make another somewhat risky promise - I've got enough of those posts finished in draft to say that this is going to be more the standard that the exception for a good while to come.  While inevitably I've watched the odd bit of rubbish over the last few months, its been in the minority to an extent that hasn't been consistently true since the early days of these reviews.  Why that should be the case, I don't know; it's not like I've been any more discriminating, goodness knows!  But it means that there are plenty of reviews of titles that don't completely suck on the horizon...



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


* Because, yes, all the evidence suggests that Tezuka named his human characters after whatever he was looking at in that precise moment.

Graduate or Die Cover Reveal

It's been rather quiet here on the blog for the last few weeks, but I do have a good excuse.  I've been putting the last touches to the fourth Black River book, which goes by the title of Graduate or Die, because ... well, you can probably work it out, right?  One way or another, everything's coming to a close with this one, and you don't get to attend your graduation ceremony if you've been eaten by a dragon.
One of those aforementioned finishing touches happens to also be my reliably favourite part of being a writer, namely working with a fantastic artist to come up with the perfect cover.  As with the first three Black River Chronicles, that meant absolute superstar Kim Van Deun, and the only reason I can't say that Kim's outdone himself this time around is because he always outdoes himself, if such a thing is possible.  Don't believe me?  Here's what's going on the front of Graduate or Die...

Actually, from Kim's point of view, I suspect this might have been the toughest brief yet.  I've never been a professional artist, but I get the impression that the more elements, the harder things become, and five students facing off against a dragon is a lot to cram in there.
Wait ... five students?  We haven't had five students on any of the previous covers!  And who the heck is that in the upper left?  Yes, the gang have a new member to contend with, and there was no way I wasn't crowbarring Lucenna Fia-Arcwright into this image, because she was my personal highlight of writing this fourth book, for reasons you'll get to share in the not-too-distant future.  It's hard to say when exactly, because we still have the copy-edits and proofs to go, but I'd say we should be ready before the summer's over.  And in the meantime, here, in all its glory, is the complete wraparound artwork, which has a teaser or two of its own to reveal...

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 65

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sword for Truth, 1990, dir: Osamu Dezaki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

Next time around: some better stuff, I promise!



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

Film Ramble: Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 65

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sword for Truth, 1990, dir: Osamu Dezaki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

Next time around: some better stuff, I promise!



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

Working From Home Lock-down Special

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

Set Your Own Schedule and Keep to It

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

Have a Dedicated Work Space

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

Slob a Bit, but Not Too Much

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

Light and Fresh Air Are Your Friends

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

Gamify Everything

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

Be the Tough But Fair Boss You've Never Had

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 64

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

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

Toward the Terra, 1980, dir: Hideo Onchi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Area 88, 1985, dir: Hisayuki Toriumi

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

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

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

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

Devilman: The Birth, 1987, dir: Umanosuke Iida

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

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

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

-oOo-

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



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


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

Film Ramble: Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 64

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

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

Toward the Terra, 1980, dir: Hideo Onchi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Area 88, 1985, dir: Hisayuki Toriumi

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

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

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

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

Devilman: The Birth, 1987, dir: Umanosuke Iida

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

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

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

-oOo-

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



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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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