David Tallerman's Blog, page 3

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 129

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Girl From Phantasia, 1993, dir: Jun Kamiya

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

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

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

Akai Hayate, 1992, dir: Osamu Tsuruyama

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 127

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

[image error] City Hunter: Death of the Vicious Criminal Ryo Saeba, 1999, dir: Masaharu Okuwaki

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

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

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

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

Capricorn, 1991, dir: Takashi Imanishi

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

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

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

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

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

Samurai Gold, 1988, dir: Atsutoshi Umezawa

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

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

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

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

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

[image error] God Mars: The Movie, 1982, dir: Tetsuo Imazawa

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

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

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

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

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

oOo-

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

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 126

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

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

Roots Search, 1986, dir: Hisashi Sugai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 125

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 124

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

Wild 7, 1994, dir: Kiyoshi Egami

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

K. O. Beast, 1992 - 1993, dir: Hiroshi Negishi
I don't know that greatness was ever on the cards for K. O. Beast: it tries to do too much and none of it's terribly original or necessarily all that compatible.  Its sci-fi tale of a divided Earth being warred over by hostile humans and shape-shifting beast people is a variation on themes that were all over anime at this point, the more so once you roll in giant robots and a race to possess ancient technologies from a bygone era that are the key to things that will be awfully vague for most of the running time, though thank goodness K. O. Beast has the decency not to throw out mysteries it isn't willing to eventually answer.  Still, it's much of a much, and while a heavy emphasis on goofy comedy isn't the usual approach, that goofy comedy is, in itself, nothing fresh; plus, in the early going, it's not so much incorporated into the sci-fi plot and mecha action as plonked awkwardly alongside it.

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

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

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

Catnapped!, 1995, dir: Takashi Nakamura

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

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

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

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

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

-oOo-

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

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

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 123

Wait, there's more Gundam?  I mean, I know there's more Gundam, if there's one thing you can say with certainly about possibly the most expansive science-fiction franchise in existence, it's that there'll always be more, but until not so long ago I was labouring under the misapprehension that I'd covered all of what fell under this series' purview, that being the films and OVAs released prior to 2000.

Admittedly, I wasn't that far wrong, except for Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, which I'd had my eye on for a while.  But then along came Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, or more specifically the film adaptations that were released in 2005 and 2006.  Now, obviously both of those years are a good bit later than 2000, but the original Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam TV series they were drawing upon wasn't, and that leaves us with a definite grey area - one I've gone and ignored by reviewing them anyway.  Which means that up this time we have Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Love is the Pulse of the Stars, and Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory...

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, 2005, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino

I can barely imagine the thinking that went into Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation.  Oh, not the notion of producing a trilogy of compilation movies of what, by the start of the twenty-first century, was already established as being among the highlights of the vast edifice that is Gundam; given that we've already covered the compilation movies of the original series and rated them pretty highly, that bit's perfectly understandable.  And reanimating them, well, that's not quite so easy to get your head around, since you'd suppose part of the point would be that you didn't have to make three new movies from scratch, but Zeta Gundam was heading rapidly toward the big 2-0, and as good as it may have looked by eighties TV standards, there was a gulf between that and what you could chuck into a cinema.  No, the unfathomable part is how the solution settled on was to reanimate only some of the films, with percentages ranging from a third to four fifths.

Compilation movies have become almost standard practice in the years since: it's almost rarer for a popular anime show not to get cut down, retouched, and thrust into theatres.  But what Tomino and co attempted was very much not retouching or anything close.  A heck of a lot had changed since Zeta Gundam first aired and apparently it never occurred to anyone to disguise the fact, because it would be hard indeed to mistake the old footage for the new.  The TV stuff looks decidedly ropey, the more so for being blown up to fit a cinematic aspect ratio, and the 2000s stuff is nicer but also very of its time, meaning plenty of shots with that awkward glossiness of animation made by people still fighting the contributions of computers as much as they were aided by them.  But what really sucks is the transitions between the two, or rather, the lack thereof: while things settle down somewhat toward the end, where the bulk of the new material is, lengthy stretches chop from one to the other with no rhyme or reason or logic as to why, say, two people having a fairly uneventful conversation needed reanimating at all.

On that last count, the answer is surely that A New Translation, as its name tells us up front, isn't quite the Zeta Gundam of old.  Having never encountered the show before, I'm not well placed to comment, but the internet tells me that there were changes made both big and small, and that's presumably why we get shiny 2000s animation for scenes that don't obviously warrant it.  Then again, keeping track of what matters on a minute-by-minute basis is such a task that it's possible I was just underestimating the significance of certain conversations: this is, after all, a conflation of one third of 50 episodes of TV, and it's not even an especially long film.

To say the results are confusing is an understatement: Heirs to the Stars does most of its storytelling at the most breakneck pace.  Nobody relays details they wouldn't have good reason to, which often means vital information arrives long after you'd expect, and rare are the moments when you entirely feel you grasp anyone's motivations, the more so since we have good reason to suspect numerous cast members.  There is a pattern that emerges whereby every few minutes events slow down enough for your brain to catch up on the essentials, and that combines with a sort of osmosis that lets the bigger picture gradually soak in, as the repetition of names and faces and concepts counteracts the general chaos.  It's mostly frustrating but sometimes exciting, since the effect - and from my experience of Tomino's work, I doubt this was accidental - is less like watching an anime show about a space war and more like learning the essentials of said space war by skipping news channels.

To some extent, that's all well and good for the tale being told.  However, while we can make excuses for Heirs to the Stars and even propose that its flaws are more like features, that doesn't do a lot to improve the experience of actually watching the thing.  It's draining and bewildering, and who wants to be drained and bewildered by their entertainment, especially when there isn't enough to compensate?  Much of the action borders on incoherence, and the better sequences are backloaded, meaning a lot of damage has been done by the time they arrive.  The politicking is more interesting in theory, except that, while it's fairly simple once you get your head around it, it's delivered in the most headache-inducing manner possible.  As with all of Heirs to the Stars, the good stuff is definitely good and the spine is pretty great, but that delivery turns it into work, and I'd be hard pressed to suggest it's worth the bother.

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers, 2005, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino

What struck me most about Lovers is how consistently it manages to fix some aspects of Heirs to the Stars while breaking others in a fashion that does barely a thing to nudge the overall quality in one direction or another.  So, for example, there's considerably more new animation this time around, and the integration is generally better, and for that matter even the original TV footage seems to have improved somewhat or perhaps was chosen with more care.  But then the new footage is generally less impressive, to the point where I occasionally found myself struggling to tell which was which.  There's also some prominent use of CG, something that was hardly guaranteed to go well back in 2005 and doesn't particularly here, aggravating the general tendency of the "modern day" footage to be too glassily smooth and polished.  On balance, the shift towards visual consistency probably has to be regarded as an improvement, and if nothing else it means we get some action sequences that are legible and thus reasonably exciting, but it's less than I was hoping for when I noted the ratios of old to new footage.

On the plot front, meanwhile, some effort has gone into addressing the aimlessness that afflicted Heirs to the Stars.  The answer Lovers brings - look, it's right there in the title! - is to focus on the relationship side of things, which Heirs to the Stars largely neglected.  Sometimes this pays off, in that there are lengthy sequences where Lovers behaves like a proper film, focusing on the interpersonal conflicts of a manageable bunch of characters in a handful of locations rather than batting madly around the solar system while flinging names and faces at us seemingly at random.  The trouble is, judging by what I've seen of his work and certainly by what's on offer here, Tomino is awful at writing relationships, and the central one, between reliably dull protagonist Camille and enemy pilot Four Murasame, is no hook to hang a movie on.  Possibly it would have worked better with the breathing room of multiple episodes, but it's hard to wish for more scenes of incoherent teenage romance.  Four reminded me strongly of Quess from Char's Counterattack, one of my least favourite characters anywhere in anime, and if she's not quite that bad, her actions are just as unmotivated by anything that could be considered reasonable or believable human behaviour.

Then again, perhaps Camille secretly found her as irritating as I did, since within minutes of their earth-shaking romance reaching its inevitably tragic ending, he's making out with someone else - again, presumably a consequence of cramming hours of footage into ninety-some minutes, but it doesn't make things less absurd in the moment.  And what's worse, the price we pay for this slightly more lucid change in direction on one front is that the wider conflict hardly makes a shred of sense: I could offer no better summary of the plot than "The good people try and stop the bad people from doing bad things while running away a lot."  A degree of that probably comes down to my fuzzy memories of part one, but contemporary audiences had waited five months between entries and it was twenty years since the TV show had aired, so I reckon I can be forgiven for a gap of a couple of weeks, and I don't feel bad about suggesting that the fault lies in some thoroughly inarticulate storytelling.*

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, Love is the Pulse of the Stars, 2006, dir: Yoshiyuki Tomino

I'd naively hoped that this last entry might be the point at which the series really began to pick up, perhaps became the original Gundam movie trilogy managed to end on a high note that made it feel retrospectively more like a trio of proper movies than a massive quantity of TV footage chopped, often clunkily, together.  No such luck: despite containing the largest percentage of shiny new twenty-first-century footage, Love is the Pulse of the Stars is comfortably the worst of three films that only ever succeeded in clawing their way up to fairly good.

Love is the Pulse of the Stars doesn't manage that much.  Oh, maybe there's the odd scene, but if there was, I refuse to be blamed for missing it, since the hundred-minute run time is an almighty slog: with two movies of back story, countless characters major and minor, and not one iota of an attempt made to re-establish anyone or anything, keeping the barest grasp of what was going on was such an ordeal that I had no energy left for discerning okay-ness from mediocrity.

By the end, it's tough to imagine that there could ever have been a worthwhile three movie adaptation of  Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, at least with this particular approach.  There are elements to this one I personally found wholly off-putting, like a drift into vague spiritualism in a series that's always struck me as avoiding that sort of thing hard, and I could definitely have done without the bizarre "The Zeta Gundam is powered by love or maybe ghosts or some damn thing" twist we get in the back half.  But there is certainly good stuff in here; the problem is that it's so rarely foregrounded.  With the running time hobbled by the determination to re-animate so much of the footage, there isn't room to balance the wider conflict, which is on a particularly enormous scale this time around, and once again that means a focus on interpersonal dramas that simply aren't that interesting.  It really does reach ludicrous heights here, as giant robot fight after giant robot fight is reduced to clashes of personality between people who were once friends, lovers, enemies, or a combination of the three, and always seem to somehow know who they're up against.  Meanwhile, the whole interplanetary war that you might naively imagine would be the point is sidelined so hard that I truly don't think it's followable without having seen the series.

So are there any compensations?  Not really, no.  For all that there's theoretically 80% new footage here (which, yes, makes this vastly more a film from 2006 than a TV series from the eighties, but it's too late to worry about that!) the animation is, on a whole, that bit weaker.  This possibly has something to do with just how much Love is the Pulse of the Stars is mobile suit battles, something Tomino is bafflingly bad at directing given how much experience he'd clocked up by this point.  He routinely acts as though space is a flat plane, the older footage continues to suffer from being awkwardly zoomed in to suit the cinematic aspect ratio, and the balance of CG and traditional animation is never quite right, as it rarely would be for another half decade or so.  So for all that the visuals are the strongest aspect - after, perhaps, a noticeably more novel and interesting score - they're not the sort of strength that could hope to make up for some disastrous narrative weaknesses.  I'm sort of glad I sat through Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation to fill in a gap or two in my Gundam knowledge, but I can't think of any other reason to devote five hours of your life to these movies.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, 1991 - 1992, dir: Mitsuko Kase, Takashi Imanishi

Throughout most of my watching of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, I was confident I'd be starting this review by declaring that I'd gone from some of the weakest Gundam entries I've encountered to one of the finest, if not the very best.  And now, coming out of its thirteenth and final episode, I still think that's the case, I'm just disappointed that I'm having to hedge that statement a little.  So let's be clear up front: Stardust Memory is superb, both top-tier Gundam and top-tier science fiction in general, not to mention an extremely high water mark for animation and one of the better OVA series ever produced.  It's excellent stuff and I recommend it, I'm merely sad to not be recommending it unreservedly is all.

But that start - oh my!  The first episode, in which the first of two experimental Gundam units is stolen from a base on Earth and rash greenhorn test pilot Kou Uraki borrows the other in an attempt to retrieve it, is as near to flawless as you could dare to hope.  And what's more astonishing is that the level of quality barely slips for its immediate successors, building out the cast and context with slick economy while never losing track of the core conflict and mixing compelling character drama with absolutely thrilling action.  Really, I'd struggle to point to anywhere in the first two thirds where a foot is inarguably put wrong; my heart sank slightly when the conflict left Earth for outer space, since, for me, Gundam is always at its best when it's not just mobile suits whizzing around against a black backdrop, but the actual dip in quality is negligible, in large part because the storytelling is so good that the shift feels both natural and necessary.

Stardust Memory will eventually take that dip, and I could point to the exact moment at which it happens, but I won't because it would be both an enormous spoiler and somewhat unfair: the scene in question is superb in its own right and the partial reboot of the narrative that follows is, again, both earned and dramatically satisfying.  The problem is merely that it pushes Stardust Memory from a track that felt genuinely fresh onto one that's more familiar Gundam fare. Familiar Gundam fare delivered superlatively, no doubt about it, and yet there's an awful lot of Gundam in existence, and there are beats that had been hit many a time by 1991 and would go on to be hit many times more, and so the early freshness is all the more exhilarating, just as its lack is that bit more frustrating - though even then, Stardust Memory is canny enough to use the experienced viewer's assumptions against them to pull off some real shocks.

It helps, obviously, that Stardust Memory both looks and sounds extraordinarily good.  Indeed, if Gundam's ever reliably looked better than this, it's outside of my experience.  Obviously, that means that the giant-robots-fighting stuff is magnificently animated, but so is everything else, from the most mundane conversations through to the most trivial of character details.  Neither Kase nor Imanishi ever get particularly show-offy in their direction, but it's purely because they don't need to when every shot feels like showing off.  Chuck in some left-field soundtrack choices that feel like they ought not to work at all and end up as a triumph of constructing a unique mood and you have the sort of show that you genuinely could enjoy without following the plot purely for its overwhelming quality.

So, yes, it's great, and I'd feel terrible if I left anyone thinking overwise.  It's only that a Stardust Memory that had stuck to its early guns and been largely insulated from the wider Gundam-verse in the manner of other highlights like War in the Pocket and The 08th MS Team would have been both a new favourite and an easy recommendation to more or less everyone, whereas the one we have, which starts out as that and ends up getting awfully busy with filling plot gaps from other shows, isn't quite there.  If you're a Gundam fan, then obviously this is indispensable, and likewise if you're a Gundam casual like me, and if you don't even know what a Gundam is but love sci-fi and outstanding animation, then this should be high on the list of franchise entries you really need to sit down with regardless one of these days.

-oOo-

It gives me no pleasure to be mean about Gundam, the rare series that has absolutely earned its out-sized cultural impact by being far more often excellent than not.  But then, it gave me no pleasure to watch Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation, so what can you do, eh?  Still, I'm very glad we got to say our last goodbye** to the Gundam-verse with an entry that shows off so much of what makes it so special.

Next up: hopefully some stuff that's actually definitely from the nineties!

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

* If more evidence were needed, I'd point to the crucial scene that relies on two children hidden in a spacesuit failing to hear or even notice a heated conversation taking place roughly a metre from their heads.

** OK, so there might be a Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 compilation movie to get to at some point...

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 122

 Normally, I'd be feeling bad about rambling on about another thoroughly obscure bunch of titles, but a) it's not as if there isn't worse to come if I don't give up on this madness soon and b) this is the rare post that throws up something I'd never heard of and ended up slightly loving and c) the one title here that's remotely well known is a return to a franchise we'd have been better off forgetting all about.  Yes, it's  the end of Urotsukidôji - at least for our purposes - and of a journey that began with Legend of the Overfiend practically at the beginning of this series.  Can the finale redeem everything that's come before it?  Well, let's just say I'm not sure it's the worst of the batch from amongst Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, Magical Twilight, Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road...

Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, 1990, dir: Satoshi Dezaki

I remember musing last time as to why no "proper" distributor* ever picked up the two Riki-Oh OVAs that were released in 1989 and 1990 respectively.  Well, here, no doubt, we have part of our answer: Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction is abysmal.  And normally I hate to pre-empt a conclusion this far into a review, but there's no use dancing around the facts on this occasion, since I'm not going to have anything nice to say.  No, wait, the closing song is OK.  But that really is it.

It shouldn't need pointing out that Riki-Oh 2 is the sequel to Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, yet it's easy to imagine the viewer who could get all the way through the latter without realising it had anything to do with the former.  That sort of thing isn't altogether uncommon in the world of manga adaptations, where it makes sense to focus on discreet arcs that are a fit for your running time whether or not they necessarily link together, yet it feels as though there ought to be some connective tissue - heck, the protagonist being recognisably the same in all but a handful of shots would be a start.  And this is especially weird given that both share director Dezaki, a creator of modest but definite talents who apparently forgot everything he knew in the span of a year.  The Wall of Hell was no masterpiece, but it had style, and that style carried it a long way, injecting energy and tension into some basically schlocky material.

Here he does the opposite, and while I don't think we should be throwing too much shade in Dezaki's direction, it's certainly the case that more could have been done with this setup.  It's overly busy and definitely too reliant on coincidence and storytelling shortcuts, but it's not hard to see from what we get here how the material might have played out better, as it no doubt did in the manga.  Following his escape from the hellish prison of the first OVA (I presume), our hero Riki is intent on tracking down his long-lost brother (I think, maybe) who he abandoned when they were children.  This quest takes him to the southernmost cape of Japan (I'm completely guessing) where, in a distressing bit of fiction foreshadowing reality, a malfunctioning nuclear plant has left a chunk of the country supposedly uninhabitable - though in the world of Riki-Oh, that just means it's been taken over by evil sorts as a base for their vague but no doubt nefarious plans.

Let's cover one example of how spectacularly shabby Child of Destruction's narrative delivery is and move on.  It's self-evident that Riki's abandonment of his brother is the beating heart of this material, yet here's how that vital moment plays out on screen: the two are playing hide and seek and it's Riki's turn to hide; as he's running off, a limousine pulls up and the old man inside says, "Wouldn't you like to come and live with me, though?" which Riki agrees to without a second thought; as the car drives off, he sees his brother sitting waiting in the snow and looks mildly troubled; and that's our lot.  So far as it's possible to judge by what we're shown, Riki left his little brother to die because he kind of forgot about him, and wouldn't it be rude to ask the kindly stranger who's just effectively kidnapped you if there might not be room in his mansion for another random kid?

With no one willing to find space in a 45-minute OVA to explain the lynchpin of the whole plot, this never had much hope of succeeding on a story level.  However, I've had kind words to say about many a narratively disastrous piece of anime before now, and so we return to why I don't know that this shambles was altogether Dezaki's fault, for all that he did nothing to right it: Child of Destruction evidently had no budget, and its animation is horrible, and that horrible animation kills every scene stone dead.  There's stuff that could be fun - the action and gore were clearly intended to be - but apparently there wasn't even cash to splash on what ought to have been highlights, since they're as visually malnourished as the rest, constantly relying on the most obvious shortcuts.  And that pushes Child of Destruction down from being merely bad to the realms of face-slappingly bad, because what sort of early nineties OVA can't find a few yen to make its outrageous gore and over-the-top fights look cool?  Fail that and you've failed everything, which, as I've hopefully established, is precisely what Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction does.

Magical Twilight, 1994, dir: Yoshiaki Kobayashi

In spite of appearances, the reason I swore blind I wouldn't review hentai here and then went on to review quite a lot of hentai is not, in fact, that I secretly just wanted to watch a load of hentai and talk about it in public.  No, it's more that, compared with most of what we might categorise as pornography, the boundary between hentai and regular anime is an awfully vague and blurry one, and there's sometimes no sure way to separate one from the other.  But on this occasion I'm pushing that argument about as far as it will go, because, yes, Magical Twilight is most definitely hentai, and yes, I knew that going in, and the only real excuse I have is that numerous reviews suggested it was good enough that, if you squinted a bit, you could watch it as plain old anime.

That's sort of true but mostly not: there's a ton of explicit sex in Magical Twilight and, compared with some of the titles we've covered here, it's hard to imagine how you could snip it out and cobble anything remotely coherent from the remainder.  Though for the first episode, anyway, this seems like it might not altogether be the case: the basic setup, with white witch Chippie and her promiscuous frenemy Irene sent down to the human world to accomplish the practical part of their witching exams by ingratiating themselves with a randomly chosen human, could easily be the setup for your standard comic nineties OVA were events played out a little differently.  This is less true of the two-part follow up, which relies heavily on Chippie's now-love-interest Tsukasa getting jiggy with every remotely appropriate female he lays eyes on, yet its heart remains in the world of romantic comedy and so does the bulk of the material.

Marking on the exceedingly slidey scale of vintage hentai, the sexy stuff is relatively innocuous, which means there's a bad witch who gets sexually assaulted into giving up on her quest to kill Tsukasa and a teenaged girl who wants to sleep with him because she watched her mum sleeping with him and got awfully horny as a result, and actually, now that I think about it, probably more of the sex is non-consensual than not, though that generally means Irene using her magic to have her way with Tsukasa, and there's no indication that he's particularly traumatised by the experience.  Again judging entirely by the standards of nineties hentai, I guess that leaves us somewhere around "only a bit gross"?  At any rate, the animation is respectable enough that these look like real people conducting recognisable acts that horny naked people might get up to, which is by no means a given, so I'm willing to suppose that as hentai it's fairly successful, if perhaps a bit on the unimaginative side.

Which leaves us with everything else, and as often seems to be the case, the everything else fares a good deal better.  Magical Twilight is fairly half-hearted as pornography, whereas as a comedic fantasy it's entirely solid and occasionally much better than that.  The animation is respectable, the character designs are appealing, and there are a handful of properly good gags, most memorably a magically assisted game of ping-pong that gets wildly out of hand.  Sad to say, though, it's still too committed to being hentai to make the most of its fun setup and characters and as hentai it devotes a lot of time to scenes that are staged largely identically, and so, at the end of ninety minutes, it finds itself sat uncomfortably between two rather nondescript stools.  If a fantasy comedy with lots of generic but competently handled sex scenes is the one thing in the world you're craving, it's hard to see how this would majorly disappoint, but for the rest of us, there isn't enough here that's at all special.

Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, 1999, dir: Shin'ichi Watanabe

One of the nice things about this whole reviewing-abolutely-all-of-the-'90s-anime deal is that I've been obliged to give attention to a lot of titles that, for one reason or another, I'd otherwise have skipped.  And OK, that hasn't always been a positive since some of that stuff was eminently skippable, but it's nice to sometimes have your preconceptions proved wrong and be entertained by something you wouldn't normally have given the time of day.  Such is the case with Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and a cover that does practically nothing to sell what lies within to the viewer seeking anything besides romance between a couple of unusually pretty (well, unusually by non-anime standards) guys.

Now, it's not that Lyrics of Love - a subtitle nearly as off-putting as the cover art! - doesn't offer that.  Our hero Shuichi Shindo, lead singer of the band Bad Luck, is certainly head over heels for author Yuki, and though it's not altogether evident for much of the running time, there are clues enough that Yuki feels the same way, albeit in a more stand-offish and cynical fashion.  For Shuichi's love is very much of the puppyish, unfiltered kind, and so it is that, as we join the story, a period of coolness on Yuki's part has sent him into such a spiral of misery that he's incapable of writing lyrics for the band's upcoming new album.  While that mightn't normally be an issue, since everyone else would be happy to bring in a songwriter from outside, Shuichi is just as outspoken when it comes to his musical career, and he's already bragged to the media that nobody but him can do Bad Luck's music justice.

So we have hot guys being in love, not to mention a fair bit of lust - which is quite refreshing given how much anime of the period tends to veer towards prudishness when it's not being out-and-out hentai - and we have music as a central story element, and all of that you could certainly work out from the DVD art and accompanying blurb.  But that Lyrics of Love happens to also, maybe even primarily, be a comedy?  That you'd never guess, which sucks when what we have here is among the funnier comedies to come out of anime in the nineties.  Indeed, it's all the funnier for being ostensibly not much of a comedy at all, since much of the best humour rises out of situations that aren't, on the face of it, especially humorous.  The benefit is that it gets to be wildly goofy at points without ever just being goofy; somehow, the push and pull of extreme silliness and high emotions works in harmony rather than opposition.  Were this not a comedy, Shuichi would be a bit obnoxious and Yuki even more so, but seeing a lighter side to them actually makes their tumultuous romance more engaging and sympathetic, such that when, towards the end of the second of its two episodes, Lyrics of Love is obliged to take its plot seriously enough to bring things to a conclusion, it's drummed up ample good will for a theoretically contrived conclusion to be warm and satisfying.

Had this arrived a few years earlier, then, we might be looking at something of a minor classic - but as I'll never tire of pointing out, 1999 was a bad year indeed for anime as an art form and long after the point when OVA meant the sort of budget that got you near the realms of feature-film animation.  Frankly, Lyrics of Love barely holds up compared with the TV of the time, and that's quite the damning criticism.  I get that not all anime fans are obsessed with the niceties of animation, I do, but there's no avoiding how it hurts the material here, with the musical numbers suffering the most: judging by what we see, there are Punch and Judy shows with more stage presence than Bad Luck.  Thankfully, their songs hold up better, enough to be toe-tapping even if not quite enough to convince you they'd be much of a big deal in real life.  Still, that leaves us with a musical romantic comedy where all three core elements are good to great and only one significant weakness, which is mostly more of an annoyance, so I think we can comfortably call this a recommendation.

Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road, 1993 - 1995, dir's: Hideki Takayama, Shigenori Kageyama

I've frequently been disgusted by the Urotsukidôji franchise, and sometimes angered by it, and often bored, and just occasionally amused, but until now, I can't say I ever felt sorry for it.  Yet that was my main reaction to Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road (or Inferno Road, as it appears to be known to everyone but UK distributor Kiseki.)  I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I dislike this series, and yet I don't know that even I would have wished upon it such a paltry nothing of a finale.  For all that this has been mostly nasty, silly, juvenile stuff, in its best moments, as far as the first two entries go at any rate, there was a certain apocalyptic grandeur to be found, not to mention some really determined cynicism and wallowing in the deepest depths of human ugliness and suffering, and the one thing you'd have a right to hope for from a franchise that sets itself those sorts of goals and intermittently hits them is that it go out with a bang and not the most strangled of whimpers.

But that's not what fans were given in the mid-nineties, and it's certainly not what eventually arrived on the shores of the UK, since the first two episodes of the three-episode OVA were banned outright and appeared merely as scripts on Kiseki's otherwise bafflingly thorough DVD edition.**  That leaves us with some 40 minutes or so of actual footage including credits, presumably cut down from the more standard 45-minute run time: a whopping 40 minutes to send off multiple hours of narrative spread over three not-entirely-reconcilable timelines, and boy is Infernal Road not remotely up to that task.  Nor is the problem the missing episodes, which appear to have been a self-contained tale that didn't move the main story forward one iota, which is in itself a weird move and probably a clear pointer to what went wrong here: everything was in such a mess by this point that it's almost impossible to imagine what a satisfying conclusion would look like, all the more so since we've already had a couple of conclusions that were about as satisfying as it was reasonable to hope for from a property where apocalypses are practically an everyday occurrence.

I admit that I couldn't remember much of the events of previous entry The Return of the Overfiend, since it was bad and I haven't wasted any thought on it since I watched it, so I guess it's my fault that I couldn't recall who most of the characters were that we meet racing in a tank through the ruined remnants of Japan on a mission to defeat the probably-bad messiah the Chōjin with the aid of the possibly-good messiah the Kyō-Ō.  Nevertheless, Infernal Road couldn't possibly do less to reintroduce them or to re-establish their goals or to ease us back into the wider context or to explain who their antagonists are or what their beef is.  Indeed, Infernal Road has no time at all for the viewer who isn't 100% steeped in Urotsukidôji lore, which is ironic given that they, presumably, would be the selfsame viewer who'd be most frustrated by its manifest failings both as a final send-off and a story in its own right.  For that mission to get the Kyō-Ō to the Chōjin and the various attempts to impede it is really all there is here, meaning a fair amount of violent action and the odd dash of demon rape - but much less of both that in any previous entry, even accounting for the reduction in length - and then an ending that I won't spoil except by saying that I couldn't even if I tried.

Nothing could have saved this material, and given the track record it had to work with and the fact that even the best Urotsukidôji entries were deeply flawed, and taking into account that the taste for this sort of stuff was already dwindling fast by 1993, saving was likely never on the cards; but the one thing that frequently pushed past instalments up to the level of intermittently entertaining is the odd bit of quality animation, so it's a further blow to Infernal Road that it contains no quality animation whatsoever and not much that would pass as basically competent.  It's ugly, small scale, and achingly cheap, with a palpable sense of creators who just wanted to get something out the door so they could move onto doing anything else with their lives.  So I suppose the only real plus is that, even for the most devoted fan, there's no reason to track this down: on its own merits it's effectively worthless, and as a conclusion to Urotsukidôji's grand, gross, baffling saga, it's truly bad enough that anything you care to make up will likely be better.  No, seriously, try it: in my version, the Kyō-Ō and Chōjin hugged it out and ended up living together in post-apocalyptic Tennessee raising demon llamas, and that's still an improvement.

-oOo-

So probably not a great post for anyone else, but a definite win for me in that Gravitation: Lyrics of Love was a nice and out-of-the-blue surprise and I'm at last completely done with Urotsukidôji, although knowing me I'll probably feel the need to pick it up on Blu-ray at some point in the future to make absolutely sure it's as unpleasant and basically shabby as I remember it being, the way I did with Violence Jack (which was and wasn't but mostly was.)

Next up: probably the Gundam special in which I bend the definition of nineties anime far past its breaking point...

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

* Both were put out by a company that I think is called AVP, unless that's just a random bit of text on the box.  They did a relatively acceptable job with Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, for all that nothing about it looked what you'd call professional.  Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, however, which needed all the help it could get, is lumbered with some of the most incoherent subtitling you're ever likely to see.
** Seriously, if you want a great summary of Urotsukidôji's by this point exceedingly dense and tangled mythology and enormous cast, this is the place to find it.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 121

To be clear, I'm definitely not going to start reviewing different releases of the same titles because that would be nuts and there would be no end.  And I feel like I'm opening a dangerous door just by setting the precedent, but there's no getting around the fact that there's a meaningful difference between reviewing all of the first run of Project A-Ko sequels together - as they were compiled on DVD under the banner of Project A-ko 2: Love and Robots - and reviewing them separately as they're now being put out on Blu-ray by our good friends at Discotek.
Or to put it another way, I justified double-dipping on the Project A-ko 2 Blu-ray by convincing myself it was okay because I'd cover it here, and don't think that means I'm necessarily going to pick up the other two when they arrive, Discotek!  Frankly, compiling the three together was by far the more reasonable way to go, and who am I kidding, my money is basically yours at this point.  Hold on, I'm pretty sure I still have a kidney left that I can hock.  While I search, why don't we take a look at Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, Super-Deformed Double Feature, You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, and Riki Oh: The Wall of Death?
Project A-Ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, 1987, dir: Yûji Moriyama
It's hard to say what the perfect sequel to Project A-ko would have looked like.  But my instinct is that, at the very least, it would have needed to be ambitious in the ways the original was.  And that immediately rules out all the usual avenues because if there's one thing that made Project A-ko stand out, it's the extent to which it did the unexpected.  In a sense, that's all it does: what narrative there is ricochets from idea to idea based on little more than what will be funny or interesting in the moment, and its most arresting aspects, like that gloriously singular soundtrack, feel like conscious attempts to stand out from anything that was happening at the time.  What sets A-ko apart is an impish inclination to rush off down any rabbit hole that takes its creators' fancy while giggling at the conventionality of its peers.
Ironically, the final A-ko entry, released under a dizzying number of titles but reviewed here as Project A-ko: Uncivil Wars, took a decent swing at doing the same by chucking out almost everything except the title and the barest bones of the characters, and I remember it as being pretty sucky and probably the worst of the bunch, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Or maybe you can only pull off that sort of trick the once, the more so since Project A-ko's moment was a brief one indeed: barely any time had passed before the market was heaving with anime that parodied other anime, many of them recycling exactly the same jokes in a fashion that must have rapidly made A-ko look a mite dated if you didn't know how many of them it had got to first.
Let's commend Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group for one thing, then: it sure did come out quickly, in less than a year in fact, and that was probably a wise move.  Given that turnaround time, it's safe to say ambition was firmly off the table, and so all hope of a sequel that would push the envelope in the ways Project A-ko did, and with that being the case, what we got was hardly the worst-case scenario.  A-ko 2 goes down a pointless route, but it's an earnest and faintly ingenious attempt to continue a narrative that had no need of being continued.  Picking up a matter of days after A-ko's events, it finds that show's alien invaders now stuck in an immobilised spaceship and trying to make the best of a bad situation by selling themselves as the city's new hot tourist spot.  Or is it all a cunning plan to kidnap the chirpily obnoxious C-ko, who they regard as their lost alien princess for reasons I can't remotely remember?  Probably, but that's not enough to prevent our hero A-ko from agreeing to try and fix their ship in exchange for a free meal.  And in the meantime, wealthy genius B-ko's latest scheming gets waylaid by her father's even schemier scheming, as he pilfers her latest design and convinces the authorities to let him use it in an attempt to loot the crashed ship for its neat alien technologies.
Writing it all down like that, A-ko 2 sounds both busy and nonsensical, much as the original A-ko was, and you'd think that might be a good thing.  It does have a degree of the same energy, which is probably its biggest asset: there's not a lot that unquestionably, consistently works, but nothing doesn't work for long enough to become a drag.  With the same production values as its predecessor, I think I'd go further: the big action climax is well-conceived enough that it might have been something quite special.  But even with barely more than half the running time to be filled, A-ko 2 is a tremendous step down, and while that mostly just leaves it looking a bit cheap, there are moments when it looks really, really cheap*, with designs going wildly off-model and, for some reason, the absolutely worst lip-synching I can recall ever seeing in anime.  Can we blame that on a diminished budget?  How exactly did they get lip-synching so wrong that it's noticeable in scene after scene?  Was it a joke?
Hey, at least the soundtrack's pretty good, which makes it another step down if you're as in love with what Zito and Carbone conjured up for the original A-ko as I am, but on its own merits it stands up well against anything else that was happening at the time.  Can we say the same for Project A-ko 2, I wonder?  Not when it comes to the animation, no, it really is objectionably sloppy at points, but for the rest... Sure, why not?  Project A-ko 2 is a fun little time-waster that likely as not will leave you in a better mood than it found you, and that's fine and dandy, while also making for a crushing disappointment on just about every level.
Super-Deformed Double Feature, 1988 / 1992, dir's: Katsuhito Akiyama, Tatsuya Masaki
I've never pretended to be writing these reviews for much besides my own amusement, but occasionally we come to a title where it really does feel like I'm talking to an audience of one.  For a start, the compilation known to Western audiences as Super-Deformed Double Feature was only ever released on VHS, so far as I know, and while you can find its crucial portions on YouTube, that's not quite the same experience, for reasons we'll return to.  At any rate, the difficulty of laying hands on a video tape from thirty years ago is barely half the battle.  Of the two short animated features included, the first, Ten Little Gall Force, requires that you be a substantial fan of the first Gall Force series, while for the second, Scramble Wars, you'll also need a fair knowledge of the second wave of Gall Force entries plus Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth of all things. I know there are plenty of Bubblegum Crisis fans still around, and Gall Force has its following, but Gaiarth? I'd be surprised if anyone who isn't me has watched that one in the past five years.  All of which is a massive shame because, if you fall into the miniscule demographic that ticks all those boxes, Super-Deformed Double Feature is a blast.
Ten Little Gall Force is a comedic making-of of the first two Gall Force features, except that, outside of the recycled footage, all the cast and crew are represented by cutesy chibi versions of themselves, leaving the bizarre implication that what we call anime is actually the outpowering of some parallel cartoon universe striving for what we'd consider realism.  At no point do the chibi actors comment on how bizarre their in-film counterparts look to them, but that's about the only comedic stone left unturned across a frantic 16-minute run time.  There are clever gags, there are dumb gags, there are sight gags, there are surreal gags, and there are even quite a few rude gags, which begs the question of whether we truly needed to see the Gall Force gang both chibified and naked.  And obviously we didn't, but it does feel in keeping with the Gall Force ethos of matching the most high-concept sci-fi with the most low-brow exploitation; I'd forgotten quite how seedy Eternal Story got amid its heady pacifist space opera musings, but Ten Little Gall Force wasted no time in reminding me!  Then again, I ought to have expected fan service from something that couldn't possibly have been made more for a specific fanbase: this was unmistakeably made by people who loved Gall Force for people who loved Gall Force, with the caveat that if you truly love a property, it's OK to make fun of it in some fairly mean ways.
The same goes for Scramble Wars, if not more so, which is only appropriate for something that pits the casts of Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, and other properties from studio Artmic against each other in a Wacky Races-style contest with an outrageously huge cash prize at the end of it.  Scramble Wars takes up the lion's share of the tape and so gets to develop a bit more, which means it's that bit better for being able to set up jokes rather than rattling about like a pingpong ball in a spin dryer as Ten Little Gall Force did.  Though requiring a wider breadth of knowledge in theory, it's also less reliant on in-jokes, though there's a truly joyous one for the Gall Force fans; but front and centre it's a Wacky Races rip-off, and I'm happy to call it the best of that plentiful subgenre.  It's also probably technically superior, though a startling aspect of both is how well made they are, even if each cheats in its own ways, Ten Little Gall Force by pilfering footage from the Gall Force movies and Scramble Wars by setting the action on Gaiarth and so getting its background art for free.
Admittedly, I was always likely to say nice things about this one, since I love Gall Force and Bubblegum Crisis and and even have a soft spot for Genesis Survivor Gaiarth - which is why I'd argue that watching Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars back to back won't quite substitute the true Super-Deformed Double Feature experience.  The reason being that AnimEigo saw fit to include a couple of short documentaries, and while the animations are the obvious stars, the live action stuff is charming in its own right.  The first focuses on Kenichi Sonoda and is worth watching for his one-man anime movie alone, while the second follows the Gall Force cast as they record one of the songs for the soundtrack and is nearly as fun if you're the kind of person who'd consider watching that sort of thing.  But put all four segments together and what you have is seventy minutes of vintage anime nerd nirvana.
I have an abiding hope that one day we'll get a Gall Force blu-ray set - it's crazy how ignored the franchise has been given some of the rubbish that's been rescued over the years - and if and when that magical day should come, it only makes sense that Super-Deformed Double Feature will make its welcome return as a bonus feature, that being more or less what it always was, albeit in an age when bonus features were another thing you were expected to splash out for.  Should that not happen, I guess you can always go ahead and watch Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars on YouTube; just remember to feel slightly sad that you're not getting the whole of one of vintage anime's most charming, if phenomenally niche, experiences.
You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, 1997, dir: Junji Nishimura
Here's how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: this was one of the very first DVDs I bought to review here, many a year ago, and I got most of the way through it before giving up in despair, since when it's been gathering dust on my shelf, taunting me with its grimy presence.  This is also how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: amid a collection of twenty stories of seven or so minutes, three of them pit our heroic traffic cop pair Natsumi and Miyuki up against panty thieves, and those three episodes occur one after the other.  I can imagine the writer so devoid of imagination that they'd fall to so miserable a cliché of bad anime, and if I really stretch, I can imagine the writer who'd go back to that well not once but twice more, but to then tell those stories back to back?  No, that beggars belief.  And it's hardly the only idea that gets reused here, either, though I suppose "idea" is too strong a word for most of what's on offer.
By the law of averages, not all of those twenty mini-episodes are terrible, though the failure rate is impressively high.  Nevertheless, they're practically all bad in a few basic ways: almost all the humour (and humour is definitely the goal here, for all that it's one more occasionally brushed against than hit) is broadly sex-based, in that the antagonists are creepy guys of one sort or another that Natsumi and Miyuki have to put in their places, generally through violence.  But the whole thing is so leering and creepy that it feels far more on the side of the men than our heroes, who are generally treated with no real respect whatsoever; if I told you they spend ten minutes out of the two and a half hours of material here doing anything that resembles actual police work, I suspect I'd be exaggerating.  There are also some strikingly nasty gags at the expense of trans character Aoi Futaba, who I'm fairly sure was treated with a heck of a lot more respect in both the OVAs and the film, and in general, none of the cast feel like they have much to do with their earlier incarnations: they're stock types plugged in to stock narratives, many of which could have wandered in from any show.
The better sections, then, tend to the be the ones that remember what You're Under Arrest is about and that the concept was never, "Oh my god!  Women cops, whatever next?"  Whenever Natsumi and Miyuki are behind the wheel of a car, proceedings pick up considerably, but that amounts to a minute of two, presumably because animating cars costs money and nobody wanted to spend more than the bare minimum on this: it's distressingly cheap-looking from start to finish and if there was ever a point where director Nishimura brought any flair to the proceedings, I must have blinked and missed it.  Heck, even the music is actively dull, and I struggle to think of any anime from the period that couldn't muster at least one decent tune.  Really, the whole business has the feeling of something made as an obligation by people with no affection for the source material and no sense of what to do with it; not that it was ever a good fit for these bite-sized episodes, but the eagerness to veer as far as possible from what the show was traditionally good at in favour of the most generic plotlines imaginable is truly baffling.
I'll say this much: by the end of what amounted to a second watch, the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials had worn my down from active dislike to surly indifference, and there were points, albeit brief ones, when I got caught up in a couple of the better stories.  Aside from the nastiness toward Aoi, there's nothing here that's worthy of real anger or contempt, though that only makes it more frustrating from a reviewing perspective, since I'd always rather have a terrible title that I can merrily tear into over one I'm bored just thinking about.  And it's conceivable that were this mess not dressed up in the ill-fitting clothes of one of my favourite anime franchises, I'd be a little more kindly disposed to it.  But it is, and I'm not, and it's thoroughly depressing that this tacky, lifeless nonsense will be our last brush with You're Under Arrest after the highs of the OVA and movie.
Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death, 1989, Satoshi Dezaki
As a prime example of the mission creep that's overtaken this review series, I offer the fact that once, very long ago, the plan was to cover only films and OVAs from the nineties that had been released in the UK and were readily available, and now here we are with something from the eighties that has seemingly never once had what you might call a "proper" release anywhere outside of Japan.  The only physical copy of Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death you're likely to come across was, so far as I can tell from the shonkily produced inlay, distributed by a company called AVP, on whom the internet yields precisely no information.  It looks awfully like a knock-off, yet you do occasionally see a new, sealed copy floating about, so maybe it's legitimate in some loose sense of that word?
Whatever the case, it's probably not the sort of thing we ought to be concerning ourselves with, any more that it would make sense to be reviewing, say, fansubs of shows videotaped off Japanese TV.  Except for two things: one is that, against all the odds, this 45-minute OVA has managed to retain something of a reputation for itself, as perhaps the least known but still occasionally talked about member of the fraternity of video-nasty-style titles that were so many people's introduction to anime back in the day; and secondly because the wider world of Riki-Oh has left its own legacy, in the shape of the live-action film Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a film prestigious enough to recently get the deluxe Blu-ray treatment - a fact that makes it all the weirder that no one in the West has seen fit to pick up this OVA and its sequel.  (Media Blasters apparently did, but lost the rights before they could do anything with them.)
The Story of Ricky is a gleeful dive into violent excess on a par with any splatter movie you can name, at least as far as delivering maximal quantities of latex and stage blood to provide some ingeniously horrible gore effects goes.  Whether it's a "good" film is perhaps besides the point, though it's certainly put together with a degree of craft that you mightn't expect from something that's aiming, above all, to be shocking and gross.  Personally, I was exhausted well before its end, so the notion of the precise same story told in half the time had a definite appeal, the more so since that story is better fitted to 45 minutes than 90: our hero, Riki-Oh / Ricky, has been condemned to a privatised prison run by a hierarchy of increasingly monstrous tyrants, from gang leaders up to the warden and beyond, and while they're initially willing to leave him be due to his nigh-inhuman martial arts abilities and seeming obliviousness to pain, that status quo barely outlasts the first proper scene.  With the prison's fragile totalitarianism at risk, the only way to go from there is a series of ever more over the top efforts to put our hero in his place, especially as it becomes evident that he didn't end up in this particular prison by accident and won't be done before he's settled some business of his own.
Both live action film and OVA tell a largely identical tale in superficially identical fashions, in that both are primarily vehicles for lots and lots of bloody violence.  So nothing could have surprised me more than how The Wall of Death approaches that violence.  It's certainly there, and it's certainly graphic, but what it isn't is fun in the manner that the movie's take on identical scenes tends to be.  And here, of course, I'm referring to a very specific sort of fun, but there's an undeniable gleefulness to the movie's take on this material that's largely absent from The Wall of Death.  The gore is off-putting and very much seems as though it was meant to be, even in its more absurd moments, of which there are considerably less this time around.
Is this a bad thing?  Is it a good thing?  Truly, I'm not sure.  I can't say I enjoyed The Wall of Death less, but that's arguably just because it didn't outstay its welcome, and while I'd give both interpretations a similar score, here it would be averaging out a much narrower range of highs and lows.  It's relatively well-made, though rarely strikingly so; the animation is resolutely fine and all that visually sets the title apart is some unusually nifty editing, which adds a punchy, unnerving rhythm that's a definite boon.  And while would be easy to condemn the focus on plot over spectacle when surely no one would come to any version of Riki-Oh for the plot, it's hard to see how the narrative could have been trimmed back more without straying into incoherency.  Still, the fact remains that the only reason anyone's likely to seek out The Wall of Death is for its place in the video nasty pantheon, and while it warrants inclusion, I suspect the measure of seriousness it applies to material that's arguably better suited to The Story of Ricky's gleeful excess will make it slightly unsatisfying for most.
-oOo-

My goodness, this is really getting to be an exercise in futility!  Two recommendations for things that are nigh-impossible to watch (I mean, I guess I recommend Riki-Oh) and two titles that I hadn't much time for but that are easy to find - or, wait, no, a quick check suggests that the You're Under Arrest Mini-Specials are even getting a bit rare, and goodness knows that's not likely to ever get a rerelease because, as I think I may have mentioned in my review, it sucks goat nostrils.



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

* And for all the deservedly nice things I've said about Discotek, their Blu-ray print needed a fair bit more work or perhaps was from a source that was beyond entirely salvaging.  At any rate, it's nowhere near on a par with what they delivered for the first A-ko.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 123

To be clear, I'm definitely not going to start reviewing different releases of the same titles because that would be nuts and there would be no end.  And I feel like I'm opening a dangerous door just by setting the precedent, but there's no getting around the fact that there's a meaningful difference between reviewing all of the first run of Project A-Ko sequels together - as they were compiled on DVD under the banner of Project A-ko 2: Love and Robots - and reviewing them separately as they're now being put out on Blu-ray by our good friends at Discotek.
Or to put it another way, I justified double-dipping on the Project A-ko 2 Blu-ray by convincing myself it was okay because I'd cover it here, and don't think that means I'm necessarily going to pick up the other two when they arrive, Discotek!  Frankly, compiling the three together was by far the more reasonable way to go, and who am I kidding, my money is basically yours at this point.  Hold on, I'm pretty sure I still have a kidney left that I can hock.  While I search, why don't we take a look at Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, Super-Deformed Double Feature, You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, and Riki Oh: The Wall of Death?
Project A-Ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, 1987, dir: Yûji Moriyama
It's hard to say what the perfect sequel to Project A-ko would have looked like.  But my instinct is that, at the very least, it would have needed to be ambitious in the ways the original was.  And that immediately rules out all the usual avenues because if there's one thing that made Project A-ko stand out, it's the extent to which it did the unexpected.  In a sense, that's all it does: what narrative there is ricochets from idea to idea based on little more than what will be funny or interesting in the moment, and its most arresting aspects, like that gloriously singular soundtrack, feel like conscious attempts to stand out from anything that was happening at the time.  What sets A-ko apart is an impish inclination to rush off down any rabbit hole that takes its creators' fancy while giggling at the conventionality of its peers.
Ironically, the final A-ko entry, released under a dizzying number of titles but reviewed here as Project A-ko: Uncivil Wars, took a decent swing at doing the same by chucking out almost everything except the title and the barest bones of the characters, and I remember it as being pretty sucky and probably the worst of the bunch, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Or maybe you can only pull off that sort of trick the once, the more so since Project A-ko's moment was a brief one indeed: barely any time had passed before the market was heaving with anime that parodied other anime, many of them recycling exactly the same jokes in a fashion that must have rapidly made A-ko look a mite dated if you didn't know how many of them it had got to first.
Let's commend Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group for one thing, then: it sure did come out quickly, in less than a year in fact, and that was probably a wise move.  Given that turnaround time, it's safe to say ambition was firmly off the table, and so all hope of a sequel that would push the envelope in the ways Project A-ko did, and with that being the case, what we got was hardly the worst-case scenario.  A-ko 2 goes down a pointless route, but it's an earnest and faintly ingenious attempt to continue a narrative that had no need of being continued.  Picking up a matter of days after A-ko's events, it finds that show's alien invaders now stuck in an immobilised spaceship and trying to make the best of a bad situation by selling themselves as the city's new hot tourist spot.  Or is it all a cunning plan to kidnap the chirpily obnoxious C-ko, who they regard as their lost alien princess for reasons I can't remotely remember?  Probably, but that's not enough to prevent our hero A-ko from agreeing to try and fix their ship in exchange for a free meal.  And in the meantime, wealthy genius B-ko's latest scheming gets waylaid by her father's even schemier scheming, as he pilfers her latest design and convinces the authorities to let him use it in an attempt to loot the crashed ship for its neat alien technologies.
Writing it all down like that, A-ko 2 sounds both busy and nonsensical, much as the original A-ko was, and you'd think that might be a good thing.  It does have a degree of the same energy, which is probably its biggest asset: there's not a lot that unquestionably, consistently works, but nothing doesn't work for long enough to become a drag.  With the same production values as its predecessor, I think I'd go further: the big action climax is well-conceived enough that it might have been something quite special.  But even with barely more than half the running time to be filled, A-ko 2 is a tremendous step down, and while that mostly just leaves it looking a bit cheap, there are moments when it looks really, really cheap*, with designs going wildly off-model and, for some reason, the absolutely worst lip-synching I can recall ever seeing in anime.  Can we blame that on a diminished budget?  How exactly did they get lip-synching so wrong that it's noticeable in scene after scene?  Was it a joke?
Hey, at least the soundtrack's pretty good, which makes it another step down if you're as in love with what Zito and Carbone conjured up for the original A-ko as I am, but on its own merits it stands up well against anything else that was happening at the time.  Can we say the same for Project A-ko 2, I wonder?  Not when it comes to the animation, no, it really is objectionably sloppy at points, but for the rest... Sure, why not?  Project A-ko 2 is a fun little time-waster that likely as not will leave you in a better mood than it found you, and that's fine and dandy, while also making for a crushing disappointment on just about every level.
Super-Deformed Double Feature, 1988 / 1992, dir's: Katsuhito Akiyama, Tatsuya Masaki
I've never pretended to be writing these reviews for much besides my own amusement, but occasionally we come to a title where it really does feel like I'm talking to an audience of one.  For a start, the compilation known to Western audiences as Super-Deformed Double Feature was only ever released on VHS, so far as I know, and while you can find its crucial portions on YouTube, that's not quite the same experience, for reasons we'll return to.  At any rate, the difficulty of laying hands on a video tape from thirty years ago is barely half the battle.  Of the two short animated features included, the first, Ten Little Gall Force, requires that you be a substantial fan of the first Gall Force series, while for the second, Scramble Wars, you'll also need a fair knowledge of the second wave of Gall Force entries plus Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth of all things. I know there are plenty of Bubblegum Crisis fans still around, and Gall Force has its following, but Gaiarth? I'd be surprised if anyone who isn't me has watched that one in the past five years.  All of which is a massive shame because, if you fall into the miniscule demographic that ticks all those boxes, Super-Deformed Double Feature is a blast.
Ten Little Gall Force is a comedic making-of of the first two Gall Force features, except that, outside of the recycled footage, all the cast and crew are represented by cutesy chibi versions of themselves, leaving the bizarre implication that what we call anime is actually the outpowering of some parallel cartoon universe striving for what we'd consider realism.  At no point do the chibi actors comment on how bizarre their in-film counterparts look to them, but that's about the only comedic stone left unturned across a frantic 16-minute run time.  There are clever gags, there are dumb gags, there are sight gags, there are surreal gags, and there are even quite a few rude gags, which begs the question of whether we truly needed to see the Gall Force gang both chibified and naked.  And obviously we didn't, but it does feel in keeping with the Gall Force ethos of matching the most high-concept sci-fi with the most low-brow exploitation; I'd forgotten quite how seedy Eternal Story got amid its heady pacifist space opera musings, but Ten Little Gall Force wasted no time in reminding me!  Then again, I ought to have expected fan service from something that couldn't possibly have been made more for a specific fanbase: this was unmistakeably made by people who loved Gall Force for people who loved Gall Force, with the caveat that if you truly love a property, it's OK to make fun of it in some fairly mean ways.
The same goes for Scramble Wars, if not more so, which is only appropriate for something that pits the casts of Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, and other properties from studio Artmic against each other in a Wacky Races-style contest with an outrageously huge cash prize at the end of it.  Scramble Wars takes up the lion's share of the tape and so gets to develop a bit more, which means it's that bit better for being able to set up jokes rather than rattling about like a pingpong ball in a spin dryer as Ten Little Gall Force did.  Though requiring a wider breadth of knowledge in theory, it's also less reliant on in-jokes, though there's a truly joyous one for the Gall Force fans; but front and centre it's a Wacky Races rip-off, and I'm happy to call it the best of that plentiful subgenre.  It's also probably technically superior, though a startling aspect of both is how well made they are, even if each cheats in its own ways, Ten Little Gall Force by pilfering footage from the Gall Force movies and Scramble Wars by setting the action on Gaiarth and so getting its background art for free.
Admittedly, I was always likely to say nice things about this one, since I love Gall Force and Bubblegum Crisis and and even have a soft spot for Genesis Survivor Gaiarth - which is why I'd argue that watching Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars back to back won't quite substitute the true Super-Deformed Double Feature experience.  The reason being that AnimEigo saw fit to include a couple of short documentaries, and while the animations are the obvious stars, the live action stuff is charming in its own right.  The first focuses on Kenichi Sonoda and is worth watching for his one-man anime movie alone, while the second follows the Gall Force cast as they record one of the songs for the soundtrack and is nearly as fun if you're the kind of person who'd consider watching that sort of thing.  But put all four segments together and what you have is seventy minutes of vintage anime nerd nirvana.
I have an abiding hope that one day we'll get a Gall Force blu-ray set - it's crazy how ignored the franchise has been given some of the rubbish that's been rescued over the years - and if and when that magical day should come, it only makes sense that Super-Deformed Double Feature will make its welcome return as a bonus feature, that being more or less what it always was, albeit in an age when bonus features were another thing you were expected to splash out for.  Should that not happen, I guess you can always go ahead and watch Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars on YouTube; just remember to feel slightly sad that you're not getting the whole of one of vintage anime's most charming, if phenomenally niche, experiences.
You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, 1997, dir: Junji Nishimura
Here's how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: this was one of the very first DVDs I bought to review here, many a year ago, and I got most of the way through it before giving up in despair, since when it's been gathering dust on my shelf, taunting me with its grimy presence.  This is also how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: amid a collection of twenty stories of seven or so minutes, three of them pit our heroic traffic cop pair Natsumi and Miyuki up against panty thieves, and those three episodes occur one after the other.  I can imagine the writer so devoid of imagination that they'd fall to so miserable a cliché of bad anime, and if I really stretch, I can imagine the writer who'd go back to that well not once but twice more, but to then tell those stories back to back?  No, that beggars belief.  And it's hardly the only idea that gets reused here, either, though I suppose "idea" is too strong a word for most of what's on offer.
By the law of averages, not all of those twenty mini-episodes are terrible, though the failure rate is impressively high.  Nevertheless, they're practically all bad in a few basic ways: almost all the humour (and humour is definitely the goal here, for all that it's one more occasionally brushed against than hit) is broadly sex-based, in that the antagonists are creepy guys of one sort or another that Natsumi and Miyuki have to put in their places, generally through violence.  But the whole thing is so leering and creepy that it feels far more on the side of the men than our heroes, who are generally treated with no real respect whatsoever; if I told you they spend ten minutes out of the two and a half hours of material here doing anything that resembles actual police work, I suspect I'd be exaggerating.  There are also some strikingly nasty gags at the expense of trans character Aoi Futaba, who I'm fairly sure was treated with a heck of a lot more respect in both the OVAs and the film, and in general, none of the cast feel like they have much to do with their earlier incarnations: they're stock types plugged in to stock narratives, many of which could have wandered in from any show.
The better sections, then, tend to the be the ones that remember what You're Under Arrest is about and that the concept was never, "Oh my god!  Women cops, whatever next?"  Whenever Natsumi and Miyuki are behind the wheel of a car, proceedings pick up considerably, but that amounts to a minute of two, presumably because animating cars costs money and nobody wanted to spend more than the bare minimum on this: it's distressingly cheap-looking from start to finish and if there was ever a point where director Nishimura brought any flair to the proceedings, I must have blinked and missed it.  Heck, even the music is actively dull, and I struggle to think of any anime from the period that couldn't muster at least one decent tune.  Really, the whole business has the feeling of something made as an obligation by people with no affection for the source material and no sense of what to do with it; not that it was ever a good fit for these bite-sized episodes, but the eagerness to veer as far as possible from what the show was traditionally good at in favour of the most generic plotlines imaginable is truly baffling.
I'll say this much: by the end of what amounted to a second watch, the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials had worn my down from active dislike to surly indifference, and there were points, albeit brief ones, when I got caught up in a couple of the better stories.  Aside from the nastiness toward Aoi, there's nothing here that's worthy of real anger or contempt, though that only makes it more frustrating from a reviewing perspective, since I'd always rather have a terrible title that I can merrily tear into over one I'm bored just thinking about.  And it's conceivable that were this mess not dressed up in the ill-fitting clothes of one of my favourite anime franchises, I'd be a little more kindly disposed to it.  But it is, and I'm not, and it's thoroughly depressing that this tacky, lifeless nonsense will be our last brush with You're Under Arrest after the highs of the OVA and movie.
Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death, 1989, Satoshi Dezaki
As a prime example of the mission creep that's overtaken this review series, I offer the fact that once, very long ago, the plan was to cover only films and OVAs from the nineties that had been released in the UK and were readily available, and now here we are with something from the eighties that has seemingly never once had what you might call a "proper" release anywhere outside of Japan.  The only physical copy of Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death you're likely to come across was, so far as I can tell from the shonkily produced inlay, distributed by a company called AVP, on whom the internet yields precisely no information.  It looks awfully like a knock-off, yet you do occasionally see a new, sealed copy floating about, so maybe it's legitimate in some loose sense of that word?
Whatever the case, it's probably not the sort of thing we ought to be concerning ourselves with, any more that it would make sense to be reviewing, say, fansubs of shows videotaped off Japanese TV.  Except for two things: one is that, against all the odds, this 45-minute OVA has managed to retain something of a reputation for itself, as perhaps the least known but still occasionally talked about member of the fraternity of video-nasty-style titles that were so many people's introduction to anime back in the day; and secondly because the wider world of Riki-Oh has left its own legacy, in the shape of the live-action film Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a film prestigious enough to recently get the deluxe Blu-ray treatment - a fact that makes it all the weirder that no one in the West has seen fit to pick up this OVA and its sequel.  (Media Blasters apparently did, but lost the rights before they could do anything with them.)
The Story of Ricky is a gleeful dive into violent excess on a par with any splatter movie you can name, at least as far as delivering maximal quantities of latex and stage blood to provide some ingeniously horrible gore effects goes.  Whether it's a "good" film is perhaps besides the point, though it's certainly put together with a degree of craft that you mightn't expect from something that's aiming, above all, to be shocking and gross.  Personally, I was exhausted well before its end, so the notion of the precise same story told in half the time had a definite appeal, the more so since that story is better fitted to 45 minutes than 90: our hero, Riki-Oh / Ricky, has been condemned to a privatised prison run by a hierarchy of increasingly monstrous tyrants, from gang leaders up to the warden and beyond, and while they're initially willing to leave him be due to his nigh-inhuman martial arts abilities and seeming obliviousness to pain, that status quo barely outlasts the first proper scene.  With the prison's fragile totalitarianism at risk, the only way to go from there is a series of ever more over the top efforts to put our hero in his place, especially as it becomes evident that he didn't end up in this particular prison by accident and won't be done before he's settled some business of his own.
Both live action film and OVA tell a largely identical tale in superficially identical fashions, in that both are primarily vehicles for lots and lots of bloody violence.  So nothing could have surprised me more than how The Wall of Death approaches that violence.  It's certainly there, and it's certainly graphic, but what it isn't is fun in the manner that the movie's take on identical scenes tends to be.  And here, of course, I'm referring to a very specific sort of fun, but there's an undeniable gleefulness to the movie's take on this material that's largely absent from The Wall of Death.  The gore is off-putting and very much seems as though it was meant to be, even in its more absurd moments, of which there are considerably less this time around.
Is this a bad thing?  Is it a good thing?  Truly, I'm not sure.  I can't say I enjoyed The Wall of Death less, but that's arguably just because it didn't outstay its welcome, and while I'd give both interpretations a similar score, here it would be averaging out a much narrower range of highs and lows.  It's relatively well-made, though rarely strikingly so; the animation is resolutely fine and all that visually sets the title apart is some unusually nifty editing, which adds a punchy, unnerving rhythm that's a definite boon.  And while would be easy to condemn the focus on plot over spectacle when surely no one would come to any version of Riki-Oh for the plot, it's hard to see how the narrative could have been trimmed back more without straying into incoherency.  Still, the fact remains that the only reason anyone's likely to seek out The Wall of Death is for its place in the video nasty pantheon, and while it warrants inclusion, I suspect the measure of seriousness it applies to material that's arguably better suited to The Story of Ricky's gleeful excess will make it slightly unsatisfying for most.
-oOo-

My goodness, this is really getting to be an exercise in futility!  Two recommendations for things that are nigh-impossible to watch (I mean, I guess I recommend Riki-Oh) and two titles that I hadn't much time for but that are easy to find - or, wait, no, a quick check suggests that the You're Under Arrest Mini-Specials are even getting a bit rare, and goodness knows that's not likely to ever get a rerelease because, as I think I may have mentioned in my review, it sucks goat nostrils.



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* And for all the deservedly nice things I've said about Discotek, their Blu-ray print needed a fair bit more work or perhaps was from a source that was beyond entirely salvaging.  At any rate, it's nowhere near on a par with what they delivered for the first A-ko.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 120

So much for posting more regularly!  Ah well, I've a few of these on the go and my day job situation is hopefully settling down a bit, so there's hope yet, though I dimly remember saying much the same not so long ago.  As for a common thread, the closest we have is "titles that are really hard to find these days," which is likely to be an extremely prominent theme for the foreseeable future.  All of which is to say that I have nothing to say and we might as well just get on with looking at Dragoon, Megaman: Upon a Star, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and Iron Virgin Jun...

Dragoon, 1997, dir: Kenichi Maejima

If there's one thing you need to know about Dragoon, it's that it has nary an original idea anywhere in its head, except perhaps for the incorporation of science-fictional elements like giant airships into an otherwise fantasy-style narrative - only, by 1997 that had in itself become a cliché in the wake of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and thinking about it, if there's one thing you really need to know about Dragoon, it's that it wants very much to be mentioned in the same breath as those two classics.  Though the conversation would need to be along the lines of "Laputa sure is a great movie, but have you ever considered how much better it would be with lots of bare breasts?"

And having summed up Dragoon as Laputa with a fraction of the budget and endless shots of boobs, I could certainly call this review done, with the only caveat being that, depending on your preferences, I've either made it sound awful or awesome and it isn't either.  The word I'd opt for, rather, would be "pleasant", in the way that only something wholly predictable and unchallenging can be.  While its obsession with lingering over its female characters' exposed upper halves, regardless even of whether they're adults or not, is certainly sleazy, that aside it's all quite sweet and good-natured and relatively bloodless.  If you like straightforward fantasy tales, and if you especially like straightforward fantasy tales that toy at incorporating the odd sci-fi element, it's safe to say you'll get on fine with Dragoon.

None of this would be half as true, mind you, were it not for some surprisingly and consistently decent animation, which makes an out-sized difference in pushing Dragoon up from the realms of not-badness.  Were there more to visually differentiate it, was the world-building more imaginative, say, I'd go further, but as it is, only some reasonably nice character designs do much to make the show stand out.  Still, anime that's made with a measure of talent and care is generally better than anime that isn't, and Dragoon's tendency to punch above its budgetary weight is a definite boon.

All of which would add up to a modest recommendation were it not for one last problem, the only one I'd consider a reason to definitely avoid Dragoon if you should find yourself craving some hackneyed nineties fantasy anime: as rote as its storytelling is, the characters are sympathetic enough that I wanted to see how things played out for them, so that the three episodes here end without so much as a cliff-hanger, having resolved nothing, is quite frustrating - and more so for how the opening sequence is a flash-forward to major events we'll never see play out.  It's not ruinous, simply because what's come before isn't good enough and the tale it's been telling isn't unpredictable enough that never finding out where it's heading is especially painful.  The best of endings wouldn't have nudged Dragoon into the realms of greatness, but the lack of even a half-decent one definitely does it no favours.

Mega Man: Upon a Star, dir's: Katsumi Minoguchi, Naoyoshi Kusaka, Itsurô Kawasaki, Minoru Okazaki

Given what an extraordinary amount of anime we've covered here, it's surprising how little we've come across that was expressly and primarily made for kids.  Probably it's my memory being rubbish, but Mega Man: Upon a Star feels like practically a first.  It has no interest in adding one iota of sophistication or nuance to cater to an older viewer and is wedded so hard to the perspective of its child characters that regular logic immediately flies out the window.  On discovering that their reality has been invaded by video game characters, for example, the first concern of our young protagonist Yuuta's parents isn't to wonder at how the heck such an obvious transgression of the basic laws of reality might occur or what dangers having a mad scientist of apparently unlimited power and ingenuity running around their nation might pose but to question how their son is meant to fit all this commotion in around his schooling.

Honestly, that's kind of refreshing.  Mega Man: Upon a Star is dumb as bricks, but it's the right sort of dumb, the sort that gets that we - and by "we", I definitely mean the under-ten viewer - want to be amused and entertained, and maybe if we get enough amusement and entertainment we must possibly tolerate a dash of education entering the mix.  It strikes me only now that one aspect that sets this apart from most of what's aimed at children is that it's not very interested in humour.  Its stakes are ridiculous, but Mega Man: Upon a Star takes them as seriously as can be.  It actually plays quite fairly toward its young audience, and while it's absurd, it isn't pandering.  Even that educational aspect I touched on comes from a charming, albeit baffling, place: since Mega Man the character is apparently American, the show is determined to have him learn a bit about Japanese culture, geography, and identity, for all that there's nothing here you wouldn't expect the average Japanese schoolchild to already know.

This makes no sense, but it makes no sense in harmless, appealing ways, which is Mega Man: Upon a Star all over.  Its three stories are energetic and fast-paced enough that the silliness never becomes obnoxious.  In the first, Mega Man escapes because Yuuta falls asleep at the controls of Mega Man 5 - which raises so many questions the show hasn't the tiniest interest in exploring! - and is rapidly followed by the nefarious Dr. Wily, who immediately builds an army of robots and takes over an amusement park so that they can enjoy themselves, a plan that's actually not very nefarious at all, come to think of it, though once foiled, he does try and harness the tectonic forces of Mount Fuji to annihilate Japan.  Maybe you should have just let him entertain his robots for a few hours, huh, Mega Man?  Then in the second episode, Dr. Wily steals a time machine and uses it to travel back to kill Mega Man in the womb.  Ha!  No, he uses it to visit various of Japan's annual festivals and at one point steal some sweets, and also to gather a bunch of meteorites to drop on the nation, something it's fair to assume he could have done just as easily without a time machine.  Though his half-hearted attempts to muck with the fabric of time still make more sense than what Mega Man gets up to in part three: suspecting that Dr. Wily is again up to no good, he starts roving forward into the future in search of a point when something outright bad enough is happening that it's definitely the work of an evil genius.

It's a lazy approach to hero-ing that has no right to succeed as well as it does, and by that point I have to admit I was firmly on the side of Dr. Wily, who's a good bit more proactive and benefits from Kenichi Ogata's delightful performance, which brings him to life as both gleefully wicked and ever-so-slightly senile.  By comparison, Mega Man himself is rather dull, as are Yuuta and his sister, though it's fair to suppose that everyone involved is aware of this failing given that we're never apart from Wily for long.  Still, all the voice acting is pretty good, and mostly so is the music, so long as it's adhering to what I take to be revamps of the game's themes and not hurling terrible rock ballads at us over the closing credits.  But what surprised me was the animation, which is never what you might call impressive, exactly, yet always stays on the right side of decent to a degree it's fair to say would be wasted on its target audience.  (Granted, the designs are a bit ghastly, but I guess we have to blame the game at least partly for that.)  And so, as seems to be routinely the case these days, we're left with a title that I'm happy to recommend on its own merits - assuming you have a handy child you want to keep amused for an hour and a half while gently teaching them a bit about Japanese culture - and which is almost totally impossible to find.  Hey, at least the crummy dub is on YouTube...

Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, 1996, dir: Masami Ôbari

Of all the directors active throughout the nineties with a distinctly recognisable style, I'd argue that Masami Ôbari was unique in that he never once made anything you could hands-down describe as good. Oh, I know the Fatal Fury movie has its defenders, and sure it could be worse, but who else was there who combined such a unique MO with such a thudding lack of genuinely stand-out work? Once you know what you're looking for, you can't miss an Ôbari character design, and there are other elements that carry over from project to project as well; the only one I have any wholly positive feelings for is his sure grasp of how bodies look in motion, which, when your CV contains a disproportionate number of fighting game adaptations, is certainly a virtue to cultivate.  But then at the other end of the spectrum, he had a marked tendency towards levels of misogyny that stands out even in a decade when female characters being treated as victims, window dressing, or both was more or less the standard in anime: his women are invariably vixens or airheads and, whichever category they fall into, it's a safe bet their breasts will be bigger than their heads.

Now, this isn't a review of Masami Ôbari.  I mean, obviously it has been for the whole of a paragraph, but it's not meant to be.  Still, it seems to me a fair way into talking about Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer because Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is about as Ôbari-ish as it's possible to be.  It has all of his flaws on unmistakeable display, and, to be fair, all of his virtues as well.  And, like Fatal Fury before it and Battle Arena Toshinden, released the same year, it's based on a video game beat-em-up, in this case one Ôbari also provided the character designs for.  It's definitely possible to imagine this material in the hands of another director, but the result would have been a very different beast: better, perhaps, and surely more coherent, but perhaps a bit less interesting.

On paper, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer has no right to be any level of interesting.  The plot is boilerplate and stupid, unnecessarily overwrought boilerplate at that.  It dances around the crucial elements enough that everything seems vastly more complicated than it really is, and that's primarily the fault of Kengo Asai's script, which dresses up the stuff of fighting game plotting as though it were Greek tragedy, but Ôbari makes no moves to check that tendency.  Barring an eleventh-hour twist that's only a twist if you've never played a video game, this could barely be more of a straightforward tale of disparate heroes banding together against an evil villain, yet it somehow drags that threadbare material out for a hundred minutes, for a good proportion of which the central conflict barely rears its head.

There was probably never going to be a good version of Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and it's even harder to imagine such a version flowering out of Asai's florid prose - though I guess he had to pad the material somehow, and why shouldn't that be by having the cast spout nonsense philosophy at every opportunity?  At any rate, I don't know that it's reasonable to criticise Ôbari for not transforming this into a classic for the ages.  He does his own share of harm, though, and that's even supposing you aren't as horrified by his character designs as I am; but if you are, their flaws are harder to miss when he's this determined to show off their tackiest aspects.  Even by nineties anime standards, the number of times a dialogue scene is shot from crotch or bum height is astounding, and there's so much unmotivated jiggling of boobs that at one point I burst out laughing because it kind of looked as though two characters' breasts were having their own private conversation.

Actually, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is generally quite obsessed with sex, and the bouncing bosoms and endless shots of barely concealed crotches and bottoms become somewhat less noticeable when they're up against, say, an antagonist who's a monstrous hermaphroditic hybrid formed by an incestuous brother and sister.  Yet, in common with all of Ôbari's work, it's also resolutely unsexy, in part because it's so hard to reconcile these designs with actual human beings.  So the sexiness becomes yet another way for Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer to be strange and unexpected, and that's what really saves it, in so much as anything does.  Well, that and some frequently terrific animation, along with a few moments of visual genius: the "secret" final antagonist, in particular, is such a superb bit of design work that you can't but wonder how Ôbari managed to screw up so many of the others.  Which is why, I suppose, I've spent so much of this review discussing him rather than the title in question: here as elsewhere, I find myself just impressed enough - by a terrific bit of action there, a perfectly composed image there, or just by the distinctiveness the man brought to such generic subject matter - to wish Ôbari had managed, just once, to conjure up a masterpiece.

Iron Virgin Jun, 1992, dir: Fumio Maezono
The perfect, they say, is the enemy of the good, and perhaps that explains how Iron Virgin Jun can be both a largely faultless version of what it's trying to be and at the same time slightly hard to recommend.  Then again, maybe that's inevitable when what it's trying to be is a 45-minute OVA adaptation of a short Go Nagai series.  I'm not exactly a fan of Nagai's oeuvre on the whole, and I can't imagine a time when I'll ever be on side with the mean-spirited efforts to be vicious and gross that mark out a title like Violence Jack, yet the list of anime based on his creations that I have a measure of affection for is getting surprisingly long by this point.  But with most of it, I fall into a middle ground of being amused by the absurdity and over-the-top imagination but let down by the lack of much else: there are plenty of solid Nagai adaptations but vanishingly few that push beyond that.

The manga of Iron Virgin Jun sounds startlingly unpleasant: if the Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, its "highlights" include a spot of bestiality and the potential rape of the protagonist as a major plot point, and the anime loses the former and tones down the latter, so it's already ahead of the game for those of us who aren't on Nagai's wavelength.  Still, there's only so much you can do to sanitise a work by someone who's so eager to shock, and, in fairness, only so much you should do without losing the gleeful bad taste that's one of Nagai's hallmarks.  So the threat of rape is still there, it's just introduced late and not taken terribly seriously, which arguably doesn't make it better but at least leaves room for Iron Virgin Jun to put its best foot forward.  Plus, while my heart sank when the Golden Cherry boys were introduced, they being the gang dispatched to rob our hero Jun of her virginity, their character designs perfectly nail the balance of crass and ridiculous that Nagai thrives on: I won't spoil the gag, but I'll admit I laughed.

The Golden Cherry boys, however, are much nearer to the back of Iron Virgin Jun than the front, and what we start out with is the kind of goofy setup that's ideal for one of these shorter OVA films.  Jun's - perhaps literal, to judge by appearances - ogre of a mother wants her to get married.  Jun disagrees, and strongly enough so that she's gone on the run to make her point.  But her family is outrageously wealthy and has no end of colourful henchpeople at their disposal and Jun's mother isn't beyond squandering those resources if it gets her daughter to comply, all the more so since her motives have little to do with wanting to ensure Jun's future wedded bliss.  Fortunately for Jun, and for us since there'd be no plot otherwise, her iron physique and stock of wrestling moves mean she's more than capable of taking care of herself, which doesn't stop the sympathetic and slightly smitten servant Ohnami from tagging along.

There's plenty of material there for comedy, romance, and regular bouts of action, and that would probably suffice for something this short; but having set out its wares, Iron Virgin Jun then delivers enough of a larger plot that it actually manages to have a bit of meat on its bones.  The animation is entirely fine, Maezono's direction is suitably energetic, and so is the unusually present score, which does more than its share of keeping the pace lively.  As far as the source material goes, it's a mostly triumphant attempt at fitting it to the form of a short OVA movie, and thus we return to the opening point: it's possible to get most everything right and still end up with something that's merely okay.  If you were determined to adapt a Go Nagai work that has many of his flaws and not quite enough of his virtues, and you had less than an hour to play with, I can't imagine how things would have turned out an awful lot better, but that's not to say it was ever a brilliant idea to try.

-oOo-

I guess it's always nice to have nothing bad, right?  Then again, it's also nice to have at least one thing that's categorically good, and I want to say that's Mega Man: Upon a Star, but that would be a lie brought on by going in with low expectations and being pleasantly surprised.  Still, if we're looking at four distinctly average titles, at least they're the interesting sort of average: where else but in the world of vintage anime could you apply such a word to titles as merrily bonkers as Iron Virgin Jun and Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer?  So I'm calling this one a win regardless.

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